If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll want to know about these top self-help apps. They provide additional tools and shortcuts for helping you track and maintain your personal growth. They aren’t magic and won’t create instant transformation, but like most useful tools, they are simple and straightforward. That means they are also fun and easy to use, and especially useful for the electronically-minded.

I first read about some of these at Mashable, and then researched further to find out what real people thought of them. Here they are in no particular order:

HappyTapper has 3 self-help apps:

Gratitude Journal – this works like an electronic pad. Everyday (or however often you want) you write/text in the top 5 things you’re grateful for. You can also add photos to your entries – to to spice up the bulleted list – add inspirational quotes, and even rate your day. Plus you can password protect your list, email it to yourself, and search previous entries. Price: $0.99

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Little Buddha - Just rub Buddha’s belly to access over 39,000 inspirational quotes. You can search the quotes by keyword, add your own quotes, and share them with your friends via twitter, facebook, and email.
Price $0.99

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Vision Board – the authors describe it as a “sacred place in which you define your hopes, goals, and dreams.”
You can pick from the 7 different board themes/styles and then start adding your inspirational photos, quotes, etc. It comes with sticky notes, star labels, torn white paper, and a few other graphics to give it pizzaz. It looks pretty cool. (I’m more of a “create it with my hands” kind of gal, but I can definitely see the appeal of having it right on your phone.)
Price $0.99

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Live Happy - Live Happy is a positive psychology iPhone app developed by Signal Patterns’ SP Labs research team together with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of the book The How of Happiness and professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. It’s a whole mobile happiness boosting program based on principles of positive psychology – including evaluating goals based on her system, keeping track of happy days, and a way to remember random acts of kindness. It also includes a personality analysis and science of happiness information.

Price $0.99

And just to make you feel even better about it, they are donating a portion of every app sale to the Live Your Life Well  program, a public education campaign (launched by the non-profit Mental Health America) dedicated to helping people combat stress and promote well being.

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My Thoughts – If we become what we think about all day long (Earl Nightingale), then it’s a good idea to monitor your thoughts. When you change your thoughts, you change your destiny. Use MyThoughts+ to focus your thoughts on what you most desire.

This app includes 0ver a thousand affirmations, multiple categories of thoughts, plus lots of customizable features, such as 9 different background images (or use your own), the ability to change font, text size and color, as well as adding your own music, just to make it a multi-sensory experience.
Price: $0.99, or free version with limited options.

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That’s just a few of the many, many self-help apps. And, of course, they are just for the iPhone. We Droid users will have to wait a bit for the library of apps to grow.

Do you have a favorite self-help app you use? If so, let us know – leave a comment below and tell us what it is and how you use it.