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The Best Guided Journaling App: Jour
Jour is a guided journaling app that helps you commit to mindfulness. Features like daily jours and guided journeys help improve your mental health.
At some point, we’ve all committed to journaling in order to handle the stress and anxieties of life. Most of us have also failed to actually commit after two or three entries. Journaling can be hard, especially when you don’t know what to journal about. Our App of the Week, Jour, is the best-guided journaling app that helps you commit to mindfulness.
Maxime Germain (co-founder) has always been interested in wellness. Moving from Le Mans, France, to New York City at the age of 19 was a big step for him, but he realized that he needed an outlet to manage the stress. Trying various coping methods (yoga, meditation, etc.), journaling was the method that gave him the results he was looking for. Growing older, he realized that stress and anxiety were a global issue. In January 2019, Germain, along with other co-founders Bobby Giangeruso and Justin Bureau, decided to use their skills to create a product that would have a positive impact on mental health. Assembling a group of almost 50 people (including therapists, designers, neuroscientists) to help build the idea, Jour officially launched in March 2019.
Jour was created with the idea of it being a tool that could easily integrate into users’ lives; everyone is already spending time on their phone, so why not integrate a useful tool into that screentime. Jour is a mindful and interactive journal that’s meant to be portable and accessible so you can access it whether you’re at home, traveling, or on a walk in the park. All of your entries are completely private, so your eyes are the only eyes that can see what you journal about (even the developers don’t have access). This guided journaling app is meant to provide you the tools to handle stress and live a happier, calmer life.
Jour is fairly simple to use given that it has two main features: daily jour and guided journeys. The daily jour is meant to serve as your daily journal, giving you new questions to consider every day. It’s designed to help you reflect on your day, set goals for the future, and check-in on how you’re feeling so you can feel more present. Guided journeys are meant to make the practice of journaling more accessible and interactive; these are meant for those people who just aren’t sure what to journal about. These journal prompts are designed to help address a number of goals, including sleeping more calmly, combatting anxiety, and overcoming fears.
Jour has seen much success since day one of beta testing; the first three months of beta included 400+ testers and more than 25,000 preorders (don’t worry, Jour is completely free). Within 2 months of launch, 80,000 users were journaling with Jour, but now over 190,000 users are finding comfort in this portable journal. TechCrunch featured Jour telling readers to “throw out” their diary and TNW featured Jour as the app that “helps you build a daily journaling habit.”
Start your committed journey to journaling and download Jour.
But enough about other people's apps.
