Freud on your iPhone

Who doesn’t love a lifestyle app, with its implicit promise that you’re just a free download away from perfection? It’s hard not to fall for the idea that a few power walks and an activity log will erase years of dodgy technique and flaky willpower and result in a new, improved and impeccably databased you — even when your inner schoolmarm points out that you could walk long before the invention of the smartphone. But suppose there was an app that could go where mere common sense cannot and take you deep into the recesses of the unconscious, where all the good stuff happens. Welcome to the land of the psycho app...

Lose yourself

VIRTUAL GASTRIC BAND HYPNOSIS

What Imagine if you could achieve the weight loss associated with major surgery without leaving your armchair. In fact, that’s exactly where you need to be, as the softly spoken hypnotherapist Sue from the Easyloss Weight Loss Centre in Hampshire puts you ‘under’ with a lilting countdown and then proceeds to tell you exactly what you need to do to lose weight. It is, admittedly, fairly obvious info: only eat when you’re hungry; stop the minute you begin to feel full; imagine yourself slim and fit, eating the kind of food in the kind of quantities a slim and fit person would eat. But it's the subliminal messages that you should pay attention to — the idea that you’re locking into a powerful subconscious that will guide you towards your goal without allowing you to deviate and that will mean you effortlessly gravitate towards healthy living without slavishly following a diet. And at £4.99, it’s distinctly cheaper than the several hundred quid that one-to-one hypno sessions at the clinic will set you back.

Verdict Time will tell whether I will emerge a sylph, but early indications aren’t bad; finding myself walking up the stairs with half a sandwich in hand, I remembered the injunction only to eat when seated, and immediately hastened to the nearest sofa. It’s a start.

Night vision

Dream:ON

What Lucid dreaming — the ability to direct the tableaux that scamper through your mind while you’re asleep — is not a new phenomenon; way back in the 18th century, the fabulously named Marie-Jean-Léon Lecoq, Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, was chronicling his experiments into dream-control techniques. Fast-forward 150 years, and an app is promising you enthralling night-time adventures by playing you a carefully constructed soundscape when it ‘senses’ that you’re in REM sleep. ‘Peaceful Garden’ and ‘Into the City’ come as standard; further in-app purchases will take you on the space shuttle, into a rainforest and — curiously — fill your dreams with paparazzi.

Verdict Notwithstanding the fact that I woke up on multiple occasions to see what was going on, I did have some extremely vivid dreams, one of which took me on an extraordinary psychogeographic meander around Victorian London. Another featured a storyline from The Archers, which was less extraordinary and faintly disquieting. No matter: they tell you it takes a few nights to kick in. Perhaps I’ll get EastEnders next.

Mind games

LUMOSITY

What Often find yourself wondering which way is up? Standing in the middle of the supermarket clueless as to what you came in for? Calling your girlfriend ‘Dave’? Our accelerated culture is a fast track to distraction and disarray, but relax! Just 20 minutes of Lumosity a day and you’ll have the mental acuity of a Mensa member who’s doing a PhD in string theory while training for Only Connect. Essentially, you’ll be doing a series of superficially undemanding games that test your cognitive processes, from the speed of your reactions to your comprehension of simple instructions to your memory — swiping the screen, for example, to register the direction of a bird’s flight, or predicting where a pinball will end up according to the logic of its trajectory.

Verdict Occasionally, the games themselves fox — I scored badly on one basic puzzler because I couldn’t figure out what it wanted me to do — but this is all part of the magic. Everything you do gets logged on the LPI (the what? Lumosity Performance Index, stupid), with the inevitable in-app purchases unlocking further subscription levels that will render you an utter genius.

Cash incentives

PACT

What ‘Earn cash for living healthy,’ says the strapline, with the rather chilling addition: ‘paid by members who don’t.’ In other words, you join a community of like-minded masochists, make a weekly promise that you’ll run a mile, or swear off the deep-fried snacks, and — crucially — what you’re prepared to fork out if you fail, and then off you go. If that strikes you as a short route to humiliation and insolvency, there are plenty of reassurances; you can, for example, pause or change your pact at any point, and there are three different kinds of pact that cover going to the gym, eating more vegetables and logging your food, so you don’t have to be good at everything all at once. And if all the admin sounds too much, you can also draft in one of Pact’s partner apps, such as MapMyRun or MyFitnessPal. Nonetheless, earning bucks for burpees does sound like a paradigm shift in peer-pressure dynamics, particularly when you consider an additional feature that allows employers to fund their workers’ pledges. Don’t our bosses know far too much about us already?

Verdict I confess a certain amount of trepidation; this app doesn’t seem entirely designed for what used to be called privacy and is now called party-pooping. But I did fashion a Pact-inspired compromise: I created a doughnut ‘swear box’ on the hall table and asked my cohabitee to chastise me severely if I drove rather than walked to the paper shop.