Mental Health and Wellness Apps for Teenagers

All Apps are free of charge!

MindShift

This teen-targeted app offers strategies for facing anxieties related to socializing and school, with journaling tools, positive thinking exercises, symptom trackers, and relaxation tips.

SAM: Self Help for Anxiety Management

SAM is an app designed to help people manage their anxiety. Users can record their anxiety levels and identify different triggers. The app includes 25 self-help options to help users cope with the physical and mental symptoms of anxiety. Users can create a personalized anxiety toolkit, adding in the features of the app that they find most useful for easy access. The app also has a social cloud feature that allows users to anonymously share their experiences with other SAM users.

Pacifica

Pacifica lets you rate and track mood over time, and provides guided deep breathing and muscle relaxation exercises, daily antianxiety experiments, and health goals. Users can record their own thoughts to help analyze and understand their thinking patterns, as well as discover and track possible triggers.

Breathe2Relax

This no-fuss app, developed by the National Center for Telehealth & Technology, guides you through diaphragmatic breathing (or “belly breathing”), allows you to record your own stress level, and provides informative videos and graphics about the consequences of stress.

Recovery Record

Drawing from cognitive behavioral therapy and self-monitoring methods Recovery Record is the highest-rated app for eating disorder recovery. It allows users to keep a food and feeling journal; create customizable meal plans, coping tactics, and goals; track progress through questionnaires, which is visualized on charts; link up to a treatment team and community that can offer real-time feedback and support; and schedule personalized reminders.

Relax Melodies

Relax Melodies is the leading personalized sleep aid, offering a bank of over 50 sounds and tunes that each user is allowed to mix and customize to their preference, as well as access to the Relax Melodies blog for lifestyle tips on sleeping better.

Optimism (iOS Only)

This app is primarily a way to track moods, providing space to keep daily records of symptoms, triggers, and “stay well strategies,” and then visualizes that data with graphs.

Positive Activity Jackpot (Android Only)

This one’s another from the National Center for Telehealth & Technology, and draws on a therapeutic method called Pleasant Event Scheduling (PES). The app suggests activities based on location and interests, allows users to invite friends, save’s favorite spots and activities for future use — and if you can’t choose, you get to “pull the lever” and see what the app sends you.