Bring the game to your daily life with gamification

I dived into the world of mental health apps that gamify your day to day activities. These apps turn meditation, daily chores and self-help into a game and they might just be onto something.

Figuring out how to balance work and life can be overwhelming, disorientating and often a thankless task with little to motivate you to do more. With 1 in 5 children and young people in 2023, aged 8 to 25 years, suffering with mental health it’s becoming more important than ever that people open up to the options available to help.

The science behind gamifying your self-help journey

Setting off on your self-betterment journey has huge barriers to entry, if you’ve ever given up on a new years resolution, chances are you’re going to need a solid plan to keep going here too.

The main issue for a lot of people face is that self-improvement is a solitary sport, and we do better when we have the encouragement of our peers. This is where self-help apps come in. Tailor-made to capitalise on small but frequent rewards, this utilises the same quest-based mechanics found in video games to turn everyday tasks into something exciting to do.

By boosting motivation and user engagement, you find it much easier to keep up with your goals. Couple this with notifications sharing words of encouragement when you need it, there becomes frequent short-term boosts of energy that supports your desire to improve, where other times you might have fallen behind.

Our favourite self-help apps

Fabulous: Daily Routine Planner

The Fabulous: Daily Routine Planner is an app targeted towards helping the user create healthy, consistent habits, by setting you up on your own personal journey. Creating these habits is understood and encouraged to be a slow and gradual daily improvement. This 1% daily improvement in your mental health and habits is manageable for everyone, helping to keep motivations high with consistent small achievements.

No matter who you are, at some point you’ll need to lean on support of some kind. Whether life has just become so busy that it’s hard to see the forest for the trees or if you’re struggling to work through a difficult situation.

Fabulous has been developed in Duke University’s Behavioural Economics Lab based on behavioural science principles; specifically how small, consistent habits can lead to lasting, big changes. If you want to feel more energised, get in better shape or grow into a person you can admire - Fabulous can be there step-by-step cheering you along!

Fabulous: Final Verdict

This is a fabulous (pun intended) app that helps to support you on your way to achieving your personal goals. The aesthetically pleasing app creates a wonderful space to return to. If you choose to pay for the premium version, you gain access to guided exercises, yoga, stretching and cardio workouts.

The work-life balance can really get you down, I get that. Getting access to all the tools you need to make the most of your work day without it eating into your personal life is so important. Fabulous haven’t sponsored us but if you’re interested in making your work culture a little more fabulous then check out their professional package.

Finch: Self Care Pet

Hands up if you ever had a tamagotchi! If you answered yes, and still wish you could care for your own digital pet again, then Finch: Self Care Pet might be the self-help app you’ve been looking for. This self-help app seamlessly blends the virtual pet game concept with mindfulness techniques and features.

This app pairs you with a digital pet as an interactive element to incentivise users to maintain healthy habits and keep up with goals in order to nurture your new companion. As you complete goals and participate in self-care practices, your pet grows alongside you.

These tasks are set by the user and can be customised to direct you to building consistent habits suited to your individual journey. This versatility to adapt to your personal needs makes this a low-barrier to entry self-care app, tasks can be as simple as take a shower today to introspective reflections on favourite memories. There is a mood tracker that users are encouraged to update periodically throughout the day, this is helpful since during low points it can be hard to recognise the good in the bad.

Every time you complete your personal tasks you get energy points which you can use to send your pet out onto adventures where they grow, develop personality traits and learn new things.

This app demonstrates beautifully how much gamification of self-help journey’s can offer that gentle help along the way. As well as appealing to all those 90's kids who grew up with their tamagotchi by their side - we know you’re out there.

Conclusions

Overall, everyone will have unique and personal needs for the kind of support they’re looking for on their self-help journey. Both of these apps offer many personalisation features so you can tailor your journey to you.

It’s time to make a game out of your internal journey, try out one of these apps and bring the fun back into self discovery. As a huge fan of adventure RPG’s, it’s a huge benefit to make an adventure out of the mundane, if you’re the same this might be for you.