These Self-Care Apps Will Help You Live a Happier, Healthier Life

Remente is a free-to-download personal development and mental wellbeing app. “Currently, efforts in mental health are focused on healthcare rather than wellbeing and preventative care. Remente aims to change that by providing a tool that users can use to improve and balance their lives at any time, from wherever they are,” founder David Brudö told Culture Trip.

The app combines psychology with brain and mental training to help users reach their full potential and lead a healthier lifestyle. Whether your aim is to improve mental wellbeing, mindfulness, stress management, personal or professional relationships, Remente guides you through every step in order to make your goals a reality.

Remente was devised using techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), offering features that allow users to track their moods, and set long and short-term goals in eight areas: love and relationships; health and fitness; career and education; personal development; family; friends and social life; fun and recreation; and finances. For premium users, the app also boasts digital courses on everything from relationships to mindfulness, productivity and stress management.

Remente is free to download on the App Store and Google Play. In-app products are available from £3.49 to £43.93 per item.

With 17.5 million downloads across 190 countries, the HeadSpace app delivers new, daily guided meditation based on teachings that co-founder and former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe learned during the 10 years he spent studying meditation and mindfulness in monasteries across Asia.

Teaching the basics of meditation and mindfulness, each daily HeadSpace pack is supported by a host of content, including animations, articles and videos in a playful, quirky style. Along with daily meditation guides, Headspace also offers condensed, bite-sized meditations for users with busy schedules, and SOS sessions to support subscribers in those meltdown moments.

HeadSpace’s first series, The Basics, is free. After that, via subscription, Headspace offers more than 550 hours of original content tailored to the specific needs of each user.

After raising more than $50,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign, the team at Aloe are building a free iOS “self-care check-in and reminders app that brings essential self-care tasks together in one place.” The app will help everyone—particularly those living with mental or chronic illness, autism or ADHD—by making sure tasks such as drinking water, brushing your teeth, eating and snacking or taking time off from social media are getting done regularly.

Users, called ‘Aloe buds’, get gentle self-care reminders according to their needs and lifestyle. The app will feature a ‘reflection space’ where users can answer three simple questions: “How was your day?”, “Who is one person who makes you happy?”, and “What is one thing you’ll do for yourself tomorrow?”.

Aloe will also have an an opt-in ‘supportive social network’ community where users can interact by sending each other virtual flowers or tending to virtual ‘community support gardens’. According to Aloe’s Kickstarter page, “the app does not replace mental health care, but it can be a valuable—and free—tool to help fill gaps where needed.”

Aloe will be free in the iOS App Store for download from January 2018.

The Sleep Cycle alarm clock app tracks your sleep patterns and wakes you up during light sleep, which “feels like waking up naturally rested without an alarm clock.” By tracking your sleep cycles, the app purports to help you to feel more well-rested and less groggy.

According to the Sleep Cycle site, the app “uses sound analysis to identify sleep states by tracking movements in bed. Sleep Cycle uses a wake up phase (30 minutes by default) that ends at your desired alarm time. During this phase, Sleep Cycle will monitor signals from your body to wake you softly, when you are in the lightest possible sleep state.”

Sleep Cycle is free to download and use on the App store and Google Play.

Good Blocks is a “gamified training app designed to improve your self-esteem, body image, social anxiety and mood by training your mind to quickly and automatically reject negative thinking and adopt more adaptive, flexible thinking.”

Based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), users throw away negative (bad) thoughts and pull positive (good) thoughts towards them. By playing, users “learn to automatically detect, identify and react to your thoughts in a way that enhances mood and general functioning over time”. The app aims help users “change the way you think about yourself and the way you perceive the world.”

Good Blocks is free to download and use on the App store and Google Play.