Helpful Apps: Morning Pages, Elephant Journal, Fabulous, Bloom, Balance
When I first moved back in with my mom and was trying to figure out how the heck I had gotten there and what I wanted my next steps to be, I realized I had a lot of mental stuff to unpack. There were all these feelings of frustration and disappointment, and even some depression (both menopausal and situational). I sort of instinctually knew that I was being sent back to the place where a bunch of my childhood emotional issues had been created in order to finally deal with them and not simply ignore them. I knew I needed to open up the little mental black box where I kept all of my deep dark shadows locked up and take the time to work through all of them. My mantra up until then had been, “out of sight, out of mind!” Or was it, “out of mind, out of sight?”
Regardless, I knew I needed help, but it took me a while to admit this. I was stuck on the first stage of change for years. YEARS! Once I moved back home, somewhere in the back of my head, I knew I needed to stop ignoring everything, or I’d continue down this tricky path to self destruction. Or at least that’s how it felt at the time. But even though I knew I needed to deal with it all, I still was a bit hesitant to actually find someone to talk to, like a professional. I still had that little voice in my head insisting that it really wasn’t that bad, that I was making a bigger deal out of something than it needed to be, and mixed in there somewhere was the idea of not airing the family’s dirty laundry.
Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m not suggesting that a digital app can take the place of a trained professional, but in light of where I was mentally and emotionally, I went searching and found some online resources that did help tremendously to take me through the initial steps of seeing things as they truly were and finding my way back to myself. I thought I’d share some of them and how they helped, what I liked/didn’t like, etc.
The first thing I did, being the avid reader that I am, was read The Artists Way. And from that I started journaling Morning Pages. These were so helpful in quieting all those swirling thoughts in my head. When I first got to my mom’s, my thoughts would swirl so fast and furious that I wouldn’t be able to tune them out. Like they’d consume and override any other thing I was trying to think about or work on, I’d spend my work days just arguing with all those negative voices in my head. It was nuts! But taking the time each morning to write (and I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t being consistent at first) bit by bit they helped me pinpoint whose voice was the negative one (interesting tidbit: it wasn’t mine), and gave me a space to write down the arguments that I’d been mentally having with myself – with the negative voices, and sort of use the paper as my outlet. And eventually the negative voices quieted down. It gave me some much needed breathing room. And now, I consider my morning pages just journaling, rather than actual morning pages. But the basic concept is still there: get all my mental swirlies down on paper, and allow myself some peace to get on with my day.
The next resource that I found invaluable was a website/ezine, The Elephant Journal. It’s an online community based on mindful living. There are articles about relationships, fitness, emotional issues, family, adventure, really anything that might have to do with a mindful life. The authors are both professionals and laypeople. And the depth of information is so vast. Anyway, I found a bunch of articles that helped me validate some things in my childhood. Those dark shadows I mentioned above? Yeah, those. There were words that explained how things were in my family, and others’ experiences that said I wasn’t the only one who had experienced a childhood like this, and yes, my anger and hurt about it all was totally justified. There were articles that also helped explain to me why certain things happen and how it might have been different but more so, that it’s important to make changes now, and how to do that. Overall, I found this to be a very helpful space to start questioning where my dark shadows came from and what I could do about them now.
Once I was able to quiet the voices in my head, and then be able to even want to start to look at some of those shadows from my childhood and why I had all those negative swirlies in the first place, I then needed to find a way to start feeling better and moving forward with my life. The following three apps allowed me to do just that.
Fabulous – This is an app on your phone that helps you with forming new habits. I realized that I had developed such self-defeating habits while I was at my lowest, and I needed to kick-start myself. I knew what habits I wanted to create, and what would help get me back on the track I want to be on. But I just didn’t quite have the “want-to” all on my own to actually get myself going. This app helped tremendously. There are several ways to use the app. The one I started with was the premade “journey” where it takes you through some very simple habits: drinking water when you wake up, eating breakfast. First it helps you create a morning routine and then moves into habits for other parts of the day. You can also create your own routine for the morning, afternoon, evening. But basically, what this app does is hold you accountable. It will send you reminders/notifications. There are “Circles,” groups of other Fabulous users that you can connect with based on a shared focus: mental fitness, meditation, self-discipline, being more productive. There is also a more individualized “coaching” section with different challenges to help you change your behavior, and different “journeys” in addition to the main one that helps you create new general habits. I haven’t been using this as much lately, but it was a huge help with getting myself started on my betterment journey!
Bloom – This phone app is based on cognitive based therapy, however I do want to reiterate that it does not take the place of an actual in-the-flesh therapist. This helped me a lot with my moods, and talking myself out of those negative emotions and thought patterns. It helped me start to see things in a different light, especially when my triggers would arrive. I think I was using the app in a very basic way, and there’s so much more it’s capable of, plus I think they may have added things since I started using it that I haven’t tried out yet. But basically, it starts out with a daily check-in to kind of get a temperature reading on your mood at that moment, and from there it will suggest a few 10-15 minute pre-recorded talks about a related topic that might help how you’re feeling. There are journaling prompts, and it brings some things into focus that perhaps you hadn’t thought of like that yet. And it sort of gives me a reality check, but in a feel-good, mindful kind of way. I never feel like I am being spoken to in a judgy kind of way, and I really find it helpful to get me thinking about issues and triggers that are coming up – like the whys and things that might be bringing them up, how to deal with them. This app was really helpful for quite a while there at the beginning of my journey, though I’m not using it quite as often as I was.
Balance – This is another phone app, and I do believe that they offer the first year for free. I am still using it and continue to find it infinitely helpful. This is a meditation app similar to Calm, and maybe Headspace (though I’m not as familiar with this one). What I like about this app, is that it feels almost like mini lessons in how to meditate and about different types of meditation. It starts out with foundational kinds of things: different styles of mediating from breathing techniques to visualization, body scanning, spotlight focusing. And then it takes you through variations of each. I really liked this process because I didn’t know much about meditating except that it involved sitting quietly, but otherwise I was sort of in the dark about different things to focus on depending on what you hoped to accomplish during a meditation session. I actually like this one better than Calm. I find Calm is good if you need to quiet yourself enough to sleep. Like if you need a kind of sound machine to sleep, or if focusing on someone’s voice helps you calm yourself and quiet the voices in your head enough to sleep, but I never really found it helpful in how/why/what you can accomplish with actual meditating. So, if you want to learn more about meditating, and learn better by doing than simply reading, this might be the app for you.
To sum up, everyone has their own ways of healing. And it’s great that there are so many options because just as there are different learning styles, there are many different healing styles too. All of the above methods are what helped me get my healing journey started. It took the majority of my COVID time at home to work through a bunch of issues, and I’m still working through some of them. But I’m in a much better mental space than I was, and I owe part of that to everything listed above. I want to encourage you to give some or all of them a try. Let me know how it went, and what you think.
Let me know how they’ve helped you create A Potted Oasis of your own!
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