How I Manage Stress With The Thrive App

Photo Source: thrive.uk.com

Juggling hectic schedules and heavy workloads can easily overwhelm someone and trigger a burn out, its a difficult and extremely stressful situation to be in. Our mental health is just as crucial as physical health, one can’t function without the other.

With dozens of apps available out there to download, Thrive seeks to address mental health with a interactive game-like app that features three keys to success with mental health problems: prevention, early detection and early treatment.

The objective of the app?

To improve the world’s mental health by preventing, detecting early and managing common mental health conditions. We want access to therapy to be more affordable, more accessible and more engaging.

The motivation behind the app?

The founders are psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to redesign the way mental health services work from the ground up putting the end user in the driving seat.

They are committed to developing software to make access to mental health services more affordable, more accessible and more engaging.

What can the app do?

It’s an app that teaches you tried and tested techniques to manage stress. It tracks your mood over time and trains you to optimise your coping mechanisms.

Released at the beginning of 2016, after over two years of development and research the app seeks to pro-actively prevent and manage stress, anxiety and depression.

It’s main features are the following:

Keeps track of your mood over time
Enables you to train your thoughts so you can manage how you feel about different situations
Trains you in 4 self-soothing techniques that give you control over your stress

The app itself is very user friendly and it creates a calm ambiance once opened, with it’s easy on the ease visuals and soothing music to boot. It has three islands that each play a specific role in keeping tabs on your progress and promoting good mental health.

Mood Meter, everybody’s mood fluctuates over time, some more frequent and erratic than others. This meter helps you identify the reason for your mood and recommend exercises and tips based on how you’re feeling.

When I’m feeling depressed it really helps to have even a small thing be positive like in an assignment in work, choosing healthy options instead of junk food, saving a bit of money for a rainy day, etc.

Wellbeing Section, contains the information about issues you’ve identified using the mood meter. It lists down tips and helpful prompts to help you deal with the issues you have and future stressful situations.

This is really good when you’re lacking in direction or a course of action to take when confronting a certain problem you have. You can also treat it as a helpful reminder when you forget the tips and want to go back to them again.

Tip: If you want to track a trend in your problems list them down for a week or two and pick out whats always the predominantly present issue/s that you’ve been having.

Every time you feel lost of want to check your consistency with using the app and following your advised meditations and activities, it’s easy to check your progress. It keeps track and has a record of your current and past recommended activities.

The Message in a Bottle is a sweet motivational pick-me up when you need it, you can receive them randomly or choose one yourself, you can even create your own inspirational messages and send them out to other Thrive app users!

The Zen Garden is a virtual form of the Japanese rock garden used for meditating. It aims to to help you create a space to relax your mind and induce a calm demeanor as you create your garden.

It teaches and guides sessions on the following:

Breathing– is the simplest technique of relaxation that involves taking deliberately slow breathes and slowly exhaling, triggering a reflex that relaxes the body.

Meditation– is a powerful state of relaxation.

Deep Muscle– is a mind and body connection that eases tension in the muscles.

Self- Suggestion– not advised for everyone, it’s a state of hypnosis that helps you be trained to induce relaxation with something as simple as a word or phrase.

It’s important to take some time off from all the distractions and negativity in the world and give a few minutes for ourselves. The smallest of actions can provide the biggest benefits that’ll surprise you in the end.

Here’s a message from the founder and CEO of ‘Feel Stress Free’:

“We are becoming quite good at taking care of our bodies with healthy diets and regular exercise, but we are neglecting our mental health. We need to understand that physical and mental health are not separate things, both are just health. Working regularly on our mental health is worth it and will make us happier, stronger and more able to achieve our goals.”

And so all of you can try the app yourselves we have a gift from the people over at ‘Feel Stress Free’ in the United Kingdom, a free one month trial code to use the Thrive app!

You can also use this code (and follow the instructions to register) to use the app for the remaining days in July.