In the past few years, we have collectively learned how essential self-care is to help us improve overall wellness and mental health. Many individuals think about wellness differently depending on their cultural background or spiritual beliefs. However, the Global Wellness Institute determines that wellness is multidimensional; it goes far beyond just physical health.
Wellness and self-care are equally interlinked, as we can characterize self-care as the actions we take to maintain wellness and mental health. It’s essential to understand that self-care is not indulgence. The 2019 Harris Poll showed that physicians and patients agree that exercise, eating healthy, and getting good sleep are forms of self-care.
In a fast-paced world full of responsibilities and distractions, it presents a challenge to prioritize self-care. We want to help you find a way to improve your self-care no matter your circumstances. As such, we will provide information about the eight wellness and self-care dimensions to help actively practice self-care using our top mobile apps for improved self-care that correlate with each of those dimensions.
The Eight Dimensions of Self-Care and Wellness
The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as the “active pursuit of activities, choices, and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health.” As it is an active pursuit, individuals have the power to take action by adding self-care practices into their routines. We established that self-care involves actions individuals must do in their daily life to be able to establish and maintain overall health.
There are a few different models or dimensions of wellness and self-care (some have as low as six dimensions while others have up to eight or nine). Overall, the following are a combination of the wellness and self-care dimensions:
- Physical: It involves maintaining a healthy body using exercise, following nutritional eating habits, and getting enough sleep.
- Mental: It involves exercising your brain by learning a new skill or completing problem-solving exercises, such as playing Sudoku or doing crosswords.
- Emotional: It involves being self-aware of your feelings or emotions as well as the feelings of those around you.
- Spiritual: It is that sense of belief in a higher power or higher purpose, whether or not it is religious.
- Social: It involves healthy relationships with friends, family, or the community and meeting new people.
- Environmental: There is a correlation between the planet’s health and the safety of human beings. Examples include having access to clean water and air, and actively preserving the environment, such as recycling, watching power usage, or being aware of car emissions.
- Occupational: It involves creating a work/life balance and having good work relationships with employers and coworkers.
- Financial: It involves the management of income, debt, and savings.
It may seem overwhelming having to take care of so many aspects of daily life based on these dimensions, and even harder to practice and create self-care routines or habits. But self-care apps can help you create and maintain self-care practices. We live in a world where smartphones and tablets are a constant, so why not take advantage of the technology for self-care?
To help you get started, we have compiled a list of our top mobile apps for improved self-care that take into consideration each of the dimensions for self-care and wellness.
For more information about self-care, we invite you to read our post about caring for yourself and why self-care is important.
Top Mobile Apps for Improved Self-Care
We compiled the list of our top mobile apps for improved self-care based on each dimension of wellness and self-care and how these can support you on your self-care journey.
Physical + Social
JEFIT Workout is a free fitness app (with offers and in-app purchases) that provides workout plans and a gym log tracker so you can plan, track, and log your workouts from home or the gym. It has an extensive exercise library and workout plans for you to choose from beginners to advanced. The app also has some intuitive tool features, such as a rest timer, supersets, and interval timer. You can also join the monthly or quarterly challenges to stay motivated, set goals, and add friends.
WaterMinder is an app that helps you set goals for your daily water intake to help you stay hydrated. You can customize your goals such as your daily intake amount, set your daily reminders, and check out your achievements. It even tracks other types of drinks, such as juice or coconut water, which count toward hydration. Some of the app features include a clean visual of your water fill, a water reminder interface, a daily water intake calculator, other drink types, and water intake history.
Mental + Emotional + Spiritual + Social
InsightTimer is a free app that helps with sleep, anxiety, and stress. The app provides guided meditation, sleep music tracks, and talks from meditation and mindfulness experts, neuroscientists, psychologists, and professors. Some of the app features include creating a meditation habit by selecting a meditation timer to get you started and tracking your progress.
If you have trouble sleeping, the app helps create an environment conducive to sleep, including sleep music, soundscapes, and bedtime tales. You can also join groups for beginners meditation, sleep meditation, poetry, atheism, Christianity, Hinduism, and many more.
Finch: Self-care Widget Pet is a fun way to practice self-care by taking care of your pet. The app helps you by setting a daily self-care tracker, and as you complete the exercises, your pet grows, you earn rewards, and you improve your mental health. Some of the app’s features include easy daily check-ins, such as quick mood checks and ending your day with gratitude moments. Other features include mindful habits to help you reach your goals, including a habit tracker, breathing, quizzes, and motivational quotes.
Environmental + Social + Financial
Earth Hero: Climate Change app helps you take practical action in response to the climate changes affecting the planet. Some of the actions you can take are under different categories, including family and community, advocacy, food, home and work, energy, and travel and transportation.
The app also allows you to set your green goals and share actions with others, calculate and use a carbon tracker, and discover steps you can take at home to help with climate change. Many of the actions you take will also positively impact your finances by finding ways to conserve energy or installing a water-saving shower head.
Occupational + Financial
One of the challenges in self-care is finding work/life balance. Using the TimeTune app or the ATracker app allows you to record the time you spend on different projects, including work projects and personal hobbies to help you improve your daily routine. Both apps allow you to create time blocks for different activities such as work, eating, sleeping, TV/leisure activities, gym, or housework. It even has a set of templates to help you plan your ideal week or work day. By keeping track of your time for each activity, you can analyze how much time you spend on these activities to help you adjust your work and life balance.
Mint: Budget and Track Bills app helps you keep track of your finances and help you lower your monthly bills. Some of the features include tracking transactions and account balances, monitoring monthly expenses, controlling spending with a tracker, receiving bill reminders for payment, and you can connect your cash, credit cards, loans, and investments to help you meet your personal financial goals.
When to Seek Professional Help
Actionable self-care practices will help you maintain good physical, social, emotional, and mental well-being. However, there are times when seeking a little extra help may be necessary. At the Alvarado Parkway Institute, our mission is to help individuals who are struggling with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses so they can live happy and healthy lives.
If you or a loved one needs help, you can reach out to our trained call center staff who is ready to assist you at (619) 333-7050 and is available 24/7, or complete our contact form online.
