In a world that seems to be filled with stressful news, the only thing you can control is your reaction to what’s happening around you. Here are 5 apps to help you calmly navigate your way through the hustle and bustle that every day brings.
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Meditation and mindfulness
Rated as one of the best meditation and mindfulness apps on the market, Headspace will bring calm into your busy life with hundreds of meditations of varying lengths for you to choose from in its comprehensive library. Perfect for beginners, the app has convenient features like being able to set reminders, track your progress, and download sessions to experience offline. Perks also include sleep casts to induce restful sleep, calming music playlists and child-friendly content. Other great choices are Calm, which aims to lower anxiety and boost tranquillity, and Waking Up by Sam Harris, which offers guided meditation and mindfulness techniques for a calmer mindset.
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Manage family tasks
Has the trash been put out, and have the kids’ toys been picked up? It’s many a working mom’s endless and stressful battle to keep track of who has (or hasn’t!) done their chores. OurHome offers a simple way to coordinate chores and turn doing them into a game. The app allows family members to create to-do lists and assign tasks to each other, such as wiping counters or setting the table, with a note box allowing comments to be added. Adults can award points to tasks, with kids able to exchange those points for rewards such as pizza or an extra hour of play. Suddenly washing the dishes becomes meaningful, with kids incentivised to help keep the family home humming along happily.
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Create more time for you
We all know how lovely it feels to walk into a sparkling clean house, but if your home is looking messy because you don’t have the time or energy to maintain it, it could leave you feeling more frustrated than calm. Take the burden of tackling household chores off your shoulders by hiring in help through the new SweepSouth home-cleaning services app.
Quick and easy to use, this app allows you to hire a trustworthy, reliable, and professional domestic worker to come in for a few hours to clean your home, allowing you to take a break and relax, spending time doing the things you love. And, says SweepSouth Country Manager Awazi Angbalaga, by making a booking through the app, you directly create work opportunities at a time when many domestic workers are struggling to find employment.
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Keep your focus in a busy environment
Having worked from home for so long, the distractions of a busy office space can feel stressful once you return back to work. To help you focus, A Soft Murmur offers a simple yet effective solution, with various ambient noises to drown out distractions and help you focus. Choose from a selection of sounds found in nature, such as the soft patter of rain or the easy sweep of the wind, each softly soothing, and overlay them for a hypnotically comforting effect.
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Keep kids entertained
For those moments when you need to keep the kids entertained for a little while, YouTube Kids comes to the rescue. This easy-to-use app allows you to control what content your children view. Choose between an option to approve all content yourself or enter your child’s age group and let the app do the job of curating suitable content. You can also set a timer to limit viewing time, block certain content, turn off search options, and change search history settings.
It’s easy to get so swept along by all the things we need to do in a day that we forget about ourselves and our health. But remember that tomorrow will be just as full of demands and stress as today is. Use every bit of help available to you so that, now and then, you can stop and slow things down.
Adedapo Adesanya