The Best Wellbeing Apps for Busy Leaders

Your phone can be one of the biggest sources of distraction and stress in your working day. Used differently, it can also become a surprisingly useful tool for protecting your wellbeing.

Leadership rarely comes with much genuine downtime. Emails arrive before the working day has started, messages continue after it has supposedly finished and there is nearly always something else requiring a decision. Even when you’re technically not working, mentally switching off can be considerably harder.

The answer probably isn’t downloading another 20 apps and giving yourself another collection of notifications to manage. However, choosing one or two tools that solve a particular problem, whether that’s sleep, stress, distraction, an overloaded mind or finding a few minutes of calm can genuinely help.

We’ve selected some of the most useful apps for busy leaders who want technology to give them a little more breathing room rather than demand even more of their attention.

Headspace — for creating a little space in your head

Headspace is one of the best-known mindfulness and meditation apps, offering guided meditation alongside resources focused on areas including stress, sleep and mental wellbeing. The platform says its library includes more than 1,000 guided meditations, expert-led exercises, courses and skill-building resources.

For leaders, the attraction isn’t necessarily becoming someone who meditates for an hour every morning. It’s having something available when your head is still replaying a difficult meeting at 10pm or when you have ten minutes between calls and need to reset before walking into the next conversation. Short, guided sessions can make mindfulness feel considerably more achievable for people who don’t naturally see themselves sitting silently with their thoughts for long periods.

Best for: Leaders who struggle to mentally switch off.

Calm — for sleep and winding down

When work follows you home mentally, getting into bed doesn’t necessarily mean your working day has ended. Calm combines meditation and mindfulness content with a substantial focus on sleep, including its well-known Sleep Stories, alongside breathing exercises, music and relaxation content.

That makes it particularly useful for leaders whose biggest wellbeing problem happens at the end of the day. If your body has gone to bed while your brain is still conducting tomorrow’s meetings, creating some kind of transition between work and sleep can be valuable. Calm isn’t going to remove the things you’re responsible for, but it may help create a better boundary between dealing with them and trying to get some rest.

Best for: Leaders whose brain refuses to clock off at bedtime.

Day One — for getting thoughts out of your head

Journalling can sound like one of those habits everybody recommends and very few busy people actually maintain. Day One makes the process considerably easier by providing a private digital journal that can include written entries alongside photos, audio and other content. It also offers security features including end-to-end encryption, passcodes and biometric protection.

For leaders, journalling doesn’t need to mean writing several pages about your feelings every evening. It could simply be five minutes recording what happened that day, something you’re worried about, what went well or a decision you need to think through. When your brain is trying to hold dozens of unfinished thoughts simultaneously, putting some of them somewhere else can be surprisingly helpful.

Best for: Leaders with too much going around in their heads.

Insight Timer — for meditation without necessarily committing to another big subscription

If you’d like to try meditation but aren’t sure you want another monthly subscription immediately, Insight Timer is worth exploring. It offers a large library of guided meditations, talks, sleep content and music, with substantial content available free alongside paid options.

The sheer amount of content means it can take a little exploration to find the teachers and styles you like, but it also gives you plenty of choice. For a leader who simply wants to experiment with five or ten minutes of meditation before work, after a stressful day or between meetings, it provides a relatively accessible starting point.

Best for: Leaders who want to experiment with mindfulness before spending heavily on it.

Freedom — for protecting your attention

Not every wellbeing app needs to involve meditation. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is stop yourself opening the same distracting website for the fifteenth time while trying to concentrate.

Freedom is designed to block distracting apps and websites across devices, allowing users to create scheduled focus sessions and block the things most likely to pull their attention away. That can be useful for leaders because constant digital interruption doesn’t just affect productivity; it can create a working day where your brain never gets the opportunity to concentrate properly on one thing.

Creating an hour where news sites, social media or other habitual distractions simply aren’t available can provide something increasingly rare in leadership: uninterrupted thinking time.

Best for: Leaders whose attention is constantly being pulled in different directions.

Todoist — for taking some of the workload out of your memory

There is a particular kind of mental exhaustion that comes from trying to remember everything. Send that email. Call that person. Review that document. Book that appointment. Follow up with somebody next Thursday. Pick something up on the way home.

Task-management tools such as Todoist aren’t wellbeing apps in the traditional sense, but used properly they can reduce the amount of information you’re asking your brain to hold onto throughout the day. The objective shouldn’t be to create the world’s most impressive to-do list. It’s to build enough trust in your system that your brain doesn’t feel responsible for reminding you about everything every five minutes.

There is an important warning here, though: don’t turn organising your work into another job. If maintaining your productivity system takes more time than completing the tasks inside it, something has gone wrong.

Best for: Leaders carrying an enormous mental to-do list.

Your phone already has wellbeing tools too

Before downloading anything, it’s worth looking at what your phone can already do. Modern smartphones include tools that can track screen time, restrict particular apps, reduce notifications and create periods where only selected people or applications can interrupt you.

For leaders, one of the simplest wellbeing improvements may be deciding that you don’t actually need to know about every email, message, news alert and social media notification at the precise second it happens. Removing unnecessary notifications can make your phone feel much less like a member of staff who interrupts every 90 seconds to tell you something that could easily have waited.

Best for: Everyone who picks up their phone to check one thing and emerges 25 minutes later wondering what happened.

Don’t turn wellbeing into another target

There is a slight irony in using technology to escape the pressure created by technology, and downloading five wellbeing apps at once probably isn’t going to make anybody feel calmer. You don’t need a perfect meditation streak, a flawless sleep score or another dashboard telling you that you’ve failed to achieve your wellbeing goals this week.

Choose the problem first, then choose the technology. If you’re struggling to switch off, try something designed around meditation or sleep. If your mind feels overloaded, experiment with journalling or a simple task system. If distraction is the problem, start by blocking some of the things demanding your attention.

The best wellbeing app isn’t necessarily the one with the most features. It’s the one that quietly makes your day a little easier, and perhaps helps you put the phone down altogether.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.