In today’s competitive world, people are constantly trying to improve themselves to keep up with others. While doing this, people often feel overwhelmed by the stress that comes with competition. Overstressing can lead to numerous health problems: high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes. To counter this stress, it’s important to keep a balance by practicing simple habits such as meditation, journaling, exercise, keeping a healthy diet and performing a creative art or doing some type of brain puzzle. Here are 5 free apps that will help to develop these habits and ultimately lead to self-improvement while staying composed. 

1. Insight Timer

• Meditation is a simple and effective way to reduce stress, lower anxiety and improve self-awareness. Insight Timer is known for its large library of content. With over 80,000 free guided meditation techniques combined with over 10,000 teachers that are specialized in meditating in specific situations, this app is one of the best for meditation.

2. Reflectly

• Journaling is a great way to reflect on life. Reflecting helps individuals figure out what is going good and bad in their lives.This helps people understand why they feel certain emotions and moods and gives them a clearer picture of their thoughts. Reflectly, with its remarkably simple user interface, uses AI generated prompts that are based on your past journal entries, to achieve its ultimate goal of erasing negative thoughts and increasing positivity within the user. 

3. Nike Training Club

• Exercise drives your endorphins, which are the hormones that relieve pain or stress. Building a simple habit of exercise is important to living a long, healthy life. To do this, Nike Training Club is an app with numerous fitness workout guides that are provided by your favorite trainers, athletes and experts. This app also has a simple user interface to understand your progression and consistency as you exercise. 

4. MyPlate Calorie Counter

• A person’s nutrition and stress are correlated. The healthier a person eats, the less stress they have. When essential nutrients are consumed, blood flow is improved. With improved blood flow, important nutrients are easily brought to the brain, which ultimately lessens the impact of stress on the brain. MyPlate Calorie Counter is an app that can create healthy, balanced 8-week meal plans for all 3 main meals of the day. Additionally, this app has a calorie tracker which keeps track of all the calories a person intakes. It also has a social media network filled with many other individuals that are supportive and motivational. 

5. Creative art app

• A creative activity every day helps with increasing your levels of mindfulness. Mindfulness helps reduce your stress levels. Creative arts can be anything: painting, writing, drawing, photography, pottery,  music, etc. The possibilities are endless. Although many of these arts can’t be learned or practiced on an app, people are recommended to do something in the art medium to increase mindfulness. If that is not possible, people can play fun creative puzzle apps. Great examples of these are the New York Time’s Wordle, Sudoku.com on the app store, Cross Fingers and Monument Valley. There are always new fun, creative, puzzle type games coming out, and playing something like that once a day will help counter stress.