My Mental Health ‘Tech Stack’ For 2021
8 apps / devices that I use for managing my mental health, and how I use them
Given that I spend most of my time working on mental health software, I thought it might be interesting to talk about all the bits of tech I use to manage my own 🧠👻.
For context, I’m at the depression + anxiety camp, in the nihilism bunk. I currently manage it without medication, sometimes well and sometimes less well. This post is mostly about the fundamentals, which for me is about optimizing my potential good days while minimizing the negative impact of (chemically) bad days.
1. Journaling — Grapefruit
The benefits of journaling are well-documented and it’s something I’ll do for a while, stop for a while, but always come back to. (If you watch Kati Morton the YouTube therapist, you’ll know just how much she talks about the benefits for journaling. Here’s a good video.)
I use Grapefruit to journal. Because of course I do since I created it. I made it to be exactly what I wanted out of a journal and general mental health app.
I like a journal that is simple. I don’t want to worry (obsess?) about how my digital journal is organized. (Which I will absolutely do/did when using text documents!) And I like to have a few prompts for whenever I don’t have the energy to think about how to start, so I set up a few of those in Grapefruit.
2. Thought dumping — ByWord
Sometimes (often!) I get ideas and, as the saying goes, they live rent-free in my head for far too long. I need to dump them somewhere and that somewhere is usually ByWord. It’s a great replacement for TextEdit on the Mac, and my go-to for throwaway writing.
That’s not to say all my thought dumps are throwaways, but I’ll create a new doc in ByWord, save it in iCloud, and worry about categorizing it later. Super simple. I also find the blue cursor and simple layout really calming. You can see the settings I use in the screenshot there to keep it looking calm. I like the soft character lines of Avenir, with a light theme and a medium column width for readability.
3. Sleep Tracking — Fitbit
I could write a million words on my bizarre sleep habits, but I think one fact holds true for you, me and almost everyone: the amount of sleep we get and the amount of sleep we think we get are not the same. Go to sleep somewhere around 11, which is actually 12; get up somewhere around 7, with some number of snoozes; wake up in the middle of the night to pee or investigate a weird sound some number of times. You get it.
So often if I feel crappy for a few days in a row, one of the first places to look is my sleep. Regularity matters less to me than amount, so strapping a Fitbit to my wrist for a couple of weeks can help me make sure I’m getting enough.
I use a Fitbit Charge 2 with the strap super-glued to the device because I’ve broken two straps already. I’ve tried a Garmin and various smart watches and phone sleep tracking apps and I keep coming back to the Fitbit as the best of a bunch of only-okay options.
4. Step Tracking — Apple Health
I don’t use the Fitbit for this because I don’t like to wear a wearable all the time. I could wear one only for walks, but I know that I will forget it one day or the battery will be dead.
The Fitbit I have also likes to register a lot of false steps. And while the mental health benefits of showering are probably better than the 600 steps it records from my arm’s washing motions, I’m not sure that number is useful.
I like to only track ‘outdoor steps’ and aim for a very doable 5000, 3+ times per week. This means going for intentional walks, but not being stressed out trying to hit 10,000 steps every single outing.
It took me a while to start using my phone for this because I simply didn’t think about it. Then I was out for a walk one day thinking, “I wish there was a step tracker in every one of my jackets so there would always be one with me.” And then I realized my phone was pretty much that because I always take it on walks to listen to music.
Using my phone’s built-in tracker is low-effort and only counts the steps I care about. Perfect.
5. Food — Trello
Another fundamental of stable mental health — eating well. Or in my case, eating something. My appetite is like an abused animal that runs away if you even look at it.
If I’m a little bit down, getting up with no appetite but needing to eat can start a downward spiral that can destroy my entire day.
So it’s important to have a list of recipes ready to use as inspiration or fallbacks. I’ve been developing my recipes in Trello. I write them out in the card description, then add comments every time I make it so I can adjust them and experiment as I go.
Some of them are large prep-ahead things, and some are very simple like the no-thinking instructions on boiling an egg exactly the way I like it. This lets me go through step-by-step to get food ready. (Ever made food in a bad mood and it comes out inexplicably terrible? Wanna avoid that.)
I’ve only started with this and really hope to build it out this year with lots of options, including ‘defaults’ so if I don’t want to eat I still know exactly what to make. Getting those early morning moments right are really key for the days where my mental state hasn’t decided which way it wants to point.
6. Relaxation — ASMR + Headphones
It’s 3am, I’m wide awake, and I haven’t been productive all day. My head is spinning because I’m unhappy with how little I’ve done today and is this all life is and maybe I should move to Australia but what about the spiders I really don’t like spiders and….
When my head starts spinning, this is when I switch on some ASMR, and ride the gentle-sound-funicular back down to the bottom of the mountain. My go-to setup here is a set of AirPods + the YouTube app on my TV. I find the big video screen helps with the visual triggers. I actually started watching ASMR on Twitch, but got tired of the ASMRtists’ whispering when responding to chat. That takes me out of it so I’ve been building up my ASMR playlists on YouTube instead. #nowhisper
I don’t think YouTube is the ideal place for this though, and I wish there was an ASMR-specific site. Both the YouTube ads and sponsored segments that YouTuber’s do are very distracting when you’re trying to relax. (BTW If you’re looking for a startup to build, ASMR is begging for a proper home.)
Regardless, the headphone + ASMR video combo has become an integral part of my relaxation routine and I highly recommend taking the time to try out the many, many different kinds of ASMR to see if it’s for you.
Just get a quiet room and some headphones and prepare to see some wonderfully weird stuff.
7. Financial Planning — Apple Numbers
Ever been stressed about money? No? Are you a 1-year-old?
Money is a huge stressor and it goes right in line with worrying about the future, a sport in which I could be an olympian.
Rigid planning has always helped reduce this stress for me, particularly through some of the more risky career moves like starting up a new company. (Ironically, the feelings of satisfaction that come from building your own company can also come with financial and other stressors that can prevent you from benefitting from the good feelings.)
So, I plan. I track every expense in my custom spreadsheets and categorize them. And with all that data I’ve collected, I can confidently say how much I’ll need to live, what I can cut if I have to, and the frequency of unexpected or one-time expenses. This data gets more accurate over time, but you don’t need more than a few months of data to do some decent planning.
With that data, you can make tons of scenarios to ease your mind. (But not too many, because being over-analytical can also be negative!)
An example: when the pandemic started, it happened to be at the same time as a career transition to working on my own. So I took every glum prediction of what kind of recession every expert said we might be looking at, and made a worse-case scenario. If the worse-case was doable, then for me the risk was still worth it. If a medium-case looked iffy, then I may have waited a bit because I know I would have stressed over it a bit too much.
(Any spreadsheet could do the trick, but I recently moved my stuff to Apple’s Numbers app as I continue the ongoing battle to reduce my reliance on ad-supported free services and I don’t have an Excel license handy.)
8. Mood / emotion tracking — Grapefruit, again
Alright, alright, more blatant self-promotion. Being Canadian, I apologize for that. But hear me out!
Even though I use the same app as I do for journaling, I separated this out because my need and desire for mood tracking waxes and wanes differently than journaling.
Mood tracking is amazing when you start doing it, but the benefits can have diminishing returns. Journaling, however, is forever.
For me, mood tracking doesn’t do much for me after a decade of it. I understand my patterns pretty well now and rarely am I surprised by my findings there anymore. I still do quite a bit of emotion tracking though.
I’ll break out the emotion tracking when I feel generally off-balance, but can’t quite figure out why.
An example from this past year: I was feeling more anger and frustration than usual. These feelings usually come with a trigger for me, but this past year I felt them a lot more often without a specific trigger. This is probably pandemic-related, but using Grapefruit here was helpful in backing up my instinct that there was no common trigger for these feelings.
So that’s my list going into 2021.
A couple notable absences are meditation apps, which I’ve tried again and again but just aren’t for me, and online-therapy apps, which I have not tried enough to have an opinion on. I‘m skeptical about online therapy but mostly kept away by the price. Maybe I will try it out this year to see if there is anything behind it.
You could almost put anything on this type of list. Chat apps or video call apps to keep in touch with friends would be a good one, which is absolutely a key component of mental health. Though this past year digital connections have probably done more harm than good to me personally. Perhaps I’ll write another list of the tech that attacks my mental health.
I’m also not currently using any sort of screen-time-limiting or site-blocking software. I did use a site blocker to kill my Reddit habit a few years back, and that worked like a charm, but there’s nothing I’m trying to keep myself from right now. They’re handy tools when you need them, though, and I wouldn’t hesitate to break one out when needed.
Are you using any tech tools for your mental health?
