three mental health apps i recommend

February 16, 2021 Aspen Murray

Hi folks! Today I’d like to talk about mental health, which something I have spent more time thinking about this year than ever before in my life.

It may or may not be a surprise for you to learn this, but COVID-19 has negatively impacted many Canadians’ mental health. As a global community, we’re facing unprecedented challenges that will require all the brainpower, emotional labour, and sustainability we can muster to solve. We must have access to the mental healthcare that we need in order not only to survive, but also to thrive. I’d like to start on a micro level today by talking about something that’s helped me — taking advantage of my phone, rather than allowing it to work against me quite so much.

As someone who saw my Weekly Screen Time Report go up by much more than I’m proud of, a couple of months ago I decided to try and use my phone more positively. I figured there had to be lots of smart people working on lots of cool mental health-related apps, and after some research, I wasn’t disappointed! Here are my favourite mental health apps, coupled with brief rundowns on what they’re helpful for.

Headspace

Cost

- Normal subscription: $6/month or $70/year
- Student subscription: $10/year (I believe this may only work in the US! Apologies!)
- Family subscription: 6 accounts for $100/year (this is what I use with a group of friends!)

Source This image gives an overview of what the app’s various features actually look like. — *Source*
This image gives an overview of what the app’s various features actually look like.

Headspace is one of the most popular meditation and sleep apps out there, and for good reason. I’ve been using it for about a year and a half and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. There is truly something for everyone, even if you’ve never tried meditation before!

You’ll find programs ranging anywhere from a minute to basically an infinite amount of time, and you can search/filter based on whatever you need. There are also courses, an exercise tab called “move”, and then my personal favourite — the sleep tab. Headspace offers guided sleep meditations, calming music, soundscapes, and something called “sleepcasts”, which is basically a 45-minute story with calming sounds behind it.

Moreover, if you’d like to get a better sense of what Headspace — or even meditation in general — entail, you should consider checking out Netflix’s Headspace Guide to Meditation! This 8-part series guides viewers through the many benefits of incorporating a meditation practice into their daily routines, whilst also providing them with opportunities to try it out themselves. This show is definitely on my watchlist.

Jour

Cost

- Free version, with limited personalized features
- Paid version: $60/year, with a 7-day free trial

Jour is a mindfulness and mental health journal that uses tech to help you with your personal mental health needs. I have been using this app for about half a year, and I am such a huge fan of everything about it. It uses the freemium model — which essentially means there is both a free and a paid version, with the latter having more enhanced features than the former. While I recently upgraded to the paid subscription, I believe there is a lot of value in using whichever version you can afford.

This beautifully-designed app has a whole host of features, including guided journals and breathing, ‘stories’ (ie. short blog-style posts on various topics), insights, and a record of all your entries. Personally, I believe the most powerful aspect of the app comes in the form of its AI-powered journal and its insights tab. First of all, the daily journal works by asking you a series of questions about your mood and what you believe it’s being affected by. Based upon your answers, it creates a custom open-ended questionnaire that you can fill out. After you complete it (these normally take 5-10 minutes, depending on how much detail you use), the paid version of the app provides you with a “breakthrough”: bite-sized advice based on what you wrote in your journal.

After you complete enough daily journals, the insights tab will begin to populate — providing you with information about the trends of your daily, weekly, and monthly moods and thoughts. If you can foresee how this would continue over time, coupled with the everlasting record of all your entries, you can imagine how powerful this might become in managing your mental health. I really can’t recommend this app enough.

Habit

Cost

- Free version, with limited features
- Premium version: $40/year

Let’s end off with a simple, but immensely powerful habit tracker that will propel you forward in meeting your goals! Habit is a colourful, easy-to-use habit tracker that I’ve had for about half a year. The reason I like this habit tracker more than any others is that the free version (which I personally use) allows you to make a good number of habits. I also like the simplicity of its interface; there’s one screen for everything, and it looks good.

There are a couple benefits of moving to the premium version — you can use dark mode, you can track unlimited habits, you can create more detailed smartphone notifications, and you can add a Habit-based widget to your homescreen. I’m personally happy with the free version for now given the simple reasons I use this app; however, I can totally see why you’d upgrade.

I started using a habit tracker not because I wanted to whip myself into shape, meet fitness goals, or do something crazy. Instead, I downloaded this app because I just wanted to take better care of myself. Earlier this year, I was really struggling with accomplishing what were, to me, the most basic things. Something I know about myself is that I gain happiness from a sense of accomplishment, regardless of the scale on which those accomplishments actually are. So, I set myself up with a digital checklist which would help me access that.

Some of the things I started keeping track of every day include: taking my vitamins, eating 3 meals (or an equivalent) per day, getting outside, meditating, journaling (both using the two apps above!), and drinking enough water. For me, just having a very straightforward place to go check those things off a list, and see a bar fill a little more, was enough to keep me motivated. This app has definitely positively contributed to my life, and I’m sure it will yours, too.

Conclusion

I simply want to end off by saying that of course these apps are no substitute to mental healthcare; however, they have certainly been of great assistance to me. I wholeheartedly believe in the missions and power of all of the apps I’ve recommended above — a level of such that can come only from using them daily over the course of months.

Are there any apps — or other online tools or resources — that I missed and should check out? Let me know in the comments! I look forward to hearing your feedback and commentary if you decide to try any of them.

With love and sustainability,
ethigirl :)

“sustainability guilt” and re-centering joy: interview with juliette escande, sustainable food aficionado

November 5, 2020 Aspen Murray

Aspen: So, tell me about your history with food and sustainability.

Juliette: I became vegetarian for weird reasons. I started living by myself from a young age and I was worried about how I’d ensure I stayed healthy. So I decided to make a change in my diet. I knew that if I focused on that with a goal in mind I could stay motivated, learn new recipes, and eat less takeout.

Later on, when I came to McGill, I initially wanted to focus my degree just on business. But when I found out about the Fair Trade Corner (a volunteer-run, by-donation coffee stand on campus) I got excited about food and sustainability. That’s what pushed me to change my degree to Managing for Sustainability and make it more than just my daily life. I loved my classes; for one of them we even came up with a venture idea to reduce food waste. I then found a job at Lufa Farms as Community Coordinator, through which I educated folks about sustainable foods and their importance.

Aspen: I relate to what you said about making vegetarianism a project. I learned so much about cooking and creativity, plus ate out way less, during my time as a vegetarian. Could you tell me more about what specifically sustainable food means to you?

Juliette: Working at Lufa made me realize that the most important thing is eating locally -- it’s not only good for the environment, but also accessible and beneficial to the economy. It checks all the boxes. Local usually means less packaging and less food miles. In order to buy with as little packaging as possible, I go to the farmers’ market, which is super cheap and you can bring your own bags. To me, that’s the most sustainable you can be.

Aspen: I agree. For me, when I started out, I thought eating zero meat was peak sustainability, but I later realized it wasn’t for many people for many reasons, including myself. Also, meat isn’t inherently bad for the environment, it’s just how we produce it.

Juliette: I was once told that sustainability isn’t about vegetarianism, it’s about mindfulness. The moment you become conscious of your choices, you start making a difference. The idea of just one day cutting out all meat is so discouraging and overwhelming. So if I eat meat, am I mindful of where it came from? Being mindful also means not just replacing your meat with vegetarian substitutes, which aren’t necessarily great for the environment either!

Aspen: I agree and I like that. Being mindful is super important. When people feel like if they’re not doing it perfectly it’s not worth it at all, that’s discouraging and gatekeeping. In reality, eating meat once a week is not much worse than not eating it at all. It’s important to shift into that mindset.

With that said, how do you balance taking care of both yourself and the planet?

Juliette: I find that sometimes, even if you’re not doing something by the “textbook definition” of sustainability, there’s always another way to adjust. It’s not about specific rules that need to be followed; we don’t need to be so strict on ourselves. Putting all this pressure on yourself is not worth it. For me, it’s more about asking myself “what’s the best thing I can do to reduce this waste”. It’s a matter of adjusting to the situation and not telling yourself there’s a right-and-wrong way. The other week, I ordered from GoodFood because I got a great promotion, and when it arrived the packaging made me feel sick. But at the same time, if I’m broke, I shouldn’t feel guilty of taking advantage of an offer to get $80 off my groceries. However, feeling guilty also means something -- I understand the consequences of my actions. I can weigh the decisions and adapt accordingly.

Aspen: Completely agree. I wrote a recent article about how HelloFresh helped me. Although I feel awful about the packaging and not cooking from scratch or local, I’ve been eating healthy meals and I’ve been more satisfied with myself.

Juliette: And you actually end up wasting less food!

Aspen: Yes, exactly! And I feel like we don’t talk enough about the mental health impact of all this sustainability guilt. If you’re feeling guilty about how your individual decisions are destroying the environment all the time, that’s really unhealthy. Ensuring all our purchases are sustainable is an unfair expectation. It’s important to balance what sorts of pressures we’re putting on ourselves, and whether they’re actually productive.

What’s a main tip you’d give to someone looking to make their diet more sustainable?

Juliette: Go to the farmers’ market! It’s hard to stay connected to our food. For me, sometimes food is just like brushing my teeth - something I need to do today. It can be hard to find excitement about cooking, and on top of that I also need to be sustainable? There’s no joy left. Finding pleasure in food is what makes it so much fun. With my roommate, we go every Saturday to Jean Talon and make it a fun activity. Food is at the basis of changing everything, and the moment you eat sustainably, it’s going to taste and feel better. It’s finding a way to make sustainability fun; in the long run it will make you happier.

Aspen: Wow. For me too. Food and cooking changed my life. Discovering that as a hobby, something to look forward to and build a routine around. Finding pleasure in my food, sustainability, doing right by the planet, feeling connected to food and purchases in general is a radical act. Our current systems have divided us from who makes our products. Reclaiming those connections is a beautiful thing.

Juliette: It goes with the rules we talked about. If you put rules on your eating, you make it less fun. If you actually start enjoying what you eat, you naturally become more mindful of it. They go hand-in-hand.

Aspen: yes - just trying to find ways to take the “chore” aspect out of it and make it more enjoyable.

OK, last question: what are your favourite sustainable restaurants and stores?

Juliette: Here’s a list:

How I Regained My Passion: Cooking as Healing

November 24, 2019 Aspen Murray

Hello all!

If you’ve been reading Ethigirl for awhile, or if you know me in real life, you probably know that I regularly struggle with my mental health and that burnout — more specifically, activist burnout — has played a huge role in my life.

Most of the time, it feels like I’m constantly surrounded and, frankly, suffocated by the issues which plague our world. In high school, I had a healthier work-life balance along with outlets like sports and art… but in university, the constant whirlwind of assignments and extracurriculars and pressure and struggle to succeed truly got to me, and I lost all of that.

Everything in my life orbited around its focal point: trying desperately, but always feeling like I was failing, to fix the problems of the world. And the worst of it all is that every problem was is so intertwined and entangled. You approach something as simple as single use plastics and are surrounded and caught inside and unable to escape the grips of capitalism and colonialism and environmentalism as an intersectional issue of social justice that affects some of the world’s most vulnerable people and species who have been oppressed and undercut for centuries.

Simply put, it’s difficult to approach an issue, to implement a solution, to see positive results, and to accept them for what they are without feeling defeated by what is left to do or what you cannot accomplish with what you’ve put in place. You’re always missing some component, or you can’t scale. And this tireless work — this chasing after some goal which is damn near impossible to reach — coupled with that constant discouragement breeds one thing alone: burnout.

I often feel that way with fashion, too. I fell in love with sustainable fashion because of how beautiful it is as a solution: sustainably-made clothes are better quality, more unique, and more exciting to wear. I thought that focusing on fashion would allow me to stay positive. It was fun and exciting. And although I certainly still often feel this way, there are some times when I don’t.

This past summer and fall, everything came to a halt: I just didn’t know how I could do it anymore. So I took a break from Ethigirl. I took a break from, well…everything. I was forced to leave a social action-oriented university extracurricular to which I’d probably dedicated hundreds of hours over the past couple of years. I dialed back entirely, leaving me to figure out who I was without activism and advocacy.

It was really scary. I came to terms with the fact that who you are isn’t based on what you do. You can do many, many wonderful things for the world and still hurt the people around you because you’re bad at keeping in touch, you hold grudges for too long, or you never properly learned how to resolve conflict. I learned that we are nothing without the people around us: being surrounded with those who make us feel whole are, well, what make us whole. And we need to take the time to genuinely and deeply foster those relationships for all that they are worth.

At some point during all of this self-learning, I revisited something many people had told me when I was in some of my hardest times: you really need to pick up a hobby. Something completed detached from activism. And that’s when I started getting into cooking. Though I had been meal prepping sporadically for about a year, I’d never put a lot of serious thought into it — probably because I was always so preoccupied with everything else I had on the go.

Vegetarian ramen with green onions, sesame seeds, and a ramen egg

But over this past summer and fall, thanks to the influence of Tyler (my boyfriend), I really started getting into cooking videos on YouTube. Big shout out to Bon Appetit in particular. And then, I started replicating what I saw. I started getting excited about buying my groceries every week. I wanted to learn every tip that I could. Every Sunday, I’d set aside (and still do) about four or five hours to prepare all of my meals for the week ahead. Tyler often helps me cook, and although sometimes he’s just as excited about the food as I am and takes over a little too much, I love having him around during the process.

Cooking has become a true form of self care for me: and not even just in the sense of having nutritious, prepared meals to eat for the week ahead (although that’s also a huge plus), but also because it’s an art form. When I am simply chopping up and simmering veggies for a delicious meal, I get so psyched about the process. It’s very reminiscent of my high school days, when I was doing watercolour paintings on the regular.

Tomato soup with parmesan and microgreens

It has helped me to relearn the simple art of creating something for myself that is just intrinsically good. I am not cooking to support any political or social cause. It’s something entirely detached from every other issue I have going on in my life, and I can just focus on it for those five Sunday afternoon hours while I play music, let some sauce bubble on the stove, and just allow myself to breathe for a minute.

Sick-day vegetarian curry with green onions and sesame seeds

About four months later, I feel deeply healed. I am not all the way better — nor will I probably ever be. But with deeply mindful cooking as part of my lifestyle, I have learned how to take even just five hours every week to take care of myself without any other concerns. And through this process, I know with some practice I can expand that five hours into an hour, or two, or more every single day. That’s something I’m pretty excited about.

With love and sustainability,

Ethigirl

(P.s. — let me know your favourite recipes in the comments. I’m hungry.)