In this digital age, it’s easy to feel swept up by the momentum of ever-changing technology and lose our sense of mental balance in the process. It makes sense that our hunter-gatherer brains have a hard time adjusting to this daily whirlwind of information—not to mention the hardships life tends to throw our way. While it may seem antithetical, why not use the very thing that makes us feel insane at times to get a hold on our anxiety?
Mental health apps have come a long way since the inception of laptops, smart phones, and tablets, which means you can have some of the best stress-relieving tools in the world right at your fingertips. Here are the best apps you can download and use right now to improve your mental health.
Stress and Anxiety: Headspace
It’s the meditation app to end all meditation apps. Thanks to directed meditation sessions that ease you through increasing amounts of time, it’s the perfect tool for beginners looking to learn how to meditate. Even Emma Watson has gotten in on the meditation game, calling the app “kind of genius.” While the first course is free and a great jumpstart into a solid meditation practice, you’ll have to pay a small subscriber fee if you want to unlock the rest of Headspace’s tools and courses.
Depression: Optimism
Nothing squashes depressive episodes like a hearty dose of optimism. While an app shouldn’t be anyone’s only method of treatment for serious depression, Optimism offers a starting point for those who aren’t quite sure if they’re depressed or not. With tools to help you track health and wellness strategies, triggers, and early warning signs of depression, the app can help users trying to help themselves or can be used in conjunction with standard therapy. As a bonus, it’s 100 percent free to use.
Panic Disorders: Panic Relief
Designed by Danish psychiatrist and cognitive therapy specialist Marianne B. Geoffroy, Panic Relief aims to help panic attack sufferers with visually-aided breathing exercises and calming techniques. The light version of the app is free to try, and if you find that it helps relieve anxiety, you can download the expanded version of the app.
General Stress: MoodKit
In addition to helping you track your natural mood fluctuations, this app has an array of tools to help you shift your mood into a more positive direction. With over 200 mood improvement activities, custom journal templates, and a thought checker to help you reduce negative thought patterns, MoodKit is the mental health app for the easily bored. At a price of $6.99, you’ll have numerous strategies to help improve your mood.
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: PE Coach
Designed specifically for veterans grappling with PTSD, the PE Coach app aims to supplement traditional psychotherapy led by a Prolonged-Exposure-trained therapist. While PE Coach is not a self-help tool like many of these other mental health apps, it does provide PTSD sufferers the tools they need to accelerate their progress outside of therapy sessions. It’s free to use as well, so there’s no harm in trying it out.
Adolescent Anxiety Disorders: MindShift
It seems as if every year teenagers have more homework, more pressure to succeed, and, as a result, more to worry about. What MindShift does is help relieve those compounding worries by offering tools to combat performance anxiety, test anxiety, and perfectionism. Backed by research from BC Children’s Hospital, parents don’t have to worry about their teenage sons and daughters getting misinformation. And because it’s free, all teens can have access to MindShift’s stress-relieving benefits.
Obsessive-compulsive Disorder: Live OCD Free
As the most expensive app of the bunch at $29.99, the Live OCD Free app promises to reduce OCD symptoms by 34 percent in eight weeks using Exposure Response Prevention Therapy techniques designed by Dr. Michael Jenike, a board member of the International OCD Foundation. The app provides exercises, video tutorials, games, goals, and rewards to help decrease symptoms. There’s even a specialized version designed for children. You can check it out by heading to the app store.
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
Gif of Robin Williams via 
A woman conducts a online color testCanva
A selection of color swatchesCanva
A young boy takes a color examCanva 
Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.