5 Mental Health Apps to help ease your troubled mind
Social media can be a pretty toxic place if you’re not careful with how you use it. Excessive use of social apps such as Instagram and TikTok may lead to unhealthy comparisons that are detrimental to mental health. Thankfully, there are also apps that will help safeguard our mental well-being and steer us back onto a healthier path.
If you’re feeling stuck in a tough spot in life, here are 5 mental health apps to ease your overthinking mind.
1. For Sleep: Sleep Cycle
A good start to the morning begins with waking up peacefully. It’s the first step to getting the day right and putting your life in order. Which is why apps like Sleep Cycle is important.
Sleep Cycle is a comprehensive alarm clock app that wakes you up in phases. The reason for this is so you gradually ease yourself from heavy sleep to the lightest sleep phase, making you more refreshed and rested when you wake. This is a gentler alternative compared to the blaring noise of your generic phone alarm.
Sleep Cycle also tracks your sleep quality via your phone’s microphone. It will detect any noise you make in your sleep, such as your snoring patterns and sleep talking. You can then analyse how well you slept via daily sleep graphs.
If you have trouble sleeping, you can turn on sleep aid. This will play soothing spatial audios that will help draw you into slumber.
Download Sleep Cycle on: Android, iOS
2. For Meditation: Insight Timer
If you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, then meditating will help gather your thoughts and put you right back on track. For this, we recommend Insight Timer.
Insight Timer is a meditation app that will bring the tranquility of meditating on an ancient mountaintop pagoda – right to your phones.
It’s as simple as setting a meditation timer, then selecting which bells you want heard during intervals. Choose between the deep resonance of a gong, the gentle tinkle of a basu, the light reverberations of a shurong, and many other options to facilitate authentic meditation.
You can also play ambient sounds to your background as you meditate, such as river streams and deep Om chants.
Subscribing to a Plus version will unlock vast and comprehensive guided meditation courses to help you on your journey towards enlightenment.
Download Insight Timer on: Android, iOS
3. For Developing Good Habits: Fabulous
Once you’re up and running from your morning routine, then it’s time to strive to your greatest potential.
Building healthy routines, however small, is a step towards a better mindset. Routines give us order and sets us off into the right direction before we are ready to take on spontaneity and adventure.
Fabulous is a great way to track and build on small habits that are ultimately life-changing.
It’s as easy as figuring out what good habits you would like to embody, inserting them into the app, and ticking off those habits as you achieve them throughout the day. Habits can be as simple as drinking water, going for a 10-minute walk, or just sitting down and being grateful.
You can also be involved in Circles, which is a social community that, like you, are on the same path towards self-development
Download Fabulous Daily Routine Planner on: Android, iOS
4. For Journaling: Gratitude: Self-Care Journal
Happiness starts with gratitude. On social media, everyone’s on a chase and striving to be someone, but it will do good once in a while to look around and be grateful for what you already have. And more importantly, to be grateful for what you already are.
Journaling does wonders, which is why apps like Gratitude is essential.
Gratitude (both the app and the quality) helps shine a light on the good things you might not notice. They do this through thought-provoking prompts that force you to look introspectively, thus re-affirming your sense of worth and purpose. You can also create your own vision board to remind yourself of the things you can be proud of.
You will also have access to daily Zen quotes, gratitude stories, and spoken affirmations even on the free version. Subscribing to premium will unlock more positive notes to keep you going.
Download Gratitude: Self-Care Journal on: Android, iOS
5. For Daily Focus: Focus Plant: Pomodoro Forest
Social media moves at breakneck speed. We consume one content to another with a swipe of a finger, but forget what we saw two swipes ago. It’s convenient and entertaining, but prolong usage will only deteriorate our attention span and hinder progress on important tasks.
The Pomodoro Technique is a useful time management technique. It encourages full focus on one task with short breaks in between (eg. 25 minute homework, 5 minutes rest, and repeat). To make this technique more lively and disciplined, try Focus Plant: Pomodoro Forest.
Focus Plant: Pomodoro Forest encourages this technique by giving you a virtual garden. For every session you commit to, you collect raindrops which you can use to grow plants on your virtual garden. As your garden grows, you unlock new plants and new land as a testament to your hard work!
You have to be on the Focus Plant app during your session. Exiting the app for more than 20 second will disqualify your progress. You can set a whitelist of apps you can access if only absolutely necessary.
Download Focus Plant: Pomodoro Forest on: Android, iOS
Towards a healthier mindset
Being mindful and responsible in this era of social media is important for our mental well-being. We cannot afford to get too caught up with trends and comparisons at the expense of our health. At the end of the day, we’re all humans and deserve to be in a place where we can be happy.
We hope these apps will bring you some positivity and order in your life, and helps you become a person you can be proud of.
