Choosing our New Year’s Resolutions is rather easy. In essence we all have the same aspirations for the future: to be healthier both physically and mentally, to be better persons, to better manage our time and projects or to better manage our finances. Sticking to those resolutions… well, this is the hard part.
Thankfully technology comes to the rescue. Today you can easily find a multitude of apps designed to provide the necessary motivation and help you keep your New Year’s resolutions. No matter if your goal is to eat healthier, be more physically active, save more money or find new ways to relax and relieve stress, there’s an app for that.
Walk More: ActivityTracker
ActivityTracker is a pedometer app for iOS and Android designed to track your daily physical activity. This means it can monitor several metrics, such as your step count, total calorie burn, distance walked or ran, total active time or the flights of stairs climbed. And the great thing about it is that it will do it without draining your phone’s battery. This is due to the fact that it uses the built-in motion sensors instead of GPS to record your movement.
With ActivityTracker you’re always up-to-date with the progress made. The app provides accurate stats about your hour-by-hour, daily, weekly or monthly activity. To motivate you to walk more and improve your overall health, the app enables you to set a personal step target. To avoid putting unnecessary pressure on you, ActivityTracker lets you set a weekly target and shows a daily goal based on that target.
Eat Healthier: Lifesum
If you’re looking to change your eating habits for the better, Lifesum is definitely worth checking. This app places at your disposal everything you need in order to make smart nutritional choices, eat healthier and enjoy a better health. Lifesum provides customized diet plans, healthy recipes, food diary, calorie tracker, hydration tracker and other useful features.
Lifesum lets you know about everything that’s in a food item (calories, fat, protein or carbs) and helps you build a meal plan tailored to your individual needs and based on your health assessment. Depending on your necessities, you can opt for a Scandinavian, Mediterranean, Ketogenic or perhaps fastening plan. The app comes with a social feature, allowing you to connect with other users, share before and after pictures, dieting tips and recipes and encourage one another.
Get Fit: Sworkit
Sworkit is the ideal app if you want to get fit, but don’t really feel like going to the gym for a variety of reasons. Basically with this fitness app you can work out anytime and anywhere. Sworkit places at your disposal an impressive array of exercises and guided video workouts to drop those unwanted pounds, build up muscles, increase your strength and improve your cardio, flexibility and endurance.
This app comes with more than 500 exercises and over 300 workouts that target various parts of your body. The great thing about it is that you have the possibility to customize those workouts based on your needs and fitness level. If you feel like you require even more guidance, Sworkit offers you the option to chat and get advice from a certified personal trainer.
Sleep Better: Sleep Cycle
A good night’s sleep is essential to be able to function properly the following day. In order to know if you’re getting the necessary hours of rest, you need to track your sleep. And this is where Sleep Cycle steps in. This app is designed to monitor the way you rest during the night and help you wake up in the lightest sleep stage, in order to feel refreshed and energized.
The good thing about this app is that you don’t have to place your phone under the pillow in order to analyze your sleep patterns. It’s enough to place it on your nightstand or relatively close on the floor. Sleep Cycle offers two alternatives to record your sleep: it can use either the accelerometer to detect your movements or your phone’s built-in microphone to monitor your breathing.
Train your Brain: Elevate
If you want to keep your mind active, challenge yourself with new obstacles and make improvements in areas that affect your everyday activity, download Elevate ASAP. Elevate is an app particularly developed to help you train your brain. This app comes with a series of fun and challenging games designed to help you improve your concentration, speaking and writing abilities, your math skills, processing speed or memory.
Elevate works by enabling you to play various games that require certain skills. Afterwards it will begin tracking your performance and, after analyzing your results, it will provide you with a customized training plan. This way you’ll be able to acquire new skills and improve the ones that really matter to you. It’s worth mentioning that the app allows you to compare your performance with other users as well.
Meditate: 10% Happier
10% Happier is an award-winning meditation app. There’s no need to worry if you haven’t done this before. The app teaches you the basics of meditation and guides you along the way so you can relieve all the stress and anxiety. For that purpose it places at your disposal a large variety of videos and guided meditations on various topics, such as stress, health, emotions, happiness or parenting.
10% Happier covers other areas as well. For instance, there’s a sleep section available where you can discover relaxing meditations designed to help you fall asleep in a harmonious manner and stay asleep. The app also comes with short stories, wisdom and inspirational audio pieces and quick meditation sessions which you can listen to on the train or during a break. It’s worth mentioning that new content is being uploaded every week.
Do Yoga: Daily Yoga
If you’re looking for new ways to relax, taking up yoga might be a solution. You don’t really need to go to a class, just download Daily Yoga. This is the ideal alternative since the app is able to provide various guided classes for all levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Depending on your goals, you can choose from numerous programs: to completely relax, to better rest at night, to lose weight and so on.
Daily Yoga comes with more than 70 such programs, as well as over 500 guided sessions for yoga, pilates or meditation. In case you don’t know which program may be suitable for you, the app provides a Smart Coach feature that will guide you along the way. Daily Yoga will monitor your daily progress and give you the opportunity to share that progress with other yoga enthusiasts from all over the world.
Save More Money: Mint
Who doesn’t want to spend less on useless things and save money for something that’s really worth it? If you’ve raised your hand, then go ahead and download Mint. Mint is a money management and personal finance tracker developed to help you be more financially responsible and discover clever methods to save money.
Mint provides a complete overview of your finances by gathering everything in one place: your bank account, bills, net worth, expenditure, transactions and so on. This way you can see the exact amounts your spending and how you can save more. Based on the information you enter, the app will provide you with a series of useful financial tips and money-saving opportunities.
Stay Organized: Remember The Milk
Remember The Milk is a great solution if you want to stay organized and get things done in an efficient manner. This is a to-do list app designed to help you become more productive in the new year by properly managing tasks. Basically the app takes the burden of having to remember everything you have to do in a given time.
With Remember The Milk all you have to do is add your tasks and to-do lists. From that point on the app will make sure you won’t forget anything, including buying milk. You can receive notifications about upcoming tasks and events by email, text, Twitter or instant message, you can give certain tasks to others or share your to-do lists. The app also lets you search your tasks and notes and organize them properly using priorities, due dates or tags.
Help Others: ShareTheMeal
One of the nicest things you can do in the new year is help others in need. ShareTheMeal is designed to be the link between you and those less fortunate. This charity app, developed by the United Nations World Food Programme, gives you the possibility to feed a hungry child with a single tap. By donating $0.50 you can provide the necessary meal for a child for one day.
ShareTheMeal enables you to feed hungry children anywhere in the world. Once you’ve made a donation, the app will let you know where exactly your money went and who exactly you managed to help. If you want to become even more involved in the quest to fight world hunger, you can invite your friends and create your own team.
