May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to bring attention to the importance of prioritizing and supporting mental health. I had a whole month of ideas to write on, but I ended up taking most of the month to prioritize my mental health. One of the ways I did that was by using the Spiritune app (currently only available on iOS).
Spiritune is an app that uses specialized music tracks to help take you from one emotional state into another. It’s probably the most simplistic self-care app that I have used and I love it.
How Does Spiritune Work?
You open the app and it asks you “How do you currently feel?” and then it gives you four options: energetic, anxious, lethargic, and chill. Once you click the general feeling, each one will break out into four other emotions that help get a little more detail into the feeling itself. For example, “anxious” is general but inside you can choose frustrated, worried, angry, or tense. I like that you can tap between words to show that you are not entirely one but also a little bit of another.
After you have told the app how you are feeling, it asks you how you want to feel: energetic or chill (and just like in the previous screen, those have their own four breakout feelings as well).
The next step is to tell the Spiritune how fast you want to go from the current emotion to the next. Based on the time of day, you get workflow (a faster path from one emotion to the other), waking up (takes it a little slower), and sleep (helps if you are getting ready to wind down for the night), and then you click play.
If you give it access to your Apple Health app, it will also track your mindfulness minutes.
What Is My Experience?
I was skeptical of how well an app that plays synthesized music was going to help me with my anxiety levels or even calm me down in the middle of a rough moment. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this is not some snake oil app and that it does actually work for me.
For the most part, I’m always choosing anxious/worried and wanting to feel energetic/determined or energetic/joyful. The length of the session varies based on your input but I’ve seen sessions last from anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour. You can favorite and skip tracks as well as set a sleep timer to stop after a certain period of time.
All the tracks are musical in nature with no spoken words. I’ve learned that there are over 4,200 minutes of listening with over 800 emotional combinations across four cognitive activities. New tracks are released every week, so the number of tracks has grown since this post was written.
You may notice that the feeling of “stressed” is not one of the options in the app as an emotion and that’s because the entire app was built around the idea that you are using because you are stressed. It’s a stress management app.
The idea is that if you can manage your emotions more productively and be more proactive in taking care of your emotional well-being, your stress levels will decrease.
Spiritune Is Worth A Shot
Not all apps/wellness products work for everyone. With that said, if you are looking for something that is easy to use, and doesn’t take any kind of setup to start using, Spiritune is worth checking out.
You can get a free one-week trial of Spiritune and then after that it costs $5.99 per month or $59.99 for a year (a lifetime subscription will run you around $299). Head over to the Apple App Store to download it for your iPhone, iPad, or Mac device (their website says it also works on the iPod Touch and if you are still using one of those, hit me up on social media, we need to be friends).
