Mental Health Apps: FearTools
Anxiety can interfere with our daily life and happiness. Especially now, over a year into the pandemic, many are struggling to manage their anxiety. One free app that can help you cope with your anxiety and push back against the anxiety-provoking thoughts is FearTools.
The app has various tools that can be used. There are guided mindfulness meditations and soothing sounds that can aid in grounding yourself to reduce anxiety. There are also various Ted Talks available to provide a different perspective.
A thought diary is available that allows you to select the emotions, level of anxiety, and situation in which the anxiety occurred. It also provides you with a space to document your unhelpful thoughts and recognize which cognitive distortions (i.e., inaccurate thoughts that can heavily influence our emotions) are occurring when you have the unhelpful thought. The app then guides you to challenge and provide an alternative thought as a way to reframe your cognitive distortion. The reframing of thoughts can be particularly challenging in the early stages of learning this new skill and may require an objective third party (i.e., therapist) to assist with identifying alternative thoughts.
For those with specific fears, there is a section dedicated to exposure, where you can create a fear hierarchy about specific things or circumstances you fear and then rank a list of activities from most fearful to least fearful; this provides you with an opportunity to slowly expose yourself to the feared stimuli and desensitize your mind and body to that stimuli. An example is provided in the app to help guide you or you and your therapist can work together to create this list and work through the exposure process in your therapeutic work.
Disclaimer: This app is not meant to be a replacement for therapeutic services or medication. It will likely be best used in conjunction with services provided by mental health professionals, particularly with severe or chronic anxiety.
Written by Justina Yohannan, PhD