Mental Health Apps We Recommend
There are many digital mental health tools that are effective and can be customised to suit your needs. Many of them are backed by evidence-based research, and regular use can lead to real improvements in your mental wellbeing.
There are also more than ten thousand of them, and only a small fraction have published research behind them. Between us, Richard and Helena Boyd, we have spent 21 years in practice in Perth, and clients ask about apps in almost every intake now, often before they seek anything else. This is the list we give people, with what each one does and where it stops.
How We Choose These Apps
We are both certified Somatic Psychotherapists, and our work runs through Integrative Body Mind Psychotherapy, an approach built on the idea that the body is the subconscious mind. So we favour digital mental health tools that ask you to notice something in the body rather than only argue with your head.
Beyond that, we look for three things. The psychological approach has to be named, usually cognitive behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy or mindfulness. There has to be research behind it, ideally reviewed by psychologists rather than marketed by a team. And it has to be usable on a bad day, when a fourteen step onboarding is the end of the idea.
Free Australian Programs Worth Knowing About
Australia has quietly built some of the best free digital mental health support in the world, and almost nobody we meet knows it exists. These programs are funded, evidence based and cost nothing.
Smiling Mind is a not for profit app developed by psychologists and educators, and it includes programs for adults, children and classroom education, with hundreds of guided meditations. myCompass from the Black Dog Institute is a free self guided program for mild to moderate depression, anxiety and stress. This Way Up offers structured online CBT courses, and Sleep Ninja was developed for young people with sleep problems. Head to Health is the government portal indexing these resources in one place.
Apps For Anxiety And Stress
Anxiety responds well to apps because the skills are small, repeatable and best practised in the moment rather than in a session a week away. Look for tools teaching users to recognise negative thoughts and spiralling worry as they arrive, rather than only explaining the theory.
Headspace and Calm both handle the basics well, with short guided sessions you can run in a car park before a meeting. Happify takes a more game like approach using positive psychology research, which suits people who find meditation apps grating. For acute stress the simplest option usually wins, a guided breathing exercise you can start in ten seconds.
Apps For Low Mood And Depression
Depression makes almost everything feel impossible, including opening an app, so the ones that help ask least of you. MoodKit is built on cognitive behavioural therapy and gives you concrete activities rather than reflection prompts. Moodfit is broader, with a range of tools covering thought records, gratitude and exercise tracking.
Research suggests apps can reduce depressive symptoms in mild cases and help you maintain motivation for behaviour change, at low cost or none. They are not a treatment for moderate or severe depression, and we would not want you relying on one if you are at risk.
Apps For Sleep
Sleep quality is the first thing to go and the last thing people mention, and poor sleep makes every other symptom worse. BetterSleep and Sleep Cycle differ, one using soundscapes and wind down routines, the other tracking and a smarter alarm.
For teenagers, Sleep Ninja is the standout because it was developed based on CBT for insomnia and built for that age group. It is one of the better examples of technology helping young people rather than keeping them awake. Half of all mental illnesses begin by age fourteen, and broken rest is often the earliest signal something is shifting.
Apps For Mood Tracking
Mood tracking sounds trivial and is one of the most useful things you can do between sessions. Daylio takes seconds a day and builds a picture over weeks. MindDoc is more clinical, with a structured assessment that flags patterns worth discussing.
What makes this valuable is not the graph. It is walking into a session able to say the drop started on the Tuesday, and here is what happened that weekend. That gives both of us a better understanding of the pattern and turns a vague sense of struggle into something we can work with.
Apps For Mindfulness And Meditation
Mindfulness is the area with the strongest research, including for sleep, stress and chronic pain. Insight Timer has an enormous free library, which is both its strength and its difficulty, because too much choice on a hard day means no choice. Meditopia is more guided and better for beginners.
Our advice is to pick one teacher’s voice and stay with it across multiple sessions rather than sampling. Mental fitness works like physical fitness, in that the benefits come from repetition rather than variety.
How To Use An App Well
Two tips that make the difference. Use one app at a time, because six produce notifications rather than change. And attach it to a specific moment in daily life, after you park the car or before you brush your teeth, since habits need a trigger to create themselves rather than good intentions.
Check the safety and privacy settings before you log anything sensitive. And treat it as a set of tools rather than a service. An app cannot assess risk, notice what you are avoiding or sit with you while something difficult surfaces.
What This Looks Like In Practice
These are composite examples drawn from our clinical work, with identifying details changed.
A FIFO worker on a two and one roster could not attend weekly sessions and had patchy reception on site. We set him up with a mood tracker and two breathing exercises that worked offline. Four weeks of logs showed his worst days clustered around the last three shifts of each swing, which changed what we worked on.
A woman in her forties with high functioning anxiety had tried and abandoned four apps. The problem was not the apps, it was that she was using them as another performance to get right. We asked her to use one, badly, three times a week. She still uses it.
A seventeen year old referred by his parents would not talk in the room but would answer questions in an app. Sleep Ninja and a mood tracker gave us a way in, and by week six he was talking. For young people these tools are often the bridge rather than the destination.
Frequently Asked Questions
The questions clients ask us most often about apps, and our honest answers.
