How to Calm Down: 4 Apps to Relieve Anxiety and Stress
Modern world can make the calmest people stressed out. Even things created for rest, like reading fiction books, betting at TonyBet or watching Netflix, can make us hold our breath. To stay calm in the most stressful situations, use these helpful apps.
Masters of Mindfulness
The app can safely be given a high score for its minimalist design. It has all the basic components of the Mindfulness practice and nothing unnecessary. There are several sections:
- Meditations. These are several breathing exercises through which you are guided by a pleasant voice. The meditations are divided into themes: stress relief, happiness, positivity, confidence, sleep. Each theme has 1-2 variations of exercises, not that different from each other, as they are based on a basic breathing exercise. Most are about 10 minutes in length.
- Mood Tracker. You can track your mood changes and note the reasons for these changes. Very interesting statistics can be gathered. In the long run, this practice improves your understanding and control of your emotions.
- Gratitude Calendar. Each day, note what you are grateful for today. You can make several entries a day. The essence of the exercise is that the state of gratitude has a very positive effect on our mental health.
There is also a separate tab to track your progress: how many days in a row do you track your mood, express gratitude, etc.
Zenify
The app is designed to increase mindfulness, and it shows you notifications itself with new exercise tasks throughout the day. You can’t choose the exercise yourself, but you can set how many times a day you want to receive tasks.
Zenify is a good option if you don’t have much faith in your discipline. The program itself will remind you that you were going to do a Mindfulness practice and suggest how you can do it right now. Interestingly, the exercises include not only the classics of the genre – breathing techniques – but also music and graphic tasks, as well as reminders like “Stay Conscious” and “Watch Your Breath.”
Headspace
This is one of the most popular, voluminous and diverse apps in its field. The main sections are:
- Packs are a series of meditations of 10-30 pieces from simple to complex, united by one theme. For example, the Health section contains series on weight loss, managing anxiety, stress, pregnancy, and pain relief. The Courage section is about how to deal with difficult experiences, such as Grief, Anger, and Regret. The “Happiness” section contains selections of meditations on the topics of self-esteem, relationships, kindness, and generosity. There is a “Work” section with sub-themes of “Productivity,” “Creativity,” and “Focus.” There are also specialized sections for students and athletes and, of course, the basic meditation course itself
- Singles. You can choose meditation durations from 5 to 60 minutes. Examples of situations for which there are separate singles: jogging, walking, cycling, waking up, going to bed, panic attacks, when you are ready to explode, when you are very tired.
- Minis are short meditations of 1 minute each to focus, to cheer up, to calm down, or just to breathe.
After all, Headspace has its own unique, slightly cartoonish design. The variety of exercises is impressive.
Calm
Calm is just as good as Headspace in the number of selections, but they are organized differently. There is not one meditation per topic, but several series and singles. Topics Calm offers to work with include: anxiety, sleep disorders, stress, focus, relationships, emotions, self-care, personal growth, inner peace, resilience, physical pain. There is also a small section for children and simple animated breathing exercises.
By the way, any meditation or an entire set can be downloaded for offline access and practiced whenever and wherever is convenient. Most apps of this type only work with Internet access.
Another unique section is Calm Body. It contains video and audio sets of stretching exercises to help you relax in the evening, pull yourself together in the morning, or relieve back pain in the middle of the day.
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