Monica Singh Haley knows a bit about keeping people happy.
She ran the 60-person animation department on the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. And she’s a mother of two.
Released yesterday, Haley’s new company, Happy Apps (www.thehappyapps.com), uses Eastern knowledge to assist us frenetic Westerners. Her father, a native of India, helped influence her interest in the applications she has created meant to help calm millions through a simple $1.99 iTunes download.
The influence of her father’s stories of India and her own visit to that country helped bring her the idea of developing an app that uses color to lift our moods. Inspired by the rainbow of the chakra energy centers, and the beautiful colors of the Indians’ wardrobe in a dusty land, Haley has created several applications to assist with several life challenges, including one every parent needs.
Happy Apps offers light therapy, color therapy, help with sleep, happiness and health. Each app offers a special feature to help you with your challenges. The applications work best on an iPad because of the size of the display but can be used on any smartphone.
Light Therapy
With a cool, white light of the Light Therapy Box, users can experience the mood-lifting effects of a light box without the enormous expense of the traditional headset. The light can help alleviate several issues including Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), jet lag, and depression. The light helps suppress melatonin secretion and helps reset the body’s circadian rhythms. Haley tell Family First this app also works well for people who are in internal offices and don’t get a lot of natural light during the day, or for people who live where it is cloudy, rainy or dark a lot during winter, like in Alaska.
Color Therapy
For the Color Therapist app, the Color Therapist program runs through seven natural colors, each one resonating at the same frequency as your body’s energy centers, or chakras. When your energy centers are out of balance, you can get depressed, lethargic and even sick.
Good Sleep
Here’s the app every parent needs. The Dusk Emulator slowly brings down the light in the room to simulate the sunset. With the help of your choice of white noise, ocean sounds (with no distracting seagulls, per her instruction to the developers), sitar music or others, you or your child will slowly drift into sleep. Haley says the app works great for hotel rooms, so you don’t need to remember a night light or a sound machine.
The Dawn Emulator part of the app then simulates the sunrise to slowly wake you to gradually brightening light. Again, this is a great tool if you often sleep in a darkened hotel room or other dark room. Just to make sure you do wake up, an alarm of your sound choice goes off at the end of the program.
Helping Yourself
The Help Yourself Happiness Guide offers a search tool to find the solution for the symptom you are suffering and a Body Guide so you can pinpoint specific parts of your body that need attention. The app then offers the proper solution to help alleviate your issues.
Happy Health
Just prop up your device up near your face and you get a combination of all the good stuff – color, light and sleep therapy. Moving through the color series, each one is displayed for 5 minutes each, except green with is displayed for 10 minutes because “you can’t get too much green,” says Haley. Then, for 30 minutes, reset your internal clock with some light therapy, followed by help falling asleep. You will be ready for restful, restorative sleep and wake ready for a new day.
Haley says the Happy Apps business idea is part of the expression of her own self. After spending the past several years solely in “mommy mode,” she has decided to work on her own life a bit and starting this business was part of that.
She took an entire year to rediscover herself, including learning to sew to make costumes for her kids, traveling and spending over 30 hours on the phone with her father, writing down the stories of his life. She even took writing classes to make the stories stronger.
Now, she enjoys the freedom and challenges of a new business that is all her own. She has learned to barter for help, find ways to entertain her children while she does business calls and “access (her) brain that had been hibernating.” Look for more apps to come in the future of this budding young company from this successful business woman.
