Thrive App: Feel Stress Free

While I am very lucky to have pretty good mental health, I still get myself worked up and anxious about things - like everyone does. When Thrive reached out to me to review their new app 'Feel Stress Free', I jumped at the chance as I know many of my friends suffer with anxiety, depression and other mental health problems and thought maybe this could help them, but also help me manage my feelings and not to sweat the small stuff...

Thrive: Feel Stress Free is a relaxation app with many different elements that can help de-stress you if you're feeling particularly stressed out. It has a mood tracker, weekly goals to try and help improve your mood and lifestyle. It also has a 'Zen Garden', deep muscle relaxation, meditation and self-suggestion exercises to help you when you have certain feelings or worries and to help your mindfulness. I really think this app has the most gorgeous design and some ingenious features and it's really helped me during stressful times over the past month. 

Favourite Features

Instantly, I fell in love with the mood tracker. You use a sliding scale to tell the app how you're feeling and then it asks you questions to find out what you're feeling good about and maybe what lifestyle changes you could do to improve your mood. For me, for example, the app suggested I was drinking too much coffee and maybe that was why I was feeling anxious so it set me a goal to only have two cups of coffee a day. It also reminds you about all the good things that are going on in your life, like your relationship, your career, your family etc. so that when you are feeling down, you are reminded that these things are real and there.

Another feature that I am obsessed with is the 'Zen Garden' feature. This calming exercise allows for you to create your own Zen Garden to distract you when you are worried about something, or when you just need something calming to do. You can arrange rocks, plants, sea creatures (it's beach themed, so that's why!) in your own personalised Zen Garden and you have three which you can keep coming back to and tending to and you go on. I love having this as a creative outlet when I'm not feeling blogging - it's a pressure-less zone for your creativity.  I also really love the Deep Muscle Relaxation and I find this most useful when I'm about to go to sleep. I just pop my headphones in and zone out.

Did It Help?

The app is designed for people with anxiety and depression and I really think that this can work as a temporary calming measure for people when they are having particularly bad days. For me, personally, it has helped me to be a calmer person. When I can sense than I'm going to panic about something, or something in life has got me down, I just log into the app and get lost in the fantastically designed beach world doing some of the exercises. And sometimes it's nice to be reminded that you're in a good relationship, you have a strong bond with your family and you have a great group of friends - no matter what your mental state.

I'm going to keep using this app because it's been exceptionally helpful to me, especially when travelling as I do suffer from mild travel anxiety. To listen to the Deep Muscle Relaxation and create my Zen Garden on a train has been very helpful in stopping me from completely freaking out about it and for that, I am very grateful to the app. If you feel like this is an app that could benefit you, then the lovely people at Thrive have given me a code so that you can download the app for free during the month of October. The code is 'STRESSFREE0917'. I don't benefit at all from you using this code - it's just a gift from the people at Thrive.

If this app sounds like something you need in your life, then you can download it here. Remember, use the code 'STRESSFREE0917' to get it for free this month!