Apps to help you manage your mental health
Use your smartphone to help keep your stress and anxiety in check with these apps, to help calm your mind and enhance your wellbeing.
Do you have worries that won’t go away and that impact your everyday life? ReachOut WorryTime interrupts repetitive thinking by letting you set aside your worries until later, encouraging you to deal with them once a day, rather than carrying them around with you 24/7. When you notice yourself worrying about something, add it to WorryTime, set a time to deal with the worries and get on with your day. Use your allocated WorryTime to review the worries you’ve added and ditch the ones that no longer matter to you.
Happify aims to help you gain control of your thoughts and feelings, overcoming negative thoughts and building resilience leading to a more positive, happier you. The app provides activities and games employing techniques grounded in positive psychology, mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy. Your emotional wellbeing is calculated as a happiness score which you can work to improve upon each week.
Pacifica gives you psychologist- designed tools to address stress, anxiety and depression based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness meditation, relaxation, and mood/health tracking. Day-by-day, you’ll learn to manage stress, anxiety and depression at your own pace. The app includes guided self-help paths, a mood tracker, thought recording and journaling, and daily challenges.
With over 350 million people experiencing a depressive episode each year, Moodpath is designed to foster self-awareness and empower people affected. The app will ask you 3 times a day, questions concerning your emotional and physical well-being over the course of 14 days. After the screening you receive a professional assessment of your mental health that you can share and discuss with your GP or therapist. More than 150 videos and psychological exercises are available to help you understand your mood and strengthen your mental health.
Recommended by top psychologists and mental health experts to help you de-stress, this app focuses on meditation, breathing, sleep and relaxation and was selected as Apple’s App of the Year in 2017. There are guided meditation sessions from 3-25 minutes long, sleep stories, breathing programs, music and sounds from nature to help you relax and aid better sleep.
Colouring for mindfulness has gone digital! A fun way to take a few moments to yourself and get your mind off the day to day hustle. Paint mandalas, patterns, animals, florals, and more from the Colorfy artists – or upload your own drawings.
Happier is a simple app to help you practice your gratitude skills and find more joy, beauty, and comfort in simple, everyday moments. Use Happier as an on-the-go gratitude journal to record happy moments both big and small – writing down things we appreciate is a scientifically proven way to feel more positive and optimistic.
SELF HELP FOR ANXIETY MANAGEMENT (SAM)
SAM will help you to understand what causes your anxiety, monitor your anxious thoughts and behaviour over time and manage your anxiety through self-help exercises and private reflection. You can also access the Social Cloud feature, which enables you to share your experiences with the SAM community while protecting your identity.
This app lets you use your own playlists to help you feel better; Use Music eScape to create a mood map of your music library and develop dynamic playlists to match your music to your mood. You can create or select a music journey to express, enhance or change your mood. With just the swipe of a finger you can draw a music journey starting at how you currently feel and ending at how you want to feel. Have fun and use the power of music to help you take charge of your feelings. It’s as simple as that.
ReachOut Breathe helps you reduce the physical symptoms of stress and anxiety by slowing down your breathing and your heart rate with your iPhone or Apple Watch. Research shows that slowing your heart rate can increase feelings of calmness in your body. Using simple visuals, ReachOut Breathe helps you to control your breath and measures your heart rate in real-time using the camera in your phone. This means that you can actively address the onset of physical stress symptoms such as shortness of breath, increased heart rate and a tightening of the chest.
