Apps to help staying peace-full

Will those new twenties be roaring? We will soon find out. Yet whatever is the name that the upcoming decade is destined to go down in history by, you must be able to create an island of quiet and serenity for yourself – should you want to. These apps will help you to keep peace of mind in 2020.

Art of Living Journey

This app is all you need if you have chosen spirituality as a way to inner peace. The Art of Living Journey has authentic guided meditations to improve focus, reduce stress, and manage anger. In also has a wealth of soothing bedtime talks to improve the quality of your sleep. The highlight of the app are wisdom videos by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on various topics to bring more mindfulness in your life. The videos are bite-sized, so you can watch them during the short break to help you through a particularly hectic day. Another nice touch is that you can keep listening to those videos even when your screen is turned out – just what you need in a busy metropolitan commute.

I must also mention the stunning UI – very intuitive and responsive, with beautiful shapes, colors, and smooth transitions, it creates an experience of its own.

However, that’s just a tip of an iceberg. Another important purpose of the app is to connect you with the local Art of Living community through in-person meetups and an abundance of thematic workshops where you can master the signature SKY Breathing Technique among other things. The content in the app is free, yet the in-person workshops have fees.

Headspace

Unlike many other wellness apps, Headspace prefers happy orange color over calming and subdued shades of blue. The approach is also different. Instead of pouring water of ambient music on the fire of anxiety, it addresses the core of the problem and offers to solve it from within, turning those embers into a happy glow.

The app offers guided meditation courses. The end goal is mindfulness and the perfect emotional equilibrium that comes with it. This is a course for those new to meditation. Each session is about 10 minutes long, which is a great advantage in our day and age. After all, if you are stressed and anxious, you probably don’t have 90 minutes to spare every day. The way is long, so you should take it step by step. Headspace uses gamification to encourage completing and mastering every level of meditation before moving on to a more advanced section.

Headspace offers a free trial period (two weeks) with a further monthly or annual subscription plan. You can also save substantially with a yearly family plan (up to six subscriptions) and a student plan, available for a mere $9.99 a year, with custom exercises for students to reduce anxieties before exams, tests, and presentations, instead of resorting to other, more dubious measures.

Calm

Calm is probably the most famous wellness app out there and for a reason. It became famous for those short clips when you were asked to do nothing for 30 seconds while watching raindrops cascading down the green leaves. Magically relaxing! That is a quick glimpse of what Calm actually does.

This app knows exactly what urbanites need to restore their inner tranquility. It combines beautiful scenery with calming sounds of nature to help you get in the right mood. That’s not all, of course. Calm app provides guided meditations in varying lengths, which is very convenient. You may start with a short 3-minute one or choose to go deeper and meditate up to 25 minutes. Meditations are divided by purpose as well – de-stressing, relaxation, happiness, gratitude, relationships, focus, or falling asleep. Calm also offers breathing exercises and bedtime stories for that particular purpose. As a person who had been suffering from a whole bunch of sleeping disorders, let me tell you, Calm does its job pretty well.

It has 7-day programs tailored to solve a particular stress-induced problem in a week – calming anxiety, managing stress, better sleep, tackling anger, etc. One of these master-classes is narrated by Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Relax melodies

This app is a Swiss army knife of wellness apps. Its focus is on sounds and melodies that help people relax from wow essay writing and other business and fall asleep. Unlike many other “white noise machine” apps, Relax Melodies allow you to add any sound from their vast catalog to create your unique mix. That feature can be used for all kinds of purposes. For example, you can select the sound of breaking waves, the sound of crickets, and the sound of firewood crackling to create an impression of camping on the beach for a romantic evening, or you can choose thunderstorm, wolves howling, and owls crying as a background for your Halloween party. There are all kinds of natural sounds, animal sounds (cat’s purring is my personal fav for anxiety relief), musical instruments, and environments (for example, rain in the city).

Moreover, it also has binaural noises to help you relax, fall asleep, or concentrate on work and fight anxiety-induced procrastination, ASMR sounds, guided meditation programs, narrated bedtime stories, and mindfulness programs. You can get the gist of it and play around on the website before you decide to download the app. Most of the sounds are available in the free version, however, for stories and guided meditation you will have to buy the full version.

Shine

Unwinding and having good night sleep is all fine, but how about some self-care? If you never practiced it, Shine is a great place to start. It takes a more holistic approach to your emotional wellbeing. On top of meditations and nightcap stories that help you fall asleep, it also strives to boost your self-confidence and improve your mood with daily affirmations, inspirational messages, mindfulness exercises, and positive self-talk. With the help of daily check-ins, you can take time to self-reflect, calm down, show gratitude, and put your priorities in order.

The app has comprehensive and well-researched materials (available as articles and audios) to help you better understand, value, and take care of the most important person you have in life – yourself. Another huge plus of Shine is the inclusive and non-judgmental community of app’s members. It is important because feeling seen, heard, understood and supported, knowing that you are not the only one going through something can change everything. All this makes Shine a great app for those coping with anxiety and depression.

You can also join a Shine Challenge program, which despite its demanding name, will help you to move towards your goals in a more balanced way, with self-care and self-compassion. The app has free core features and a free trial for some more advanced ones with the possibility of in-app purchases and special bargains (like joining a program with your BFF on a discount).

Happify

However you slice and dice it, stress is the biggest bane of modern life. It’s high time we approach it scientifically. Happify builds on a substantial body of thorough research about mental health. The app’s main goal is to provide you with all the necessary tools to handle stress and put you in control of how you feel every day.

Happify uses cognitive behavioral therapy, positive psychology, and mindfulness to help you reframe negative thoughts and build better emotional resilience. The nice thing, however, is that it uses quizzes, games, engaging activities, and easy exercises, that rewire your brain guiding it to seeing more positive aspects of daily life. No pressure – just fun.

I would recommend Happify to people who want to learn how to handle and channel stress instead of avoiding it. The apps focus on scientific, evidence-based approach is another plus if more spiritual-leaning wellness apps didn’t work for you in the past or if you never tried those because you were skeptical. Also, if you love numbers. You can even start by measuring your happiness score and keep the track of your stats to measure progress.

Happify has a free version with limited features and a premium one with full access.

Habit minder

Habit minder is a pretty self-explanatory name. If you need to build a healthy habit, this app will help you to achieve this goal. The cool thing about it is that it uses gamification to make you keep your promise to yourself. If you are one of those people, who love lists and get an inrush of endorphins from ticking something off as “done”, Habit minder will use it against you – but to a good end! Just choose one of the healthy habits you want to build and start your journey. Whatever it is – drinking more water, exercising, standing up at your desk, walking, meditating, mindful breathing, or better food choices – you can add and track it.

With its clean interface, cheerful colors, customizable features, and intuitive controls, Habit minder is a pleasure to use. It combines a number of health-tracker features with those of mindfulness apps, which is great because body and mind never work separately.

Definitely recommended to people who are prone to ditching their New Year’s resolution after the first week of January – that is to everyone! The app has a free version, which you can upgrade to a Pro, should you want to.

Bio: Robb Matox is a young entrepreneur who always promotes a healthy lifestyle, practices yoga, and enjoys writing articles on healthcare insights. Also, he is a health blogger for WowEssays.

Website link: https://www.wowessays.com/