Somara: When the Body Speaks First
The Setup
We feel things in our bodies before we can name them. The tight chest before a hard conversation. The stomach knots before opening your laptop. Most wellness apps skip past this entirely — they ask "how are you feeling?" and assume you already know.
I started Somara because I didn't.
After nine years at Movoto, a layoff hit harder than I expected, and at the same time I was supporting my mom through Parkinson's Dementia and navigating my own undiagnosed autoimmune disease. Therapy was where I learned the language for what my body had been doing all along. Once I could read those signals, everything shifted — and I couldn't let the insight sit.
The Challenge
Naming an emotion is the hardest part of regulating it. For people navigating stress, trauma, chronic illness, or emotional dysregulation, the feeling shows up in the body first and the word comes much later, if at all.
I validated this on r/Alexithymia, where thread after thread described the exact gap I was designing for. One person could only identify chest tightness or stomach tingling. Another said the body-emotion connection makes intellectual sense but doing it in the moment is confusing. This isn't an edge case. It's a widespread, underserved need backed by established psychology and almost entirely absent from mainstream wellness apps.
What I Did
I approached Somara the way I'd approach any product problem, research, user definition, intentional design decisions, while also being one of my own users.
Three personas anchored the work: the caregiver managing compassion fatigue, the woman navigating perimenopause, and the professional cycling through burnout. Different lives, same need: a way to connect physical sensation to emotional state before it escalated.
The core design decision was a dual-entry flow. How We Feel, Moodnotes, Woebot, and Paradym all start with the emotion. Somara lets users start from either direction, log a body sensation and discover the emotion underneath, or log an emotion and find where it lives in the body. From there, a Journey Arc (Awareness, Connection, Understanding, Action, Integration) gives the experience a shape over time, so the app rewards return visits with insight, not just streaks.
Every visual choice, colorful gradients, soft animation, non-clinical language — was in service of one thing: making Somara feel like a companion, not a tool.
The Outcome
Somara is still in active design. What it demonstrates isn't a shipped metric, it's the capability to identify a problem no one is solving, validate it through real research, define product strategy from zero, and design an experience that requires emotional intelligence and craft in equal measure.
The thing I'm most proud of isn't a feature. It's that this app could genuinely help people. People like me, like my mom, like the strangers on Reddit just trying to understand what their body is telling them.
The Tension
Designing from personal experience is both a superpower and a responsibility. The superpower is empathy that goes all the way down. I wasn't imagining my users' pain points, I was living them. The responsibility is staying rigorous when the work feels personal. I still needed research to confirm my experience was shared. I still needed personas to keep me from designing only for myself. Investment doesn't replace process; it just raises the stakes for getting it right.
What I learned
Somara reminded me why I became a designer. Not to ship features to make people's lives a little clearer, a little calmer, a little more manageable. It also gave me a word for how I've always worked: kodawari. A personal commitment to craft and intentional detail. That's what this is.
