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Google recently announced the winners of Google Play’s Best of 2021, which looks at the best apps across the world and in India, across categories. And one of the categories seeing extreme growth is health and well-being, including mental health, with apps like Jumping Minds, Evolve, being, SARVA , and Evergreen Club, driving innovations to help people better manage their mental health and wellbeing.

With the onset of COVID-19, the focus is not only on physical health issues but also on mental health. Since anxiety, depression, and burnout are predominant themes in these uncertain times, we decided to pick Evolve from Google Play’s Best of 2021 list for our app review this week. Evolve has been named one of the best apps for personal growth. It has a user rating of 4.6 stars on the Play store.

According to the app makers, Evolve can help users sleep well, deal with depression, overcome anxiety, become more productive, de-stress and improve mental health with the assistance of scientifically proven techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness & Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). 

Straight off, let’s get down to the basics – 

Evolve is a refreshing app, so much so that even the simple act of opening the app has a feel-good factor. As you download and open the app, it opens with soft nature sounds. To start with, you must sign up in the app with an email address. The soft chirping birds and other nature sounds continue to enamour you throughout the login process. The ‘music’ icon on the top-left helps with changing to other sounds and reduce or increase the audio. The home page of the app looks calming, and it is filled with tools and helpful inputs on how to get started with managing your mental health.

The homepage has every essential information yet the app does not look cluttered. Rather, it looks well designed and organised. The page lets you tap and choose a particular focus area – like self, work, relationships, or all.

The middle part of the page has sessions, interactive short therapies based on your personal inputs, courses on bedtime routine, self-care routine for periods of pain, productivity, and other contemporary mental health concerns.

The bottom strip has other features such as the ‘meditate’ button dedicated to meditation tools, the ‘sleep’ button for better quality sleep and an ‘experts’ button to connect you with mental health professionals.

The tools and sessions

The app makers claim that the app’s in-built tools for self-care, for instance meditation, mental health tests, routine planners, prompted journals and self-care motivations, are all built by therapists and life coaches. When we browsed the app, we did feel that the app content is very relevant and designed to solve millennial health issues. The sessions, routines, journals are all quick and short, and offered in bite-sized chapters/ sub-sessions. 

Let’s take the session ‘After a Netflix binge’, as an example. This is a 19-minute audio clip that assists you in getting some sleep after a longish screen time. There are tools like ‘understanding your relationship’, which helps users to explore their relationship needs, pause and reflect on love life, understand what they desire, and discover their own language of love. The module is interactive and broken down into three quizzes in multiple formats, and are complemented with audio and graphics. The quiz modules are very easy to answer, owing to the rating and tap and choose system.

We felt the quiz posed some very relevant questions, and helps you ask yourself the right questions too. The module helps you to understand yourself better and helps you to visualise your perfect relationship. We really loved this session and found it useful, authentic, and complete.

Other features

Evolve has something or the other for everyone. From self-care courses to sleep exercises, journals, guided meditations, calming audios, breathing techniques and other resources to empower you with tips on mental health, self-care, self-discipline, self-love & self-help techniques. There are short daily quizzes to analyse your feelings every day, and even track your progress or journey. The ‘Today’ page on the home screen is like a fully curated routine for your mind. The app also has a ‘learn something today’ feature that comes in a Instagram Story like format. 

Evolve, available on both Android as well as Apple’s App Store, is free to download and use. A subset of the features are free forever, but some content is only available through an optional paid subscription.

The verdict

Evolve has a holistic approach to helping people feel well and get better. The bite-sized interactive self-improvement courses based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) seems really useful and relevant for Genz or GenY users.  The app makers are sure that consistent use of the app can help users become positive, learn how to become more self-aware, overcome low self-esteem, and build self-confidence by the right self-affirmations and introspections. After spending a short while on the app to review it, we did feel the app gives us enough reasons to revisit it.