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8 Apps for Your Emotional Health

The pace of our life speeds up constantly. The environment we live in today is safer, but ironically, much more stressful and hectic than the world of our ancestors. Our smartphones alone cause enough troubles and distractions to drive us to the brink of sanity. Luckily, there are lots of apps that can turn our devices into the tools of coping and sources of peace and mindfulness. Here are just a few to choose from.

Happify

Available: iOS, Android, Web

This app aims to modify your habits by providing effective tools for taking control over anxieties and emotions. Basing on the cognitive behavioral therapy, it offers engaging activities and puzzles that take a few minutes to solve, but help to lower the stress-level. As the creators of the app say, “small slices of time can make big-time changes.” The Happify app also measures your emotional wellbeing level to provide a feedback on your progress.

Calm

 Available: iOS, Android, Web

This app offers you an array of programs ranging by their time and purpose from 10-minute talk about mindfulness to 21-day courses in better sleep and non-judgment. It is your guide to easy meditation with a focus on your particular needs at the moment. This beautiful app provides everything one may need to start meditating – a brief on the concept, delightful scenery, and wonderful tracks by meditation music master, Kip Mazuy. It will help you to relax and sleep more and will bring calm into your life.

Anti-Stress Quotes

Available: iOS, Android

Sometimes friendly advice is all you need to cheer up and start looking on the bright side. This app has an enormous selection of comforting and inspiring words of influential people and verses from sacred books. These motivational quotes will help you to keep a positive and philosophical outlook on life and reassure you when you find yourself in a difficult situation.

The app also allows saving your favorite lines and sharing them with your friends via e-mail, SMS and Facebook.

The Worry Box

Available: Android

If there is a trouble on your mind, just put it in the box. All your troubles, worries, and concerns come to this little casket to relieve you and help you cope with them. This cognitive diary helps you to keep the track of your worries and to approach them mindfully. It gives you advice suitable for your particular situation, or words of comfort if the worry is beyond your control. The app also offers coach audios with tips on coping strategies, articles that will help you understand cognitive-behavioral therapy and a selection of relaxing tracks.

Relax Melodies

Available: iOS, Android

The app offers a variety of relaxing sounds and melodies to help you fall asleep, create a mood for yoga and meditation or simply have a few moments of serenity in a middle of a busy day. Apart from beautiful and user-friendly layout, there is another nice feature that makes Relax Melodies stand out among similar apps – it allows you to create personalized mix of sound that you find particularly helpful (for example, you can add crickets chirping to the sound of ocean waves and mix it together with a soothing melody).

Breathe2Relax

Available: iOS, Android

The purpose of this app is to provide you with a tool for anger, stress and anxiety management. Breathing exercises help you to calm down and reduce the “fight-or-flight” response of your nervous system to stressful factors. The guided breathing sessions are short, they are not enough for a long meditation, but prove to be very effective as an immediate remedy. Another handy feature is a possibility to customize the length of breathing cycles in order to match your preferences.

Pumpic App

Available: iOS, Android

This app is good for your own peace of mind as a parent: it enables you to monitor mobile devices of your underage children. When you can always see what your teen is up to online and keep him or her out of trouble, you have fewer things to worry about. It will also help you to take care of the emotional well-being of your children, enabling you to block the unsuitable content, inappropriate apps, and to ensure they do not suffer from cyberbullying, unwanted solicitation and other harmful aspects of digital life.

Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector

Available: iOS, Android

To effectively de-stress and restore positive mindset you absolutely have to smile and think of something nice. What can be nicer than furry cuddly kittens? That’s right, more kittens! The game is easy – all you have to do is to leave some snacks and toys and they will come. Your reward is to watch them playing and romping around in your yard. Unlike games where speed, reaction, concentration and skills matter the most, this one is refreshingly undemanding. It was created to shower you with cuteness and good mood, and it certainly delivers.

With these apps on your device, you will be able to dispel stress before it affects you, and to cope with troubles mindfully.

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Best Apps for Healthy Sleep for You and Your Children

Sleep deprivation is a worldwide problem of our time. Although the recommended amount of sleep is 8 hours daily for adults and about 10 hours for school-aged children, an average grown-up barely sleeps 6 hours a day. As for teenagers, various social pressures conspire against the proper amount of daily rest. This can lead to exhaustion, impair memory and cognitive abilities, and affect overall well-being. Luckily, technology is not only able to interfere with our sleep (we all indulge ourselves to social networks and YouTube video-hopping late at night), but also to offer us a remedy.

Sleep as Android

This is the most versatile and multi-functional application of its kind, that tracks everything you need to know about your sleep. The most important and usable feature, however, is sleeping patterns tracking – based on your movements and other data analysis, the app chooses to wake you up during the optimal sleep phase, which makes the awakening process easier and less stressful. Besides, the alarm is gentle and customizable. The app also keeps sleep deficit stats and offers sleep advice. On top of that, it can help with detecting some alarming symptoms of sleeping disorders, such as sleep apnea or sleep talking.

Twilight

If you have a hard time falling asleep or your children get too excited while using their phone or tablet before the bedtime, the probable cause may be the harsh blue light coming from the screen. This cold-hued glow, to put it simply, reminds our brain of the daylight and keeps us awake. Even the calm activities such as reading from the tablet screen can delay your going to sleep by an hour. Twilight solves the problem by adjusting your screen to the time of day and reducing blue light emission at night. When the app “thinks” that the sun is already down (it collects data about your GPS location), it dims the screen and applies warm orange and red filters, to imitate the sunset colors and prepare our brain for going to sleep.

Nature Sounds Relax and Sleep

Sometimes all we need to peacefully fall asleep is slowing our mind down a bit. Our days are full of stirring sounds – traffic, door slamming, furniture rolling, dogs barking, and sirens wailing. The app imitates the sounds of natural environment – birds singing, rustling of the grass, ocean waves, the wind, rain and thunder – whatever makes you comfortable and relaxed. There are many “white noise” machines and ambient music generators created to accompany us in the arms of Morpheus, however, this one offers only pure nature sounds and no music, which has the most wholesome effect on the psyche. It’s good for various purposes: to lull you to sleep, to help you relax when you feel stressed or tense, or even to wake you up in the mildest and most placid way possible, as it allows to use tracks from the app as the alarm and ringtones.

Pumpic

The most common reason why children have troubles falling asleep nowadays is their keenness on gadgets and digital. Sleeping is boring, whereas online life is buzzing 24/7 – they play games, they chat with friends, they share everything that happens to them during the day through the social networks. If you feel that maybe your child is growing dependent on their phone and that online activities interfere with their bedtime, you may opt to block the most distracting apps altogether. Pumpic has the variety of monitoring and blocking features that will help you to keep the cyber life of your child within the reasonable limits.

Yoga for Insomnia

This app offers you a guided series of yoga poses emphasizing the right way of breathing. The experience aims specifically to help you in overcoming insomnia. Traditional hatha yoga has a wholesome effect on your body and sets the right mood for sailing away to sleep. If you have never done yoga before, you may want to try Core Yoga app first. Nevertheless, Yoga for Insomnia is quite suitable as well. Your children may try it also; however, it is strongly recommended that they do the exercises under your guidance.

Dream Journal

Dreams are the reflection of our psyche, our worries and wishes. Sometimes people have reoccurring unpleasant dreams and this can affect their sleep and general state. To clear your mind and put your dreams right, you can keep a dream journal. It also helps to train your memory and to keep your brain fit. Luckily, now there is an app for that too. In Dream Journal you can track reoccurring patterns and elicit key moments that need interpretation. Though it is a very intimate process, you may choose to share your dreams with the community by posting them on the Dream Wall and read the dreams of other people from all over the world.

These apps will not solve all your sleep-related problems, but will definitely help you and your children to keep a proper regimen, cope with stress and avoid distractions after bedtime. The rest is up to you. Sleep tight and have nice dreams!

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