Understanding and managing your mental health can be difficult, especially in periods of high stress. There are a lot of apps designed to make it a bit easier, though. This list is by no means comprehensive, but these apps are a great place to start if you want some help gaining insight into and caring for your mental health.
- Daylio
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Daylio is an app that allows you to track your daily mood and activities so that you can see trends in activities that improve or worsen your mood. The app is highly customizable. The free version of the app gives you five or six customizable moods to choose from. You can create any number of activities to track and they can be represented by dozens of various icons, and see your monthly data in a graph. You can also set goals (just one with the free version, or more with premium) to do an activity a certain number of times each week or month.
- Booster Buddy
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Booster Buddy introduces you to one of three adorable virtual buddies who will help you track how you’re feeling and practice self care. When you open the app for the first time in a day, your buddy will be napping and will have left a little note reminding you to check in and wake them up. When you check in, you choose between four options about how you’re functioning. Based on what you select you’re given three self-care tasks to do. Once you’ve done all three tasks, your buddy wakes up from their nap. You earn virtual coins for completing the tasks that you can use to buy your buddy accessories. The app comes loaded with coping strategies for a variety of mental health struggles including depression, anxiety, lack of sleep or oversleeping, and motivation, to name a few. You can also use the app to track medication reminders, to-do lists, and appointments.
- Meditation Game
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Meditation can be a wonderful way of maintaining wellbeing, but it’s not always easy for beginners or people who have trouble focusing. Meditation Game is a free app that solves that issue by making mindfulness a relaxing game. Your only task is to guide a ball of light through a soothing underwater scene and collect little balls of energy as text prompts guide you through a mindfulness meditation. There are four meditations to choose from: wisdom, love, existence, and awareness. There’s also a meditation with no text prompts if you just want to relax without meditating or do your own meditation.
- MyLife Meditation
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MyLife Meditation is a meditation app for those of us who need or enjoy more help getting started or staying focused. The app allows users to pick a guided meditation based on their mood. When you open the app it will take you to a check in page where you tell the app how you’re feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally. Based on your responses, the app will recommend a few meditations to try. You can also skip this and explore other categories of meditations based on activity, like sleep, or for certain populations, like college students. There’s even a “Calm Coronavirus Anxiety” section.
It’s important to note that none of these apps are a substitute for mental health treatment. If you have concerns about your mental health, it’s important to seek professional help.