You don’t go anywhere without your phone, so why not use it to help you create some consistent habits for your mental and physical health? Here’s a curated list of apps for you to try.
Mood:
Calm is an award-winning app that is popular with many mental health professionals for their personal use. It offers guided meditations, sleep stories, breathing programs, and relaxing music for the beginner and beyond. Be sure to check out the blue breath bubble that shows you how long to take a calming breath.
The Headspace app teaches the skills of mindfulness and meditation by using it for just a few minutes every day. Dealing with stress? Anxiety? Sleep issues? Trouble focusing? This app reminds you to keep practicing each day.
With the Daylio app, you can make a journal entry and track your mood and daily activities in just a few steps. Hence, when your therapist asks about your habits between appointments, all the info will be on your phone! Both of you can learn about recurring patterns and creating new ones. You have to know what they are before you can make a change, right?
Physical Health:
This app helps you track your sleep patterns. My favorite feature is the SleepCycle alarm clock that wakes you up during a window of time that you set (default is 30 minutes). When your sleep is light during this “wake up phase”, the SleepCycle app will awaken you. Even on a short night of sleep, you’ll be able to get out of bed feeling rested than groggy.
The developers of this app say it best: “Discover how your personality impacts your unique health behaviors and unlock how you can achieve your weight loss goals.”
Time management/Productivity:
By dividing your work into 25-minute chunks, with a 5-minute break between each burst of activity, you’ll be on your way to increased productivity. After four focus sessions, you are rewarded with a longer break.
This creative app uses the power of visual stimulation and an environmental awareness vibe. It’s a rare thing that gives you time rather than take it away!
With this app, al your tasks are in one place and you can decide what are the most important priorities of the day.
These are some of the health apps that we recommend (no affiliation to Thrive Collective). Each app outlined above is based on reliable theory and research on mood, habit formation, and mindfulness. When the content is delivered to you in a modern format, they help you use it consistently –That’s the key to developing and maintaining healthy habits!
Have any questions? Contact us and we’d be happy to help!