Manage Your Stress, Insomnia and More With These Free Mental Health Apps
There are many great mental health apps out there, but some require a subscription. If you just want some basic tools to help you manage your mental health, the US Department of Veterans Affairs has a ton that they designed for veterans but released for everyone.
You can find a complete list of apps here . Most of them are available for both iOS and Android, and they are all free. There are also some web-based tools that don’t require an app to be installed at all.
None of the apps are intended to replace professional mental health care, but they do provide tools that can help you in between visits or when you are not ready or unable to speak to someone. These typically include information to help you learn about your situation, tools you can use, such as guided meditations, questionnaires to help you gauge whether you’ve made progress, and a diary to track your mood or how many times. you have practiced these techniques. in the application.
Among those worth paying attention to:
- Mindfulness Trainer : You can learn about mindfulness, track how often you exercise, and listen to dozens of guided meditations with specific goals, such as nurturing compassion or mindfulness walking.
- Coach COVID : This course is designed to overcome various stresses arising in a pandemic, with the tools, when you are in stress, lonely, sad, angry, etc. D..
- PTSD Coach andPTSD Family Coach : These include tools for tracking and managing symptoms. Family Coach is designed for family members of people with PTSD and includes ways to manage their own stress and emotions while maintaining a healthy relationship with the person you care about.
- Stay Quit Coach : This is to quit smoking. You can open the app to remind yourself why you quit smoking, and you can also track statistics such as how much time has passed since you quit smoking and how much money you have saved.
- OBJECTIVES for anger management : This app provides relaxation tools you can use in the moment, as well as tools to track your feelings and make plans for how to best respond in the future.
- Insomnia Coach : Have trouble sleeping? This app guides you through learning sleep hygiene strategies and provides tools to track your progress.
These apps may not be as quirky or addictive as something like Headspace, but they are backed up by (in many cases) proven psychological techniques that have helped people manage their mental health. If you’re looking for something that gets the job done without requiring a subscription or account, these mental health apps might be the help you need.