Forget Angry Birds and other mobile apps that do a great job of helping you waste time. And set aside for now the apps that help you find information and practice clinical medicine more efficiently.
It was only a matter of time before mobile apps would be developed that can actually help you prevent physician burnout.
Here are my two favorite mobile apps to help you lower stress and create more work life balance
I have been using a pair of mobile apps on my iPhone for a while now that are doing a really good job of keeping me (and my coaching clients) focused on the simple daily steps that make all the difference in preventing physician burnout.
Research shows meditation and other forms of mindfulness based stress relief (MBSR) – like the 1 Minute Stress Relief Program – are the most effective way to lower your stress level and prevent physician burnout.
And most of us struggle to maintain a regular meditation habit …
That is where Insight Timer comes in.
I use this free iPhone mobile app every day in my own meditation practice and every coaching client I have shared it with raves about it too! There is also a “full” version for iPhone and Android that costs $1.99
If you have struggled to get a meditation habit off the ground in the past, I encourage you to play with the Insight Timer mobile app and see for yourself just how powerful it is.
- Set up a meditation session of any length
- Include bell and singing bowl tones at whatever interval you want to help you stay present
- Insight Timer keeps track of all of your meditation sessions so you can always see how many sessions and what length, average length and total meditation time since you started using the app
- It allows you to put a note after each one
- Join the Worldwide Community in a Virtual Sangha of meditators
- You can see and connect with hundreds of people all over the world that are meditating using the Insight Timer mobile app at the same time you are. As I write this post, 136 people are meditating around the world. The map on the face of the app shows you exactly where they are too
- I have also just applied to create our own group on the app. Search the groups function for “The Happy MD” and join up.
Here is a video tour of Insight Timer from the developer
Find Insight Timer in the Apple App Store
2) Lift
Lift is perfect for all the other actions you want to turn into life balance habits.
Things like Exercise / Yoga / Going for a walk / Planning your day / Writing in your journal / Being grateful / Spending time with your spouse/significant other/children/dog/cat/gerbil/goldfish
You get the picture.
I have “Plan my day” loaded as an activity in my Lift app and there are thousands of other people with that as one of their action steps too. You can connect, form a group, give them a thumbs up when they check the box.
You can set up Lift to give you daily reminders for each activity and send you an occasional “supportive message” if you wish. It sends me a message about every other day telling me I am on a consecutive day streak in one of my activities as in, “You have walked for 7 days in a row. What can you do today?”
Lift will also track all your check ins, and has simple little graphs showing your weekly success .. all in that lovely shade of check mark green.
Find Lift in the Apple App Store
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Insight Timer and Lift are two mobile apps I use every day to support my mindfulness/meditation practice and create more life balance.
Check them out for yourself and please LEAVE A COMMENT on how they work for you.
P.S. in case you were wondering, the author has no conflict of interest to disclose. I am recommending these based on my own experience and the experience of my coaching clients and have never even met the developers of either web app – I just love the way they keep me in action and think you will too.