Ever since the COVID outbreak, people around the world have been feeling more depressed and anxious than ever. Furthermore, college is a stressful period, students have to balance between challenging academics, maintaining relationships, and uncertainties of the future. We were inspired by this problem to create a React application to spread awareness for mental wellbeing and practice gratitude by focusing on the present moment through reflection and practicing of gratitude.
Our React application aims to spread awareness for mental well-being and practice gratitude by paying attention to small things that we are grateful for in our lives. We also created a one minute reflection for people to stop what they are doing and focus on their breathing, designing a short period for people to process and understand the complicated emotions/feelings that are going on internally at the moment. Then users can publish a short message for things that they are appreciative of before seeing past posts and posts by others.
We built the frontend application using React and ChakraUI utilizing numerous state hooks and changes. The backend was developed using Firebase for storing user logins and collecting user reflection posts, we learned a lot about it during the development process regarding dynamic components of a functioning application and databases.
We encountered some challenges while building the application such as having problems using Github and merging the code from everyone's computer, while for React we had troubles with implementing a timer and randomizing the music, and changing a completely different component into a separate component, but we overcame them through extensive research and guidance from others.
We're proud of successfully creating a complete application that allows users to practice mindfulness by focusing on their breathing and documenting feelings. Furthermore, we are proud of overcoming all the challenges that we faced along the way to create a fully functional web application.
Learned how to use React Implement Chakrai UI for styling Firebase for backend Learned how to use GitHub What's next for Grateful Living: Our primary goal is to implement this project into a cross-platform application to make it more accessible to the public. We plan to continue working on the application and implementing new features for user customization, such as allowing the user to decide the breathing timer or the music that is played during the meditation exercise. We also want to implement an option for users to interact with others on the platform. Lastly, we could implement daily reminders such as sending push notifications to encourage the users to take breaks and practice mindfulness