Great Mental Health Apps To Try

Phone apps can be an incredible support for monitoring behavior and emotions, supplementing therapy, or for improving or maintaining mental health and wellness.  While mental health apps do not substitute treatment from a mental health professional and do not provide a diagnosis, they can be used in conjunction with therapy to help you build awareness of habits and patterns, as well as independently to support self-care.  Many of these apps are based on scientific research and evidence based therapy techniques.  I recommend some of them to support work I do with my clients and I use them personally. 

With all that said, there are thousands of apps to choose from and it can be overwhelming trying to sift through them to find ones that are best to meet your needs.  There are a variety of ways you can work on your mental health, and the below apps provide you with a number of different areas to focus on depending on your needs and preferences.  Here are some apps that I have used personally, with clients to support our work, or that other clinicians I trust have recommended:

Meditation: meditation has been proven again and again by a number of studies to improve mental health, stress management, self-awareness, and attention.  That’s just to name a few of the benefits of a meditation practice.  Below are a couple of our favorite apps to support the learning and practice of mediation. 

o   HeadSpace: this is a fun and easy to use app that provides numerous guided meditations, mindfulness practices for sleep and focus, as well as educational videos. 
What’s Great About It? In addition to offering a variety of types of meditation, it includes a number of educational animations that can be supportive for learning more strategies to support your meditation practice. 
What Could Be Better? Without a subscription, options are limited.  You can do a free trial, but once that trial period is over, there are very limited meditations you can access and many of the additional resources are completely unavailable. 
Bonus: if you’re not ready to subscribe to HeadSpace but you have a Netflix subscription, there are meditation specials on Netflix that are created by HeadSpace.

o   Calm: this is a beautiful meditation app that provides numerous options of guided meditations in a variety of themes. 

What’s Great About It? In addition to meditations, it has beautiful visuals as well as relaxing music and sounds.  There’s a little more to utilize for free with Calm as opposed to HeadSpace. 
What Could Be Better? If you’re searching for something specific such as the theme of the meditation or length of time, you have to scroll through rather than being able to search and find exactly what you’d like.    

Relationships:  Relationships take very intentional work and effort.  Utilizing apps can be a great way to make a habit of putting time and intentionality in on a regular basis.  Research has proven that these small investments can add up to a strong and satisfying relationship. 

o   Paired: this app connects you with your partner to complete fun and interesting questions, quizzes, and games about one another daily.  The trick is both partners have to answer the question to be able to see the response of their partner.
What’s Great About It? it’s fun, simple, and brief.  It takes just a few moments to answer the question, but goes a long way in a relationship.  Additionally, because it offers virtual interactions, if you don’t always get to spend time with your partner in person, this provides opportunity for connection.
What Could Be Better? It can sometimes create a sense of having another obligation or another item on your to do list. Be sure to communicate about this with your partner.  Additionally, at the moment you can only partner with one person, so it may not meet the needs of individuals in polyamorous relationships. 

o   Gottman Card Decks: This app offers a number of virtual flashcard decks ranging in topics from your partner’s “inner world”, sex, emotions, gratitude, and listening.
What’s Great About It:? Many of the topics and questions create opportunities to share and learn things with your partner that you may not have thought to or had the opportunity to discuss otherwise.  Also, the content of the decks are based on evidence based research done by the Gottman Institute to improve and maintain healthy relationships.   
What Could Be Better? An option to share the cards or your answers virtually with your partner would be a nice addition to make use of this app more flexible. 
 

Mood and Habit Trackers: mood and habit tracking is a tool therapists often utilize in counseling.  It can create awareness of patterns in behavior, provide insight in to your emotions and their triggers, and support in making effective change.  Apps can be an easy, organized, and accessible way to track this information.   

o   Dailyo: provides customizable habit and mood tracking.  After you’ve entered consistent data for a number of days you can look back on patterns or  themes in your entries.    
What’s Great About It: in addition to being able to simply and easily enter your habit and mood data into the very easy to use app, it provides a small space to take notes or make journal entries so when you look back on your entries you’ll have more details as to what may have been going on that contributed to your mood rating.
What Could Be Better: to get the most in depth statistics on your patterns based on what you enter in to the app, you have to purchase a subscription.  The free app really only offers you a place to enter your data and reflect on it.    

o   Habitica: uses retro role playing game elements to make habit building in to a game.  It’s extremely self-customizable to fit any and everything you would want to track.  
What’s Great About It: the gaming aspect of it means you get points and rewards for accomplishing tasks, which can be very motivating to make you want to complete more tasks and habits to level up your character and gain more points.   Additionally, you can invite friends to join your party and hold you accountable, as well as enormous “guilds” of others on the app to find support. 
What Could Be Better: there’s a lot going on in this app, so it can feel a little confusing and overwhelming figuring out how it works and where to start, especially for those unfamiliar with role playing games.

Remember, you may not find the right fit on the first try.  Test things out and see what works for you. And, remember, it’s best to pair these apps with work with a trained therapist. The mental health therapists at our office offer counseling for a variety of issues including trauma using EMDR, depression, anxiety, grief, and couples counseling. We work with teens, adults, and couples. We also offer online counseling services which can be great for people with busy schedules or for people who live in parts of Pennsylvania with limited counseling options. You can check out our website to see the full list of counseling services that we offer. Or, Request An Appointment here.