Your twenties are home to some of the best and worst years of your life: you take risks, spread your wings, lose friends (and make more), and ultimately find who you are. It is both an exhilarating and difficult journey. If you are a 20something struggling with anxiety, depression, or elevated mood swings, you shouldn’t have to struggle alone! Whether you’re in college overwhelmed with assignments, a POC who needs emotional support, or trying to become more aware of your mental chatter, everyone can benefit from a mindfulness or wellness app.
From difficulty in finding time in your schedule, balancing your checkbook, or knowing who to turn to, the therapy world can be hard to navigate, but these obstacles shouldn’t be the reason you don’t seek out much-needed help. As a jumping-off point, here is a list of mental health platforms and apps that you can participate in from home at a reasonable cost.
- Peers.net
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Peers.net is a new mental health online platform that functions as a network started by Obi Felten and Kim Newell Green. Peers.net takes a unique approach to mental health treatment for people in the age group 18-30 by recruiting individuals who have suffered their own mental health experiences, training them, and making them available to patients.
Rather than choosing a peer based on specific licensing, you choose your peer based on the specific struggles you are seeking help/advice for. For example, you can search for specific life experiences like “LGBTQ+ support,” “Emotional support for being Latinx in an all-white school,” or “anxiety as a STEM major” Basing treatment on experience provides a nuanced approach to providing support through different life situations and identities.
- Mood Mission
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Mood Mission is an app that provides you with quick, healthy coping mechanisms called “missions,” when you are experiencing high emotions. To use, it’s pretty simple and effective: you just input how you are feeling into the app, and are given a list of options to complete to help cope. By completing activities, you earn rewards that provide positive reinforcement to app users. They published three different academic peer-reviewed sources vetting their efficiency in improving mental well-being.
- Moodfit
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Moodfit is a top-rated holistic app that helps you track the efficiency of different coping mechanisms on your mental health. This app provides a comprehensive list of tools for you to customize… and the bright side is that it’s free!
Based on mindfulness practices like the gratitude journal, Moodfit helps you figure out and bring awareness to what things have the largest effect on your mood. It uses a comprehensive list of tools, creates a data chart, and helps you understand the relationship between your mood, thoughts, and behaviors.
- The Shine App
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The Shine App is a BIPOC-owned meditation app voted Best Of The Year by Apple, and is operated by the popular app, Headspace. The app intends to bring more representation into the wellness world and provide emotional support for marginalized groups. The free version of the app gives you access to personalized meditations, and the premium version ($65/ a year) allows you to access other wellness tools like self-care courses and virtual workshops. Although the app provides access to peer help, it does not connect you to licensed professionals.
Wellness is not one-size-fits-all, finding and implementing practices that work best for your mental health is a process! Date around these apps; download one, or all of them, and begin your journey to a more happy, whole, and supported you.