Know About The Apps, That Benefit Our Mental Health

Although many mental health professionals would suggest limiting your time on smartphones, there are certain applications (apps) that can modify your time spent on smartphones as valuable. These apps aid and provide the tools and equipment to those who want to enhance and improve their lives.

On one hand, some apps are rooted in the knowledge of positive psychology to improve focus, elevate happiness and promote calmness through meditation and mindfulness. On the other hand, some apps are developed to help and aid those who are wrestling with concerns such as PTSD, Anxiety, and Depression.

It is significant to remember that if any individual is wrestling with mental health concerns, then first consult a doctor, psychologist, or mental health professional. All these apps are not a replacement for in-person caring interaction but they can act as a supplement to psychotherapy or aid in inculcating or initiating healthier habits and behaviours.

A study evidenced that among the individuals who used the mental health apps, 90% reported and showed an increase and enhancement in confidence, motivation, and attitudes regarding emotional and mental health.

Apps For Meditation

1. Insight Timer: It is a free meditation app that provides courses on meditation processes, with several known guides (such as Tara Brach, Thich Nhat Hanh, etc.) in the practice of meditation. This app keeps track of your progress with the diagrammatic presentation. This app can be suggested to those who are still understanding which type of meditation works for them.
2. Smiling Mind: This app is developed by two Australian enthusiasts of meditation and mindfulness. They aimed to make meditation and mindfulness available for all. This app provides guided meditation mostly for children but is also available for adults.
3. Headspace: This app is for meditators (beginners and experienced), as it offers a series of meditative practices that deal with several psychological concerns such as stress, anxiety, physical exercise, and sleep. It includes characteristics such as, “sleep cast”, “SOS” meditation, knowledgeable animation to provide detailed explanation and demonstration, and several other features.
4. In space: This app helps in enhancing and improving the areas of your life as specified by you. It works on various goals (like boosting confidence, getting improved sleep, being efficient at work, de-stressing yourself, etc.) and provides practice for all of them. The sessions of this app consist of meditation, guided positive visualizations, breathing exercises, and others.

Apps For Dealing with Stress

• Stop, Breathe, Think: This app was developed by individuals working in non-profit Tools for which, it educates about meditation and mindfulness to teenagers and empowers them to be more compassionate and understanding. It is suitable for all age groups and deals with severe emotional concerns like stress, sadness, anger, and anxiety. The app guides you when experiencing these emotions, to provide a calmness to your mind by breathing, looking at your thoughts, and meditating for some time.
• Aura: This is the app to put together your mental state at the present with the most suitable relaxation strategy to decrease anxiety and stress, increase happiness and enhance sleep. It provides various services like relaxing nature sounds, tranquil music, short stories, guided meditation, and other things.
• Calm: This app provides various services such as guided videos and masterclasses for stretching, sleep stories, and meditation exercises that are concerned with addressing issues like, self-care, self-esteem, anxiety, and focus. Every day, there’s a novel calm meditation theme for users, and they also keep track of their time of meditation.

Apps For Depression

• What’s Up?: This app was developed to support individuals dealing with depression and is based on the fundamentals of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT). It is additionally useful for handling stress, anxiety, anger, and related concerns, by recognizing the negative thoughts and feelings to provide modified thoughts. It gives services such as a journal, relaxed breathing, guided exercises, inspirational materials, etc.
• Mood Tools: This app gives a Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to understand the severity of your depression. It also helps through videos, recording, enhancing mood, keeping track, and developing a safe plan.
• Sanvello: This app is developed for handling depression, stress, and anxiety, based on CBT and mindfulness meditation. Its former name is Pacifica. This app provides meditations, breathing exercises, tracking your mood and progress, setting goals (daily and long-term), exploring self-help strategies, etc. It helps in reframing the negative feelings and changing behaviour to become better.

Apps For Dealing with Anxiety

1. Panic Relief: Designed by a Danish Psychiatrist, this app supports a panic attack and severe anxiety through cognitive methods. By guiding sensations and short animations for being calm during the attack of panic. This app provides support for several activities (like, positive visualization, breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, etc.) for handling panic.
2. Brain.FM: This app utilizes AI-generated music to improve brain function by promoting neurons to regulate and lock in a certain way that helps in achieving a desired mental state. In whichever state you are (such as looking ahead to focus, sleep, relax or meditate), according to the developers of this app, you will observe the results in 15 minutes.
3. Breathe2Relax: This app educates about diaphragmatic breathing to lower blood pressure, heart rate, and stress relief. It can help with mental health issues like, PTSD, panic, anger, or anxiety. It offers videos, ways to keep a check on your progress and reading material.

Apps For Mindfulness

1. Happier: This app was developed as a personalized mindfulness coach, to aid you in regulating and monitoring your emotions to magnify your happiness and joy throughout your day. It provides courses on well-being and happiness, a meditation series, a platform to store the things you are grateful for, quotes for inspiration, and an opportunity to interact with other users of this app.
2. The Mindfulness App: As the name suggests it focuses on making mindfulness practices attainable for all. Evidence suggests that practising mindfulness consistently is beneficial for self but sometimes it becomes tougher to take out time, and that’s where this app provides reminders gently for every day, timers for the ones who practice meditation silently, and guided meditation for all.
3. Budhify: It aims to intertwine meditation in your life, irrespective of where you are emotionally and physically. The session duration varies from 4 to 30 minutes, to feature according to your suitability. The sessions give support in taking or walking away as a break from work, for better sleep, and in dealing with severe anxiety. It provides meditation with your family, friends, colleagues, or others who don’t have the app.
4. 10% Happier: Meditation: This app focuses on and aims to elucidate meditation and gives simple hacks to support eager meditators to continue. It provides meditation process videos and advice related to it, sessions guided to address political stress and anxiety, and also guidance about the application of lessons learned for being mindful.

For Habits/Productivity

Productive: This is an app that provides simple features of setting targets, routines, to-do lists, and tracking progress. The users can select when they want to use it, how long they want to use it, etc., by sending them reminders, streaks, and charts of their progress, to help them in developing healthy habits and breaking unhealthy ones.

Streaks: This app helps in knowing about the consecutive days (streaks) that you don’t continue your negative and unhealthy habits and continue with the healthy habits. It motivates and supports you to reach your targets.

Fabulous: This app teaches, inspires, and motivates you to accomplish goals set by you. Through evidence-based understanding, this app helps in developing or inculcating healthier habits in merely 30 days. This app supports comprehending what works for you and what does not help you. It helps in changing small habits to maintain a productive routine.

HabitBull: This app can help in keeping track of small changes (limiting caffeine intake, etc.) to inculcating healthy habits (practising meditation, etc.) so that you can look at your routines clearly and change or modify them according to your requirements. There are features like reminders, streaks, charts for progress, inspirational quotes, etc., to keep you responsible for the goals set for you.

Conclusion:

In modern times, technology is trying to make our lives more convenient and comfortable, and these apps are just a way to positively contribute to our mental health. Although human interaction and its impact cannot be replaced by anything, these apps are to soothe the process of understanding the significance of our mental health in our lives.