Why your Mental Health App is not the answer to your Health and Wellbeing: 3 Tips to implement today

Do you have a mental health app?

Go to the App Store and look at the Health and Fitness charts and you will see that Mental Health apps dominate this space. Products that have had tens of millions of dollars ploughed into them sit at the top of most lists and continue to grow. This is obviously a very positive step in our society given that mental health can still be an extremely taboo subject, but I challenge the efficacy of saying these products are for improving your overall Health and Wellbeing. They are most definitely for improving one aspect of your Health and Wellbeing but they sit as a silo construct and presume we can be holistically improved by focusing on one core construct.

Health and Wellbeing is multi-dimensional and at its heart should be a holistic approach. Imagine your personal Health and Wellbeing as being a piece of music. To make great music you need an equaliser that allows you to adjust the various gains (volume controls) so that each section of the music at any given time are completely optimised for quality and performance. Mental Health Apps are, simply put, one gain. Making music with one gain leads to bad sound quality 90% of the time. It’s limited in success. It doesn’t make that gain wrong, it just needs other controls to stay in perfect balance.

Whether you define it as health, fitness, wellbeing or wellness — you have multiple controls that are always in a state of flux. Improving the right thing at the right time can have a huge impact on your overall status. So, what app should you have for your Health and Wellness? the Sleep one, the Meal Plan one, the Meditation one, the Exercise one? As Co-Founder of Health and Wellbeing start-up we realise to be truly effective you need to understand them all. However, we have some controls that have a direct impact on the majority of all aspects of Health and Wellbeing. And from here I make this suggestion: If you could make three changes to improve both your mental health and Wellness/Wellbeing today, then you should do these:

1. Exercise — this is not as obvious as it seems

Exercise does not necessarily mean falling over in a pool of sweat or having aching muscles for days on end. It's all relative to the individual. However, research is already shown that even low-intensity exercise boosts mental health, the immune system, cognitive function and emotional stability. It has also been shown that exercise improves focus when engaging in mental health based activities, so having a pre-10 minute power walk will maximise your meditation results. We have also seen that having a walk for 30 minutes, in many cases, can have more effect on your mental wellbeing than a nap or reading a book. The key here is variety.

For your own personal exercise journey, keep a diary to track which intensity tends to work best for you. I simple method is to calculate your “exercise load” and align this to how you feel. Start by multiplying your exercise in minutes by how hard it felt on a simple 5 point scale. For example, 5 out of 5 in toughness for 10 minutes equals a load of 50. Whereas a 2 out 5 for toughness for 25minutes is also a load of 50. Track how your day went in align with this load and you will start to see which “load” number gives you the biggest mental boost for the day.

2. Hydration — Our Brains are 73% Water

We turn to water to hydrate our skin, which is 64% water, more than we do to feed our brain. About a third of people don’t drink enough and another third have enough but don’t do it right. The final third would still benefit from doing a little more. Those that don’t do it right tend to “binge” water to meet a quota they have read about. So they end up being well hydrated for a very small percentage of the day. It is not dissimilar to your fruit and veg intake where binging 5 servings in one go is only beneficial to your body for a very limited time, we need to spread it out!

And for all of those that do think they do it right…a little more doesn’t do any harm (just like out 5 servings of fruit and veg again!)

3. Reflect

You know you better than anything else. Sometimes we have just lost sight of how we understand our feelings and emotions. This is a skill, it takes practice to master and it can be a skill easily lost in the noise of the modern world. How many people have a nutrition app, exercise app, mental health app and sleep app all running on their phone at the same time? Don’t get me wrong, I'm a data guy and an app guy but its crucial to find the time to upskill the APPlication of your internal reflection. This is surprisingly easy to do, similar to the aforementioned exercise diary, just ask yourself how you feel and perhaps why you feel like that. This will be difficult to answer at first but it gets much easier very quickly. Check-in with yourself, make it a habit and it will even improve how you consume your mental health app — having better internal reflection will help you select what app to use and when for maximum impact.

Final Thoughts:

Keep your apps, but the next time something tells you that you must feel great because you slept great or you meditated to perfection yet you still clearly feel rubbish, step back and look at the bigger picture. We are complex, multifaceted individuals. The Health and Wellness market is getting more and more confusing and all we want is the magic bullet. The magic bullet does not lie in a mental health app that treats you as a single-dimensional individual — use them to support your balanced lifestyle but don’t rely on them to fix everything. Finally, do the basics right by exercising, feeding your brain, asking how you feel and the rest will follow