Ask HN: What are some mentally healthy apps to have?
Like many of us, I’m in a battle to minimize social media and related apps influence over my life. But I’m not at a point where I want to just toss my phone in the corner and forget about it either.
I’m looking for some apps that people use and get genuine value out of. Can I learn something while I’m bored on the couch? Keep up with some unbiased news while I’m using the toilet? Etc
235 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] thread"Mens sana in corpore sano" [1] as my dad used to say :)
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[0]: https://7minuteworkout.jnj.com
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_sana_in_corpore_sano
Why are you putting more apps onto the phone when you could live with the ones you have?
Body:
I haven't used Android in years but the high level concepts I'm describing probably apply equally, I've noticed a lot of cross pollination of ideas between them and us "iOS folks"[1][2]
Here are three apps you can use to improve your mental health, by reducing the chances your phone will be hacked and helping you plan your + make predictions.
1.) Notes app + emoji.
I have not used Android on a day to day basis for years, but on iOS, you can "pin" lists. Title the first line with emoji, then the second line with a description since titles are visible if someone forces you to unlock your phone.
Then add password to the notes.[3] A long one, stored in a password manager of your choice, or just write it down and put in in a safe place, like your wallet, or a physical safe. Or memorize it. Or use another technique I don't publish (because some things should be kept esoteric and offline)
Then set up a few lists like "Dailies" (stuff like morning pushups), "Groceries" (stuff you need from the store), Names (first name plus a few details about business contacts, lovers, and/or agents of foreign power).
2.) Clock app
Add a few time zones, and start checking them whenever you see an event in the news.
I currently have UTC, Zurich, London, New York, Toronto, and Tokyo.
(But I also have little mental hacks for each, like "Brussels is London plus one" so I'm not clogging the list with every single city that's on my radar.)
3.) Stock app
Add a few stocks you're interested and currencies. When you read a news article, check the time zone, then check the stocks and currencies. Try to guess if they'll be up or down. Don't record if they were -- you're training yourself to trust your gut.
Conclusion:
If you do these three things every day for a couple years, you'll start to get the same rush you get when you put a bullet in the center of a target, or successfully hack a server for the first when you confirm you were correct... but be careful -- on the rare occasions you're wrong, you'll probably need to smoke a strong indica to recover from the sad feelings you'll incur knowing you were wrong and will have to start the process over tomorrow.
Citations:
[1] I very purposefully chose an iPhone as my comms device. I don't want total control of my phone. I want a set of vetted apps to select from, protected by a strong passphrase so folks can get a warrant, spend millions or billions of dollars to get into my phone, or literally match me up with some catphishing goth girl informant who will probably go white as a sheet and panic when I just look her in the eye, tell her I'm not a serial killer, then go into the bathroom to turn off my phone as she rifles through my backpack.
[2] Ich besitze immer noch keine Schusswaffe, aber ich habe allen Spielern im Spiel gesagt, dass es kein Softplay mehr geben wird. Habt einen schönen Tag, wenn ihr könnt.
[3] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-features-in-...
Why not? it works.
It turns out that your phone is an incredible tool, but only if taken in small doses. In larger doses - it's a nightmare device, actively designed and engineered to suck as much free time from you as possible.
The answer is simple: Stop using it except for explicit reasons.
If I want to dick around with tech - I'll use my desktop/laptop.
My phone is for
- Checking messages twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening (sometimes more frequently if I'm coordinating with or meeting folks).
- Maps & GPS
- Shared internet connection if I need to use my laptop while out and about
- Unlocking my e-bike
That's it. I'm down to about 5 total apps I open (phone/camera/messages/maps/ebike) and I have never liked my phone more.
5 years ago I was on my phone all the time and miserable. It's much better to lug around a magazine or kindle, or turn on a podcast. Just don't get sucked into the time trap that "social media" is engineered to be. It's literally digital cancer.
Basically - don't open websites or social media apps at all.
I am a big fan of leaving my phone in a different room if i am coding or in the car if i am building something. Problem is i run a business now and i have to be reachable, in case someone calls.
But i dont use any apps other than maps on my phone nowadays.
>If I want to dick around with tech - I'll use my desktop/laptop.
That is exactly what i do.
Apple Watch: Fitness
A few years ago I made it my personal goal to pick up my phone only when absolutely necessary and that has done wonders for my mental health. For photos, I have a Canon G7 X and appreciate that it only has one job and it does it very well.
My Instagram feed is full of e-commerce memes, AI generated art, and hand drawn dungeon maps.
It's not exactly useful but it keeps me inspired for the next day.
https://www.headspace.com/
1: https://www.oakmeditation.com/ 2: https://www.oakmeditation.com/privacy-policy
I learned quite a bit about music theory and writing music over the last year. The iOS music ecosystem is fantastic and affordable.
I’ve been drawing in procreate on my iPad for several years but this also helped pass the hours.
Those are both pretty wholesome activities for something that you describe as “crack”.
I've been having good experiences recently with Flip for some quick fun jams.
Any suggestions of the "fantastic" kind ?
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pure-acid/id1481283602
Apps you would want on that device might include a lot of healthy apps.
For example —
It would replace many of the devices we used pre-internet. A compass. A calendar. A guitar tuner. A pedometer. A notebook. A recipe book - where you place recipes. A recording device - and a bank of guitar effects pedals.
These are all healthy apps in my opinion.
At some point in your life you get bored of doom scrolling on various apps and even browsing the web I’m now totally bored of it all. There isn’t anything new. Getting creative on the iPad using Procreate and using the phone for its camera to take reference shots and arty photos has been great. We have marvellous tools at our disposal and to use them for social media or reading rehashed blog articles masquerading as news seems like a crime to me. At any point in history people would have loved to have those tools available!
https://www.withsara.com https://www.insighttimer.com
The timer is MUCH better than the built in iOS timer. It has pleasant (less jarring) bell/gong sounds and customizable presets.
It also keeps track of your sessions which is useful as a subtle nudge to keep a routine practice.
It’s not essential but is nice, useful and free.
The more you can integrate the slower pace of nature and natural life, the better your mental health. Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by.
Still struggling with this, but my long term life goal is living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with easy access to the unnatural and constantly accelerating flow of information that is the Internet.
Perhaps the ideal way would be to have your main cabin with no real internet, and a 100 yard path to your tiny work cabin with internet. A physical friction to prevent needless interruption.
One can dream.
I don't think it's the internet, exactly. But anywhere on the internet where your attention has been commoditized.
Basically - if you aren't paying to use the app (and it's not decent open source software), get that fucking cancer out of your device.
Just the basics: messages, calls, GPS, maps, shared connection, photos/videos
those make one awesome, compelling device. Don't ruin it by letting fucking scum companies siphon all your energy and attention away for their own profit (and they are actively trying - complete with statistics and graphs, OKRs & key performance indicators... all painting a picture about how much they can fuck you by stealing all your attention and time)
I have an iPad explicitly configured this way, and it's incredibly relaxing to use it.
I like notifications, and I try to respond to them intentionally. I open apps intentionally (this was easy enough to learn) and close apps intentionally (this was hard to learn). So I am pretty good about actually going into the app to do what I intended to do in response to the notification, and then closing the app. I can reassess afterwards if I want to spend more time in the app and open it back up, but again I create an intention before opening it that has a stopping point.
Intention is the difference between enjoying some funny short videos while sitting in a waiting room, and losing 1-2 hours of your life a day to doomscrolling. And if I could have a filtered list of notifications in a todo somewhere, I can set aside time to update myself on whats new that I care about but arent super important
We don't know everything about the era that shaped our bodies, there are a few contradicting narratives:
One being that we were mainly scavengers during the time that our brains grew to this size, especially savoring the marrow of the large bones of the large animals that used to roam the earth before we finished them off and had to look for other sources of highly nutritious foodstuffs. [1]
Another (albeit questioned) is that we hunted prey by running them to exhaustion, so called persistence hunting - a far cry from "waiting for deer to pass by" [2].
Some do argue that the preagricultural societies seemed to have plenty of leisure however [3], so you might be right :-).
But the larger point is if we would be mentally more healthy if we stuck to the old ways of hunting mammoths - or if we are first and foremost adaptable ... I guess my penny is on the latter, within reason.
[1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-f...
[2] https://undark.org/2019/10/03/persistent-myth-persistence-hu...
[3] https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...
They didn't have to pay taxes!
(this is a joke)
Certainly, if me and my buddies could hunt a whole mammoth our entire tribe could afford to do nothing for a month, as meat lasts a while in cold latitudes.
Sadly, nowadays one can't work very hard for a week and ask the boss to take the rest of the month off.
I am 1000% on board with this perspective, yet find your prescriptive solution to be a tad askew.
To me, the early internet - especially the pre-broadband days - was very similar to "doing fuck all," waiting for something to come by my screen to engage my focus & attention. In fact, the keyboard-driven computing world was a very pure invocation of the hunter-gatherer mindset. I wrote an article on Medium about this back in 2017, called "Tyrannical Illiteracy." [0]
I have yet to conceive of a more fitting description of today's internet than that.
[0] https://medium.com/@AndrewUnmuted/tyrannical-illiteracy-part...
For example, in an RPG game when I find a powerful 1-time use item - I use it as soon as I can.
There are many factors to optimal decision making, and optimized results are just 1 factor. Games help me explore trade-offs with quick vs long decisions, side effects of over planning, stress and panic effects on decisions, etc.
It carries over into the rest of my life, even work, where I am better able to manage things, like diminishing returns on my efforts, in ways that are very personal to me and my natural tendencies.
No, your physical presence is optimized for being active most of the time. If you do "long days of doing fuck all", you'll lose bone density, muscle mass and probably gain weight and a mass of health issues. You'll probably experience cognitive decline.
The older you get, the more rapid these issues manifest themselves and the more important constant activity becomes.
I rarely use the app as I've normally got the latter with me if I'm going to have time to read.
Apps that I would recommend however are many of the apps that tries to gamify physical activity. I use Garmin, but I am not sure if the app works without owning the accompanying smart watches and there are plenty of alternatives, and the gamification and accountability that it offers around physical activity makes it a lot easier to get out of the door (which is always the hard part). Physical activity has long been known to have a huge positive effect on mental capacity and health so well worth spending an hour or so every day on.
Get rid of the social media apps. You don't need them. You're lying to yourself if you think that you do. Nobody is going to miss your Instagram or Facebook posts. TikTok is a stupid waste of time and likely algorithmically programmed to make you hate your country (why we let China ban our social media apps and then let them operate in our country I'll never understand) and Reddit is a cesspool of awful, uninformed opinions and if you really need to visit a special interest community there you can just visit that manually. You don't need an account and you don't have anything interesting to say so there's no reason to post.
Instead, fill your home screen with apps with positive goals. For me, this includes having Downdog, btwb, Fitness (Apple), Wikipedia, Maps, my local newspaper, and similar style apps with all red dot notifications turned off.
> But I need to sell things on Facebook marketplace so I'll have to keep my account.
No. Use eBay or Craigslist, sell it at a yardsale, or stop buying stuff you don't need. If you can't stomach that then you delete your actual Facebook account and create a new one specifically for marketplace.
> But how will I stay in touch with all of these groups and influencers that I follow who post entertaining content?
You won't. That's the point. Otherwise stop stressing about being addicted to social media and just embrace it. There's no separation of "people I like to follow" and "I feel addicted". You cannot have one without the other.
> I'm going to lose touch with friends and family.
Good. People come and go, including close friends and family members. And if the primary way you stay in touch is social media, well, you're just lying to yourself about your relationship with them. Let it go. It's unhealthy to cling to past relationships.
> Yea but I do stay in touch but I also like to see their new baby pictures
Well great, instead of seeing all of this stuff beforehand, just see them in person like you regularly do and ask them to show you pictures and then you can sit down and have a meaningful interaction.
Yes I understand that HackerNews and LinkedIn and other sites that I use are also social media. There are degrees of addictiveness. I don't believe you can only "minimize" top social media apps. They do provide value to a lot of people, but if you feel that you're being pulled away from your real life and you're literally posting asking how to win the battle over social media apps and their influence, the best thing you can do is start disengaging with the most addicting ones.
Some people can buy a bag of M&Ms and eat just one and put the bag down. Most people can't.
A middle road I’ve used is to restrict myself to the browser versions of social media. The user experience is so frustrating that I don’t want to stick around, I just check on what people are up to once or twice per week.
(Another guided meditations app is Plum Village - free, but a bit worse quality, with a bit more random order of things.)