4 Apps That Can Help Improve Our Mental Health
- by XpatAthens
- Wednesday, 09 March 2022
If we take a look at our smartphones, we will realize that we have too many applications. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and the list goes on. But how many of them can contribute in a positive way to the promotion of our mental health? None. And to be honest, they sometimes do more harm than good.
If we do a little research, however, we can find and download applications that will have a positive impact on our physical, mental, and spiritual health. Such a positive response can have a music application, for example, where we can create our playlists and enjoy our favorite songs. What soothes the soul more than music, after all? Or it can be a fitness application that will help us get in shape. The point is to make the right choice and download apps that prove to be helpful, not a waste of time.
Below is a list of some applications that can help improve our mental health through various activities, meditation, thought recording, and more. They can also be useful tools for parents, who can encourage their children to spend time on them rather than relentlessly engage in social media.
1. What’s Up?
This is a free application that utilizes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) methods to help us cope with depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and more. We can record daily our positive and negative habits so that we can more easily identify what we do right and what is counterproductive. The app offers more than 100 different questions that can help us understand how we feel, while the Thinking Patterns tool helps us manage our internal dialogues.
2. MindShift
MindShift is one of the best mental health apps designed specifically for teens and young adults dealing with anxiety. Instead of encouraging people to completely eliminate stress from their lives, the application emphasizes the importance of changing the way we think about stress. The app encourages us to take our lives into our own hands, believe in ourselves, and face any challenges that come our way.
3. CBT Thought Diary
The central element of cognitive-behavioral therapy is the change of our emotions through detecting dysfunctional, negative, or distorted cognitive patterns. We can use the CBT Thinking Diary to record our negative emotions, locate fatal flaws of our thinking, and re-evaluate them. It is a great application if we want to gradually change our approach to stressful situations.
4. Happify
With everything that’s been happening, we all need a dose of happiness! Through a psychologist-approved mood training program, the Happify app is a quick and easy way to get in a good mood. It includes games, activity suggestions, gratitude prompts, and much more to train our brain, as if it were a muscle, to overcome negative thoughts. The best? It's completely free!