Five Wellness Apps to Try This Year

It seems like everything has gone digital these days. You can even gain entry to a movie or concert without showing a paper ticket. Mobile phones have, admittedly, become a distraction for many people, but they can also be an amazing resource. Thanks to innovative thinkers and app developers, our phones can also help us live healthier. Just peruse the app store for a minute and you’ll see that the number of mind-body, exercise, and health apps has skyrocketed. So, which apps are worth your time and attention?

Whether you want to be more centered, drop some unwanted pounds, or create healthier habits, check out the following apps and see what a bit of digital help can do for you!

Making its way onto millions of cell phones these days is Headspace, an app for becoming a more mindful human. The benefits of meditation are widely known and touted in many spiritual and psychological traditions, both new and old. Headspace makes it a little easier to carve out time for a short meditation or mindfulness practice. Created by a Buddhist monk and complete with guided meditations, sleep help, and even mood-boosting workouts, this app makes it easier to feel emotionally and mentally healthy all year long. Headspace is great for both beginners as well as advanced meditators and costs $12.99 per month or $69.99 per year. This stress-relieving app provides calm and stillness in an uncertain world.

If you own an iPhone, Apple Health is a great place to track all your wellness information in one app. By pairing it with an Apple Watch, users can easily access readings like heart rate, steps, sleep, and other health information. When you start or complete a workout, you can log it into your tracker, which helps create new and healthier habits. Other features include storing health information like menstruation times, blood sugar levels, and more. Apple Health is important in the landscape of wellness because it allows people to take a more holistic view of their health. Exercise not only impacts your weight but also your sleep; both things are seamlessly trackable in Apple’s user-friendly format.

If you’ve been living under a rock, you may not have heard of this hugely popular app. Designed to help people develop healthy lifestyle habits by forming new neural connections and gaining rewards along the way, Noom has helped countless people lose weight and feel healthier with an easy-to-use program. Weight loss is the biggest use for this app, which claims to help people shed weight and keep it off, thanks to the formation of better exercise and eating habits. Their approach, however, is different from the usual calorie-counting or carb-avoiding diets. It uses a psychological basis for helping people change the way they think about food. Not a small task in our fast food, sugar-obsessed society. Noom is perfect for anyone looking to better their relationship with food in 2022!

When it comes to fitness apps, the sky is the limit. Among the hundreds available, our top pick is All Out Studio. Many apps specialize in one form of exercise, such as running or lifting. All Out, however, combines great workouts and tips from Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Prevention, and Runner’s World to create a great library that will inspire and motivate you. Choose from bodyweight workouts (no specialized equipment is required), strength training with weights, high-intensity interval training, yoga and meditation, animal flow, dance cardio, and Barre, among others. Membership is $14.99 per month or $89.99 per year. In the winter, when it’s difficult to get to a gym, All Out Studio is an invaluable resource for wellness.

One of the best ways to maintain your health on multiple levels is to quit smoking. At Hancock Health, we treat people every day who have complications related to cigarette use. We offer smoking-cessation classes, which are a great option and resource for someone looking to quit. Sometimes, however, changing a well-ingrained habit, like smoking, takes the use of a few powerful tools. Smoke Free helps you track cravings and progress. It deters you from lighting up by showing every penny you have saved by quitting and the hours of life you’ve regained by not smoking. Now that is one exceptional wellness app!

Our phones are a great doorway to health if we know where to look. Meditation apps can help us tap into our center and see what benefits mindfulness can add to our lives. Apps to help create better habits, like Noom and Smoke Free, make lasting lifestyle changes. By choosing to track your wellness through apps like Apple Health and exercise with fitness apps like All Out Studio, you can get your physical activity requirements met even when the weather doesn’t cooperate. Check these out and see what they can do for your 2022!