This blog post is sponsored by Sharecare. We pride ourselves on our decisions and purchases of quality, rather than quantity. When we mention or promote a product or service, it is one that creates a spark in our life or delivers ease, and/or longevity. The two Sharecare wellness apps we are recommending for the holiday season in this post, are fully aligned with our values, promoting mindfulness and wellness. We stand behind them. All opinions are our own.
Sharecare Mindfulness Apps
As you know, we advocate for sustainable gift-giving for the holidays, and all year long. There is nothing better than giving a gift that is not only eco-friendly but helps to spark wellness in the life of the recipient.
There are two mindfulness apps, by Sharecare, which we will tell you about. Both are meant to improve lifestyle habits and improve overall wellness. While the wellness and health enthusiast in your life will love these, anyone can find benefit from the ongoing gift of freedom from unwanted behaviors and anxiety.
Unwinding Anxiety
Sharecare’s Unwinding Anxiety app is dedicated to bringing you a better sense of understanding anxiety. Not only does it help you understand anxiety overall, but being more mindful about what is causing your anxiety. There are lessons and tools to teach you how to prevent anxiety from interfering with the life you deserve.
What is refreshing is that the app begins with a video from Dr. Judson Brewer, the addiction psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author whose research the apps are based on. Now look, this guy is not just some talking head, or app developer, he knows his stuff. He has a TED talk about the relationship between mindfulness and addiction. Most important, Dr. Brewer will literally blow your mind with what he has implemented in the Sharecare mindfulness apps.
His introduction about breaking the cycle of anxiety won us over! Not just that, but he describes the drivers of it, and how we can learn to control our lives! This all happens through mindfulness training. Change your mind, change your brain!
What you can expect from Unwinding Anxiety
There are daily training modules, in-the-moment practices, and an online community with which you can opt to interact with or not. Dr. Brewer recommends you report your activities in the community. This helps to serve as an accountability partner.
Dr. Brewer walks you through each module, explaining it, not talking down to us. In brief, he breaks it down into terms we understand. Don’t worry, this isn’t your college-level psychology class. This is enjoyable!
You set your own goals with prompting and things you want to accomplish with the app. Thereupon, these can be to feel better emotionally, learn ways to work with and free yourself from anxiety, or simply add tools to your toolbox to feel more at ease and calm. Unwinding Anxiety is meant to go at a pace where you will take key points from it. For example, you cannot skip through the modules all at once.
There is a time associated with the next module as to when it can be unlocked, so you can really interact with the practices for that specific day and week. Unwinding Anxiety is clinically proven to reduce anxiety by 67% after 2 months of use.
The Worry Tool
Our favorite aspect of the Unwinding Anxiety app is the Worry Tool. As worriers, we found that by clicking the Worry Tool and allowing the prompts to ask questions about the feelings we were having, we were able to identify exactly what was bothering us. The app walks you through steps to recalibrate your brain, paying attention to what reward or un-reward you are obtaining by worrying.
I began noticing how much I (Shannon) bite the inside of my mouth when I am worrying. The app helped me realize that by bringing awareness to my face and body when I clicked the worry tool. By paying attention to the results of my worrying, I am creating more mindfulness and can unwind my anxiety, stepping out of the worry habit loop that I get into often.
Notable Highlights
There are so many great aspects of the app that we found to be notable.
- Check-ins– at first, we sort of overlooked them, but then, when we realized that in order to be a part of those who found success from the app, we should take advantage of it. Check-ins are brief, just be mindful of how you are feeling. For example, if you click “tired”, there is an exercise to be more mindful and aware of learning how your mind works.
- Tools– the mindfulness exercises such as “Tea or Coffee Meditation” we have been telling everyone about! It is only 5 minutes but really helps to clear the clutter from your mind and have a peaceful break in your day. Other exercises we love are “Grounding Practice”, “Candle Awareness”, and the “Face Scan”.
Gift the Unwinding Anxiety app
Overall, receiving a gift that helps to cultivate a better life is fantastic! Imagine being the giver of a tool that allows one to feel less anxious, and feel more like themselves. You will definitely be the star of gift-giving this holiday season by opting to nurture a loved one’s wellness with a sustainable gift like Unwinding Anxiety.
The Sharecare mindfulness apps like Unwinding Anxiety, are life-changing. There is no doubt about it.
Subsequently, you can gift yourself peace of mind, or the ability to help reduce the anxiety that comes with the holidays, and all year long!
Here is what you need to do:
- Download the Unwinding Anxiety app. Experience the mindfulness process for yourself.
- Take advantage of Sharecare’s special offers this holiday season starting Cyber Monday and running until the end of the year!
- Unwinding Anxiety family memberships are 50% off for up to five family members.
- To redeem the holiday offer, sign up for a subscription and you will receive an email with instructions on redeeming this offer.
Eat Right Now
Sharecare’s Eat Right Now app helps you recognize, understand, and work with the habits you have formed. It works to change your relationship with food. You begin to feel as though the control is coming back into your hands, where it belongs.
You will notice a theme within the Sharecare mindfulness apps. Habits, the brain, and all of the mechanisms of how they co-relate are the common thread throughout Unwinding Anxiety and Eat Right Now.
Since eating is a way in which we stay alive, it is best to form healthy habits with the process. Dax Shepard, actor, podcast host, and self-admitted addict to drugs and alcohol said on one of his podcasts when discussing food addiction, “I cannot imagine having the addiction to something that is needed to keep me alive. At least I can stay away from drugs and alcohol, though difficult, it is possible.”
Through the lessons Dr. Brewer walks you through, you begin to realize that being addicted to drugs, alcohol, and food, are very similar. Retraining your brain is the process that Dr. Brewer walks you through in the Eat Right now app.
What you can expect from Eat Right Now
If you are a regular reader here, then you know that we have been on a wellness journey. This journey has been ongoing for the past couple of years. I (Shannon) have lost a significant amount of weight since making our lifestyle change. Keeping a healthy lifestyle requires sticking to habits that are positive. It also requires changing your mindset.
Similarly to the Unwinding Anxiety app, the Eat Right Now app is developed to assist with mindfulness practices. From the beginning, there is a “raisin exercise” that encourages you to think about every part of eating one raisin. It helped us change our entire relationship to eating after just one day. When you pay attention to what, why, and how you eat, it helps to create better habits.
Forthwith, the Sharecare mindfulness apps have that theme, creating better habits!
Identically, Dr. Brewer walks you through the modules in this app as well. Fitting, since he is the expert in habit forming, and the brain. The online community is meant to be helpful with accountability and camaraderie with Eat Right Now as well.
Setting goals for what you want to get out of the app is how you begin your journey with Eat Right Now. If you are a regular in the food app world like I am, you will find that this app is different than anything you have ever used. The app truly is tailored to YOU, not a blanket process for everyone.
The Craving Tool
Our favorite aspect of the Eat Right Now app is the CravingTool. A fact that we found to be comforting is that craving unhealthy food is due to activation in a part of our brains. It is the same part of your brain that is triggered by someone who smokes crack cocaine! Can you believe that?! No wonder cravings can be so intense!
While it may be true that this triggering happens, this part of your brain does not get triggered by fresh veggies or whole foods. Bummer!
The craving tool can be used anytime you have a craving for food that you are struggling with. When you click the craving tool, it takes you step-by-step through the particular craving. It prompts you to pay attention to why you want to eat something you are craving. When you dig deeper, via a quick exercise in the craving tool, you begin to foresee the crappy way you will feel after eating said food.
Consequently, you can tailor the tool to check in with you in 5 more minutes. The check-in is meant to see how you are doing with your craving. It really feels like you are having an accountability partner, without having to bother an actual person.
Notable Highlights
While the entire Eat Right Now app is beneficial, we wanted to point out the areas that have been most helpful to us. You will notice a pattern between the two apps, and what makes them so successful!
- Check-ins– Markedly, like the Unwinding Anxiety app, check-ins are super important! Note, even though they are not invasive, you can change the notifications for check-ins, but we realized how important they were in changing the way our minds work.
- Tools– the mindfulness exercises available in this app’s toolbox area are similar to the Unwinding Anxiety app as well! We have often used the tools when we sit down together for dinner. Rather than multitasking through dinner, we walk through the “pre-meal warm up” or go through a lesson to break bad habits like the “reward value animation”. We take bites talking about what we are experiencing with the food- paying more attention.
- Want-O-Meter– There is a reason the Eat Right Now app is clinically proven to reduce craving-related eating by 40%. Tools like the Want-o-meter are eye-opening. This tool prompts you to use an exercise based on how you answer a couple of questions when you are “wanting” a particular not-so-healthy food.
Gift the Eat Right Now app
We get it. You may think that gifting the Eat Right Now app is crossing some sort of boundary. Know that this app is not a weight-loss app. That is just one of the benefits that may result from using it. While there is a recently incorporated separate weight loss path, the app focuses on how to use mindful eating for weight management.
Gifting this app is gifting mindfulness practices in a one-stop-shop solution that is not invasive, stress-inducing, or judgemental. Anyone can benefit from the tools implemented in the Eat Right Now app. Imagine enjoying food for what it is: a nourishing, delicious journey through your senses!
From experiencing this app, we have learned to eat mindfully. We savor the experience with each of our senses while enjoying each bite of food. Surprisingly, I have begun to lose weight in the process of building healthier habits, without weight loss being the main focus.
With mindless eating during the holidays, perhaps you can use the app yourself. You will learn more about how it helps, as well as give it to someone. You both can reap the benefits all year long!
Here is what you need to do:
- Download the Eat Right Now app. Try out the mindfulness exercises to understand how changing the way in which you eat, even a raisin, makes a difference!
- Take advantage of Sharecare’s special offers this holiday season starting Cyber Monday and running until the end of the year!
- Sharecare has a “buddy offer” for the Eat Right Now app: Buy One, Gift One!
- To redeem the holiday offer, sign up for a subscription and you will receive an email with instructions on redeeming this offer.
Unquestionably, giving presents signifies a time of warmth and nostalgia for many. The feeling of joy that comes from giving a meaningful gift is simply unmatched. The two Sharecare mindfulness apps that we have recommended to you are sure to be helpful tools. They are beneficial for those you choose to give them to but for you as well. Above all, these apps continue serving wellness all year long.
To sum up, mindful gift-giving helps to take a load of stress off your plate this holiday season, much like the Sharecare mindfulness apps themselves.
We’d like to thank Sharecare for the sponsorship of this blog post. All opinions expressed are our own.
