Reams of paper and terabytes worth of server space have been spent writing about how our phones are bad for us in one way or another. The immensely harmful effect that social media has on our mood, our beliefs, and our self-image; the many examples of apps designed to addict you or trick you to empty your wallet; and the countless hours spent scrolling aimlessly through a shallow sea of equally-shallow content. As unfortunate as it is, we’ve largely accepted these negative influences on our lives as table-stakes of the social internet and the smart phones we love and get in line to buy every year — yet we do painfully little to make room for positivity in our digital lives. That’s where Affirmations from developer Justin Hamilton comes in — an app entirely dedicated to building users up and sparking joy in a digital world so determined to wear us down.

A Self-Care Salve in Our Digital Desert

On the face of it, Affirmations is an incredibly simple app: it’s a large repository of encouraging, loving, and wholesome phrases displayed in a rotating home screen widget, as scheduled or random push notifications, or just sifted through manually in the app. But, naturally, the way that this simple concept is executed on makes all the difference in how well it jostles you out of a negative headspace. Affirmations’ aesthetic is rich with calming color tones in smooth gradients, and subtle haptic feedback throughout the app (especially when tapping through affirmations) helps to gently nudge you to pay attention to the message being shown. These small details were so clearly made with care, and are entirely vital for what the app aims to do for its users — every aspect of the app evokes the positivity and reassurance it wants to share, in both what the app says and how it looks and feels while saying it.

Affirmations is helping to make my home screen a more pleasant place to be.

I find the best way to use Affirmations is via its home screen widgets. Carving out some space on my home screen for a small widget that cycles through compliments and encouragements throughout my day is such a simple antidote to the other stressors found there — like my calendar, emails, and reminders. I’ve recently been reassessing the “balance” of my home screen — especially how much of that precious real estate I set aside for “goodness” — and Affirmations is a crucial component to shifting that balance away from “stress, work, notifications, tasks” and towards “happiness, calm, pause, breath, joy” whenever I unlock my phone. The widget serves as my ever-present reminder to center wholesome thoughts instead of negative ones, and to reassess my attitude when something has gotten me down — it seems like such a small thing, but it's really made a noticeable difference in my mood because of how quickly it redirects my mind from the negative to the positive.

Tailoring Affirmations to best fit your needs is dead-simple, as is setting up notifications to randomly brighten your day.

In addition to simply displaying words of encouragement, Affirmations also has an excellent offering of features to fine-tune when and how the app tries to lift your spirits. You can set custom notification times for an affirmation to be delivered via push notification, as well as enabling "Random Notifications" to add a bit more spontaneity to when you're affirmed. You can control how many random notifications you receive in a day, and can also set a "do not disturb" window — because not everyone wants random encouragement at 3AM. Affirmations also allows you to toggle off specific categories of its pre-loaded affirmations that may be less applicable (or affirming) to you in your specific situation. Justin is always adding new affirmations and new categories, even with time-specific affirmation categories like Pride Month affirmations and seasonal affirmations like "Pumpkin Spice Season is here!" (for those who observe it), all of which can be toggled off if you'd prefer. Users are also able to populate the app with their own affirmations (up to 200 characters), perhaps to add a personal goal or a specific call to action to the rotation of messages — allowing a more targeted tenderness that the developer could never have introduced on their own. The appearance of the widgets (and the app itself) is entirely customizable, with settings to modify the color scheme of the gradients, gradient opacity, font size, as well as the drop shadow — meaning Affirmations can fit into any home screen aesthetic. Oh, and of course, Justin has created a wonderful selection of custom app icons as well!

Making Affirmations your own is easy with the straightforward appearance customization and colorful app icon selection.

Also hidden within Affirmations' Settings is a built-in breathing exercise bubble akin to the Apple Watch's Breathe app, a truly delightful Fidget window full of haptic feedback on buttons, sliders, and dials familiar to any iOS user, and an extensive repository of mental health resources from organizations and governments from around the world.

The Fidget page of Affirmations is such an unnecessary but excellent addition to an app focused on mental health.

Ambient Mindfulness, No Credit Card Required

So many other apps in this category — I’m thinking “mindfulness” apps or other apps designed to motivate and encourage — have too much of a “work” component to them. Demands to set aside X minutes a day for a meditation, or apps designed to be pushy in their efforts to improve your life. Worse yet: so many of these apps are locked behind prohibitive pay-walls or scummy weekly subscription fees. Affirmations is entirely free, and is very much an ambient attitude adjustment app — an IV drip of delight, slowly but steadily shifting me toward more positive thoughts whenever I unlock my phone. This is in stark contrast to how our phones usually make us feel — unpleasant feelings like anger, sadness, fear, loneliness, or dread. Affirmations is the only app that I can unequivocally say has only ever made me feel good, charitable, and wholesome feelings. And with the volume of doom and gloom we've all be main-lining for, well, years at this point, we could certainly use more apps like Affirmations in our lives. You can download Affirmations on the App Store today for free, and try out the so-called “self-care sidekick” for yourself.

I just finished installing a new CPU heatsink on my desktop PC; a new-in-box Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4 I got a good deal on from a reseller on r/HardwareSwap. It’s an excellent heatsink, especially considering how excessive it is for my Ryzen 5 2600X CPU (I’m essentially passively cooling my PC!). Now, I could review the Dark Rock 4 as I have other products; highlighting its pros and cons, assessing it’s price-point, and elaborating on why it is (or isn’t) a good fit for my needs. But ultimately, that wouldn’t fully explain why I bought it. My stock AMD Wraith CPU cooler was more than sufficient, and I certainly didn’t need to burn $55. What I needed was a project; some mechanical task I could do with my hands. What I needed was a sense that even through all this uncertainty and chaos, there was something in my life that I could disassemble and rebuild as better than it was before.

The Dark Rock 4 is a good CPU heatsink. It was a better “bulwark against madness”.

I’ve been exclusively working from home since the first week of March due to the COVID-19 pandemic that quite nearly everyone has been affected by. Transitioning to 100% work from home has been challenging, mostly in the area of keeping myself sane. I’m spoiled to have a job where there is plenty for us to be doing from the safety of our homes, I’m spoiled to have a desk with a computer where I can do that work from, and I am spoiled to have a wife and a dog to keep my home feeling like home through all of this mess. Many reading this may be more spoiled, and some perhaps less — regardless, home isolation, perpetually bleak news, and the creeping anxiety caused by a global virus outbreak can really take a toll on one’s mental health.

I’ve had productive days, and I’ve certainly had unproductive ones too; but one thing that I’ve noticed (now, as well as during other stressful times in my life) is that I periodically need a tactile project to clear my mind and calm my spirit. Most often this need is satisfied by working in my wood shop (which I am also incredibly spoiled to have) — today, it was the anticipation of receiving the CPU heatsink I carefully selected and hunted for a deal on, the process of delicately affixing it to my PC’s motherboard, and the fine-tuning of fan RPM curves to quiet the noise my computer makes as much as possible.

“You aren’t working from home — you are at home during a crisis trying to work.” - Unknown

The unnecessary purchase of and frivolous fiddling with a computer part may seem both wasteful and trivial, but in these unusual times it also meant much more to my sanity than the money or time it “cost” me. You probably have a hobby or interest that may feel much the same — lean into it. If spending a little extra money on a high-quality calligraphy set, a handsome piece of figured walnut, a Nintendo Switch, or a CPU heatsink is what it takes to give you a sense of normalcy and safeguard your mental health, do so. There’s an excellent quote circulating on Twitter lately: “You aren’t working from home — you are at home during a crisis trying to work.” Your first priority should be you and your family’s physical and mental health. Much has been said about the former — don’t neglect the latter. Find what brings you joy when things are hard. Reference good resources (like IsolatedNotAlone.com). Consider what little things you can do to settle your mind the next time anxiety over world events takes hold, or what gift you can give to yourself or a loved one to brighten an otherwise gloomy day. Because we all sometimes need “bulwarks against madness...museums against entropy.”