Fastcompany posted an article about a Harvard study using an iPhone app to track what a person is doing throughout the day.

“That last question proved to be the key to the study, which concluded that a main cause of people’s unhappiness is how frequently their minds wander. According to the app, 46.9 percent of people’s time is spent thinking on something other than what they’re doing. And using a bit of statistical wizardry, study authors Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert were able to tease out that that mind-wandering was in fact the cause of much of the unhappiness. In fact, what activity a person was engaged in only accounted for about 5 percent of a person’s happiness, whereas whether that person’s mind was on- or off-task accounted for over 10 percent.”

Their conclusion – “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” is not new to us. I think it is great we are using our toys to not only prove it, but as guides to mindfulness and happiness. With Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose we are seeing more support for being happy as a valid state of being. Now we have an app that will help us get it.

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Stress sells. It is certainly selling iPhone apps. The iTune store has 19 apps beginning with the word stress. Our holistic health guru Deepak Chopra, MD has his own stress app called Stress Free. NPR’s story, Therapist In Your Pocket talks about how therapists are using phone apps to help their patients in ways other procedures weren’t before the apps.

These apps take two prevalent phenomena – stress and phone apps and puts them together. These apps make being aware of stress and releasing it, fun and easy. When you have a technology assisting you, what was hard to remember and do, becomes automatic and cool.

These apps certainly beat becoming sick from stress or taking drugs to reduce stress.

What are your favorite apps for stress?

Here is an excellent video by Gina Trapani the founder of a great blog – Lifehacker. The video is a short course on why not to multitask. The magazine Fastcompany produced this video and blog post on the downsides of multitasking. Bottom-line, it produces stress trying to keep your focus on two or more items simultaneously. Don’t do it.

Deepak Chopra, MD created an app, Stress Free for your iPhone to deal with stress. NPR has an interview Chopra on the features of the app, including its ability to tell jokes.

It is great we are using some of the technology that creates our stress to reduce it. Now if we only can get the iPhone to massage shoulders, I would buy one.