Posted on 25th November, 2023 at 7:11:46 AM
Much like air, stress is everywhere. Negative moods and poor emotional health cause stress at home. Improper time management, lack of focus, and poor social interactions lead to work-related stress. Wherever they may be, these high levels of stress are the reasons for mental illnesses in most adults.
Sleep disturbances, lack of regular exercise, and the absence of a balanced life are the sources of stress that lead to mental illness today. Most of us suffer from mental health issues that we are not even aware of until it starts affecting our physical health. Only then do we start hunting for mental health professionals to treat us.
7 Best Ways to Track Your Mental Health
The time has come when every one of us must start tracking our mental health before it endangers our life. Without further ado, here are the top seven ways to effectively track your mental health.
Bullet journals
Busy people cannot do without bullet journals to keep track of their daily activities and goals. Why not use these bullet journals to track your mental health? Let your “bujo” become a mood journal and reflect your moods over time. Jot down your mood patterns throughout the day. This will help you find the triggers for your bad moods.
Daylio is one such simple tool that helps to record your habits, and activities and generate daily reminders.
Use a Mood Tracking app
Mood tracker apps are particularly useful to patients with bipolar disorder. This daily mood tracker can denote their mood swings by marking them through colours.
Patients with depressive disorder can also use mood tracker apps to note their symptoms of depression. The levels of clinical depression can also be marked from moderate anxiety to severe depression using numbers.
A mental health professional will find a mood-tracking app like eMoods very handy while treating the patient.
Download a Depression app
Patients with depression often grapple with a sense of loneliness. for such people, depression apps can come as a blessing in disguise. Some apps help you note down the depression symptoms while some like MoodTools have videos and activities for depression management.
Apps like Talkspace act as a platform to find a person to talk to freely, vent your feelings, and be listened to, without judgment.
Make use of Meditation apps
Meditation is one of the traditional therapies most mental health providers recommend to patients with anxiety disorder. Soothing sounds, pleasing nature videos, and calming story-casts from these apps help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder to a great extent.
Meditation apps like Calm or Headspace offer hundreds of meditations to help patients alleviate their stress and anxiety.
Utilise Medication Reminder apps
Mental health conditions cannot be solved through mere counselling but need medication too. Most patients fail to take their medicines on time and that can affect their therapeutic process.
Apps like Pillsboxie schedule and generate medication reminders with visual and audio alerts to help you take the pills on time.
Install Cognitive Behavioral Therapy apps
Several mental disorders like anxiety, depression, Obsessive-compulsive Disorder, etc. use CBT as the treatment tool. Here, positive psychology is used to alter negative thoughts and motivate the mind.
Apps like MoodKit have a host of therapeutic activities based on CBT to alleviate stress and change the sad mood of patients.
Take Advantage of Breathing Apps
The final way to effectively track your mental health is via breathing apps. Deep breathing is known to relax the mind and act as a stress buster for most patients. Even panic attacks can be treated by using deep breathing techniques.
Patients can use breathing apps like Relax, Breathe, or Kardia to learn breathing exercises to calm their minds.
We have all heard of apps like the Apple Health app used to track our physical activity and general health. Now, try the above mental health apps to cure mental health concerns. These apps may not be a substitute for therapy but can be used as part of the treatment plan. The healthcare provider can use these apps in therapy sessions to see if the patient’s emotional activity matches his daily goals. Some of these apps are free while some have an annual subscription. Several versions of mental health apps are available from the basic versions to the premium versions with additional features.
