According to Newsweek, about 42.5 million Americans suffer from mental health issues. And often, many people don’t know where to turn. But if you’re struggling with mental health issues, Pacifica is the app for you.

What is Pacifica?

Founded in 2014, in a building in San Francisco, CA, Pacifica is an app that helps people with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a wide variety of other issues. Pacifica is based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT. According to pyschologytoday.com, “Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that treats problems and boosts happiness by modifying dysfunctional emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.”

Where can you download Pacifica?

Pacifica is free to download. You can use Pacifica on your computer and or laptop. Or, if you’re always on the go, you can also download Pacifica on your phone, tablet, or other mobile devices. You can download Pacifica in the App Store and Google Play Store for free.

Features

Mood

One feature that Pacifica allows you to do is to write a mood entry. It gives you a scale where you can say if you’re great, very good, good, okay, not good, bad, or awful.

Below that there are boxes where you can pick an emotion that you’re feeling. Or even several emotions. And if an emotion you’re feeling isn’t listed, you can type it in.

However, probably my favorite part is the text box they provide you so that you can go more depth about how you’re feeling. You can use it to write about what made you feel a certain emotion, or what happened in the day in general. I find this feature incredibly helpful because I like to write a lot. And writing our emotions and reading them out loud may help us better understand them.

Health

The health section allows you to track healthy habits in which you do from day to day. For example, you can track if your eating was poor, or if you meditated, or if exercised that day. I find this feature to be almost like a game. The more you do healthy habits, the better your progress chart will look. And wanting to make your progress chart look as good as possible can help motivate you to do better.

Relax

Everyone has rough days where you feel angry, or sad, or overwhelmed, and you need to take a break so we can breathe. Pacifica’s relax feature provides users with a plethora of meditation and deep breathing activities. These activities are designed to help you calm down and become less anxious.

Also, some of the activities are designed to be used during specific social situations. Like public speaking or going on a plane.

However, the problem is, very few of the activities are free. Most of them you’d have pay for. However, the ones that are free are really good nonetheless. Additionally, once a day, Pacifica will allow you to unlock one of the premium activities for free. So despite its flaws, this feature is definitely worth using.

Progress

One of the main purposes of Pacifica is seeing how you improve over time. The progress feature basically gives you an outline of all the activities you’ve completed, all the goals you’ve accomplished, and all the progress you’ve made whilst using the app. Seeing my personal growth over time raises my self-esteem. And that’s probably how others feel when they see their own personal growth. Because when one sees how much they’ve grown, they’re more inclined to keep improving. So overall, I’d say that this is probably Pacifica’s greatest tool.

Community

Frequently when people go through depression or other mental health issues, they feel like they’re alone or they have no one to turn to. However, Pacifica’s community feature will give you, well, a sense of community.

In the community section, you can share what you’re grateful for, share inspirational quotes, problems with your relationship, stress at school, or even books and YouTube videos. There’s something for everyone which is what I absolutely love about this feature.

However, probably my favorite part of the community feature is the group chats you can join or create. Like say for example if you have PTSD or suffer from bipolar disorder, or if you’re in the LGBT community, you can join or create a group chat that’s centered around that. This is incredibly helpful because you can talk specifically to other people who have similar issues to yourself.

Thoughts

According to the Pacifica website, “Pacifica’s Thoughts tools help you to understand your thinking patterns, challenge the thoughts contributing to your anxiety, and develop more balanced perspectives.”

For example, if you’re going through a breakup, or you had an argument with your parents, or you didn’t get a raise at work, you can use the Thoughts tool to calm down. It allows you to run through the situation, and how that situation made you feel. Often times when we become depressed, or overwhelmed, we might be confused on why we’re feeling that way. So by using the Thoughts feature in order to identify where your feelings are coming from, you can better understand your feelings and work through them.

Hope

When battling depression or other mental health issues, many people often lose sight of what they’re working towards. The hope board is a section that you can fill with a bunch of things that give you hope. Like for example, you can write down a quote that inspires you. You can insert pictures of friends, family, or people who support you. This section is really useful for staying track and reminding myself of what I’m fighting for.

Therapist

Although Pacifica is an incredibly helpful resource when it comes to mental health, seeing an actual therapist or clinician is still very important. But that doesn’t you can’t use both at the same time. Pacifica allows you to share the information from your account with your clinician. Your clinician can see how you’re doing and if you’re on the right track or not. So not only is it helping you, it’s also helping your therapist.

Pricing

As I stated before, the only downside that Pacifica has is that you need to pay in order to gain full access to the app. Although I myself haven’t paid for a subscription, I think it would be worth it. Additionally, a subscription isn’t that expensive. Monthly, you only have to pay $5.99. Which is definitely cheaper than what you pay for Netflix. And yearly, you’re only paying $2.99 per month with $35.99 being the total. So although you have to pay, Pacifica is quite affordable.

Conclusion

Overall, Pacifica is an app in which I recommend that anyone going through a tough time should use. I’ve been using it for the past two years, and it’s really helped me. Even if you don’t pay for a subscription (which I haven’t), you can still utilize a lot of the features in which the app provides you with. As I stated before, Pacifica is free in the App Store and Google Play Store so go download it today.