While we might strive to minimise stress from our lives, busy schedules and the pressures of modern life invariably lead to uncomfortable levels of stress. We’re told that maintaining a calm persona can assist with our relationships, creativity and productivity. But how do you unwind after a long day at work? Here are some apps that can help you lower stress, increase resilience and relax more easily by utilising simple mindfulness techniques. 

Headspace

Headspace is a charmingly designed mental health and wellbeing app with hundreds of guided meditations, mini-meditations, sleep sounds, and SOS meditations for emergencies. It also includes meditations for kids to enjoy, as well as animations to help you better understand meditation and mindfulness. You can use the app to keep track of your daily mindfulness and even invite friends to do the same.

Headspace is designed to be a daily practice, which in time can help you to develop better focus, wellbeing and resilience in stressful situations.

The app offers targeted meditations on happiness, mindful use of technology, stress relief and a multitude of other topics to help you benefit from daily use of the app.

Calm

Calm is another mindfulness app with a strong focus on helping you get the most out of your sleep, meditation, and relaxation. It offers guided meditations for all experience levels, that help you better stabilise sleep patterns, which in turn effects how affected you are in stressful environments. Calm features a library of nature sounds and relaxing sleep stories to lull you into a relaxed state and help switch off at night.

Breathe2Relax

Breathe2Relax is an innovative stress management app that acts as a kind of ‘on-thego stress management tool’. It provides both in-depth information the effects of stress and instructional exercises on how to practice ‘diaphragmatic breathing’, the basis for almost all meditation.

Diaphragmatic breathing is a breathing exercise that has benefits for your entire body, including owering stress levels, reducing blood pressures and regulating important body processes.

Yoga Studio

Yoga Studio is a fun and all-encompassing yoga app, that offers easy-to-follow HD video yoga classes. The app comes with 65 complete yoga and meditation classes and a library of over 280 poses for people of all experience levels. It includes detailed advice and instructions as well as the ability to schedule classes.

Personal Zen

This simple and enjoyable smartphone game built by a team of leading neuroscientists and mobile developers, is based on clinical findings to reduce overall anxiety levels.

Playing Personal Zen regularly works similarly to exercising a muscle but for stress reduction, helping to build resilience and combat anxious feelings that may creep in. It works by stopping negative cognitive biases in stressful environments, by training your brain to follow your ‘Happy Sprite’ and focus on positivity instead. The game keeps things fun by letting you track of your achievements and goals.

Pacifica

Pacifica gives you holistic tools to address anxiety based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, mindfulness, relaxation, and health. It provides helpful guided deep-breathing and muscle relaxation exercises, as well as daily anti-anxiety experiments. It also comes with tools such as an intuitive mood tracker for recording your own thoughts. This can help you understand your thought patterns – a key benefit of which is recognising possible anxiety triggers and becoming better equipped to combat stress with a resilient mindset.