These 6 Android apps helped me relax after a stressful week

Key Takeaways

Wysa provides a personal AI chatbot to discuss problems, offer advice, and track moods.
Headspace offers guided meditation, relaxation exercises, workouts, and sleep aids.
Mood Tracker helps track moods, identify patterns, and encourage positive habits.

Life is stressful — it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and if you’re anything like me, you might need a hand to stay calm and focus on the positives. Luckily, I have a ton of Android apps in my arsenal to help me relax and sleep well. They’re easy to install on your phone and can change your life with meditation and other mindfulness techniques if that’s not up your alley.

While an abundance of self-help apps for Android phones is great news, it can be time-consuming to sift through all the options. I’ll make it easier to choose by listing the best six apps I use whenever life gets to be a little too much.

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1 Wysa

A personal chatbot you can talk to like a friend

Wysa / Pocket-lint

Wysa is a personal AI chatbot I can talk to about my problems. It’s like talking to a friend, and the chatbot is completely non-judgemental. It offers encouragement, advice, and even asks me about my goals and plans to then offer helpful tips on achieving them. If I have serious issues that Wysa can’t help me with, it can connect me with an actual therapist, although that does require a subscription.

The Premium version offers exercises to cope with pain, manage anger, and overcome loneliness. It can also help me sleep with various bedtime stories and provides calming exercises to cope with nightmares. I can also track my moods and measure my progress with Wysa’s built-in journal.

2 Headspace

Headspace/Pocket-lint

Headspace is one of the most popular mindfulness apps out there. Getting started is simple, with an introductory video to explain how it works and others to learn meditation basics and practice daily mindfulness. The meditation exercises are varied for boosting motivation, finding time to rest, calming everyday anxiety, and more, and are taught by professional teachers with years of experience.

Our mental and physical health are linked, so Headspace provides Yoga, cardio, and other workouts to help me get into shape.

The best thing about Headspace is its comprehensive solutions to help my mind and body. It makes it easier to wind down and sleep with relaxing sounds, breathing exercises, and stories. Our mental and physical health are linked, so Headspace provides Yoga, cardio, and other workouts to help me get into shape. I can also access binaural beats to help me relax and focus or use the Politics without Panic feature to escape the mental stress of watching the news or having challenging conversations.

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3 Mood Tracker

Track your moods to see your feelings from a bird’s eye view

Mood Tracker/Pocket-Lint

Mood Tracker does exactly what the name sounds like — tracking my moods to gain insight into patterns and events that make me happy or sad. I start the day by selecting the mood that most aligns with how I’m feeling, with options ranging between terrible and excellent. I can then add other details affecting it, like the weather, relationships, locations, hobbies, etc. The app even lets me add custom mood categories and record voice audio to store my feelings.

Besides recording my moods, Mood Tracker encourages positive habits like meditation, exercise, and learning new languages. It also offers a scheduling feature with reminders to keep me on track, and all the information is then stored on a calendar where I can review the trends, patterns, and more. The information empowers me to eliminate bad influences and enforce a positive change in my life.

4 Mindfulness Coach

A free app to teach you about meditation and mindfulness

Mindfulness Coach/Pocket-lint

The United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs designed Mindfulness Coach to help veterans and service members reduce stress and anxiety. It’s one of the best free mindfulness apps and is perfect for beginners wanting to learn the basics before stepping up to more advanced options. I like Mindfulness Coach because of its simplicity and how gently it started with Seated Practice training.

The United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs designed Mindfulness Coach to help veterans and service members reduce stress and anxiety.

After training, the app asks 19 assessment questions to learn more about me and what assistance I require. It then provides feedback based on my answers and offers tips on focusing and de-stressing. Mindfulness Coach’s Expertise section is excellent for taking my mindfulness to the next level and provides helpful information on being a genuine listener, practicing acceptance, and other things that generate positive energy.

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5 Pzizz

Feel refreshed with good sleep and relaxing mornings

Pzizz/Pocket-lint

Pzizz is a simple and effective app that improves my quality of sleep. Its homepage is friendly and minimalist, with sleep, nap, and focus as the only options. Pressing sleep or nap opens the settings for me to customize the sounds, set the timer for how long I want to rest, and more. The app offers various soothing sounds, like Riverbed, Snowfall, Wind Instruments, and SnowFall, to help me get to blissful sleep, but I can also choose relaxing voice narrations that combine different psychophysiological methods to make me relax if I don’t want to hear the sounds.

Setting alarms for going to bed and waking up is easy, and Pzizz offers various options to optimize my experience. I can choose between various narrators’ voices and decide whether I want them to run in a loop. It also lets me set the music and voice fade-out times to make them stop playing after I’m asleep. There are even options for playing music and voices that gently wake me up in the morning and offer a more peaceful solution to buzzing alarms.

6 Insight Timer

A comprehensive mindfulness apps for everyone

Insight Timer/Pocket-lint

Insight Timer offers basic and advanced mindfulness activities for beginners and experienced users. Beginners — like myself — can start with a guided course to learn how to meditate in seven days with ten-minute easy breathing and focus points exercises. Advanced users can try longer sessions to release anxiety or enjoy relaxing piano meditation. The app includes longer courses teaching how to manifest success in life, understand and manage depression, and other valuable skills.

I like that Insight Timer isn’t just about mindfulness — it has features to improve my sleep and mornings, making me feel fresh and more energetic. The sleep feature includes soothing music and sounds and some courses for unwinding, but in the mornings, l enjoy trying the guided rituals and routines to help me feel refreshed for the day ahead. Insight Timer also offers exciting challenges to help with long-term self-improvement and includes a journal to track my progress.