How to Practise Mental Fitness in the Smiling Mind App

A practical, step-by-step guide to the Smiling Mind App, with tips to help you find the right content, make the most of features, and discover personalised tools designed just for you.

Are you looking for simple ways to build mental fitness that actually fit your life? The free Smiling Mind App is designed to empower you with the skills you need to build and maintain mental wellbeing through our Mental Fitness Model. Whether you're looking to build overall resilience, manage stress or create better sleep habits, the Smiling Mind App is filled with 700+ meditations, micro-lessons and interactive practices to boost your mental fitness and thrive, anywhere and anytime.

Keep scrolling, or jump in to: 

• Explore the Smiling Mind App
• Session types: Learn, practice and meditate
• Build your practice with Collections and Pathways
  
• Create a routine based on your mental fitness needs
• Discover new Soundscapes to fall asleep to
• Adjust app settings
  
• Download the free Smiling Mind App

Find what you need, when you need it

Whether you're winding down for sleep, managing day-to-day stress, or supporting your child as they navigate big emotions, you can quickly discover what you need using search, filters or categories. Explore over 700 sessions, meditations and activities by title, mental fitness need or age group so you can find the right support, at the right time.

If you have a specific need, content type or skill you want to build, you can discover content by:

1. Searching by keyword

Start searching for content using keywords related to a need or goal you have (like, 'stress' or 'calm'). You can also search by title if you know it.

2. Finding it with filters

Once you type a keyword into the explore bar, select either ‘Kids’, ‘Teens’ or ‘Adults’. Then, use the drop-down filter on the right to choose a content type.

Personalise Sessions to Suit You

Look out for session labels and handy buttons during your practice—they're there to help you navigate at your own pace and make each session work for you.

Within a session, you'll find a range of ways to customise your experience:

Learn, Meditate, and Practice Mental Fitness

There are three types of content in the Smiling Mind App, designed to help you to Learn, Meditate and Practice key mental fitness skills. Everything is mapped to skillsets to support you to: Live Mindfully, Embrace Flexible Thinking, Grow Connections, Act Purposefully and Recharge Your Body.

Learn: Micro-lessons that aim to broaden your knowledge about the different aspects of mental fitness.

Meditate: This is the label used for meditations with guidance to help you achieve calm and clarity.

Practice: Activities to address a particular need. Examples include guided journaling, a card swipe activity or a physical activity. 

Build your practice with Collections and Pathways

Explore curated Collections and Pathways designed by psychologists to help adults and children deepen their understanding of mental fitness skills and build a regular practice. 

You can find some fan favourite collections like the Relationship Toolkit for Kids, Connection with Self (for adults) or find one based on a specific wellbeing goal or need. 

Parents and caregivers can also check out our newest learning Pathways, which contain multiple modules that build upon each other to help manage the mental load, build connections, and recharge energy.

Keep checking for personalised recommendations on your app homepage to find content we think you'll love!

Tip: The ‘Explore’ collections are great for beginning your practice in a specific area, while the ‘Toolkit’ collections build on these learnings. Try to work through collections in order, starting with the session at the top and moving down as you complete them. 

Smiling Mind App Settings

Navigate to your app settings by tapping the 'cog' in the top right corner of the home screen. From here, you can personalise how the app looks and sounds—choose your preferred theme, adjust text size for easier reading, and select a narrator voice that feels right for you.

Customising your experience:

• Choose between light mode and dark mode. ‘Auto’ will simply use your device's existing display settings.

• Set content preferences by age group to automatically filter content based on your preferences.

• Choose between male or female (Note: Some new content has been recorded in only one voice. We’ll be continuing to add and adapt the app’s content offering, including ensuring a diversity of voices!)

Mental fitness tools that fit your life

Build a Routine 

The Routine feature will support you to build daily habits to enhance your wellbeing—now and in the future.

Build a custom mental fitness plan and set reminders for your Routine to fit in with the rest of your life and support achievable habits.

You can get started with one of the pre-built routines, including:

• Beginner mental fitness routine

  Designed for individual practice and offers content suggestions for morning, midday and evening throughout the week.

• Family mental fitness routine

  Created for the whole family, which includes recommendations for both kids and parents to build resilience together.

You can also customise routines as your schedule, unique goals and lifestyle changes. To edit your Routine, tap the pencil icon at the bottom of the screen. From here you can easily:

• Delete a session from your routine by tapping the bin icon
  
• Change the day or time of your session reminder with the pencil icon
  
• Add a session to your routine by tapping the ‘Add to Routine’ button to bring up a search bar and content recommendations for you to choose from. Or, within any session screen, tap the sun icon to set a day and time for that session to be added into your routine.

Track Your Mental Fitness Progress

In the Fitness tab, you can see how you're tracking. Review the skillsets you've engaged with, how often you're practising, and visualise your moods over time. Reflecting on your progress is an important part of creating healthy habits, and it's rewarding to see progress you're making!

A new, peaceful way to fall asleep

One of Smiling Mind's newest additions are Soundscapes—calming blends of instrumental music and sounds from nature—you can use them for your unguided meditation practice, background music while you do your chores or as peaceful music to unwind.

If you’d like a cosy place to start, we love easing into sleep with ‘Piano with light rain’.

Start building your mental fitness

For over 12 years, Smiling Mind has been helping people build the skills they need for mental wellbeing. Whether you're just starting out or deepening an existing mental fitness practice, the Smiling Mind App gives you practical tools you can use anytime, anywhere. And it's completely free, because we believe everyone should have access to the resources they need for mental wellbeing.

Ready to get started?