iPhone / iPad – Free with in app purchases (£22.99 / $29.99 a month, £299.99 / $299.99 annual).
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New year resolutions often focus on your physical health and personal fitness — cutting the calories, upping the reps, smashing that 5K run barrier. But what about focusing on your mental well being, too?
If you’re looking to give your brain a New Year's detox along with your muscles, the Soaak sound therapy app, available on iPhone, iPad, and as a browser-based service, could give you the lift you need.
According to Soaak, “Five minutes of Soaak has been compared to one hour of meditation, but with greater outcomes.”
The app lets you choose from thirty frequency therapies, playing sounds tuned to help problems including stress, focus, depression and sleep quality, as well as frequencies designed to encourage better creativity, memory recall and even pain alleviation.
Your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of some of the therapies offered (can sound therapy really improve ‘Male Sexual Health’?), but the app does well to make using its frequencies as friction-free as possible. As the sounds can be quite strange, it lets you blend them in with soundtracks from nature and musical compositions, making them a bit more palatable and even supports a ‘dual audio’ mode that allows you to play your own songs or audiobooks alongside the frequencies.
The full mental health picture
Soaak goes beyond sound frequency therapy to offer other sorts of positive mindfulness activities, too. The app offers daily affirmations to set your day and mindset off in a positive direction, as well as letting you record a gratitude journal.
It also offers up 21-day audio programs with clinicians, therapists and influential figures to help guide you towards goals including fitness, dealing with loss and addiction, and more.
In addition, the app can sync with your Apple Watch and Apple Health data to suggest frequencies and programs based on biometric data received from your device. There are also leaderboards, if you want to get competitive about your mindfulness — which seems somewhat beside the point of the app.
With its clinical backing, the Soaak app is unsurprisingly expensive. You’re looking at £22.99 / $29.99 a month to use the service, or an annual subscription price of £299.99 / $299.99. There’s also a ‘VIP Wellness’ program that’s priced at $10,000 that offers 1-to-1 therapy and guidance, but that’s currently sold out. Seeing as Soaak also offers similar therapies at in-person clinics, this is several orders of magnitude more affordable for those that want to give it a try.
