MindShift – Anxiety Relieving App For Teens
MindShift
Struggling with anxiety? Tired of missing out? There are things you can do to stop anxiety and fear from controlling your life. MindShift is an app designed to help teens and young adults cope with anxiety. It can help you change how you think about anxiety. Rather than trying to avoid anxiety, you can make an important shift and face it.
MindShift will help you learn how to relax, develop more helpful ways of thinking, and identify active steps that will help you take charge of your anxiety. This app includes strategies to deal with everyday anxiety, as well as specific tools to tackle:
- Making Sleep Count
- Riding Out Intense Emotions
- Test Anxiety
- Perfectionism
- Social Anxiety
- Performance Anxiety
- Worry
- Panic
- Conflict
Think of MindShift as your portable coach helping you face challenging situations and take charge of your life and gain insight into building the basic skills to manage their symptoms of anxiety disorders, including GAD, social anxiety, specific phobias, and panic attacks. It’s also useful for managing worry, performance anxiety, test anxiety, and perfectionism. The skills taught may be applied to individuals with physical, emotional, cognitive, or behavioral manifestations of anxiety, providing users with more helpful, balanced ways of thinking about feared situations.
It does a terrific job of readily offering lists of active coping strategies tailored to the type of anxiety and a variety of methods to manage anxiety; the information and strategies are simple and clear. “Chill out” tools such as breathing exercises, mental imagery, and mindfulness strategies are provided in text and audio format. “Quick Tips” are included to assist with anxiety in the moment. Users can “favorite” the methods that work for them. It is not helpful for people looking to track their symptoms and progress, those easily overwhelmed by many choices, or those with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Other helpful apps are:
Self-Help Anxiety Management is an app to help you understand what causes your anxiety, monitor your anxious thoughts and behavior over time, and manage them through self-help exercises and private reflection. The app is targeted to older teens and adults with anxiety disorders. The skills taught may help those with good insight and self-awareness.
Breathe2Relax is a simple, intuitive, and attractive mobile app designed by the National Center for Telehealth & Technology to teach breathing techniques to manage stress. The skills taught may be applied to those with anxiety disorders, stress, and PTSD.
Pacifica is targeted to help those with anxiety and mood disorders and stress, this app teaches deep breathing, behavioral exercises, excises and identifying cognitive distortions (negative thinking patterns), and learning how to replace them with positive thinking patterns. It’s also good for those experiencing bouts of anxiety between treatment sessions. The app does a terrific job of personalizing one’s cause of anxiety using voice recordings, and introducing CBT and reinforcing exercises between therapist appointments. This app is designed to be used in conjunction with therapy, not as a substitute for professional treatment.
Headspace is targeted to anyone who wants to learn meditation to reduce anxiety and stress and improve their attention and awareness; good for a beginner to establish a regular meditative routine. The skills taught include mindfulness and cognitive diffusion, breathing exercises, meditation practice, tips for increased relaxation, concentration; may be applied to anxiety and depressive disorders, PTSD, and OCD, especially in conjunction with a health provider.
Panic Relief is targeted to help individuals with panic disorder access easy-to-use, empirically supported coping tools to better manage and move through panic attacks.
The free version includes access to progressive muscle relaxation of the arm skill, while the upgrade allows access to the rest of the skills, including square breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation.
Information provided by Anxiety and Depression Association of America (https://www.adaa.org/finding-help/mobile-apps) and AnxietyBC (https://www.anxietybc.com/resources/mindshift-app).
