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Finding motivation to pursue your goals isn’t always easy, especially if you’re struggling with stress or negativity. But inspiration can come from surprising places — including the palm of your hand.
Today’s motivation apps are designed to inspire you to keep moving forward with positive affirmations, tips, and insights. We rounded up the year’s best apps and chose winners based on their content, overall reliability, and user reviews.
iPhone rating: 4.8 stars
Android rating: 4.5 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Find the motivation and positive mindset you need to succeed with daily encouragement. This app is designed to inspire you with positive affirmations and self-talk — a proven technique to make your mind work for you. Choose the ones that resonate with your goals and learn how to reduce negative self-talk now.
Android rating: 4.5 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
The Fabulous app is more than a habit tracker. This well-rounded, science-based app will motivate you across the board by helping you build life-changing habits. Features include an expansive library to help you improve productivity and focus, integrated health sessions for meditation and relaxation, and more.
iPhone rating: 4.8 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Motivate’s goal is to help you make the first steps toward a more driven, focused, inspired life. The app features thousands of handpicked motivational videos from mentors around the world. Use the customizable notifications to build your daily habit and start discovering what works for you.
iPhone rating: 4.9 stars
Android rating: 4.5 stars
Price: $1.99 on iPhone; free on Android
The Forest app offers an innovative approach to help you put down your phone and overcome distractions. Use the app to turn your focused moments into a lush forest by creating more positive habits. It all starts with a seed.
iPhone rating: 4.8 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Designed as a smart goal tracker, this user-friendly and beautifully designed app will help you monitor anything. Keep your goals, habits, and routines together, all in one simple to-do list. Features include a powerful dashboard, reminders, charts, customizable target dates, and so much more.
iPhone rating: 4.7 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Just need a simple app where you can jot down your thoughts and feelings and see how they change over time? This app lets you capture each day with an icon representing an emotion and write some simple notes to keep track of all the positive (and even negative) things that happen. This can help you remember all the opportunities for happiness and growth you’ve had and stay motivated to keep working toward your goals.
iPhone rating: 4.0 stars
Android rating: 4.3 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Forming steady, consistent habits is hard to do. But you know what’s not hard? Playing video games. By turning your life into a sort of role-playing game, this app can help you build a routine. It assigns you a custom character avatar, and when you achieve your designated goals, to-do list items, and desired habits, you can level up and unlock rewards like equipment, skills, and quests.
iPhone rating: 4.4 stars
Android rating: 3.9 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
One of the hardest parts of getting organized is organizing your thoughts and your to-do lists well enough to feel confident that you’re making progress. MindMeister lets you develop numerous custom mind maps that can help show the visual connection between your thoughts, goals, tasks, and custom notes so that you can dive deeper into each item. You can also create folders and categorize your mind maps by topic and assign colors to make it easier to keep track of everything.
iPhone rating: 4.8 stars
Android rating: 4.8 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Quotes can seem kind of cheesy sometimes, but the right quote at the right time can give you the boost you need to get whatever’s on your mind done and off your to-do list. This app contains thousands of quotes for any time, place, or mood, including sadness, focus, friendship, studying, and much more. You can also categorize quotes in your own custom folders and save your favorites.
iPhone rating: 4.9 stars
Android rating: 4.6 stars
Price: Free
Need a little reminder to keep your head up? Always Positive has a quote to keep you feeling your best and help you change negative habits around your self-talk and thinking. Some quotes come from the usual sources, such as historical figures, though there’s a wide variety of original quotes from users of the app that you can share with others. And it doesn’t just end there. This app also contains user-shared recipes, projects, and many other original submissions that keep the app community interesting and inspiring.
iPhone rating: 4.8 stars
Android rating: 4.7 stars
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Taking the extra step to choose to receive positive affirmations throughout your day can be a surprisingly moving experience. This app lets you set up your own daily positive affirmation reminders as notifications and has a big list of topical affirmations to choose from for any type of inspiration or mood you want to achieve.
If you want to nominate an app for this list, email us at nominations@healthline.com.
