We’ve all tried to reduce our reliance on our phones in a bit to rest our eyes and live in the moment more – and failed miserably. Well, if you can’t beat them, join them! Use technology to help make your lives more wholesome and assist in your quest towards wellness. The Rawbought team tried out many wellness apps throughout 2021, and shortlisted a few that we will continue using in 2022. If you’re looking for recommendations to add to your app library, continue reading!
Productivity Apps
Working from home, while convenient, came with its own struggles. With our usual routines broken by constant distractions and changing regulations, we struggled to keep up with our regular habits, and to introduce new ones to fit our new circumstances better.
Habitify – This is one of our most favourite habit trackers apps. Our favourite feature by far has to be the one that sorts our habits into ‘habit areas’ a.k.a type of habits. You can customise it to your liking if the preset ones aren’t accurate. So you can track your habits by theme so that it’s neat to look at.
Today Habit Tracker – If you’re a more visual person, the Today Habit Tracker is the one for you. Available on iOS is visually stunning app that is fully customisable. Aesthetics aside, its core features are strong and useful. You can create custom dashboards for each of your habits, and connect them with the Apple Health Charts to view and track your health data.
Meditation Apps
Meditation and mindfulness is an important part of your journey to wellness. Practising meditation every day helps you to build mental resilience and manage your stress in a healthy way. Mindfulness also helps you gain deeper appreciation for the world around you and regulate your emotions without judgement.
Headspace – The hype is real, and so worth it. If you’ve always to get into meditation and mindfulness but aren’t sure where and how to start, Headspace is the perfect app for you. It makes everything extremely simple and easy to understand, with daily short meditation sessions.
Calm – As big advocates of healthy sleep habits, we love the Calm app for its huge library of guided mediation, breathing programmes and exercises that help you clear and calm your mind before bed-time. The app has different types of sessions depending on how much time you have and what you’re looking for. With sessions starting from 3 min to 25 min, you can choose to focus on calming anxiety, breaking a habit or even encouraging deep sleep. You can also fall asleep to your favourite celebrity as they read you bed-time stories that are guaranteed to lull you to sleep.
Affirmation Apps
On the surface, affirmations may seem like empty words that can apply to anyone. But when truly internalised, affirmations have great power to motivate you right when you need it the most. There are many affirmation-related accounts on Instagram (we post some of our own too, once in a while!), but if you’re looking for timed, dedicated affirmations that are not lumped in with the rest of the noise on social media, having a dedicated app can help you.
ThinkUp – We found ThinkUp to be a truly innovative app that engages in a unique way, to enable us to internalise the affirmations in the best way possible. You can choose from pre-written affirmations from their extensive library, or compose some of your own. You can then record yourself reading our your selected affirmations, before listening to them on playback with soft music in the background. This helps to build up your confidence, as you speak through your affirmations.
Co-Star – If you are an astrology nut, you’ll like the Co-Star app. With personalised daily notifications based on your astrology signs, the app has beautiful one-liner affirmations that relate to your specific circumstances most of the time. The app itself has detailed descriptions and community-based features that enable you to engage with other people around the world.
Health Apps
Catching symptoms early allow you to seek proper treatment for any health issues you may encounter. Tracking your health also enables you to cultivate and maintain good habits over a longer period of time. Visualising your progress over time will give you that added push you need to keep going.
Clue – Ever gotten your period and every emotion that you’ve felt for the past week suddenly makes complete sense? With Clue, you don’t have to have that surprise anymore! You can track your period every month, with options to put in symptoms like cramps and flow, as well as lifestyle indicators like sleep. This helps to give you a holistic view of how your lifestyle can affect your health. It is also especially helpful for people looking to get pregnant, as it can help track ovulation cycles as well.
Sleep Cycle – This is by far the most popular wellness app among us, for obvious reasons. Sleep Cycle helps to track your length and quality of sleep throughout the night based on movement and sound analysis. Its built-in alarm system also wakes you up at the optimum time, when you are at your lightest sleep phase, to ensure that you’re less groggy when awake.
Journal Apps
Journaling is not just for kids. Journaling is a great way to make sense of your day and process all the feelings that you felt throughout. It helps to clear your mind at the end of the day, allowing you to have a calm mind before bed.
As much as we’d like to return to our girly days with bedazzled diaries and scented pages, maintaining a journal as a working adult requires a lot more effort nowadays. Harness technology that you have at your literal fingertips and get cracking at innovative ways of expressing your innermost thoughts and emotions.
Day One – This is a great app for the no-nonsense, no-frills person, who just needs a blank screen as her canvas. This app offers multimedia options for journaling, writing, adding pictures, recording voice memos etc. With sophisticated security features and unobtrusive designs, Day One ensures that your deepest secrets remain hidden for your eyes only.
Five Minute Journal – This app pretty much does what it says on the tin. This is perfect for those who are new to journaling and don’t know where to start. Five Minute Journal makes journaling easy with timed prompts throughout the day. Start your day right with gratitude and end your day by reflecting on the positive aspects. This helps to cultivate the habits of gratitude and self-reflection.
Daylio – Want to journal, but don’t want to actually write? Daylio is perfect for those people who want to express their thoughts in other ways than words. You can choose icons that best represent your mood and activities for the day. If you want to add more context, there are options to add notes. The app also comes with the standard set of features including reminders, exporting entries and goal-setting. The analytics dashboard also allows you to see how mood fared over a specific time period, and draws interesting correlations between your activities and moods.