How Anti-Anxiety Apps can Improve Mental Health?

Mobile apps are everywhere. Apple’s app store has 47,911 healthcare apps available. The total number of healthcare apps is 165,000 in the year 2018. These reports are generated by Statista and healthcare IT news.

Such stats show the growing number of health awareness and mobile app demand. The market of healthcare mobile app development has seen a great hike in recent years. With a growing population, pollution, and competition, the number of diseases is also increasing. Here comes the need of healthcare apps.

Benefits of healthcare-related mobile apps:

• Convenience
• Better clinical decision making
• Improved accuracy
• Increased efficiency
• Real-time communication
• Fast treatment
• Precaution before the need of a cure
• Transparency
• Enhanced productivity

In this article, we are going to discuss the benefits of anxiety apps. Developers have developed some anti-anxiety apps for patients to relax and relive.

Read More: Technology Trends in HealthCare App Advancements

First, let’s understand the term anxiety.

Anxiety is not a disease in itself. It is a term for different disorders causing nervousness fear and worrying. Anxiety can affect how we feel and behave. It can also cause physical symptoms.

Symptoms of anxiety:

• Panic
• Fear
• Uneasiness
• Sleep problem
• Lack of calmness
• Cold and sweaty hands or feet
• Breath shortness
• Heart palpitation
• Nausea
• Dry mouth

Causes of anxiety:

• Brain chemistry
• Genetics
• Environmental changes
• Stress
• Relationships
• Job
• Finance
• Medicine side effects

Types of anxiety

• Panic attacks- Patient gets panic about anything. The intensity of apprehension increases after some minutes. The patient might take a few hours to calm down.
• Phobia- It is nothing but fear about an object or a situation. Some have a phobia of height or water. Such people avoid going on heights and in water.
• Social anxiety disorder- These people are constantly worried about negative judgment from people. It includes fear of public embarrassment and stage fear.
• Post-traumatic stress disorder- The patients of PTSD feel anxiety due to previous trauma such as kidnapping or accident.

Related Article: Healthcare Apps Impact on Patients and Healthcare Industry

Let us see how anti-anxiety apps can be helpful:

Cognitive behavioral therapy apps:

Cognitive behavioral therapy apps are very helpful. These anti-anxiety apps help you change your thought process. From all negative thoughts to realistic and more practical thoughts. These apps help increase positivity in the thought process.

It ultimately offers behavior change. Some famous CBT apps are Pacifica and Youper. CBT apps allow users to face their fear. These apps are for those who have a lot of negative thoughts and have unrealistic beliefs.

Meditation apps:

These are the most common forms of mental health apps. The market has various meditation apps. These apps are for people who want to improve focus and improve concentration. Some of the most famous meditation apps are Headspace and calm.com.

These apps teach you mindfulness through meditation. These apps have the audio form of content in decent voice. It offers guided meditation, music and Sleep Stories.

Breathing technique manuals:

Mental care professionals offer breathing relaxation technique to the patients in the start of the treatment. There are chances of patients forgetting about what the therapist told them. As patients are in stress, there are fewer chances for them concentrate in the first meet with the therapist. That is why breathing technique manual apps are developed.

These apps instruct an automatic breathing manual that shows the count on which the patient should take slow deep breaths. People with anxiety might feel suffocation while breathing which is actually not happening.

Hence, such apps usually display some sort of relaxing animation that indicates the breathing is going normal and there is no disturbance. The person can quickly calm down after using these apps.

Interactive activities:

These apps can also be called distraction apps. Patients who suffer anxiety due to disturbing thoughts usually search for a distraction. Concentrating on work or talking to someone or playing games can help these patients distract from anxiety-inducing thoughts completely.

These interactive activities capture a person’s attention and change the direction of their thoughts. These apps contain engaging activities like puzzles and games. These games are interactive and engaging.

It can be a quiz or puzzle or virtual beings or word games, etc. The therapist can also edit the games or questions from puzzles as per the patient’s condition.

Heath analysis:

These apps are used to analyze the health of a patient. The reason behind anxiety can be physical health issues too. Patients with abnormal blood pressure or dehydration can feel uneasy and invite anxiety. To protect such cases, healthcare apps are used which detect physical health issues and offer a solution.

Medication apps:

These apps offer medication plans. The therapist explains the medication to patients but there are chances of patients forgetting it. As the patients are disturbed, it is difficult for them to focus on medication plan.

The therapist simply feeds the data in the app and share the medication plan with the patient. These apps also offer a reminder for pill intake and pill refill. The apps guide about the number of pills and timings.

Tracker apps:

These anti-anxiety apps track the patient’s mood. Those who are undergoing treatment can use these apps. Tracker apps display what moods you had in the complete day. Patients can analyze how many times the mood changes and what are the reasons behind it.

Conclusion:

Mental health is a sensitive topic and healthcare app development companies are offering the best solutions to all mental health-related issues. The medical app developers are developing some amazing anti-anxiety apps which can actually reduce the anxiety problems and help patients fight with anxiety disorder.

Hemendra Singh

My name is Hemendra Singh. I am Managing Director and co-founder of PuzzleInnovationz, a Mobile App Development Company. I am having a keen interest in the latest trends and technologies that are emerging in different domains. Being an entrepreneur in the field of IT sector, it becomes my responsibility to aid my audience with the knowledge of latest trends in the market.