Why Use An Addiction Recovery App
Substance abuse is far from a rare condition, with an estimated 20.7 million people in need of treatment in the United States. Unfortunately, a fair number of those in need, around 19 percent, are unable to receive it due to a variety of circumstances. Whether your local community lacks access to resources or your financial situation does not permit seeking aid, you may have to look for alternative solutions.
Some of the reasons why recovery applications are useful include:
Best For A Money Tracker: Nomo
- Platforms: iOS and Android
- Features: tracks time sober and money saved
Nomo tracks how long a person has been sober in terms of years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. Each time a person reaches a recovery milestone, the app issues a chip to celebrate the achievement and keep people motivated.
People can track time and money saved on the app and share successes and new chips on social media. They can also share their sobriety clock.
Smartphone Or Internet Addiction Can Also Negatively Impact Your Life By:
Increasing loneliness and depression. While it may seem that losing yourself online will temporarily make feelings such as loneliness, depression, and boredom evaporate into thin air, it can actually make you feel even worse. A 2014 study found a correlation between high social media usage and depression and anxiety. Users, especially teens, tend to compare themselves unfavorably with their peers on social media, promoting feelings of loneliness and depression.
Fueling anxiety. One researcher found that the mere presence of a phone in a work place tends to make people more anxious and perform poorly on given tasks. The heavier a person’s phone use, the greater the anxiety they experienced.
Increasing stress. Using a smartphone for work often means work bleeds into your home and personal life. You feel the pressure to always be on, never out of touch from work. This need to continually check and respond to email can contribute to higher stress levels and even burnout.
Exacerbating attention deficit disorders. The constant stream of messages and information from a smartphone can overwhelm the brain and make it impossible to focus attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes without feeling compelled to move on to something else.
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Best For Estimating Blood Alcohol Content: Alcodroid Alcohol Tracker
- Platform: Android
- Features: estimates blood alcohol content and has an alcohol diary
AlcoDroid is an app that tracks alcohol consumption. People can also use it as a drinks diary and a calculator to determine blood alcohol content. The app estimates blood alcohol content based on the drinks people log.
AlcoDroid charts a persons drinking habits daily, weekly, or monthly and displays their consumption statistics. People can set up targets to see how alcohol intake matches those goals over a set timeframe.
Best For A Health Tracker: Sobriety Counter
- Platforms: iOS and Android
- Features: tracks how stopping drinking improves health
Sobriety Counter is an app that aims to gamify a persons stop drinking journey. The dashboard shows people how much money they have saved by not drinking. People can also set up a treat as a goal with a personal image, and the app will show them the duration until they reach their target.
People can also view trackers showing how stopping drinking improves health, such as blood circulation, cell regeneration, gray matter, mental health, and the risk for heart disease and cancer.
This app also has games that may help a person distract themself from alcohol cravings. People can earn shareable badges as rewards for not drinking alcohol.
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Top 5 Smartphone Apps For Recovery
Smartphones and technology have had an impact on most industries and for the recovery space is no different. Weve compiled a list of five smartphone apps available on the App Store and/or Google Play Store that can help aid your recovery. Alongside each of these weve included a rating out of 5, with 1 being least effective, to 5 being very effective.
Benefits Of Online Therapy
- Convenience. Rather than making your way to a therapists office, you can send text or voice messages or speak in real-time via audio or video calls from the comfort of your own home, at a time that suits you. For people with reduced mobility or those living in rural areas, online counseling is a real boon.
- Choice of therapist. Your choice of an in-person therapist is limited by geography. With online therapy, you can choose from hundreds of qualified therapists, each with their own specialization, therapeutic approach, communication style, and schedule, giving you more options to find the right fit.
- Communication. You get to choose what works best for you: text messaging, audio messages, or voice or video calls. Most teletherapy plans include unlimited messaging, so you can communicate your thoughts and feelings at any time, which in and of itself can be therapeutic.
- Price. As youll see below, online counseling is typically much less expensive than in-person therapy.
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Best Apps To Stop Your Smartphone Addiction
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There could be a number of reasons behind rising smartphone addiction. It may include easy availability of a number of useful apps, social media apps, gaming apps, better camera & video features, easy source of connectivity and a lot more.
In fact, people are more dependent on their digital lives than staying connected with people in real life. This increased smartphone addiction showing lots of side effects like a waste of valuable time on unnecessary apps, social disconnect, health issues and a lot more.
To deal with the issue, we suggest you use smart apps that help you beat your smartphone addiction. These apps keep track of your phone usage and help you reduce unnecessary use of it.
Aa 12 Step Toolkit Recoverybox
Android Rating: 4.6 starsCost: Free with in-app purchases
This app is a good companion for those participating in Alcoholics Anonymous. It lines out the entire 12-step program including the entire Big Book. Recovery Box also features in-app sponsorship to support you on your recovery. Go through the 12-step program by yourself or alongside an AA team. Find support, journal your feelings, and read AA stories from others.
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Why Simply Quitting Social Media Isn’t Enough
First, it’s important to keep in mind that social media is literally addictive. Just like a drug, it’s designed to trigger reward centers in your brain every time you see a notification on your phone or a like on your latest Instagram post. And this is why the cold-turkey approach sometimes won’t cut it .
“On a deeper level, these social media companies know exactly what they are doing a neurological perspective. What they’re doing is called intermittent reinforcement — it’s what casinos do too with slot machines. And it’s the same with swiping on Tinder or checking your Instagram. The addiction is the reward pathway, it’s a dopamine hit,” Jones said.
Instead of totally quitting your social media, Jones recommends taking smaller steps to mitigate your habits. “I think it’s a problem when people start too big. Start somewhere, where there’s the least resistance,” Jones said. Examples of small steps to help break your addiction include turning off notifications, turning off vibrate, and using a feature on your phone that monitors how much time you spend on social apps.
The Haven Detox Is Here To Help
These apps for addiction recovery and mental health are among the many powerful tools made accessible to us by technology.
Although the applications featured here can be a valuable resource for healing, no smartphone application can replace the value of in-person counseling or enrolling in a rehabilitation center that provides evidence-based treatment.
If you or your loved one is experiencing cravings and needs recovery support, contact The Haven Detox at our helpline .
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Best Addiction Recovery Apps
To find an application that best suits your needs, consider the issues you may be struggling with. Examples include:
- Fighting urges to give in to substance or alcohol use
- Recognizing and replacing bad habits with positive ones
- Building self-confidence and practicing mindfulness
- Meeting advocates and other members of the sobriety community
- Maintaining motivation, particularly on days of adversity
Besides, brainstorm about what forms of support would best help you cope or face your problems. Once you narrow down the field, you can start looking at apps that address your specific needs. Below are 12 options that we have found are great options:
Will These Apps Really Help Me Break Old Habits Or Start New Ones
Tracking behavior helps break and establish habits, said Dana Litt, an associate professor of health behavior at the University of North Texas, but research on the effectiveness of app-based tools is still emerging.
Some apps go beyond simple habit-logging. Reframe from developer Glucobit comes with educational modules and homework assignments for people looking to reduce or eliminate their alcohol consumption. The app Fabulous also offers learning modules for managing addiction. Be careful, though. Both apps have relatively permissive privacy policies, and many people suffering from addiction require personalized treatment in a clinical setting.
Some studies have shown that internet-based interventions can help people reduce their alcohol consumption, said Stanford psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor Keith Humphreys. The effectiveness often depends on the severity of the persons overuse, he noted.
Fabulous co-founder and CEO Sami Ben Hassine said the app is not a replacement for counseling, but it can help people grow, measure their progress and regulate their emotions. Reframe CEO Vedant Pradeep said the app is an additional resource and does not replace professional medical advice or treatment.
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Using Apps To Cope With Addiction
Just be sure to keep it all in perspective. While apps can be an excellent tool during your recovery treatment, they certainly cannot replace attending 12-step meetings or consulting with your healthcare provider. This article highlights 10 apps that were chosen for their affordability, accessibility, and evidence-based principles that can supplement your treatment and journey to recovery.
What Makes A Trustworthy Health Or Habit
People have different expectations for privacy and ease of use. If youre evaluating habit apps on your own, lookout for these best practices.
First, a habit app probably doesnt need your location. Productive, Reframe and Me+ all leave room in their privacy policies to collect your location, and Habit Tracker from developer Davetech explicitly asks for location permission when you set up the app.
Second, a habit app shouldnt ask for more data than it needs. Productive, Reframe and Fabulous all come with elaborate onboarding questionnaires seekinghighly personal information. While those questions might help tailor your appexperience, they also create privacy risks.
Last, a habit app should minimize the data it shares with third parties. Lockdowns Lin observed Reframe and Fabulous communicating with multiple advertising companies, he said. DayCount, Me+ and Productive also leave room in their privacy policies to share data with outside marketers and advertisers.
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How Apps Can Help
Dr. Jaimee Heffner, PhD, and an assistant member of the Cancer Prevention Program at the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Washington, helped develop a smartphone app called Smart Quit.
The app uses ACT to help people be more cognitive of their urges and their desire to smoke. The app also utilizes therapeutic techniques to help people overcome their desire to smoke.
Heffner said there are a number of ways that apps can help people with addiction issues, such as those addicted to nicotine.
Theyre low cost, and theyre available at any time and place, she told Healthline. Thats generally not true for any type of treatment that is delivered by a person.
She pointed out that it can be difficult and time consuming to make appointments with a medical provider and get transportation or child care with traditional addiction treatment.
Theres also a stigma around seeking help for substance use or any other type of mental health issue, which adds another layer of difficulty to getting assistance, she said. Apps cant fully replace what a healthcare provider can offer, but they can be a great starting point or a tool to use alongside other types of assistance.
How To Beat Your Social Media Addiction According To A Therapist
Social media use is linked to depression and anxiety — here’s what to do to reduce your risk.
Love it or hate it, social media apps such as and have profoundly changed the way we think, communicate and socialize as a society. Instagram is even beginning to change features in response to studies linking social media usage to increased rates of mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Given that mental health experts, researchers and other pros are voicing concerns on how our social-media obsessed society can more cause harm than we may have guessed, you may be wondering if it’s affecting your own mental health.
Now that more people are talking about the negative effects of using social media too much, it’s common to see friends on Instagram announce they’re doing a “detox” or taking a break from the apps for a period of time. But is quitting social media a good idea and can it really help you in the long term?
According to Dr. Logan Jones, psychologist and founder of NYC Therapy + Wellness, it depends. While taking a break from social media can be helpful in some cases, according to Jones, there’s a lot more to be said surrounding why you’re taking a break in the first place.
Keep reading to find out why taking a break from social media is not enough to change your health, and how to make your social media use better for your mental health.
In our age of social media, it’s easy to get sucked into checking every app.
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Best For Those Attending Alcoholics Anonymous : 12 Steps Companion Aa Big Book
- Price:$2.99 on the App Store and $1.99 on Google Play
- Platforms: iOS and Android
- Features: provides the Big Book of AA and tracks time sober
The 12 Steps AA Companion provides the Big Book of AA and includes more than 60 stories.
People can also access morning and night prayers, 12 Steps promises on experience, hope, and strength, and notes. A person can also share these on social media.
The dashboard clearly shows how many years, months, days, and hours people have been sober every time they open the app. A person can also calculate the sobriety time of their friends.
Modify Your Smartphone Use Step
For most people, getting control over their smartphone and Internet use isn’t a case of quitting cold turkey. Think of it more like going on a diet. Just as you still need to eat, you probably still need to use your phone for work, school, or to stay in touch with friends. Your goal should be to cut back to more healthy levels of use.
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Available On Android And Ios
Making a permanent lifestyle change is a difficult thing to do, and it’s made even more difficult by being busy and having little time to waste grappling with difficult habit-tracking systems. Instead, Way of Life promises to aid the user change their lifestyle by helping them spot all kinds of positive and negative trends.
What sets it apart is that its incredibly simple design means it gets across all the important information at a single glance and it asks for only a minute of the user’s time a day to keep it updated. Unfortunately, the ability to add an unlimited amount of habits is locked behind a subscription.
