Health is a big concern for students nowadays. Lack of exercise, poor sleeping habits, malnutrition are common problems among the youth. Coupled with the stress caused by college, it can lead to anxiety and depression, which are two leading problems modern students face. According to the American Psychological Association, about 41% of students struggle with anxiety and 36% with depression.

Now, don’t let all those statistics scare you. There are many preventive mechanisms you can put in place to avoid spiraling into depression. Start with finding an online essay writer. A online essay writer service EssayWritingService can help you take care of your assignments. We all get tired sometimes, and having a reliable helper by your side is a sure way to keep yourself from burning out.

In this article, we are going to give you some app suggestions to keep your body and mind healthy. This way, you can keep track of your mental and physical health at all times and with minimum effort. Isn’t this what smartphones are for?

Fitness Apps

Sports and fitness apps are perfect for creating personalized workout plans, logging your workouts, and keeping you motivated. Below are some of the best ones we could find.

Strava

This app is perfect for runners. You can track your jogs in it, share your progress and connect with the online community. Apart from running, you can also use it for cycling, and even swimming. There’s a huge community of users that encourages you to join challenges and marathons. Such involvement will give you a huge motivation boost and won’t let you quit.

Home Workout – No Equipments

This is a perfect app for living in the pandemic. Now that gyms are closed in most of the world, home workouts rule the world. Besides, gym memberships are often costly and not every student can afford them. This app provides you with customized bodyweight workouts for all muscle groups. You can train any specific part of your body or go for a full-body workout.

Warmup and stretching routines are included to make sure you don’t injure yourself in the process. All the workouts are paired with an animation or video to help you understand how exactly to perform an exercise.

Meditation & Journaling Apps

Meditation has multiple proven benefits. You will feel it making a positive impact even if you meditate for as little as 10 minutes per day. It can help you reduce stress, learn to cope with it better, raise self-awareness and build acceptance.

Oak

This free app provides three main modes. 

• meditation;
• breathing exercises;
• sleep.

The meditation part contains three more subgenres – mindful, loving-kindness and unguided. You could probably guess the main purpose of each from the names. You can customize the meditation time in the app and increase it as you feel more comfortable.

Apart from meditation, you can use breathing exercises in an emergency situation, for example, during a panic or anxiety attack. They can be extremely helpful, especially if there’s no one around to help you cope.

Calm

Calm has a similar purpose but it offers way more functions. It is rated #2 on the App Store in the Health & Fitness category. The app aims to help you reduce stress and improve your overall quality of life. Apart from meditation, it also contains sleep stories made to relax you and put you to sleep quickly. Also, there’s music that’s made not only for meditation but to simply relax or focus.

The app’s extensive functionality might be beneficial as it can substitute several apps at once. However, according to some reviews, it’s a little too much for a meditation app. And the yearly fee is $69.99, which is not cheap for a student.

In fact, once you get the gist, you can meditate without an app at all. Just set a timer, sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. This will be even better for you as you will learn to focus much better without any outside help.

Reflectly

Reflectly is a journal created for tracking your mental health and wellness. It’s an AI-based application where you can log your mood and track your progress. The more you use it, the better it gets you. By asking you personalized questions, it can understand your moods better and help you reflect on them, too.

Apart from mood tracking it also offers daily motivational quotes and challenges. The widget on your home screen gives you a quote every time you look at your phone. The app stimulates deeper reflection based on the answers you put in. With daily reminders, you will never forget to log in your mood. And evening insights will help you increase gratitude.

Of course, you could journal using the good old pen and paper, and nobody stops you from doing that. But Reflectly also builds graphs and provides you with statistics, so you don’t have to reread older journal entries to track your mental state. The price for this app stands at $47.99 per year.

Headspace

Headspace has been around for 11 years now and has proven useful for many people since. It allows you to choose the goal of your meditation, for example, to reduce stress, fall asleep or become more productive and focused. In fact, there are numerous directions this app can take you. From improving one’s sleep pattern to helping to cope with cancer, it’s very versatile.

The best part is that it offers a student discount and you can use it for $9.99 per year instead of $69.99.

As usual with these apps, you can customize the duration of your meditation. It claims to help you raise mindfulness and bring more awareness into your life.

Wrapping Up

Your health is the most important thing you have. There’s no better time to start keeping track of it than now. Students do struggle immensely under daily pressure. So these apps are essential for keeping you happy and healthy.

Work out at home with free Home Workout – No Equipments or go for a run with Strava. Connect with a huge community to keep you motivated and wanting to achieve more. Meditation and journaling are proven to improve brain function, so use Oak, Calm, or Headspace to bring more awareness into your life. Thinking positively is a skill, so do work on it!