Why You Should Use Technology To Enhance Your Wellness
You’ve heard it before—if you want to reconnect and calm your state of mind, disconnect from your laptop. Get off social media. Turn your phone off.
While the benefits of putting down the technology are undisputed, there may also be a way to use your tech in a way that is helpful, not hurtful. I suggest certain apps to my clients as a way for them to easily access therapeutic tools. Whether that means trying out some apps geared towards mindfulness, breathing, journaling, emotional awareness, or scheduling, our phone apps make it simple to access resources. We almost always have our phones with us throughout the day. Why not load it up with some tools for emotional wellness?
Before I get into the apps I commonly recommend, it’s first helpful to be mindful of what boundaries you want to have with your tech. Research shows that the blue light of our computers and phones can inhibit our ability to fall asleep. So maybe you put a time limit on how late you use some of these apps. See our post on morning routines here. If your personal morning routine consists of having some sort of connection to nature, maybe you save your tech usage for later in the day.
Here are some apps that promote your self-care:
1. Stop, Breathe and Think: Only have 3 minutes to practice your mindfulness? Stop, Breathe, and Think makes it easy to fit mindfulness activities in to your busy schedule. Categories include mindfulness for sleep, strengthening resiliency, connecting to your body, college students, pregnancy, and more! This app is super simple to navigate and you can choose from a couple of different voices to lead you through the exercises. You can also track your progress.
2. Calm: Same idea here—choose from a variety of different durations and categories to find the mindfulness exercise to best suit your needs. You can choose the background you’d like to look at, and the sounds you’d like to hear throughout.
3. Headspace: This mindfulness app allows you to choose from hundreds of themed sessions. They suggest using the app as reactive coping skill as well—when you’re having a melt down, reach for Headspace to find your sense of calm.
4. Daylio: This is a “micro journal” and mood diary. The app gives you graphs and statistics over time so that you’re able to notice mood patterns and understand your habits better. This app is great for fostering self-awareness and self-regulation.
5. Shine Text: Need some morning inspiration? Shine Text messages you a daily dose of motivation to start your day off right.
6. Happify: Happify is an app to help you overcome negative thoughts and boost your emotional resiliency. With exercises and engaging activities, Happify can help you shift away from negative thinking (note this is NOT a replacement for actual therapy).
I encourage you to check out what apps might work best for you individually and remain open to how tech may help you practice coping skills outside of your therapy sessions!
Authored by: Anna Zapata, LPC