As a fellow human that constantly battles with the inner voice in my head, here are the 3 apps I use and highly recommend to help calm that mind chatter.
One of my go to resources when I need to brain dump. This nifty app allows you to keep a daily track of your mood through the use of journaling and selecting your current mood state through engaging emoticons – you can even add the feelings running through your head too.
One of the number of the great functions of this app, aside from the ability to capture your mood states is that it has an intelligent feature that challenges you to check you’re thinking and actually help resolve some of that chatter and change your thinking towards it. Personally I think this is great as you’re being given some form of solution to your problem.
An additionally great feature, is the analytics section where you can track and compare your mood states over a weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly period so that you understand generally how you feel and better identify triggers.
This app was first introduced to me by the great Stephen Fry and it has proven to be one of my most valuable tools.
A very popular app in today’s society with the explosion of mindfulness and meditation in the last few years.
This app is a very straightforward way of being introduced to mindfulness meditation and you can can use the take 10 (10 minutes of meditation over 10 days) for free, a nice little try before you buy. There are a host of meditation apps available in today’s world, but to me headspace still feels like the most accessible and user friendly experience to support you with learning in this field of calm.
Another free app (although you can get optional add-ons that must be paid for) which helps drown out the sounds around you and pushes you to focus through the use of a variety of sounds.
I predominately use this to help with focus in work scenarios, I find something very refreshing and relaxing in listening to the flickering of a fire for hours on end while I tackle that next project. The additional benefit of this is that my mind is kept occupied and not driven to random disaster thinking as it’s in a somewhat hypnotic state.
This app has also been a great help to me in the trials of sleeping too, I’ve never been one to have difficulty falling asleep but I’m a naturally light sleeper so I’ve used the variety of sounds to zone myself out to sleep on a variety of occasions.
In a time where technology is vilified for its addictive properties, I feel it’s key to highlight the good that these devices and the tools that have been born from them can bring. These apps form a key part of my toolkit to manage my own mental health and supplement all the additional resources/tools I use outside of technology.
Hopefully some of these apps might bring you some calm too.
Originally published at medium.com