PACIFICA FOR STRESS AND ANXIETY
By Jansie Vo
From the research, too much daily stress and anxiety can be hazardous to your health. As someone who suffers from chronic worry, I can say that managing it has been hard.
“Being mindful of your stress and working to understand what causes it can be the first step towards better stress management. Being aware of your physical health is also important when managing anxiety and depression.”
Therefore, the app named Pacifica provides tools for managing depressed mood, anxiety and stress that are built upon principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), mindfulness, relaxation and health, helping you understand your issues and change patterns of behavior over time. A specialized app like Pacifica might really be helpful targeted to help those with anxiety and mood disorders and stress.
The app is comprised of five main activities: Mood, Relax, Thoughts, Experiments, and Health. Each activity allows you to reflect on your daily moods and thoughts over time, as well as challenge yourself to face your anxieties head on and push through them. It means that helps people who tend to struggle with stress an anxiety, or more specifically the fear that can bring about those feelings. Pacifica is designed to use its built-in tools to break the cycle of fear at your own pace. You can track your mood, use relaxation audio tools, analyse your thoughts, and take part in daily experiments that help you face your anxiety and work towards eliminating it.
MOOD
The mood tracking feature allows you to rate your daily moods and recognize patterns over time. You will get notifications several times a day, asking“How are you feeling?” to become aware of what was going on in your head. You can add a note explaining why you are feeling a certain way. This can help identify any triggers or scenarios that may lead to certain moods.
HEALTH
The health activity is a way to help you manage all that with seven features to monitor your health on everyday: sleep, exercise, eating, water, caffeine, alcohol, and outdoors. Over time using this feature to identify correlations between these health factors and your levels of stress and anxiety is to find your stress levels are higher on days where you didn’t get enough sleep the night before, or lower on days when you work out in the morning. For example, tracking how much sleep you got, how long you exercises, the quality of your eating, the amount of water you drank and the time you spent doing hobbies. The user can choose other areas of health such as time spent with your partner or with friends or spending time outside.
RELAX
The Relax function is a great way to get into the meditating routine with three relaxation activities: positive visualization, muscle relaxation, and deep breathing. You can also select from a variety of relaxing soundscapes to accompany your activity of choice. This feature is amazing for those times during the day when you feel your anxiety ramp up, or at night when you find it difficult to turn off your brain and fall asleep.
THOUGHT
This function enables the user to voice record their thoughts for that day then pick out the negative and positive thoughts in order to help people work through and process patterns of thought and behavior. Plus, the daily quotes is amazing in getting inspired and setting people’s focus for the day.
EXPERIMENTS
Experiment activity helps you keep track of goals that can help you address your anxiety or depression. Choose one of your goals, identify a small step towards this goal, and then rate how difficult you think it might be to achieve it. Whether or not you get a chance to complete the experiments, simply writing them down and reflecting on the triggers that cause you anxiety throughout the day is useful.
References
Utley, T. 2016, ‘4 Technologies Innovating Mental Health In 2016’, Forbes, viewed 22 August 2016, <http://www.forbes.com/sites/toriutley/2016/01/25/4-technologies-innovating-mental-health-in-2016/#d39fac92cc26>
Christian, A. 2015, ‘Manage Day-To-Day Stress and Anxiety with the Pacifica App’, Office Ninjas, viewed 22 August 2016, <http://officeninjas.com/2015/03/26/manage-day-to-day-stress-and-anxiety-with-the-pacifica-app/>
Image References
Pritchard, T.2015, The Week’s Best Android, iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone Apps, Gizmodo UK, viewed 22 August 2016, <http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/04/the-weeks-best-android-iphone-ipad-and-windows-phone-apps-75/>
Think Pacifica 2015, Manage Day-To-Day Stress and Anxiety with the Pacifica App, viewed 22 August 2016, <http://www.thinkpacifica.com/blog/manage-day-to-day-stress-and-anxiety-with-the-pacifica-app/>
Emergent Practices 
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