How to Practise Mental Fitness in the Smiling Mind App

Let's take a deep-dive into the new Smiling Mind App, with tips and tricks for navigating the new interface, content and features.

Following extensive research and testing, Smiling Mind has created a full, evidence-based model for building mental fitness—your foundation for thriving. Using the app will empower you with the skills you need to build and maintain mental wellbeing through our new Mental Fitness Model.

The app has new content, new features, a whole new look… It’s pretty much a new app (while having roots in mindfulness and positive psychology). 

In this guide, we'll help you: 

• Find new titles of old favourites

• Learn about new features and content labels

• Adjust app settings

• Understand more ways to customise your experience

• Discover new Soundscapes to fall asleep to, and more!

Navigating the new Smiling Mind App

New titles of old favourites

If you can’t find your old favourites in the new app, it may just have a new name! 

We changed some of the session titles to be more descriptive and aligned to the content to support easier exploration. While we’ve retained the vast majority of content in the updated Smiling Mind App, a small number of sessions have been removed to ensure we are sharing the highest quality, evidence-based content. 

Adults sessions:

Kids sessions:

Content and feature labels

There are three types of content in the new Smiling Mind App, designed to help you to Learn, Meditate and Practice mental fitness. The content is also 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. 

Sessions and collections

Collections have been designed by psychologists to help adults and children gain knowledge about mental fitness skills, and build your practise around a specific wellbeing goal or need. Individual sessions are great for freely exploring the app, and you’ll find personalised recommendations on your app homepage to help get you started. 

Session: An individual piece of content (Labelled with 'Learn', 'Meditate' and 'Practice') 

Collection: A curated selection of sessions that can be practised in a particular order to address a focus area, like managing stress. 

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. 

New Smiling Mind settings

Navigate to your app settings by tapping the 'cog' in the top right corner of the home screen. From here, you’ll be able to set your display and voice preferences. You can still easily switch between male and female voices within individual sessions.

• 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!)

Session labels and in-session buttons 

To help you choose the sessions most suited to your needs, we’ve added some labels to each tile:

Within a session, you'll find a range of buttons to help you customise your experience easily: 

How to use the new app features

Explore

The long-awaited, Smiling Mind Search bar is here! You can also filter content based on whether you:

• Want to explore a specific mental fitness skillset

• Are looking for content to suit a specific context

• Have a particular focus you’d like to work on, like managing stress or regulating emotions

To add more structure to the way you search for content, you can:

1. Search 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. Find it with filters

Exploring the over 700 sessions in new Smiling Mind App can be simplified using the new 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.

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

  This routine has been designed for individual practice and offers content suggestions for morning, midday and evening throughout the week.

• Family mental fitness routine

  A routine created for the whole family, which includes recommendations for kids content to support family resilience.

You can customise routines to ensure they fit in with your unique goals and lifestyle. 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:
  By tapping the pencil icon
  
  
  To delete a session from your routine:

• Simply press and hold on that session, and tap the bin icon when it pops up.

To add a session to your routine you can tap 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.

Fitness

In the new 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!

We understand you may feel disappointed about losing your previous streak and progress data within the app. But we hope this will allow you to set new goals and reflect on how you're progressing towards them.

A new, peaceful way to fall asleep

One of the app's most exciting new features is Soundscapes—calming blends of instrumental music and sounds from nature—you can use them for your unguided meditation practice or as peaceful music to fall asleep to. Explore them all, but if you’d like somewhere to get started, one of our personal favourites is  ‘Piano with light rain’.

Curious to learn more?

We’re here to answer all of your questions and provide support as we navigate this evolution together.