Apps Focused on Emotional Well-Being
Apps Focused on Emotional Well-Being
01/23/20 Laura Gibbons
Our phones seem vital to our everyday life, but they can also distract us, waste time, disrupt quality time with our loved ones, impart negative feelings (social media influence), and can clutter our brain with streams of information that are not necessarily pertinent to our daily lives and goals.
However, some apps can be beneficial to help us better manage and cope with everyday life to feel healthy, productive, and more resilient. They may also help with your 20 for 20 list. Here are just a few to build your emotional well-being:
Action for Happiness: Receive simple, daily action ideas designed to help you boost your own well-being and spread more happiness to others around you too. Each month’s actions follow a specific them, all based on the latest scientific research about happiness.
MoodFit: Track and improve your mood and gain actionable insights into what brings you up and down like sleep, exercise, medications and more. Process your thoughts with the CBT thought record tool, learn gratitude, and mindfulness meditation in just a few minutes a day.
MoodMission: Recommends ‘missions’ based on how one is feeling – whether stressed, anxious, or depressed – and each mission sets out to improve mood and coping skills with activities that are either behavior, physical, thought, or emotion based.
Sanvello: Uses evidence-based tools to help with symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression through immersive journeys that combine videos, audio exercises, activities, mood and health habit tracking, and activities.
Headspace: Aims to bring the principles of mindfulness meditation to users’ lives, and hopes to improve concentration and mood, reduce anxiety, and increase productivity.
Calm: Meditations to promote better sleep and lower stress with guided meditations sleep stories, breathing programs, stretching exercises, and relaxing music.
365 Gratitude Journal: Practicing gratitude can make us feel happier and more present. The app prompts you to note three appreciations each day, a personal gratitude jar to capture your memories, inspiring quotes, and a supportive community to share what you are thankful for.
Happify: This app provides science-based activities and games that can help reduce stress, overcome negative thoughts, and build greater resilience by providing effective tools and programs to improve emotional well-being and happiness.
Virtual Hope Box: Provides tools to help with coping, relaxation, distraction, and positive thinking. It allows users to upload photos, inspirational quotes, and music that “spark joy” as reminders of the positive things in one’s life.
Super Better: This multi-platform, video-game style app is intended to help users build resilience – the ability to stay strong, motivated, and optimistic even in the face of difficult challenges.
Mental health apps can help individuals implement and practice positive daily habits to improve overall emotional well-being. They can prompt one to transition into face-to-face counseling for more individualized treatment, serve as an add-on to counseling between sessions, and be part of a maintenance plan after counseling has ended. The apps are not to take the place of professional help.