These days, it seems like there’s an app for everything! From ordering food to finding love, pretty much every aspect of life can be aided by an app. With so much constant innovation, and exciting new additions to the app store every day, there’s no reason why your brain shouldn’t be getting in on the action.
A busy brain can be a lot to handle, but no matter your state of mind, there’s almost certainly an app that can help. Whether you need help focusing, reducing anxiety, or finding inspiration in daily life, we’ve got you covered. Here are 12 of the best apps for boosting your brain - morning, noon, and night!
1. Best for brain training: Lumosity
Lumosity is a great all-rounder app for lighting up your mind and getting those neurons firing. The fun and easy-to-use app is packed full with daily brain training exercises to keep your mind sharp and ready!
The exercises are suitable for people of all ages, so don’t be afraid to sign up and get started at whatever level suits you best. The exercises on Lumosity are designed to help improve memory, reaction time, mathematical ability, and logical reasoning - skills that will come in handy no matter what!
2. Best for meditation: Calm
Calm is an app beloved by many for its guided meditations, mind exercises, sleeping aids, and music. Sufferers of restlessness, hyperactivity, and anxiety absolutely love Calm for its ability to bring them to a place of peace.
The app features soothing voice work by some of the world’s most beloved voices, including Matthew McConaughey, Idris Elba, and Laura Dern. Let the A-Listers of the world ease away your stress with their movie-ready voices!
3. Best for focus: Minimalist
Minimalist is designed to help you streamline all your tasks into manageable, smaller chunks of work. It features a to-do list, checklists, reminders, and a task manager to help ensure that you complete every project from start to finish.
4. Best for language: Memrise
Memrise has fast become one of the most popular apps in the world for those trying to learn a new language. Memrise’s goal is to take language learning out of the traditional classroom and textbook setting and teach languages in a way that makes them usable in the real world. Memrise uses practical phrases and has a huge bank of videos showing how words and phrases are used in daily life.
5. Best for connecting: Tandem
Tandem is another language app that has revolutionised the way people learn languages and connect with others around the globe. Tandem matches people based on the languages they speak and the languages they wish to learn, allowing you to form friends around the world as you feed your brain with a new language!
6. Best for inspiration: ThinkUp
For when you’re feeling low and your brain needs a bit of inspiration, ThinkUp is there to help. ThinkUp is a simple and effective app for daily motivation that offers its users positive daily affirmations to help set actionable intentions for the day to come.
7. Best for creativity: Creative Live
Creative Live is a skill-sharing website that allows users to learn from the best in their fields from the comfort of their own homes. With classes that cover the full spectrum of the creative industry, passionate creators can learn any skill they need to let their inner artist shine through.
8. Best for staying up to date: Pocket
Ever see an article that you mean to read, only to forget about it and not be able to find it later? Pocket is a marvellous app that helps to keep track of all the things you want to read and stores them in one place. Simply add any article or webpage to pocket and you’ll find it in your personal library, even without an internet connection, so you never miss out on a good read again!
9. Best for puzzles: Chess.com
There are few games in the world better for brain training than chess. For hundreds of years, chess has been a way of connecting with others while learning to think strategically and plan several moves ahead. With chess.com, the world’s most popular forum for the game, you can play with friends and strangers around the world, and keep up to speed with the latest daily puzzles.
10. Best for relaxation: Oak
Another great meditation app for soothing a restless mind, Oak offers instructions for meditation and breathing exercises that are guaranteed to have you feeling relaxed in no time.
11. Best for productivity: Unstuck
There’s nothing more frustrating than facing a creative block, and Unstuck is there to help get you out of such a jam. Unstuck utilises the power of peer coaching to help pull you out of any problem you might be facing, whether it be personal or professional!
12. Best for motivation: Habitica
Habitica takes a fun and innovative approach to getting tasks done and building positive habits. The app does this by turning your tasks and goals into a game, challenging you to do your best and champion your own achievements!
13. Best for boredom: Mix
Mix offers a new way to interact with the internet, pulling content from all over the web to show you the best of what’s out there. Use it to find new interests, explore particular topics, or get super deep into a specific subgenre of content - Mix turns the internet into bite-sizes that get your brain cells fired up!