Track your health stats with a click of a button

In a saturated online world of differing (and sometimes opposing) advice, staying on top of our health can feel like a full-time job. Thankfully, smartphone apps are enabling us to understand our bodies in ways that were once unimaginable.

Gone are the days of guessing how many hours you slept or how many steps you’ve taken.

Whether it’s tracking your heart rate or increasing the nutrients in your diet, here are some of the smartphone apps providing you with detailed insights and personal advice to improve your overall health outcomes.

Most apps are free to download, but you only have access to the most basic features. Many apps have a paid version, and offer in-app purchases granting you access to more features. To use an example, Headspace is €57.99 per year and Strava costs between €7.99 to €10.99 per month.

Flo Period and Pregnancy Tracker

Your mum has told you to track your periods since forever, yet here you are again looking at the calendar trying to remember when was the last one. Was it two weeks ago or three? Flo, the world’s leading period and pregnancy tracker, takes the mental gymnastics out of period tracking.

The main feature of the app is the tracker where you can log your period and symptoms, and this is included in the free version. The paid version offers a much more rounded experience, not only helping you to stay on top of your menstrual cycle, but also offering access to resources, articles and expert-led advice.

Try Dry

Putting a curb on your alcohol intake can quickly become overwhelming without a clear way to track your efforts and stay accountable. The official app of the Dry January challenge, Try Dry, can help you to take control of your drinking in a consistent manner. Unlike many sobriety apps, the beauty of Try Dry is that it works brilliantly if you don’t want to give up drink, but simply want to be more aware of your alcohol intake.

The app is very simple to use, you log your alcoholic drinking on a colour-coded calendar (yellow for staying dry, grey for planned drinking and black for unplanned drinking). As the calendar accrues with colour, you get a visual insight into your drinking patterns over a period of time. Keeping track can be as simple as clicking ‘I had a drink’ or you can provide further detail on what kind of drink, how many units and the price.

Headspace: Meditation and Sleep

Do you feel like your brain is always on and it’s impossible to switch off? You sit down and try to unwind but before you know it, your mind is racing with thoughts like what’s for dinner? Who is doing the school run? Headspace is an app that allows you to make time for yourself even in the busiest of days.

The app has hundreds of meditations for everything from anxiety, stress, sleep, productivity, or gratitude, all aimed to help you focus on the present. In the paid version of the app, there are breathing exercises, daily reminders, structured meditation plans, one-to-ones with experts and sleepcasts to help you doze off. There are also workout videos for mindful movement, including cardio, dance and yoga.

Runna

You may have started the year with the best intentions to take up running, but having no concrete plan is stopping you from getting out the door. Runna is an app designed to keep you on track (both literally and figuratively) and the app thinks of itself as a personal running coach and accountability partner.

Runna builds you a highly tailored and individual running programme, with a variety of runs from interval sprints to hill training and strength training videos to stop exercise from becoming boring.

The app also offers tips from professionals for stretching and nutrition on rest days so you don’t overdo it.

If you want to get active this year, Runna can build you a comprehensive running programme that you can start and stick to.

Sleep Cycle: Sleep Tracker

One of the best things we can do for our health is get a handle on our sleep. Like Macbeth – who does murder sleep – it feels like restless nights where we wake up groggy the following morning rob us of our mental peace and clarity. Sleep Cycle is a personal sleep tracker app with a smart alarm clock to help you get a good night’s rest and wake you up at the optimal moment in your sleep cycle.

The premium service has a lot of features to analyse and improve your sleep, including a snore recorder, sleep recorder and sleep sounds like soundscapes and bedtime stories. One drawback is that the device has to be kept by the bedside to track all of the above, which goes against the advice to keep all electronic devices out of the bedroom.

Forest: Focus for Productivity

When we think about our health, we should not overlook cultivating qualities like motivation, discipline and focus that are part of that broader picture of wellness. Mental clarity and concentration is a big part of being healthy and also a part of combatting ‘brain rot’ – that state of mental fatigue that occurs after you’ve scrolled mindlessly on your phone and your brain cells have numbed, dropped off and died.

With Forest, you plant a virtual tree for the amount of time that you want to stay focused and your tree grows in the allotted time. If you leave early, the app warns that you will have dead trees in your forest - something nobody wants!

Strava

If you are someone who needs to share their physical activity with others to keep yourself motivated and accountable, then Strava is the fitness app for you. Strava markets itself as an app that makes fitness tracking social. You can record everything from runs to swims to cycle rides and share it with friends who can give you ‘kudos’ and celebrate your achievements with you.

The paid version of the app gives you premium features, like discovering and creating new routes, and more data analytics about your movement to help you improve over time.

Yuka

The food shop on a Saturday is no longer a case of popping items into your trolley and moving on. Now, it has become a mammoth of a task, with incomprehensible ingredient lists that you can’t pronounce, let alone recognise. The kids are getting restless in the aisle as you weigh up whether ‘low fat’ trumps ‘reduced fat’ or if ‘no added sugar’ means sugar-free.

The food and cosmetic scanner, Yuka, removes the guess work out of food shopping, enabling you to quickly scan products to evaluate their impact on your health. Yuka uses a simple colour code to inform you of the product’s impact: excellent, good, mediocre, or poor. You can access an information page for each product to give you more detail on what is behind its shiny label.

Dr John Francis Leader, also known as JFL, is a cognitive scientist and chartered psychologist with the Psychological Society of Ireland focusing on the intersection of psychology and technology.

“What is really important is being able to integrate apps in your day-to-day life,” says Dr Leader. “The first thing is clarifying what are you trying to achieve but the other thing is this kind of stylistic or narrative bit. Even if technically the app does what you want, you just might not resonate with it. Sometimes it’s the voice of the person that guides you in a meditation or just the user interface. You could have the best methodology in the world but if you don’t gel with it, you won’t use it.”

Knowing if you like an app can only come from testing it out, he recommends trying an app for three months and then reviewing how often you use it to see if you should keep it, cancel or try another one.