Helpful apps for those living with ME/CFS (as recommended by our patients)
Through our experience of Perrin Technique and treating patients living with ME/CFS, we have come to appreciate how technology can play a vital role in recovery. It can help patients to manage their condition in a more productive way as well as providing an easy way to track and monitor symptoms, facilitating communication with medical professionals but also allow us to notice trends.
Here are the app’s that patients of our have found helpful, hopefully you will to!
A customisable health tracker with unique stats and insights.
This app allows you to keep track of your mood, symptoms, daily activities and other health factors such as sleep, medication, exercise and food diary. You can even automatically sync your steps, heart rate, blood pressure, weight, and more.
At Harper Road Osteopaths we have noticed that one of the benefits of using this app is allowing patients to notice trends in symptoms. With any chronic illness, improvement tends to happen over a longer period of time sometimes making it difficult to notice. By using an app to track your symptoms you can see how your experience of your condition changes over time.
An app that enables you to record and store positive affirmations in your own voice to help boost your mood and self-esteem.
“Daily affirmations can help you to banish negative or unhelpful thoughts and build a more positive mindset. ThinkUp provides a range of affirmations tailored to different needs including sleep, stress relief and relationships. Affirmations can be played with music to aid with sleep and relaxation, and you can create your own to make them more personal to you.” (ThinkUp)
Chronic illness is hard and will inevitably involve some rocky phases. No one can be expected to be positive and motivated all the time. Through recording your own positive affirmations, you can tailor-make the recordings to suit you and what you feel you need to hear. Try giving yourself the advice you would give a friend who was in your position. Remind yourself that, “you’re doing the best that you can” and “it’s ok to have days where you don’t feel positive all the time”. This will give you the reassurance you need to focus on being being kind to yourself during this difficult time.
Calm is an app for sleep and meditation aiming to help improve sleep, lower stress and reduce anxiety.
Calm is a useful app for sleep, with relaxing stories aiming to help you drift off and send you back to sleep if you wake up in the middle of the night.
By far one of the most common symptoms our patients with ME/CFS complain of is difficult getting to sleep or staying asleep. Calm can help you to get into the right head-space for sleep and provide some comfort in the middle of the night when your mind is whirring.
Similar to Calm, Headspace is an app for sleep and meditation aiming to help improve sleep, lower stress and reduce anxiety.
In our opinion Headspace trumps Calm when it comes to guided meditations and helping you to get into a state of relaxation.
Perrin Technique focuses on taking the load off of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS, or “fight of flight response”) and engaging the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS, or “rest and digest response”). If the PNS is active, the SNS is inhibited. One of the easiest ways to do this is with mindfulness meditation and focussing on the breath, which we think Headspace is great for.
The benefits of these apps are not just limited to those living with ME/CFS. All of us stand to gain from having tools to reduce stress and anxiety, whether you live with a long term illness or find it difficult to manage stress or negative thoughts.
Perrin Technique isn’t just limited to what happens during a treatment session. We provide home exercises and tips for continuing the benefits of treatment in your own time. If you’re interested in finding out more about Perrin Technique, please click here or contact us at harperroadosteopaths@gmail.com for further information.