Self-care routine for lifestyle change, setting life goals & personal growth
Updated: November 11, 2020
Fabulous Review - A Practical Tool to Track Your Habit
Fabulous is a habit tracking app developed by Duke University's Behavioral Economics Lab led by Dan Ariely. By studying human behavior, the app puts scientific theories into practice and offers actionable steps to help users build up healthy habits and achieve their goals efficiently and easily. Fabulous has been out for a few years and has gained millions of downloads on Google Play. Is it worth a try? Now let's find out.
Basic habit tracker functions
Habit tracking apps are basically to help you build up and maintain a new healthy routine like quitting smoking, passing exams, losing weight, and there is no exception for Fabulous. Fabulous is a habit tracker app including basic functions like setting your habits/goals, customizing reminders to your daily tasks, recording graphs of your progress, and more.
Science-based strategies
- Start with small changes: One of the common mistakes for goal-setters is they like dreaming big, setting big goals then make themselves miserable. So users start with a tiny little goal of drinking water after they installing the app on their mobile devices. Like playing a game, you need to complete the required mini-challenges to access more healthy habits and content. Users can create their own habits/goals or randomly pick one after triggering the "Make Me Fabulous" button on the right bottom corner of the screen. This part contains many healthy options like a 7-minute workout, 4-minute relaxing yoga, 1-minute energizing breath, and more, which allows users to carry out these activities efficiently and get closer to their goals.
- Step by step actions: Fabulous claims that they use behavioral science to help people develop their habits and achieve their goals. As a person who loves setting BIG goals (Obviously most of them failed) and also has tried a variety of habit trackers on my mobile phone, I think that's true. The app helps you break your goals down into small actionable pieces that you can then easily and efficiently tackle. Drinking water, for example, the app not only allows you to create the goal but also offers specific actions to help you achieve it like putting the water bottle by your bedside or buying a water bottle to make it easier for yourself to drink water. You need to complete all these tasks before you can level up. When the final goal turns into one by one easy step, it's more possible for users to take actions, stick to their goals, and then achieve them.
- Change your mindset: Unlike most habit trackers which only helps users "create" goals, Fabulous mainly focus on driving users to take actions immediately and also build a strong foundation of knowledge about why/how to achieve these goals. As we know, you are what you think, and limiting mindset and beliefs play a negative role in our way to achieve our goals or develop a healthy habit. So Fabulous offers lots of educational videos and articles in their app in order to help users rewire their mindset. These contents show up on the front page of the app every day, make sure you have read them before clicking the check button.
Is Fabulous free?
It's free to download the app on both Google Play and Appstore. However, Fabulous contains in-app purchases ranging from $9.99 to $90.00 and requires you to upgrade your account to unlock more content and privileges. The app offers a first-week free trial, which allows you to experience the special functions for 7 days without being charged.
Conclusion
The year is almost over and it's the best time to review what you have done and make new goals for your next year. If you are serious about not just setting goals but achieving them, then Fabulous is a great companion during your find-a-better-u adventure.
Pros:
- Science-based habit tracker
- Integrated health sessions
- Simple UI and user-friendly interface
Cons:
- In-app purchases
