Apps For Better Mental Health
It seems like life is getting more and more stressful these days! Keeping the balance between your work, your relationships and your hobbies can certainly be a challenge : and sometimes it’s easy to feel a little bit overwhelmed! But don’t worry : as long as you have a mobile phone, help is at hand! Here are three apps that can help you organise your life, maintain better mental health, and generally feel better in life!
Strava
Do you like to work out? It’s well known that physical health and mental health are closely connected. Strava is an interactive exercise app that lets you record and share your workouts with a community of other health fans.
The app can record running, cycling and swimming training, and you can also set yourself weekly and monthly goals. If you want to run 20 miles a week, that’s great, or if you feel more like 5 miles a week, that’s great too!
At a time when it’s difficult to see a sense of achievement in your life, exercise, even a little bit, can be a really simple, accessible way to feel like you’re on your way to taking control of your life – it can be a great boost for your confidence!
Calm
Your mind can be its own worst enemy. After you get home from a stressful working day, even though you’ve physically relaxed, it can stay in ‘work mode’, making it very difficult to truly de-stress. It’s almost like it’s talking to you by itself!
Sleeping, in particular, can be tricky – and when you find yourself sleep-deprived, it can be very hard to break this cycle. You can’t sleep, so you can’t relax, so you can’t sleep!
Enter Calm : this is an app for meditation, which is basically a way of dealing with your thoughts in a more efficient way, and gradually calming yourself down. You can learn how to ‘speak’ to yourself in a much more constructive way : you’ll be surprised how much quicker you can sleep once your mind isn’t constantly nagging you!
BetterHelp
It’s important to admit that the troubles in your life can sometimes be too much to deal with by yourself. When you feel like this, the best thing you can do is talk to someone who can help you with how you’re feeling. The word for this person in English is ‘therapist’.
BetterHelp is a convenient therapy app that puts you in touch with online therapists from all over the world. You will be able to message your therapist anytime if there is something you want to get off your chest. You can also arrange video and phone appointments on a weekly basis – and while therapy can be expensive sometimes, BetterHelp can adjust your payments, so you can pay what you can afford.
Of course – learning languages, as an acheivement, is also great for your mental health : you can start with doing the vocabulary exercise below!
Vocabulary
Match the bold words in the article to the definitions below
- To agree that something bad is true (verb)
- To talk about something that is bothering you (verb phrase)
- Feeling like there is too much pressure on you (adjective)
- To exercise (phrasal verb)
- Something impressive you’ve done (noun)
- To talk in an annoying way (verb)
- Easy to get and use (adjective)
- Difficult (adjective)
- Related to the body (adverb)
- Believing in yourself (noun)
- To change something to suit a situation (verb)
- An increase in something (noun and verb)
- Admit
- Get Something Off Your Chest
- Overwhelmed
- Work Out
- Achievement
- Nag
- Accessible
- Tricky
- Physically
- Confidence
- Adjust
- A boost
This is Ingla School of English‘s weekly blog, intended as reading practise for our students in Turnpike Lane, in London, and around the globe. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and take a look at the rest of our writing, much of which has activities for teachers to use in the classroom.