5 Apps To Help You Cope With Anxiety
We’ve all had moments when it feels like the sky is falling, and we feel hopeless. Anxiety is a crippling thing, but the good news is there are ways to move through it!
One of the best things about technology is that it is accessible, and you already carry it around with you every day. And lucky for those of us with anxiety, hundreds of apps have been created to help us get through those crippling moments. If you’re someone who suffers from anxiety or just wants an app to help you relax and unwind, check out these five applications guaranteed to help you cope with it!
1. Calm
Calm is quickly becoming one of the most downloaded apps ever. Calm is a fantastic app to help bring you back down to earth and ground you when you’re feeling panicked or anxious.
A lot of the time, anxiety will build on itself. When you begin to feel anxious, you make it worse by creating panic. It’s a vicious cycle, and sometimes we just need to calm ourselves down and come back down to earth.
Calm offers guided meditations to help you move through panic attacks and anxiety by doing just that: calming you down. It is also great for people who just want to become more aware of themselves and become grounded. There are also several guided talk-throughs to help you fall asleep if you have trouble getting to sleep.
2. Breathe2Relax
Breathe2Relax is an app designed by the National Center for Telehealth & Technology, so you know it’s good! Breathe2Relax trains you to breathe. It sounds silly, but when we get stressed or anxious, breathing is essential and can actually make the situation better or worse if you aren’t doing it right.
Anxiety spikes our adrenalin, which makes our body go into fight or flight. When we go into this mode, our bodies want to protect us, and it makes our breathing change. But if we’re going to get through the anxiety, we need to level our breathing, and that can be difficult! That’s where Breathe2Relax comes in.
Breathe2Relax will help ground yourself and bring you breathing to an even and regular pace and will help you get through the stress or anxiety much quicker!
3. I Love Hue
I Love Hue wasn’t necessarily designed for anxiety, but it has quickly become essential for many who suffer with it.
Distraction is a great way to get you through panicked moments by taking your attention away from the anxiety and focus it elsewhere. By playing a calming game, you are merely engaging your mind and refocusing your attention. When anxiety hits, it can build on itself, the more you focus on it, so this is an excellent option if you begin feeling panicked in a public place!
I Love Hue is a straightforward game but very satisfying. All you do is arrange mosaic tiles into perfect color spectrums, and it gets harder as you go. There is no urgency in the game, so it is very soothing and can keep your mind distracted while you move through an uncomfortable state of being.
4. Pacifica
Therapy can be expensive, and while it isn’t suggested you use an app in place of a professional, Pacifica is an excellent option if you need instant attention that isn’t an emergency!
Pacifica was designed to help people cope with stress and anxiety using cognitive-behavioral therapy. When you sign up for Pacifica, you become part of a supportive community that helps you not feel so alone. Anxiety can make us think that we are alone, but that’s totally not true! More people have anxiety than you know, but it just isn’t talked about! On Pacifica, though, you can talk about it!
Pacifica is sort of like a personal trainer in that it gives you tools to grow from the anxiety so that you won’t have to use an app in the future! Instead of distraction, it helps you become better with anxiety and can help you better cope with it in the future.
5. SAMApp
SAMApp is an excellent tool for you to use when you want to better understand your anxiety along with cope with it. Understanding your anxiety can help you work through it because we often panic and are afraid of the unknown. It can be scary when we don’t know what is going on with our bodies so if we see what is happening and why X, Y, and Z is happening, we can feel better about it!
SAMApp acts as a personal journal so you can monitor your anxious thoughts and behaviors. Over time, you will begin to see patterns and learn more about yourself. Why did that make you anxious? Was that a trigger? When you did this, did you feel better or worse? The longer time goes on, you begin to learn more about yourself and can learn to move through anxiety healthily!
