Apps to help – Free Apps to Help with Mood

When things feel hard, including with money discouragements, self-employment hardships, and many other hardships that come up, some free apps can help you hold on and be strong like this ladybug. So here are some of my favorite apps to help for mood.  

They can save money too. While certainly not a replacement for therapy and doctors, these apps to help can provide a resource for when you need something right away. People may not be there. Money may not. But these apps will. So here are some apps to help …..

List of Apps to Help when Things Are Hard

Moodfit

• Available: on GooglePlay and App Store
• Rundown: 
  • Track things such as: daily mood, activity (exercise, outdoors, sunlight), recording things for which you are grateful, sleep, and more.
    • Good to give you a way to keep yourself accountable in following through with mood tracking and the things that impact as well as help your mood. 
    • It is also a nice way to see how each “task” has a correlation on your mood. e.g., does your mood decrease with lack of sleep or lack of exercise? 
  • You can also add your own daily “tasks” to track. For example, I added one that has “Use my planner” and then assign a scale of how well I did that day from 1-10. I can also add notes to it.
  • Additionally, it has some good articles with helpful ideas to consider. 
  • Push-notifications also give nice reminders.
  • You can view your weekly and monthly activity. Also, the app lets you view two entries to see how they correspond. For example, mood versus sleep time.
• Free
• Not pushy!!!
  • If you ever feel guilty about not keeping up with something, this app is pretty good at being all happy and just saying welcome back. No need to worry about it sending notifications such as you have not been back in x days (which can add pressure, I think). 
  • Makes it easy to jump back into for me at least. Maybe it’s the very happy smiley emoji that helps as well.

Pacifica

• Available: Also on GooglePlay and App Store
• Rundown: 
  • Again it is essentially a tracking tool to track daily mood and helpful activities to improve upon it.
  • Other features include:
    • a hope board (add pictures and thoughts to work towards),
    • a forum to chat with others or read their experiences & tips,
    • and guided exercises to help with things such as reframing thoughts.
• Then there is the goals part. This feature is great because you can select goals from suggested lists within various categories. So  it makes it easy to find little (or big) goals to add to your list to help you out – without the burden of coming up with them on your own.
  • You then say how hard you think it will be to complete that goal (scale of 1-10). And when you complete it, it prompts you to say how hard it actually was.
    • You may find some things are not as hard as you thought they would be. 
  • Examples: take a nap; go outside; talk to a stranger; ask someone on a date. They can get a bit harder, but there are small ones as well. Then, you can work up to call a radio station!
• The section on thoughts takes you through exercises to try to help you reframe them by identifying what triggered it.
  • So you may say what the feeling is, the “bad” things like exaggeration, all-or-nothing, catastrophic, etc. Then you have to change those to reframe that thought into something more positive or identify negative thinking pitfalls (e.g., overthinking, catastrophic, all-or–nothing). The app walks you through this process. T
  • hen it helps reframe what you wrote into something better by changing each negative word you had into something more realistic.
• Finally, it is worth mentioning the guided path section.
  • This is a good place to start with because it tells you about each of the categories I just mentioned (the first week session one). Then it ends with a short task to complete yourself within the app.
    • This session is free – later ones are included with paid subscriptions.
  • Everything else I mentioned though is free.
  • My view? I like this app a lot.

MoodMission

• Available: On Google Play and App Store
• Rundown: 
  • First, you input whether you are feeling a negative feeling (like I’m anxious or depressed), rank how distressing it is, and pick a specific option describing how exactly (e.g., is it stopping you from doing things or can you just not put your finger on it, among other examples).
  • Then it gives you a suggested list of things to do (missions) and says why they help. For example, count your breaths, run in place for 60 seconds, clean, go outside, etc. Usually they are short activities that can be done quickly to help you out at that moment.
    • It is your choice which one you pick and they change each time. 
    • Afterwards, you then say if you feel less distressed and how helpful it was. This lets you track what types of things help (mindfulness, physical activity, etc).
• Thoughts? I like that they tend to be rather short. Also, some suggested activities help more than I realized until I did them.

Happify

• Available: Again you can get the app on both Google Play or the App Store.
• Rundown: It has some free guided tracks with some fun activities.
  • However, not all content is free and it pushes heavily that you should subscribe. 
  • But if you do not want the pro-guided content, I think the free content is worthwhile. 
  • For the free version there are some tracks that have tasks that are not all free but I think the overall tracks are still helpful by using the free aspects of them.
• Another cool feature included in this app: game-type activities. These can be good distractions to just shift your focus and breathe a little. 
  • Not all content on here are games, but this is just something unique about this app in addition to guided tracks.
• Additionally, this app posts some good in-app articles.

Take A Step and try one of these Apps to Help – I hope something helps in some ay!

Let me know your thoughts!

Apart from apps…if you use some of my apps for money that reward you in Amazon gift cards

(like Job Spotter – see my post on earning money via miscellaneous apps but there are others as well as you will find – especially if you have an Android/Samsung phone – see my post on Survey apps), then you may want to buy one of these cool devices I bought for my mom for Christmas.

It is a neat little device for relaxing and mellowing out and hey if you easily rack up some Amazon gift cards via some apps I mention that pay out in Amazon gift cards, why not use them for some cool new thing?? 🙂

We all love it. I got the six scent variety pack as a starter.

So far we have tried the health scent which is a cinnamon-citrus type aroma. I feel that it perks you up a little and is good to have going in a room while doing chores, cooking, cleaning; just something to spice it up a bit.

We have also tried the breathe aroma which is great for congestion. If you have smelled eucalyptus before, you will smell some here.

What is cool about the diffuser though is that it sprays out just amount where you can smell it, but not too much. Also, it seems to take short little breaks so that your room does not suddenly smell like a perfume shop. It is the perfect amount.