When I get nervous, anxious, overwhelmed, I get twitchy. I start tapping on things. My arms start shaking. My head has trouble remaining steady on my neck. The unnerving energy needs to go somewhere. I often find myself tapping the back of my iPhone, allowing the soft acoustics it produces to calm my nerves. It's the tiniest amount of relief but it's what keeps me sane, grounded, level-headed.
What if we could track the number of times you tap the back of your phone? To monitor when, how long, how fast, and how often, you need that little bit of relief. Just a simple counter with the Total Number of Taps will do. Even nicer, a little graph outlining when those Taps happened. Perhaps accompanied by some trend line. Insights into the days you tapped most or least. Connect it to your calendar to figure out what triggered the anxiety—or what helped prevent it.
Anxiety Community
Should we be able to compare the number of Taps we did to those of other people? Like an Anxiety Community, keeping each other aware that you're not the only one feeling this? If your number is lower than other people's, that's perspective that perhaps you aren't doing as bad as you thought. If your number of Taps is higher than other people's, that's perspective that perhaps it's time to take things more seriously.
In any case, the goal is not to have the most amount of Taps. It's to have the fewest. And that comparison shouldn't happen at the Total Number of Taps level; it should happen at the best trend-progression. People that Tapped a lot but now Tap less, people that are doing better. That should be celebrated—something for others to aspire to. A high Tap Count shouldn’t be something to mock, admire, or feel ashamed of. It should be met with compassion, understanding, and support. Decreasing the velocity with which those Taps are acquired over time is what deserves the praise. It signals you're doing better, in some way.
Anxiety coaching
The cherry on top: offering bespoke resources or other aids to help people fight that anxiety. No, wait, release that anxiety. The goal is to not keep things bottled up until they explode. You wish to flush it out of your system, One Tap at a Time (or Two Taps, because that's when your iPhone starts counting Back Taps.) How you achieve that can use some guidance. Some information on how to channel that anxiety and truly get rid of it, without continuously restocking the anxiety-reserve. Not just content, but therapy—or at least, something close to it. A low-barrier, light-hearted, nonjudgmental form of therapy. It won't even be called therapy, it's too on the nose. Too insisting of 'issues.' That's not what the anxiety-induced need. They are not depressed, not yet. They are not sick. Not yet. They just need to unload whatever bottled-up restlessness they’ve accumulated. For that, these little taps—combined with pinpointed guidance on How to Tap Away Your Troubles—might be enough.
Technological impl(ementations)ications
The iPhone then, is perfect for this. It's an anxiety-inducing tool but also one we won't be parted with. Let's stick whatever anxiety we have back into the machine. Let that machine hold your troubles for you. Back Tap only registers on the second tap, so the Tap Count always increases by two. Ideally this works with the screen off. The screen shouldn't even wake up. Just the Tapping itself should be registered. Somewhere, in a little data-base. Probably an App, but a Shortcut feeding an Apple Note is good enough already. Heck, you can build an entire online portal with a Dashboard giving insights into your anxiety over time, find causes in the data (again, your calendar is a good place to start), solutions via Resources, support from the Community (and even licensed professionals...? I don't know, I'm riffing here.)
If the Back Tap doesn't suit you, a Widget on the homescreen works too. Oh and for those that wear an Apple Watch: a complication on your favorite Watch Face achieves the same. In any case, what you want to achieve is that you can just Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, until you feel the tension release from your body. Here, take this, and stick it someplace where it's no longer mine, you whisper to the phone.
The iPhone probably won't do parts of this (none of this?) out of the box right now, hence why I'm writing this down instead of building it. And even if it does, I wouldn't know how to build it anyway. Not even the Shortcut to Notes version I mentioned. So if somebody feels like they can take whatever loosely-defined of an idea this is and thinks they can turn it into something tangible: go ahead. You have my blessing. I don’t need to be CEO of this company. I’ll happily take a consultancy fee to help with the ideas behind the development. That's all I'm good for anyway.
In any case, Whatever you do, please let me know if you build it. And please, for the love of whatever you deem holy, call it Tap. Tagline: Tap Away Anxiety, One Tap at a Time. It’s a direct link to the action you’re doing. It’s a connection to the native functionality of the iPhone. It’s a hint to the word ‘step’ and doing things ‘one step at a time’. It’s perfect.
Time for me to Tap Out,
Mitch
