Designed to help those stay safe while having thoughts of suicide, MY3 is free and lets you customize your own personal safety plan by noting your warning signs, listing coping strategies, and connecting you to helpful resources to reach out to when you need them most. At your fingertips is a button that puts you in direct contact (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) with a trained counselor from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline as well as a 911 alert. Additionally, you can choose three people to contact in the event you’re having thoughts of suicide.

notOK is a free app developed by a struggling teenager (and her teen brother) for teenagers. The app features a large, red button that can be activated to let close friends, family and their support network know help is needed. Users can add up to five trusted contacts as part of their support group so when they hit the digital panic button, a message along with their current GPS location is sent to their contacts. The message reads: “Hey, I’m not OK! Please call, text, or come find me.”

What’s up is an amazing free app that uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) methods to help you cope with Depression, Anxiety, Stress, and more. Use the positive and negative habit tracker to maintain your good habits, and break those that are counterproductive. We particularly love the “Get Grounded” page, which contains over 100 different questions to pinpoint what you’re feeling, and the “Thinking Patterns” page, which teaches you how to stop negative internal monologues. Try it out for yourself.

MoodKit uses the foundation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and provides users with over 200 different mood improvement activities. Developed by two clinical psychologists, MoodKit helps you learn how to change how you think, and develop self-awareness and healthy attitudes. The journal feature is a great way to practice self-care by reflecting on the day, noting any distressing thoughts, and documenting how you overcame them.

This social media-like app is recommended for people hoping to connect with others facing the same health challenges. The Mighty offers groups for those with rare diseases, addiction, and pretty much anything else, allowing them to share stories to an empathetic audience. It drives home that you’re never really alone.

Sanvello has a little bit of everything. First, users take a quiz for an anxiety, stress, and depression score. Then, they start the healing journey through meditation tools, a hope board, peer support, and blog. And if you don’t have a therapist, the app can even help match you with one.

Based on your needs, Remente acts as your life coach and provides a bunch of self help tools to achieve lifestyle improvement and habits for personal growth, mental health, and wellbeing.

7 Cups connects you to caring listeners for free emotional support. Explore self help guides and growth paths for proven tips and advice on how to feel better. Be heard by volunteer listeners and chat with others who understand in support chat rooms.

Based on the best-selling book of the same name, Twenty-Four Hours a Day offers 366 meditations from the book, making it easier for people in recovery from addiction to focus on sobriety wherever they are.

Quit That! is a completely free app that helps users beat their habits or addictions. Whether you’re looking to stop drinking alcohol, quit smoking, or stop taking drugs, it’s the perfect recovery tool to track and monitor your progress. Track as many vices as you want and find out how many minutes, hours, days, weeks, or years it’s been since you quit.

Struggling with addiction is never easy, especially these days. I Am Sober helps fill in the social gap caused by the pandemic, offering the motivation and support you need to overcome addiction. In the app, you can see exactly how long you’ve been sober, set and build healthy habits, track how much money and time you've saved, and connect with others going through the same process.

MindShift is one of the best mental health apps designed specifically for teens and young adults with anxiety. Rather than trying to avoid anxious feelings, Mind Shift stresses the importance of changing how you think about anxiety. Think of this app as the cheerleader in your pocket, encouraging you to take charge of your life, ride out intense emotions, and face challenging situations.

SAM might be perfect for you if you’re interested in self-help, but meditation isn’t your thing. Users are prompted to build their own 24-hour anxiety toolkit that allows you to track anxious thoughts and behavior over time, and learn 25 different self-help techniques. You can also use SAM’s “Social Cloud” feature to confidentially connect with other users in an online community for additional support.

The centerpiece of cognitive-behavioral therapy is changing your emotions by identifying negative and distorted thinking patterns. You can use CBT Thought Record Diary to document negative emotions, analyze flaws in your thinking, and reevaluate your thoughts. This is a great app for gradually changing your approach to anxiety-inducing situations and your thinking patterns for future situations.

Part personal journal and part mood tracker, IMoodJournal can be used to record everything from mood and symptoms, to sleep, medications, and energy cycles. By tracking these various factors, you’re able to analyze your daily feelings through summary charts that indicate where your stress levels rise and fall.

eMoods is a mood tracking app designed specifically for people with bipolar disorder. Throughout the day, users can track depressive and psychotic symptoms, elevated mood, and irritability and give an indication of the severity of their symptoms. Users can then see their mood changes on a color-coded monthly calendar and even export a monthly summary report to identify specific triggers and better understand their fluctuating mood.

Track and graph your moods, anytime, anywhere. Track as often or as little as you'd like. See how your moods change over time, and discover mood patterns and triggers.

What sets this mood tracker apart from other mental health apps is that it starts you off with three different ranks of mood, (good, okay, and bad.) It then gives you the option to go into further detail, either by specifically selecting the moods you're feeling or noting something down.

Need a happy fix? With its psychologist-approved mood-training program, the Happify app is your fast-track to a good mood. Try various engaging games, activity suggestions, gratitude prompts and more to train your brain as if it were a muscle, to overcome negative thoughts. The best part? Its free!

MoodTools aims to support people with clinical depression by aiding the path to recovery. Discover helpful videos that can improve your mood and behavior, log and analyze your thoughts using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles, develop a suicide safety plan and more with this free app.

Recovery Record is a great app for anyone recovering from an eating disorder and wanting to develop a more positive body image. Keep a record of the meals you eat and how they make you feel using the app and complete questionnaires that’ll help you track your progress over time. One user calls Recovery Record a “remarkable recovery tool”; “It helps me stick to my meal plan, provides an outlet to vent about my food concerns and helps me stay intact with my body to work with it rather than against.”

Rise Up + Recover is a unique app as it not only allows you to track your meals and how you feel when you eat them, but you can also transcribe your progress into a PDF printout. Pull up the Rise + Recover app on your mobile when you feel the urge to binge or skip a meal, and need quick coping strategies.

Unlike the other apps featured in this list, Lifesum is a broader resource for all things healthy living. The app allows you to set personal goals, from eating healthier, to building more muscle and getting in more steps each day. You can also enter your own personal data and let Lifesum generate a “Life Score” to get a personalized roadmap to better health. With reminders to drink water and eat regularly throughout the day, Lifesum is a great option for anyone trying to live healthier, but for people with eating disorders, this app can be used to help you redefine how you think about healthy body image.

nOCD was designed with the help of OCD specialists and patients to incorporate two treatments: mindfulness and Exposure Response Prevention Treatment. You can receive immediate, clinically-supported guidance when an OCD episode strikes, take weekly tests to assess the severity of your OCD, and have motivational support along the way. One user calls nOCD “a free therapist in your pocket!”

One of the most frustrating parts of living with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can be dealing with intense anxiety despite the fact you know your worries are irrational. Worry Watch aims to help users identify their trigger points for anxiety, note trends in their feelings, reflect on when the outcomes were harmless, and change their thinking patterns for the future. Think of it as your personal, password-protect, worry diary.

GG OCD aims to improve OCD symptoms by increasing the user’s awareness of negative thoughts and training the brain to push those aside to embrace a more positive outset. The app takes the users through various levels, each consisting of short games around a specific theme. From how to automatically replace negative self-talk with positive thoughts, to belief in change, building self-esteem and more, this app takes its user on a journey towards a healthier thinking pattern.

Created by the VA’s National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), PTSD Coach offers everything from a self-assessment for PTSD, to opportunities to find support, positive self-talk, and anger management. What’s great about this app is that you can customize tools based on your own individual needs and preferences, and integrate your own contacts, photos, and music.

Sometimes you just need to breathe and remind yourself you are okay. Breathe2Relax is made for just that. Created by the National Center for Telehealth and Technology, this app is a portable stress management tool that teaches users a skill called diaphragmatic breathing. Breathe2Relax works by decreasing the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ stress response, making it a great option for people suffering from PTSD.

The Headspace app makes meditation simple. Learn the skills of mindfulness and meditation by using this app for just a few minutes per day. You gain access to hundreds of meditations on everything from stress and anxiety to sleep and focus. The app also has a handy “get some headspace” reminder to encourage you to keep practicing each day.

Named by Apple as the 2017 iPhone App of the Year, Calm is quickly becoming regarded as one of the best mental health apps available. Calm provides people experiencing stress and anxiety with guided meditations, sleep stories, breathing programs, and relaxing music. This app is truly universal; whether you’ve never tried meditation before or regularly practice, you’ll find the perfect program for you.

Want to sleep better, find relaxation, be more mindful and, well, ten percent happier? This is the app for you. Ten Percent Happier has a library of 500+ guided meditations on topics ranging from anxiety and stress to parenting and sleep, as well as videos, bite-sized stories, and inspiration you can listen to on the go. New content is added weekly so you’ll never tire of having to do the same meditative practice again and again.

The motherlode of meditations, Insight Timer offers 70,000 free guided meditations (some of them by silky-voiced celebs such as Gisele Bundchen and Elizabeth Gilbert), yoga classes, and music tracks to help with sleep, anxiety, and stress. You can also have someone read you a soothing bedtime story, such as The Wind in the Willows or The Life of Buddha.

Self-care app Shine has more than just meditation and mindfulness exercises, but its library of 800-plus meditations for everything from Black mental health to personal growth is definitely the highlight. And if you’re someone who needs a little extra positivity and inspiration in your life, you’ll love the daily motivational texts.

Deep breathing is a small way to ease stress and anxiety symptoms, and a little guidance can go a long way. iBreathe’s uncluttered and simple-to-use interface is as soothing as it is helpful. Just breathing exercises, no frills. Plus, you make your own exercises by setting custom intervals. You decide how long to inhale, how long to hold, how long to exhale, and how many times you repeat it.

Beyond its meditation offerings, Aura also boasts a mood tracker, gratitude journal, and an active community of both users and meditation teachers. While it has premium offerings, plenty of reviewers say the free version is more than enough for casual use.

Eternal Sunshine offers daily mantras, meditation exercises, morning mindfulness, inspirational talks, and essential wisdom. It also offers recommended books.

ThinkUp is a multimedia, positive affirmation app. Upon first opening ThinkUp, users are prompted to choose or compose 5-10 positive affirmations. There is a library of pre-written affirmations for a wide array of life experiences (e.g. career changes, anxiety, self-confidence, collaboration, entrepreneurship, and others). ThinkUp then invites users to record themselves reading their selected affirmations. After recording at least 5 affirmations, users can click the “Listen” tab to play back their affirmations with soft background music.

Forest is an app that helps you stay focused on the important things in life. Whenever you stay focused, plant a tree. Your tree will grow while you focus on your work. Leaving the app halfway will cause your tree to die. Stay focused daily and turn hard work into a land of lush forest.

According to scientific researches, listening to relaxing music can help you focus, meditate, get better sleep, reduce your stress, and so on. It’s been proven that listening to such music improves your physiological functions and manages your stress level. So, how about having a relaxing audio app to help you concentrate, focus and be less distracted? Well, Here and Now contains many kinds of sessions and each session comes with different types of relaxing recordings from instrumental music to nature sounds. You get to easily mix and combine different recordings in every single session and even save your combination.

Fall asleep in minutes with a personalized mix of soothing sounds and music, bedtime stories voiced by award-winning narrators, and sleep meditations that will guide you gently toward your dreams. Keep your daily stress at bay with hundreds of meditations guided by experts from around the world. With practices in loads of lengths and styles, it's a breeze to find exactly what suits your needs, whether you're a beginner or advanced. In a hurry to relax? Try our animated breathing exercises for quick relief.

Guided meditation videos to feel happy, calm, and sleep better. 10-minute transformations daily. This app will help you reach your wellness goals with inspirational courses that will keep you engaged and motivated. Whatever life challenge you may be facing, you will most likely find a meditation for it in the 750+ video library. Try searching for anything and shift your mood at the click of a button.

Stressed? Balance your life and experience a relaxed meditative state to relieve your daily stresses and tensions. Health through Breath is a simple and intuitive guide to deep breathing that features a progressive course based on the principles of yoga to help you find balance and stress relief.

Experiencing sexual violence is a risk factor for mental illness. To combat its physical and mental strain, Michener recommends RAINN, a free app designed by its namesake National Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Chat with support specialists, explore self-care exercises, and learn about healing from sexual trauma.

MoodMission is like a Choose Your Own Adventure for feeling better. Specifically built for low moods and anxiety, it asks you a series of questions about how you’re feeling and presents you with a unique list of five “missions” to choose from in the moment. As a bonus, your results are more unique to you the more you use it—after you complete a mission, you rate how you feel so MoodMission can learn what does and doesn’t work for you.

This cute little A.I. chatbot will coach you through a hard time via chat by asking you what’s up and offering CBT-based tips and exercises for you to try. Whether you’re in an anxious thought spiral or just feeling like crap, Woebot will guide you step by step until you feel better.

If you’ve ever felt the need to hit a big fat panic button during an anxiety or panic attack, Rootd is for you. It provides, quite literally, that virtual panic button. Hit it, answer a few questions, and Rootd will guide you through.

If traditional mental health apps tend to bore you, SuperBetter might be able to keep your interest. It gamifies mental health skill-building and self-care, teaching you to be more resilient through a series of superhero-themed missions and challenges.

#SelfCare is set in a bedroom, where your customized avatar can spend the day lounging around and exploring their virtual space along with all the objects in it. Beyond the incredibly soothing, spa-like soundtrack, there are very simple tasks you can do—or not do—it’s up to you. Picking up dirty clothes and tossing them in the hamper or folding laundry in a virtual bedroom is incredibly satisfying. There are also tarot cards, breathing exercises, crystals, basic but meaningful word games, and even a cat to pet. It’s a safe, meditative space that provides me with a brief break from reality.

Colorfy is a free art and coloring game designed to help you kill time, relax your mind, and have fun. The coloring game comes in the form of a painting book with several designs to choose from. You will find complex and simple art such as mandalas, animals, patterns, and florals in the coloring book. Reduce everyday stress that can make people feel depressed, upset, and unproductive. Science has proven the benefits of coloring. It makes people happy, helps them overcome stress, and also brings out their creativity.