4 Self-Care Apps That Will Help You With Your Mindfulness Practices
When we feel down and dissatisfied with ourselves, we can fall victim to bath bombs and serum- soaked face masks and lighting candles, but more often than not, this stuff just doesn't work. The problem is society teaches us to diagnose the symptoms not the problem. "Treating ourselves" becomes a vicious cycle of spending money for momentary release, for that easy rush of dopamine, before we fall back into our deepest holes.
Self-care doesn't have to be expensive, and it certainly isn't a surface-level fix. It takes inner reflection and good habit-making to feel better both mentally and physically. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be hard either. There are a plethora of good apps flooding the market whose main goal is to help transform you into your best self and achieve mental stability, relieve stress, and find balance in all areas of your life.
To help you get started, I've compiled a list of four self-care apps that can help you reach your mental wellness goals.
Calm is a sleep and self-meditation app to give its audience the tools they need to sleep more, stress less, and live better. Calm immediately commits to their promise upon first opening the app where users are lulled to an easy stillness with soft ambient sounds of crickets chittering and an owl hooting in the background.
Calm is unique to other meditation apps in that it gives you a personalized experience based entirely on the goal you choose upon first entering the app. Some of the standout goals you can choose from are: reduce stress, increase happiness, and build self-esteem.
Within the app, you can choose between guided meditations for beginners and advanced students, breathing exercises, narrated stories and music to fall asleep to, or even masterclasses with famous authors and wellness experts to impart words of wisdom. My favorite is “Calm Body,” a section dedicated to warming up, cooling down, and preparing your body to start or end the day.
DailyBean
Daily Bean is a cute, aesthetically pleasing journaling app that allows users to track their daily lives. Users are encouraged to choose from several different categories you can keep track of that cover all facets of their day. The categories you can choose from allow you to keep track of: the weather, your social life, school activities, which meals you ate, your health and wellness, hobbies, sleep schedule, romantic life, chores, work, big events, and, of course, your emotions.
To each daily journal, you can attach a single picture to commemorate the day and accompany your entry with a “note” to talk about anything you can’t express with the tracker. The longer you use Daily Bean, the more information the app will have to record and track your mood, so it can provide you with an advanced analysis of how your mood correlates with the activities you were doing. It combines this analysis in both a monthly and yearly report for you to look back on.
Daily Bean is essential to recognizing how your habits can directly impact your mood, so you can make more informed decisions about how you spend your time to improve your mental wellbeing.
Aloe Bud
Aloe Bud is your self-proclaimed "self-care pocket companion." Aloe Bud brings a retro, pixelated and intuitive design to help you be more proactive about making healthy choices. The app allows you to set specific intentions about things you want to do more actively and frequently and sends you gentle notifications whenever and however often you choose to keep you on track.
The activities you can set are: hydrate, move, breathe, health, break, rest, fuel, refresh, people, stimulate, and motivate. The app automatically populates each activity with a reminder message but allows you to write your own if you desire.
Some activities will even give you space for journaling or reflection with a guiding prompt, or you can use the space to take notes about how you completed the activity.
Aloe Bud is great for reminding you when to move around, take a break from work or check in with old friends you haven't seen in a while. Often, we can get stuck in vicious cycles of overworking or isolation, and Aloe Bud is there to pick you up and set you back on your feet. The best thing about the app is that the notifications aren't overbearing and pressuring you to act now. Instead, the app asks you a question, encourages you with positivity, or just simply tells you why this activity is good for you, making the overall experience feel like a friend is truly looking out for you.
Grateful
Grateful is a prompt-based gratitude journal. Oftentimes, we focus more on the negative aspects of our lives than the positive. We dwell on our bad days and ignore the good ones we have to accompany them. Grateful aims to remedy that by prompting users every day to share the good parts of their lives. It can be as small as something that made you smile to something as monumental as what keeps you going.
Rather than lament, Grateful asks you to reflect. Each journal gives you a space to answer the prompt, add additional notes or thoughts, and a place to put a photo. If you don’t like the prompt you’re given, you can change it or write your own.
Grateful presents all of your journals in a timeline, so when you're feeling down, you can easily scroll through and be reminded of all the happiness and blessings in your life. At the end of the year, you can even export your journal as a PDF to print or bind it into a book you can flip through offline and keep forever.
Each of these apps is intended to help you create healthier habits, more positive thoughts, and happier days just from that little thing in your pocket. So when you're making your New Year's Resolutions for 2022, don't forget to include practicing mindfulness with self-care. With these apps, we bet it'll even be the easiest to cross off your list.
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