👥 Serves: 1 person

🎚 Difficulty: Easy

⏳ Total time: Ongoing

🥣 Ingredients: Your smartphone, pen and paper, willingness

🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Awareness, Digital Consciousness, Liberatory Learning, Positive Emotion, Rest

💪 Wholebeing Skills: Digital agency, Focus, Fun, Gratitude, Mindfulness, Play, Self-directed learning, Time management

👣 Steps

Step 1 – Pick digital goodies that interest you

When’s the last time you can remember using your smartphone for something productive? Let’s change that! 

Note – apps with * means there is a fee or subscription to use them.

Apps for new skills

• Anchor – Anchor is perfect for people keen to create their own podcast. The app allows you to edit your sounds, add music, and review analytics about who is tuning in.
• *Coursera – It offers incredible lessons in art design, accounting, business, science, and many more other subjects including lectures, chat features with other students, and quizzes.
• Duolingo – Replace scrolling for learning a new language.
• *Forks Over Knives – This app is sifor home cooks who want to focus on eating healthy vegan and vegetarian meals. There are more than 500 recipes from a diverse range of chefs so you can practise getting creative in the kitchen.
• Khan Academy – Totally free education! Khan Academy is run by a non-for-profit organisation and offers many different courses such as maths, computer, science, English, history and more through various lesson plans, videos, articles and quizzes.
• *Simply Piano – The perfect app if you are curious about learning the beautiful piano instrument, but don’t know where to start. The app uses the microphone in your smartphone to provide feedback from the sounds you play as you move through the many exercises and varied songs to play.
• *Skillshare – Both an app and a desktop experience, Skillshare offers lessons, classes, and courses on a wide variety of different subjects and skills.
• Steezy Studio – Against popular theory, everyone actually can dance! Dancing is one of the best ways to move your body and get those positive feelings going through you. Steezy Studio offers more than 500 video classes to help you feel more comfortable dancing in all sorts of styles.
• TED – TED app offers more than 3,000 inspiring talks in more than 20 languages, to offer motivation and inspiration from incredible speakers around the world.
• Yummly – Yummly gets to know you by learning what you like and don’t like to eat and curating specific recipes based on that. It offers an interactive meal planner, a shopping list and it lets you put in your pantry foods for a simple and ready to go meal.

Apps for mindfulness

• Action for Happiness – This app will ping your phone daily to provide you a nudge with an action that aims to boost your mood and happiness, based on their popular monthly calendars.
• *Calm – Calm is the most popular mindfulness app out there to help you improve your sleep quality, reduce stress or anxiety, improve focus, among other mindful skills.
• Coffitivity – Coffitivity is a little app that helps out workers by playing the ambient sounds of a café! This is meant to inspire your brain to be more creative. It’s a cost effective way to get in café level work, but from home.
• Insight Timer – Insight timer is an incredible, totally free app that offers great exercises for meditation, yoga, and mindfulness.
• *Headspace – Headspace is an accessible way to get into meditation and to improve sleep! The app is bursting with amazing content which is refreshed regularly so you can try various different meditations every day. 
• Mantra – Mantras are a fantastic way to change up your thinking patterns. With this app, a daily affirmation will ping right to your phone for you to repeat outloud to yourself to create new, healthy habits.
• Moodfit – Moodfit allows you to track your moods, from happiness, anxiety, etc. and it gives you different interactive exercises to help address “negative” or challenging emotions.
• MindShift CBT – CBT stands for cognitive behaviour therapy, which works with brain training to develop useful skills and health habits to lead a healthier and more fulfilling life. The app offers meditation, journals, coping cards, and activities to help you face fears and develop healthy habits.
• No Zero Days – This is a super handy app that will help you reframe the way you think. The app will divide your day into four categories: created, helped, learned, and dealt. Whenever you do something that corresponds to these categories you can tap the right theme to keep you motivated and help you to reflect. 
• Omvana – The nice part about Omvana are the sleep sounds! Sleep sounds can help guide you into a deep sleep. There are also many guided meditations you can do at any point, which you can also personalise.
• Take a break! – It offers brilliant and gentle mindful meditations for people who need a break throughout the day.
• ThinkUp – Daily affirmations to use or create your own that you can even set to music and set reminders to focus on them.
• *Streaks – A motivational app that helps keep track of goals and habits. Streak allows you to track up to 12 tasks/day, and the goal is to create streaks of 12 days in a row!

Apps for exercise

• 30 Day Fitness – This app allows you to track your goals and achievements and you set pings with reminders to get some movement in. The app offers videos for a wide range of exercises that work the entire body.
• None to Run – If you want to get started with running, None to Run is a terrific starting spot. This app offers you workouts, schedules, and encouraging prompts. The goal is to follow the 12-week plan to get you running at your own pace.
• Strong – Strong helps weightlifters to automatically track their weightlifting workouts to see their progress. It also offers custom workouts in the extensive workout library.
• Studio Bloom – This app is for folks who are pregnant and recently given birth. The idea is that all workouts are safe, educational, and supportive.
• *Underbelly – The app describes itself as “a home for wellness misfits who may feel displaced, discouraged or overlooked due to a lack of diversity in the health and fitness community”. It focuses on a range of accessible classes that focus on breath work to different yoga types.
• *Yoga for Everyone: body & mind – This app takes a true inclusive approach to movement and yoga by making the lessons doable for everybody regardless of their shape, size, or ability. You can choose from short 5-minute lessons up to 60-minute lessons; each is completely different.
• *Yoga Wake Up: Mindful Mornings – This app is here to take over your alarm clock job by replacing it with a gentle, guided meditation that you can do from your bed! There are an incredible range of on-demand meditation and movement classes for every level and ability.

Step 2 – Journal about changes (a few minutes every month)

This step is optional, but it is very helpful to track how your relationship with your phone has changed – which, hopefully, will be for the better! 

Grab your pen and paper and write down a few sentences that come to your mind once a month about your connection to your phone, how much you use it, and what new skill and habits you’ve learnt.