Self-care apps are on the rise, and they are the easiest way to improve your health and maintain it. If you don’t know which self-care app is best for you then our Top 10 list below will help. These apps introduce simple everyday things that help to stimulate your mental health and lead you to a healthier lifestyle, by encourage positive thoughts, and driving purpose in your every day life – even if everything else around you might be spinning into a repetitive downward spiral. “Just keep spinning, just keep spinning…” Okay Dory, we get it! Let’s get to the apps already!
Calm
What if you could tame the storm after the calm?
Dubbed the “Happiest App in the World” by app reviewers, makes Calm one of the most useful self-care apps available. It is the best app to help you unwind after a long, tiresome day, as well as help you practice mindfulness and meditation.
The Pros
Help yourself to some clarity, joy, and peace by using the “Daily Calm” which is a feature within the app that provides a unique and new meditation and inspiration every day. Indulge in “Sleep Stories” which is another feature that provides bedtime type stories for adults (Remember when you were read to as a child to fall asleep? You slept like a baby, right?). Their stories are designed to help you unwind and fall into an almost coma-like sleep.
The Cons
The biggest issue with Calm can be found in their pricing tiers. The app might be free, but only the first couple in a random series are available. If you need help with a specific issue, you have to buy into the whole program eventually.
10 Percent Happier
Only 10%? Why not 20%?
10 Percent Happier App allows users to either start daily meditation or improve daily meditation. Starting your day with meditation has been proven to increase happiness. The app helps to manage your daily meditation, which promotes a healthier and happier life. 2 + 2 is 4, quick math.
Pros
The app allows access to the best meditation teachers around the world (not too shabby) not only in North America but from other continents as well, such as Asia and Europe. The app also offers a free podcast that helps to improve a listener’s calmness and ability to deal with anxiety.
Cons
One of the biggest user complaints stems from this self-care app’s inability to create playlists for meditation practices and it doesn’t maintain a reasonable history of meditations practiced in the past.
Headspace
Get out of your own way already!
This app encourages you to be the greatest version of yourself by helping to increase your mental health. Sort of reprogramming the way you think. Headspace offers hundreds of themed meditative sessions ranging from stress to sleep.
Pros
This self-care app claims that meditating with their practices for up to three weeks may enhance your compassionate behavior toward others, and that is something that everyone could use to help enhance their own soul and spirituality.
Cons
The biggest drawback with Headspace is that after the first thirty days of free meditations, you have to purchase a subscription to gain access to the rest of what the app has to offer. So you better get your head straight in a month, or you’ll need to crack open your wallet.
Simple Habit
Eliminate those pesky vices.
Simple Habit offers a flurry of meditative practices that promote a healthier life. Only needing five minutes of your time a day, the meditations range from a variety of symptoms – stress, sleep, anxiety, depression, and more.
Pros
Simple Habit offers on-the-go sessions that you can use while you drink your morning coffee, while coming home from work, or in any gap of free time you have throughout the day which makes it pretty versatile for the user that’s always on the go.
Cons
This self-care app only offers about twelve hours of free content before users are prompted into ponying up into a subscription model that can be quite expensive. How expensive? Let’s just say you can’t put a price on your sanity.
Breathe
When life seems to have you in a rear naked choke-hold – just “Breathe”.
Breathe App is the king of sweet and simple things. Other apps try to give a guided meditation session to a stranger that they can never really know fully. This app doesn’t ask a few multiple choice questions and pretend to know the complexities of your own life, instead it chooses to let you sort through the thoughts of your own mind and soul while you take a few moments and do some deep breathing exercises.
Pros
It is a simple app to use and will block all other notifications while you are practicing your breathing. Like, how are you supposed to meditate with 50+ Instagram alerts, Facebook notifications every other minute, and Trump’s latest tweets? The app encourages healthy focus and motivation through taking some much needed personal time as many times a day as you desire.
Cons
This self-care app works well through the Apple Watch, but other iOS users can download it as well. Android users will have no such luck.
Yoga Studio: Mind & Body
If Dhalsim from Street Fighter had a SmartPhone, he’d probably be using this app.
This app provides users with their own personal yoga instructor to guide them through simple yoga sessions. The app has beautiful HD video classes for everyone with easy-to-follow commentary from the instructors.
Pros
It offers over 75 different classes ranging from traditional yoga, yoga for back pain, or yoga for runners, and offers varying skill levels for each class with the options to change the duration and focus of each session.
Cons
This self-care app allows users to try it free for two weeks, but after that period of time users will again be forced into a subscription service if they want to continue using it. Bummer.
Personal Zen
99 Problems but your health ain’t one.
The Zen App is the only meditation app that claims to be scientifically-validated in training users to be better at reducing stress and anxiety, as well as building positive habits of attention. You can use the app and feel its positive effects after just one sitting, and it can be used for short sessions or longer ones depending on your availability.
Pros
The app is set up with a little quirk – users will find the app almost like a game, where they will have to travel through a world of Personal Zen to banish negativity and restore positivity in the changes that will mirror your own personal growth through using the app.
Cons
The fact that this app functions as sort of a game can leave some people dissatisfied, as they would rather not take on the challenge that a game presents, but rather take a few simple minutes to help them meditate in order to get back to their own zen through peace and calm. This self-care app is a great option if you feel your life is like an unbeatable Nintendo game.
Stop, Breathe & Think
You SHOULD be doing this anyway, but there’s an app for that as well.
With this app, you’re only five short minutes away from achieving your desired level of peace and serenity. This app allows users to track updates on their emotions and how they got to that emotional state in the first place.
Pros
The app uses the tracked emotions data to find meditations that will assist them into practicing mindfulness and creating space between their thoughts, emotions, and reactions.
Cons
This self-care app offers up to thirty free activities, but if users want the full experience of over 85 different activities for reaching their own personal space of nirvana, then they will be forced into paying for it. Goes to show that nothing is truly free in this world. Not even your own sanity.
MyFitnessPal
What if Arnold Schwarzenegger was your gym buddy?
This app is a marvelous way of keeping track of your health and promoting a healthier lifestyle. Not by focusing on building muscle, but by using workouts and healthy eating as mental therapy. The app is essentially a calorie tracker, with a wide range of knowledge on different foods and meals that make it the easiest and fastest calorie counter app.
Pros
Just enter what you’ve eaten and it will come up with all of the nutritional information about it. Critics claim it is the most useful app to use when it comes to promoting weight loss, and I can even claim to its benefits myself, as it has helped me lose a few pounds before beach season starts.
Cons
The biggest complaint about this self-care app is the interface for choosing what kind of foods you have consumed. Some people think it takes too long to find the correct selection when searching through the 5 million options in the app’s database, so it can be a little time-consuming.
Mint
It’s all about the Benjamins.
Mint stands out on this list because it is not promoting a healthier lifestyle of the mind and soul, but rather promoting a healthier wallet. Let’s get real – managing your finances is essential and can cut out unwanted stress from other areas of your life.
Pros
The app helps you control and maintain a budget, manage your weekly or monthly bills, find out your credit score (for free, might I add), and just makes it effortless to stay one step ahead when it comes to managing your finances. It offers an easy way to keep track of your spending and to cut out the areas where you might be wasting money.
Cons
If you run into problems with the app, however, their customer support service is not the greatest and you may end up spending several hours trying to get in contact with them for assistance with things your millenial friends might be able to help you figure out if you let them toy around with the app for a while.
