How do I win against stress? This one-time, typical nervousness, but also this chronic, long-term stress, which makes normal functioning very difficult? There are many methods, but among them, there are also mobile applications to fight fear.
Best applications to help you win against stress
A hard day at work, personal problems, the need to deal with complicated matters in government offices and many others – if we wanted to make a list of stress factors, we would not have enough time for anything else. That is all the more so because in everyone it appears in different situations and under the influence of various factors. However, for whatever reason, reliable and, above all, prolonged stress is hazardous and can cause many diseases.
Although stress is unavoidable, you can learn to cope with it. Although no home methods can replace the help of a psychotherapist, especially in the case of really severe and prolonged stress, they can help you win with your daily nerves. Four applications in front of you will make it easier to overcome anxiety.
Which of them is the best? This time, exceptionally, we will not indicate the winner of our ranking. We have tested many applications for you and selected the four best ones, but each of them touches on a different area of stress management.
Relax Melodies will calm us down with relaxing music and sounds, Headspace will help us in meditation exercises, Relax Lite: Stress Relief will allow us to work on breathing. That also helps in calming and relaxing, and the most extensive Pacifica will take care of our emotions and will let us to understand and master them more sustainably.
That’s why the best solution is to install all four applications and choose those that will help you the most. Or use each of them in parallel.
And if you want to strengthen their effect on stress reduction a little, you can also see the recommendations that – in the recipe! The doctor (although strictly speaking not for stress, but in our opinion, it is an excellent remedy also for this ailment) prescribed to one of the heroes of the otherwise excellent book “Three men in a boat (not counting a dog).
Apart from this one quote, the book Three Gentlemen in a Boat (not counting a dog) is a great novel which we recommend to everyone, all the more so because in our opinion reading is one of the best ways to stress. Buy it from many bookshops for a right price – check out our current offers.
Relax Melodies
Relax Melodies is an application designed primarily to calm us down and make it easier to fall asleep, and it does so with the help of carefully selected sounds and melodies. And it has to be said that it is doing its job well.
Importantly, it does not force us to always listen to the same pre-programmed sounds and music, but it allows us to create a set of sounds that we consider to be the best in our case.
You can choose from a variety of meditative sounds, fresh melodies, and the sounds of nature and the environment. We can freely combine them until we create the most suitable setting for your situation. Initially, it requires a bit of rehearsal, but once you’ve set up your relaxation music, it can help you calm down in stressful moments.
The advantage of the application is also the ability to save the settings and load it when we want to use Relax Melodies again.
In our opinion, however, a free variant is entirely sufficient, and with the free sounds available, each of you will quickly build at least a few useful, relaxing sets.
Headspace
Headspace is a well-prepared guide to the world of meditation, but unfortunately, only those users who at least have a good understanding of English will benefit from it, as all meditation sessions are conducted in this language. The rest of the people in Headspace can get at most increase their blood pressure and stress levels.
Next, we listen to an introduction to the exercises for a few minutes, and then we can start learning meditation. The most critical element of this is the daily short sessions, which we are reminded to do by the notification. We receive them at a predetermined time.
Apart from the daily dose of learning, we can also use additional guides. They are prepared in the form of short animated films so that even if we don’t speak English very well, we will be able to understand quite a lot of them.
But if you don’t have a problem with English, then Headspace meditation can bring you a lot of stress relief. The adventure with the application begins with answers to a few simple questions, such as o what effect we want to achieve (easier falling asleep, faster calming down in nervous situations, higher concentration), what experience we already have in meditation. And this is an essential element of the application configuration at what times of the day we want to and can spend a few minutes on meditation exercises.
A large part of Headspace materials is available only after buying a paid subscription, which costs PLN 58.99 for a monthly payment, or PLN 435 if we decide to pay for the whole year in advance. Is it worth spending this money on? Surely not right away. Try the application and only when you like it, and it will be noticeably helpful, you can consider buying a paid variant. In our opinion, however, the materials available for free, and there are many of them, are entirely sufficient.
Relax Lite: Stress Relief
Relax Lite: Stress Relief is a simple but quite useful application for breathing exercises which, as you probably know, are one of the fundamental ways of (at least) dealing with stress. Also, you will also be supported in meditation exercises.
The tool that makes it easier for you to cope with stress must be, above all, simple – the excess of options, functions and other add-ons can make what is supposed to calm you down even more annoying. And simplicity is the significant advantage of this application. In fact, there is nothing unnecessary here. We only choose whether we want to meditate or work on breathing (we will focus on the latter function), then we wish our level of advancement, and already, we can start the exercises.
They are not complicated either. The application shows you exactly when you should breathe in, when you should breathe in, and how long you should take them. The levels of advancement we have already mentioned differ in these details, but they do not introduce additional, stressful confusion so that this simple application is practical.
The second element of Relax Lite – meditation exercises – is, again, a function aimed only at English-speaking users. That is because they depend on listening to our guide through the world of meditation and following her instructions, so without the knowledge of English, we will not be able to do it.
Pacifica
Pacifica is a slightly different application from the others. It is preferably a diary of emotions which, although it will not calm us down in a few minutes. That will allow us to get to know our feelings and stress factors better, and thanks to the system of tasks and goals, we will be able to eliminate them in the long run and introduce in their place those that will make us feel better.
We start by defining our goals – it can be to increase the feeling of happiness, improve people-to-people contacts, learn meditation, or better manage our nerves. Then we move on to the first entry in our diary, where we define the general mood (from excellent to very bad) and the more specific emotions we feel at a given moment. It is also worth describing (here we already use our own words, we can also add hashtags) what is currently happening and why in our opinion we feel exactly what we think.
We can also define health issues – how long we slept, whether we did any physical exercise, etc. This will also help us to determine what factors cause stress in us and what effects it brings to our health.
A fascinating function is the ability to plan your daily tasks. They are very simple, such as greeting all colleagues in the office, eating lunch or reading a book. It seems that these are simple, everyday things, but in fact, they are often omitted, which, contrary to appearances, can have a considerable impact on our mood.
Additional application features include the ability to save your dreams and goals to realize, determine the threats that we think are lurking on us, or analyze bad emotions.
Pacifica is a very developed, but also very good application. While the titles described above help you to deal with your current stress symptoms quickly. Also, Pacifica will help you to identify and deal with the causes of your negative emotions in the long term. So if you can describe your stress level as high and long, it is worth to start using this application systematically. Its drawback? Its interface is in English, but all the features are also graphical. So even if you don’t speak English very well, you should have no problem dealing with it.