5 Calming Smartphone Apps for Better Mental Health
Learn about the benefits of popular relaxation apps for anxiety reduction, better sleep, and overall well-being.
Taking care of your mental health can take many forms – seeing a therapist, practicing your hobbies, and nourishing friendships are all good for your mental health. Similarly, taking steps to increase your calmness and decrease feelings of worry, fear, stress, and anxiety may also contribute to mental health and well-being.
There is a seemingly endless variety of smartphone and other mobile device apps designed to help promote calmness and relaxation. These apps all aim to decrease uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings of worry and fear while also increasing the much more pleasant and desirable feelings of calmness and relaxation. They do so in a range of different ways, from providing you with music and sounds created and curated to bring about a state of calmness and relaxation, to teaching you lessons in brain science, psychology, and how to monitor your own mental states, to guiding you through meditations and breathing exercises that promote calmness and relaxation.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be extremely effective in helping people with anxiety overcome their worries and fears (Borza, 2022). In CBT, patients work with a therapist to learn to identify their maladaptive thought patterns. They then work their problematic thought patterns with the goal of replacing them with positive, less problematic, less distressing ways of thinking and processing. Psychoeducation, or learning about your own mind and about how your thoughts, feelings, and actions all influence one another, is a critically important part of CBT, as is learning strategies you can use to minimize feelings of fear and worry.
Mindshift CBT is an app that introduces users to some psychoeducation exercises similar to those used in CBT. It also incorporates calming, relaxation, and mindfulness exercises.
So many of us feel that we’re not sleeping enough – a quarter of all adults don’t feel that they get enough high-quality, restorative sleep with up to 15 percent of people feeling that their daytime functioning suffers because of poor sleep (Marin & Benca, 2012). Luckily, there are calming apps that may be able to help you get to sleep faster.
Bettersleep has a range of activities and exercises that you can use to help guide you into sleep. Some of its features include hypnosis, relaxation techniques, sounds, music, meditations, and bedtime stories.
Pzizz has different settings for nighttime sleep and for naps. Using soundscapes, music, and narration, this app guides you from wakefulness to sleep and even back to wakefulness again after a specific time if you want, helping you transition from awake to asleep and back again smoothly and peacefully.
“Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.”
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The two most popular smartphone applications for calming and meditation are the “Calm” app and the “Headspace” app. The Calm app has over 1.5 million ratings that average 4.8 out of five stars in the Apple Store and over 500,000 ratings that average 4.4 out of five stars in the Google Play Store. Headspace has over 900,000 ratings that average 4.8 stars out of 5 in the Apple Store and over 285,000 ratings that average 4.4 out of five stars in the Google Play Store. As of 2019, it is estimated that together, these apps have somewhere between five and nine million monthly users.
Both of these apps include guided meditations, breathing exercises, soundscapes, music, and sleep stories amongst other content. Currently both Calm and Headspace operate on subscription models and both charge the same for their services. Subscribing to either one costs 12.99 USD per month or 69.99 USD per year.
Generally, Calm may be preferred if you have some experience with meditation while headspace may be better if you are new to mindfulness or meditation. Headspace tends to offer more guidance and more structure while the content on Calm is presented in a more “a la carte” format which may suit you if you like less structure. This may be confusing or overwhelming if you don’t have meditation experience or if you just feel more comfortable with guidance and structure.
Notably, a recent scientific review (O’Daffer et al., 2022) found 14 published, peer-reviewed studies testing the efficacy of Headspace but only one published, peer-reviewed study testing the efficacy of Calm. Overall, the authors concluded that there is some evidence that using the Headspace app may improve some symptoms of depression, while the evidence for effects on mindfulness, well-being, stress, and anxiety is more equivocal.
Ultimately, both apps have benefits that may help you achieve greater calmness in your life. They also both have trial periods so you can give them each a try and then stick with the one that works best for you.
Our smartphones and other mobile devices can be a source of stress and anxiety (Vahedi & Saiphoo, 2018). But, by downloading and using calming apps, like those reviewed in this article, we may be able to turn a source of stress into a source of calmness. The apps reviewed in this article may help you decrease feelings of worry, stress, anxiety, and insomnia.
● Borza, L. (2022). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.
● O’Daffer, A., Colt, S. F., Wasil, A. R., & Lau, N. (2022). Efficacy and Conflicts of Interest in Randomized Controlled Trials Evaluating Headspace and Calm Apps: Systematic Review. JMIR mental health, 9(9), e40924.
● Vahedi, Z., & Saiphoo, A. (2018). The association between smartphone use, stress, and anxiety: A meta-analytic review. Stress and Health, 34(3), 347-358.
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