Effectively Managing Your Mental Health and Wellbeing

These are tough times that we are navigating and looking after your mental health and wellbeing has never been more important. Finding the time to stop, pause, take a deep breath, and check in with our own emotions can be challenging. Below are some useful free apps that will help guide you through:

  • Managing stress and anxiety in the moment

  • Creating time to effectively manage worrying thoughts and then move on

  • Mindfulness and relaxation

  • Checking in with others and asking are you ok?

  • Effort recovery

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ReachOut Breathe – (free) designed by ReachOut Australia this app was developed to help you reduce the physical systems of stress and anxiety by slowing down your breathing and your heart rate. ReachOut and Breathe helps you to control your breath and measures your heart rate in real-time using the camera on your phone.

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ReachOut Worry time – (free) Helps you set aside a short window of time for your worrying. When a worrying thought pops up, record it on the app, then go back to your day knowing that you can return to it later. This is a helpful way to track what you are worrying about, so that you can notice patterns and try to address reoccurring themes.

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Self-help for Anxiety Management (SAM) – (free) – SAM can help you better manage anxiety and depression. This free platform will teach you different ways to deal with your feelings by recognizing them and what causes them. Once you identify your personal triggers, SAM’s guidelines and resources prompt you to take action

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Smiling mind – (free) - Mindfulness meditation can be a valuable tool for improving your mental wellbeing. Smiling mind guides you through simple meditation exercises to get you started on your mindfulness journey.

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The checkin – (free) -Beyond blue – The Check-in app was designed by beyond blue and Two Bulls to help take the fear out of having a conversation with a friend that might be struggling. The app provides tips and advise from young people who have been through these conversations with friends. It also provides links to a range of online and phone services in Australia.

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Headspace – (free) - Headspace helps with mindfulness meditation and has a series of guided and unguided meditations, and plenty of other relevant content to listen to in your own time and space.

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Luminosity - (free) -Play games that help improve your brain health including your memory, response time and attention. Provides you with an opportunity for effort recovery.

Remember that it may only take a few minutes to reset and get back on track but if you are finding it difficult to move forward then it will be worthwhile connecting with someone that you can talk to in more depth such as a close friend, GP or psychologist.

Jo Wintle