How to Use the Mental Health App with Your Apple Watch
Mental health and physical health are often intertwined, but Apple’s Health app features have largely focused on the physical aspect in previous years. With watchOS 10, however, that is about to change with the Mindfulness app.
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The app will allow you to not only log how you feel each day, but also look at data that can help you determine what impacts your mood the most. In this guide, you’ll find out everything you need to know about how to use the mental health app on your Apple Watch.
What Is the watchOS 10 Mental Health App?
The mental health features in watchOS 10 will appear in the Mindfulness app, and you’ll be able to note what your emotions are like each day. You can rank your mood on a scale of Very Unpleasant to Very Pleasant, for example. The screen will change depending on how you use the slider.
You will also get questionnaires that you can answer to determine how your mood has been. Once you’ve done this, you can determine whether you need to make any changes – small or large – to your life.
Like when you track your steps on an iPhone, the Mindfulness app will have plenty of useful mental health tracking features. For example, you can – as you enter more information – figure out which contributors are impacting you positively or negatively.
As Apple mentioned in an announcement article:
“The Health app in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, and the Mindfulness app in watchOS 10, bring an engaging and intuitive way for users to reflect on their state of mind.
“Users can scroll through engaging, multidimensional shapes and choose how they are feeling in a range from Very Pleasant to Very Unpleasant. Then, they can select associations that are having the biggest impact on their feelings, like Travel or Family, and describe their feelings, such as Grateful or Worried.”
How to Use the Mental Health App
Using the features coming to watchOS 10 will be simple. Once the software has rolled out, you’ll need to download it from the Apple Watch iPhone app. To do this:
- Go to My Watch > General.
- Tap Software Update > Download and Install.
In terms of using the actual features, you’ll see these within the Mindfulness app. To log how you’re feeling, go to State of Mind > Log. Here, you can jot down how you’re feeling in the moment and what your mood has been like over the course of the entire day.
To use the other features in the Mindfulness app, you can use your digital crown to scroll between these.
Track Your Mental and Physical Health on Your Apple Watch
The Mindfulness app will receive some useful new mental health logging features with watchOS 10, which should hopefully help you track your mood more easily. You can use the app to determine what’s impacting how you feel, before deciding whether you need to make any changes to your current routine.
When using the Mindfulness app’s mental health logging, you will also be able to see different screens as and when you use each slider. And on iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, you can get other in-depth mental health features within the Health app.
Danny is a freelance writer who has been using Apple products for over a decade. He’s written for some of the largest technology publications on the web and previously worked as an in-house writer before carving his own route. Danny grew up in the UK, but now writes about tech from his Scandinavian base.
