'APPS FOR THE MIND'

                                                       

APPS FOR THE MIND

‘USEFUL APPS WHEN CARING FOR ONESELF AND MENTAL HEALTH’

Amongst the social media, music streaming, fitness and popular gaming apps that we can download onto gadgets or phones, there are also many apps that have been created to help us keep our minds in check and continue to ensure our mental health is cared for and a priority.

HEADSPACE:
A simple mindfulness and meditation app. Accessible techniques available so people can experience the benefits of meditation anytime, anywhere. It includes and shares guided meditations, animations, articles and videos. Sharing the message that meditation and mindfulness isn’t about switching thoughts off, but about acknowledging them and letting thoughts pass by in order to bring the attention back to the breath. Settling and quietening the noise and tangling of the mind and the body and bringing ones focus to the present. We can often become caught up or too focused on what’s been or what’s to come, this app helps to let go of the past and not worry about the future, but instead to breathe and live in the present moment. You can use it to learn the essentials and basics with the free course before subscribing to a range of bite sized minis for when short on time, exercises, and hundreds of meditations on everything from stress to sleep. Stress less, focus more and sleep better.

CATCH IT:
Helping to learn to manage negative thoughts and feelings and look at problems differently. Particularly useful when it comes to battling with feelings like anxiety and depression, it teaches you how to look at problems and thoughts in alternative ways, turning negative thoughts into more positive experiences and improving your mental wellbeing as a consequence. Helps you monitor your own wellbeing and behaviour, recording when you feel low or down, reflecting on thoughts and the effect they’re having on your mental health, spotting patterns and looking at alternative lights and solutions. It’s useful when confronting and understanding mental health needs. It works in three sections, catch it, check it change it. Catch it is about recording moods, scales and events. Check it is about reframing situation and reflection. Change it looks at more thoughtful or helpful ways to approach situations which can alter moods and feelings as a consequence.

CALM HARM:
An app especially designed to help people resist or manage the urge to self-harm. It’s private and password protected. Tailored to your needs and will provide you with strategies in order to help you get past those crucial moments of need and urges of wanting to harm. It looks at the urge like a wave, it feels the most powerful when you start wanting to do it. Learn to surf the wave by using the ‘five minute rule’ or ‘fifteen minute rule’ with different activities to bring ones awareness and focus away. Once you surf the wave the urge will fade. It comes with different activity categories including: comfort, distract, express yourself, release, random and breathe.

CLEAR FEAR:
This is an app that’s designed and created by the same producers of Calm Harm, but this is for anyone experiencing anxiety, equipped with information and support when it comes to triggers, understanding the bodies response, managing worries and dealing with emotions. Reducing physical responses to threat by tuning into threat responses, threats that aren’t necessarily threats but the mind and body reacts as they perceive them to be so, facing fears, breathing, relaxing, releasing emotions, accepting emotions and experiences in order for them to change and pass, and changing thoughts and behaviours.

WORRY TREE:
Aims to take control of worry wherever you are, helping to create an action plan for managing worry. Notice, record and manage your worries using cognitive behavioural therapy techniques. Cognitive behavioural therapy is an intervention used to work on challenging and changing cognitive distortions (thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) and behaviours, to improve emotional regulation, wellbeing and improve coping strategies. Through acknowledging thoughts and coming to terms with challenging those that are unhelpful or harmful to us by letting them pass by or adapting, we are able to unwire and rewire hindering thinking. It looks at recognising behaviours, challenging and changing those that are detrimental to, in altering behaviours we can alter our thought and feeling patterns as a consequence. It looks at the direct link between behaviours initiating a thought, sparking a feeling, which in turn begins the pattern all over again. It’s about breaking that vicious cycle. It’s all about awareness and adaptation in order to assist and support our mental health.

NHS WEBSITE:
There are also many more to browse and try on the NHS Website https://www.nhs.uk/apps-library/category/mental-health/.