Taking care of your mental health is just as important, in fact, as taking care of your physical health. While there is a lot we don’t know about the effectiveness of mental health apps, studies show that they can be helpful, especially for depression and anxiety, and when people want to be doing something to improve their mental health, but don’t have immediate access to care (such as if they are waiting for an appointment).
We asked our team what apps they’re using to improve their mental health, and we thought World Mental Health Day was the perfect opportunity to share some of our favorites!! Let us know in the comments if you’ve used these apps or what other apps you’d recommend!
Meditation
From the developers: Insight Timer is the world’s largest free meditation app with over 210k free tracks to help you build healthy habits and create a wellbeing routine that works for you.
From our team: “I practice meditation daily, and I especially connect with guided visual meditations. I also love using binaural beats, which help balance out the anxious monkey-mind that I sometimes have! I love that it's free, and I love the huge variety and quality of meditations that are offered.”
Self-care
From the developers: Finch is a free self-care pet app that encourages you to take care of your pet by prioritizing your own self-care through personalized exercises.
From our team: “This app is like a self-care pet. You can add your own goals, and each time you complete one it gives you points to go towards your little Finch pet. You can dress up the pet, decorate its room, and send it on adventures. It's a nice way to remind myself of habits I'm working on, and it's satisfying to see your pet grow.”
Sleep, meditation, relaxation
From the developers: Calm is the #1 app to help you sleep more, stress less and live mindfully with a range of science-backed content and activities for daily mental health support.
From our team: “I used this during a period of insomnia. It has lots of stories and sounds to listen to – and when a story ends, it doesn’t abruptly stop, it starts a calming ocean sound that keeps going so you can stay asleep!”
Self-Care Bullet Journal with Goals - Mood Diary & Happiness Tracker
From the developers: Daylio is a free app that enables you to keep a simple, private journal without having to type a single line.
From our team: “I use it for tracking my mood. There are activities you can select along with the mood, and it has charts to track your mood and what activities or events might be affecting your mood. This is helpful if you have mental health struggles and need to see how medications, activities, social patterns, and habits might be affecting you over time, or to get a gauge on your overall mental health over time. It is customizable and you can add your own activities or sections (such as weather, menstrual cycle, social activities, hobbies, etc).”
Improve your stress, sleep, and more with Balance's personalized meditation program.
From the developers: Balance is your personal meditation coach that creates daily meditation sessions based on your meditation experience, goals, and preferences.
Emotional wellbeing journal
From the developers: How We Feel is a free app created by scientists, designers, engineers, and therapists to help people better understand their emotions and find strategies for managing them in the moment, allowing users to accurately describe their feelings while tracking sleep, exercise, and health trends.
Bonus
Yuka
Food & cosmetic scanner
From the developers: Yuka is a free mobile app that allows you to scan the barcodes of food and personal care products to see their health impact, providing a rating and detailed information for each product, and suggesting healthier alternatives when a product has a negative impact on your health.
From our team: “A healthy body helps promote a healthy mind. This app helps take out the guess work of all the toxins, dyes, and harmful chemicals in food.”
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