Learn to feel and understand emotions

Animi is the first app dedicated to improving alexithymia, emotional awareness and emotional intelligence

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Example screen of the Animi application showing bodily sensations emotion identification tool for alexithymia
Example screen of the Animi application showing bodily emotion compass identification tool for alexithymia
Reviews

What users say about Animi

The best app ive ever used in my life!
I cannot recommend enough.
As someone who struggles with emotional dysregulation this has been exponentially helpful for me, as well as my family.

This was far more informative than talking with a therapist for an hour to figure out what I'm feeling, so I would recommend it.

Very helpful!
Feel like the tool has allowed me to regulate even when having very distressing emotions through understanding. Easier to map them using symptoms on the body. 10/10 something I didn't even know I needed or could help so much with PTSD/ADHD.

I really like this app - it's going to be genuinely useful for me. The emotion compass is the best part. My wife agrees! It helped me to have a conversation I would otherwise have struggled with, by showing her the cards.

It feels like the app was tailored for me and reached me at the perfect moment. Regular therapy and methods have not worked for me cause guess what - I DON’T KNOW WHAT I FEEL! 😂 With Animi - I finally feel seen, valued, like I matter in this world and best of all - I feel tremendous hope. ❤️

This app is very helpful. I know a lot of people with autism use this. But ever since my injury I had a hard time figuring out what I was feeling. This app has been helping me by identifying my physical reactions and helping me match them up with a word.

I’ve improved immensely - almost unrecognizably. Now I find myself much more capable of crying, expressing myself, and recognizing my emotions much faster, almost instantly. I have more capacity to motivate myself, approach others, and socialize. I am much happier and adapt better to my environment.

The app is in my opinion much better than emotion wheels as there is so much more details/information.

I DON'T LOVE this app, I learn WHAT IS LOVE in this app.
Highly recommended for people with traumatic histories, people with poor emotional intelligence who cannot get along with peers and with those who were never trained in assessing their own emotions in their early developmental stages of life.

Step by step

How it works

1
Identify emotional label that might fit your experience

Use one of our tools to find a word that precisely describes what you are feeling. If you're not sure about the exact meaning of the word, consult our dictionary of emotions that provides further context and identification clues.

2
Log the emotion with a journal about your experience

Introspect about your feelings and emotions, the situation that triggered them, and overall context with the help of guided questions. This over time helps you develop emotional intuition.

3
Regulate, process, or communicate the emotion

Use one of the three breathing techniques to calm down, focus, or get a boost of energy. Or figure out what exactly is the message behind what you're feeling, and express it to somebody else in a productive way.

Emotion identification

Find the right word

Use either our Emotion Compass or Body Sensations flow to narrow down a few labels that are likely to fit.

Emotion Compass

Indicate how much energy you currently feel and whether it's overall pleasant or unpleasant and get a few suggested labels.

Body Sensations

Select where in your body you feel activated, and then swipe on specific sensations to refine suggestions.

Example screen of the Animi application showing bodily symptom emotion identification tool for alexithymia
Example screen of the Animi application showing emotion encyclopedia tool with context about emotions
Emotion encyclopedia

Understand and learn emotional context

Specific emotions are tied to specific situations, bodily sensations, expressions, and other clues. They have various functions, evoke different thoughts, and protect specific needs. Learn all about each emotion in our encyclopedia to better understand the full meaning and implication of each word. This also further helps you find the right label to describe your experience even if your emotional vocabulary is limited. Helpful analogy included!

Introspective journal

Express and explore your experience

Expressive writing and journaling has been shown to be helpful in training the ability to detect emotions, as well as understanding and regulating them.

Introspective Prompts

Browse through questions designed to help you write more introspective and insightful journals.

Tags

Tag each journal with however many tags you like, to later get insights about your emotional patterns with relation to different tags and contexts.

Example screen of the Animi application showing introspective journaling tool
Example screen of the Animi application showing alexithymia test result
Alexithymia test

Measure your alexithymia and track progress

Take the latest scientifically validated questionnaire, get your alexithymia score, and understand exactly which things to focus on from the detailed test subscores. Repeat the test every month to track the progress of your emotional awareness journey.

Work with emotions

Regulate, process, or communicate

After you identify an emotion, you can choose how to work with the emotion to understand it fully, quickly regulate your nervous system to calm down, or make sure you express it in a way that people understand.

Regulate

Perform a quick 3-min breathing technique to shift how you feel to a different place

Process

Fully experience and explore the meaning, purpose, and message behind identified emotions

Communicate

Formulate a message clearly expressing how you feel in an understandable and productive way

Example screen of the Animi application showing emotion processing, regulation, and communication tools

Research manifesto

We've spent the last few years researching alexithymia and developing a product that holistically addresses it. During that time we've ran across hundreds of scientific papers describing the prevalences of alexithymia in various communities, as well as important (and sometime unexpected) associations and insights, such as the examples above.

We've summarized them in a manifesto explaining why alexithymia is the most overlooked emotional health problem.

If you're interested in quickly getting up to speed about  alexithymia, the manifesto will build your initial understanding quickly and for free.

50+ years of academic research summarized
100+ peer-reviewed papers referenced
Evidence-based claims
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We're mission-driven

Animi aims to build one stop solution for alexithymia. To  help people understand, work with and communicate emotions, and ultimately improve the wellness, quality of life and relationships for millions of people.

Privacy-conscious

We only collect anonymized alexithymia test data and other metadata to assess effectivity of the app. Your sensitive journal data stays on the device. We don't share the data with any third-parties nor sell it nor use it for any kind of advertisement.

Impact-oriented

We incorporated Animi as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) to clearly signal to users, investors, or other stakeholders that we are motivated not only by profit, but mainly by our mission. Our impact has been recognized by the Social Impact Award organized by Impact Hub in 2022.

Evidence-based

The app and resources are based on the scientific literature, and initial internal data shows great results (see for yourself). We are exploring options to validate our app in pilot studies, as the initial internal data shows the app can significantly improve alexithymia in a dose-dependent way. Please reach out if you're interested in collaborating.

Support us

Support the development

Donate a

Ko-fi

You can support us by buying us equivalent of a coffee - everything will be used to offset some of the infrastructure costs that we now pay out of pocket and develop the app further, as well as to create YouTube and Instagram content about alexithymia. Any support is appreciated!

Help us

Develop

If you are a developer and would be willing to contribute your time to help us develop the app so we can help as many people improve their alexithymia as possible, please let us know. Our current stack is React Native (Expo), with GCP (Firebase).