When your thoughts finger like a tornado, it’s nonflexible to do stuff like plan healthy meals, or schedule gym time.
Never mind falling unconsciousness at a decent hour the night surpassing so you have the energy to unquestionably DO these things.
Seems like an unlikely hero—but your phone might help.
Specifically, via stress management apps.
Stress management apps promise to help you manage your thoughts, regulate your emotions, and ease tension and restlessness from your body.
And in turn, largest recovery from stress “fills up your tank,” making it easier for you to eat mindfully, find time to exercise, and finger like you have the topics to take on new challenges.
In the pursuit article, we’ll discuss how apps for stress management and uneasiness might help you do that. You’ll discover:
- What stress apps are, and how they work
- Who’s most likely to benefit from these apps
- Which stress management apps are the best
If you want to largest manage your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors so you can create or sustain your health and fitness habits, alimony reading.
First, what are stress management apps?
Stress management apps are programs on your phone that offer tools like guided meditation, guided breathwork, and mood tracking. These tools aim to reduce uneasiness and stress, and modernize mindfulness and wellbeing.
The tomfool thing is, apps for uneasiness and stress can help you find relief in the moment, but moreover ongoing.
That’s considering stress management is a skill.
So, the increasingly you practice regulating your emotions—like calming yourself lanugo with controlled zoetic without a heated conversation with your boss—the increasingly it begins to finger natural, and plane automatic.
Because your phone is nearly unchangingly with you, stress apps can help you practice the skill of stress management wherever and whenever you need it.
Okay, but do apps for uneasiness unquestionably work?
The short answer: Yes. (For most people.)
A 2020 study in the International Periodical of Technology Assessment in Health Care reported that apps using behavior-change strategies (such as CBT), significantly helped with depression, anxiety, and stress.1
And, a 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that mindfulness apps in particular show promise in helping reduce perceived stress, anxiety, depression, and modernize psychological well-being.2
However, there’s nothing special well-nigh using these tools through your phone.
Apps just help make these therapies increasingly convenient, accessible, and user-friendly. (Often, they’re increasingly affordable than traditional therapy, too.)
Marla Deibler, PsyD, clinical psychologist and founder of The Center for Emotional Health of Greater Philadelphia, suggests that while apps can be part of your mental health toolkit, constructive stress management should include a wide range of strategies.
Other strategies might include connecting to loved ones, getting out in nature, or talking to a mental health professional, such as a therapist, stress coach, or social worker.
Precision Nutrition Master Health Mentor Kate Solovieva, MA, who holds her masters in Social and Personality Psychology, points out that for some, their phone is a source of stress. For these people, non-digital strategies, like the ones mentioned above, might be increasingly effective.
Techniques that help with stress management
Stress and uneasiness apps tend to focus on one or several of the most constructive techniques for stress management and uneasiness relief.
Here’s an overview of these approaches:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is one of the most constructive and well-researched treatments for many mood issues, including uneasiness and depression—but moreover plain old daily stress.3
“We all have moments where we unintentionally increase or maintain our own stress by thinking unhelpful thoughts. These thoughts are often unrealistic, inaccurate, or, to some extent, unreasonable,” Dr. Deibler says.
CBT helps you identify and rewrite these patterns of thinking, so you can finger better, and transpiration your policies in positive ways.
For example, you might have a thought like, “I don’t have time to work out today, but if I skip, all my progress will be lost.”
Under normal circumstances, this thought may rationalization you to finger defeated, and may plane tempt you to requite up your training goals altogether.
Using CBT, you learn to rencontre this thought, realizing that it’s overly catastrophic. (Skipping one workout will not somehow turn all your hard-earned muscle to mush.)
While CBT is most constructive when washed-up with a clinician, most people can learn vital skills to help themselves have increasingly sensation of their thought errors, and learn to respond to these thoughts increasingly productively.
Mindfulness and acceptance
Research shows mindfulness can be highly constructive in helping reduce the physiological stress response in people with generalized uneasiness disorder.4
Mindfulness can help you observe uncomfortable emotions with healthy detachment—kind of like watching a wave in the ocean swell, and then ride out.
Anxiety may finger bad, but it isn’t inherently harmful—and it does pass, says Dr. Deibler. Learning to observe your experiences—even the unwanted ones—without judgment or resistance, can help you finger less overwhelmed, and move on faster.
Meditation
Mindfulness meditation is the style of meditation most wontedly found on stress apps.
This type of meditation usually involves sitting somewhere with your vision closed, and simply observing your thoughts and feelings—your bodily sensations, sounds in your environment, or the peep in your brain.
Whatever you notice, the idea is to try not to tenancy it, judge it, or get overly identified with or emotionally wrapped up in it. (Yes, this is hard!)
This practice can help you to wilt increasingly present—instead of overanalyzing the past or projecting into the future—as well as uncouple from stressful thoughts.
Not surprisingly, research shows that this type of meditation is constructive at reducing anxiety.5 6
Breathwork
Taking deep, slow breaths helps lower your heart rate and thoroughbred pressure. This has a calming effect on your body, which can in turn cue your smart-ass to wifely lanugo too, explains California-based Nathan Brandon, Psy.D., who specializes in online therapy.
Studies show breathwork—especially when the exhale is plane with or longer than the inhale—is an constructive intervention for reducing stress, increasing mindfulness, and reducing anxiety.7
(There are some unconfined apps that can help you use your vapor as a tool for stress management, but if you want a quick primer, we have a free guide too.)
Relaxation techniques
There are many activities that relax the soul and mind—and variegated apps that cater to each. A few popular techniques:
- Yoga (whether it’s fast-paced and sweaty, or slow and stretching-focused)
- Tai Chi (an warmed-over self-defense technique that’s practiced as a gentle spritz of standing postures)
- Progressive muscle relaxation (a practice of tensing variegated muscle groups one-by-one, then releasing them)
“These activities work by focusing your sustentation on something other than your stressors and by helping your physical soul to relax,” says Dr. Brandon.
Identifying triggers
“Figuring out the things that trigger your stress and learning how to deal with them in a healthy way can make a big difference in your overall stress levels,” Dr. Brandon says.
Both he and Mentor Solovieva suggest identifying what causes your uneasiness to flare up. Triggers can include people, places, or things—for example, alcohol, caffeine, too many hours at the office, poor sleep, or plane unrepealable relationships.
Once you identify the things that make your mood or behaviors go south, you have increasingly tenancy over them: you can icon out how to minimize your exposure to triggers, or just yo-yo your perspective on them
Apps that track your mood or habits can illustrate these patterns increasingly clearly.
What are the weightier stress management apps?
According to all three of our experts—and established research1—the most constructive apps for uneasiness or stress are ones that are based on evidence-based techniques, like those above.
However, if your stress or mood issues are persistent and/or severe, talk to your doctor or typesetting an visit with a licensed mental health professional.
With that in mind, here are seven of our top choices:
Headspace
Free 7-day trial, then $13/mo; iOS and Android
All of our experts recommended the leading meditation app, and it’s one of the few wellness and stress management apps with significant clinical research to support it.8
Headspace takes the practice of mindfulness meditation and makes it easy-peasy for beginners.
First, you well-constructed a 10-day introductory undertow that holds your hand through how to meditate with videos and informative animations.
Then, you can wangle a huge library of guided meditations and exercises, with experts ranging from Buddhist monks to Olympic trainers.
The app leverages all sorts of meditation techniques, including visualizations, resting awareness, soul scanning, and compassion, so it’s a unconfined way to explore niches that might work well for you.
Waking Up
Free 7-day trial, then $14.99/mo; iOS and Android
Created by neuroscientist Sam Harris, Waking Up teaches you not only the nuts of how to meditate, but moreover includes resources like mini-courses and podcast-style interviews on spiritual theories, philosophy, and psychology.
With the Waking Up app, you can do the daily 10-minute guided meditation, but you can moreover do shorter or longer specialized meditations, or listen to thought-provoking conversations on Stoicism, spiritual philosophy, sleep improvement, and plane productivity—all from world-renowned teachers and scholars.
Liberate
Free 7-day trial, then $10/mo; iOS and Android
This meditation app is designed to be a helpful and unscratched space specifically for the Black community.
It features over 260 meditations plus spare talks from BIPOC teachers, tent unstipulated mindfulness as well as topics specific to microaggressions, internalized racism, racial healing, forgiveness, and more.
The meditations range from 5 to 25 minutes.
InsightTimer
Free; iOS and Android
InsightTimer gives you wangle to increasingly than 90,000 meditations for free, including ambient sounds to help wifely your mind and guided sessions from meditation teachers, psychologists, and celebrities like Russel Brand, Gisele Bündchen, and Elizabeth Gilbert.
Its thorough library can finger a bit overwhelming for beginners, but it categorizes its meditations, so you can hands find something to help you wifely uneasiness in the moment, focus on self-love or compassion, or fall unconsciousness faster.
It moreover offers all styles of meditation, including Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) therapy, and zoetic meditations.
Breathe
Free for vital features; iOS and Android
Controlling your vapor helps regulate your inside nervous system, which is the on/off switch for anxiety. But simply sitting still and zoetic can be surprisingly difficult.
Breathe uses a simple diamond to help you zero in on executive your breath. You just input how long you want to practice breathwork for and how many counts you want for your inhale, hold, exhale, and hold. Hit start, and the app screen shows calming waves to mimic the rise, fall, and pauses of your breath.
We love the serviceability and simplicity of this visual-oriented app for in-the-moment calming, but if you prefer talk-guided breathwork, trammels out Othership or Breathwrk.
Tangerine
Free; iOS and Android
This habit- and mood-tracking app helps you stay subject for the practices you know alimony your uneasiness levels down.
Displayed like a calendar, Tangerine allows you to input any habit, withal with what time of day and how many times per week you like to well-constructed it.
Each day, you trammels off the habits you completed, rate your mood on a simple smiley squatter scale, and add a few periodical notes well-nigh what made your day good or bad.
It’s helpful on its own for peccancy with healthy habits, but for an uneaten $5 per month, you can wangle insights and stats to see how your routine unauthentic your mood, and to see trends.
Sanvello
$9/mo, iOS and Android
Sanvello combines many of the same science-backed therapies into one app. It:
- Tracks your mood, exercise, and sleep every day
- Offers expert-designed guided journeys based on things like mindfulness and CBT
- Has a library of tools to help with specific, anxiety-inducing situations like public speaking or morning dread
Then, it offers a report to show correlations between your daily mood ratings and the activities you did—or didn’t—do.
Build yourself up, bit by bit.
While doing five minutes of box zoetic will definitely help wifely you lanugo in the moment, substantial changes to your baseline levels of stress will only happen when you practice these tools regularly (likely daily).
Additionally, considering apps are designed to be universally helpful—a kind of “one size fits all” approach—they work weightier for minor stress and anxiety.
However, many people goody from deeper and increasingly individualized support—particularly from flipside human. That’s why we created PN Level 1 Sleep, Stress Management, and Recovery Certification. It gives you the tools, know-how, and skills needed to help yourself (and others) cope largest with life’s many stressors, modernize mental and emotional well-being, and proceeds the topics to make meaningful health and fitness changes
But apps are a great, wieldy place to start.
Even if you only have one minute a day, build in your stress management reps, just like you might build in reps at the squat rack.
Every time you practice stuff mindful, regulating your breathing, or moving your soul in a way that relieves tension, you get stronger and increasingly skilled at that practice.
Over time, you wilt increasingly constructive at managing stress. One day, you might plane undeniability yourself a mental health athlete.
References
Click here to view the information sources referenced in this article.
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