Christmas can be a difficult time for many of us, but particularly for those of us in the healthcare industries who are still working over the holiday period, it can be even more stressful than usual. Health and wellbeing apps are a great on-the-go resource to help bust stress, keep anxiety at bay, and lift our mood.
There are lots of free health and wellbeing apps that you can download from your app store that are full of great tips, tricks, information, and advice. Here are our top 10:
Unless otherwise stated, all of these apps are free to download and access.
Every Mind Matters is an NHS campaign designed to help us be kind to our minds. Every Mind Matters features expert advice on a range of topics, from money worries to looking after a child’s mental health, and offers practical tips to help us look after our own mental health and wellbeing.
Answer 5 quick questions to receive your own personalised Mind plan, with tips to help lift your mood, deal with stress and worry, and sleep better.
You can also sign up for an email programme tailored to managing anxiety through the app. The series of emails feature expert advice, as well as practical tips and advice on how to incorporate the tips into your daily routine.
Exercise is great for our mental health, and running is a great form of exercise with lots of health benefits. Read more about how exercise helps to improve our mental health.
The NHS Couch to 5K app helps you to work up to running 5K from a complete beginner level. The app features commentary from comedians Sarah Millican and Sanjeev Kohli, as well as presenter Jo Whiley.
Thrive is a health and wellbeing app designed to help you prevent and manage stress and anxiety. Thrive was developed in the UK by specialists with years of clinical experience and uses evidence-based information and techniques.
Thrive includes meditations, deep muscle relaxations, and there is also a “thought-trainer” programme which uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy based techniques.
The Stress and Anxiety Companion wellbeing app is designed for the modern workforce, helping us to combat the challenges that work presents. You can sign up to use the app for free, however there are also paid subscription options.
The app offers online workshops, a library of over 300 audio guides, and personalised mental wellbeing plans, designed to “help employees cope with the most demanding of days.” The content includes reducing stress, combatting anxiety, and building mental resilience.
The NHS Mental Wellbeing Audio Guides are a series of audio guides designed to help boost your mood, and there’s a range of audio guides for a variety of experiences, such as low mood, sleep problems, and low self-esteem and confidence.
The Mental Wellbeing Audio Guides are short, and you can listen to them at any time, as many times as you like.
Headspace is “your mind’s best friend”. The app is paid subscription based, and uses science-backed meditation techniques and mindfulness tools to help support your mental wellbeing.
You can download the Headspace app for free, however access is limited. You can unlock the full content library with a free trial and explore everything Headspace has to offer. Once your free trial ends, you can sign up for a paid subscription on a monthly or annual basis.
Alternatively, you can access the Headspace YouTube channel for free and discover a library full of videos, including meditations, journalling prompts, expert advice, and relaxation playlists.
Here is an example of the kind of videos you can find:
In addition to this, the Headspace podcast is also free to sign up to – hear from experts in the field covering a range of wellbeing topics.
Are you a worrier? Do you often find yourself consumed by thinking of all the negative outcomes? Then WorryTree could be the perfect app for you. The app is based on a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy technique that involves identifying your worries and working through them as they appear.
The app will encourage you to log a worry – you can give your worry a title, add in further detail, and even categorise the worry, for example, is it a money worry, work related, health related, or family related?
The app will then ask you if there is something you can do about the worry. If you answer yes, WorryTree guides you to create an action plan to tackle the worry. If you feel as though there is nothing you can do to help alleviate the worry, the app offers you the option to schedule in some worry time. Following this, the app then provides some suggestions to help focus your attention away from the worry. You can select an option from the list or add your own.
My Possible Self promotes a holistic approach to taking care of your mental health and wellbeing, offering interactive tools and visual and mental exercises, as well as tips, activities, and toolkits. You will need to create a free account to access everything the app has to offer.
This wellbeing app is a really useful tool to create your own personal wellbeing plan – you can include as much or as little information as you like, including triggers, the techniques that work for you, and the accommodations that others can make to help make things a little easier for you. The app then allows you to share this plan with others via email, so you can share this with all the important people in your life.
Getting a good night’s sleep is an important part of a healthy lifestyle.
Sleepful is a great free wellbeing app to aid a healthy night’s sleep, featuring lots of helpful tools which are designed by experts to help improve your overall sleep quality.
Sleepful offers top tip videos, deep relaxation audios, habit prompts, and bite-sized facts and information on sleep. The app also features a digital sleep diary and offers continuous feedback so you can keep up to date with your progress.
We hope that you find some of these health and wellbeing apps helpful, not just over the Christmas period but in day-to-day life too.
If you are struggling over the holiday season, please reach out for help.
Samaritans’ helpline is open 24/7, 365 days a year. Call the helpline for free at any time on 116 123.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash.
