The Best Meditation Apps to Help You Find Your Zen
You no longer need to travel to find your teacher on a mountaintop. Today, you can have your guru in your pocket with meditation and mindfulness apps.
It’s ironic. While our smartphones are our main source of distraction, mobile mindfulness and meditation apps can be very effective in helping us achieve the peace we seek. Although they have recently flooded the market, only a few are worth it. We tested some of the best apps and found the best mindfulness and meditation apps.
What is meditation?
Meditation is a practice that has been around for hundreds of years. Originally, it was a spiritual and religious practice of Buddhism and Hinduism. Meditation also improves health and well-being, trains breathing, concentration, and mindfulness.
You may be anxious and stressed, or you may be constantly trying to calm yourself down with logic. Meditation, with its various techniques and breathing exercises, can help you break free from your habitual thought patterns.
Best Meditation Apps Compared
1. Headspace
Headspace is introducing its Take 10 program, a 10-day guided meditation taught by Andy Puddicombe, a former Tibetan monk and current mindfulness advocate and meditation teacher. Andy’s meditations offer simple, 10-minute daily sessions that can help anyone develop a habit of relaxation through thought-provoking metaphors and simple, easy-to-understand instructions.
The first 10 days go by quickly, and then you’re invited to subscribe for $12.99 per month or $94.99 per year. The good news is, you’re not alone. The fun buddy feature lets you sync with your friend within the app and encourage each other to reach nirvana.
2. Omvana
The biggest difference with Omvana is that the app allows you to fully customize your meditation experience. The app offers a mixing console that lets you combine your favorite guided meditations, narrated lessons, and inspiring talks with thousands of high-quality audio recordings and ambient background sounds. You can even upload your voice and mix it with any of their recorded songs to create your own meditations and share them with others. Isn’t that great?
The app also includes free starter meditations. It gives you access to the Omvana store, where you can purchase thousands of different meditation songs, ranging from three minutes to an hour long, on hundreds of other topics, for less than $1.80.
3. Calm
Like Headspace, Calm offers a free seven-day guided meditation class, followed by a monthly subscription for $12.99 or an annual subscription for $59.99. Once you become a paying user, you’ll unlock a 21-day wellness plan and a week of bedtime stories to help you sleep better every night, plus over 50 guided meditations and bedtime stories to help you deal with anxiety and stress. Focus, improve breathing, and more.
Individual sessions last from 2 to 20 minutes, and countless unguided sessions immerse the listener in the sounds of rain, jungle birdsong, campfires, and more that make this app ideal for those who want to get a little more sleep. Name:
4. Simple Habit
Simple Habit is a mindfulness and mental health app designed for fast-paced people, especially those who want to incorporate wellness into their busy days. The app offers over 2,000 short meditations and audio therapy sessions that you can use to strengthen your mind, gain flexibility, or improve focus. There are even more sessions for specific purposes, such as meditation for children or focused sounds for stressful situations or emergencies. One of the best things about the app is that the content is created by psychology and health experts.
Simple Habit is priced on a “Habit’sium” basis, which means that most of the features are free, but to unlock some meditations or sounds, you’ll need to pay for a premium subscription ($89.99/year, $11.99/month, or $299.99 for life).
5. Buddhify
Buddhify is for those who have always wanted to start meditating but didn’t know where to start. The app’s rainbow-colored rotating indicator asks you what you’re doing right now, then suggests a series of meditations that are tailored to your situation and can be done at that moment. Are you trying to sleep? Are you spending unproductive time online? Or are you dealing with difficult emotions? They have something for every situation, and with over 80 different meditation tracks to choose from,
6. Insight Timer
Insight Timer is a meditation app full of surprises. It’s perfect for both amateur and professional meditators, with over 100,000 guided meditations to suit any level of practice. This free app offers a lot of flexibility and features, including a customizable meditation timer and the ability to track your progress with milestones and statistics. Insight Timer’s interface is modern and engaging.
One of the most exciting features of Insight Timer is the ability to join a community of meditators. With Insight Timer, you can improve your breathing, relaxation, and sleep, join groups, discuss spiritual topics, read poetry, practice transcendental meditation, and much more.
7. Smiling Mindmindling Mind is an AMindalianMind-profit organization working to make mindfulness meditation accessible to everyone. Their free is a little different than the others on this list because psychologists and meditation educators originally designed it for people as young as seven. Content is categorized by age group, with specific meditations for 7-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-18, and adults. Even for kids who shy away from the idea of meditation, Smiling Mind is a great place to start if they’re struggling with emotions, anxiety, or insecurity. The tour guide’s funny Australian accent doesn’t help the attendance either.
8. The Mindfulness App
The Mindfulness app offers everything from multi-hour meditations with influential teachers ranging from 3 to 30 minutes, personalized one-on-one meditations with guided presentations and callbacks, insights to help you stay on track, and optional daily reminders to free up time for your meditation practice. The app also has a unique timer that displays a 360-degree circle of slowly moving dots instead of numbers, helping you focus on the moment.
Like the other apps on this list, there’s a one-month introductory period to learn everything the app has to offer, which is plenty of time to explore. If you decide to go all-in after that month, a monthly subscription will cost $9.99, or just $59.99 annually.
9. Healthy Minds Program
The Healthy Minds Program features a scientifically proven process. The app was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a neuroscience approach. Healthy Minds offers meditations, shorter sessions, and a curriculum to track progress and build long-term skills. You can also reflect on your progress and see the state of your health and learning. Ultimately, Healthy Minds focuses on four core concepts of your wellness practice: awareness, connection, self-observation, and purpose.
The Healthy Minds app is completely free and is part of the program’s mission to help people heal and grow through mindfulness. Healthy Minds Innovations is a nonprofit organization funded by donations.
10. Breathe
Breathe focuses on offering meditations that are adaptable to any weather and time of day. With the app, you can develop the habit of incorporating these habits into your daily routine. You can answer questions through the My Life Kit to help the app better support you, start listening to a variety of super-specific voices and meditations, or participate in master classes with experts. Breethe’s offerings are creative and practical.
You can sign up for a 14-day free trial of Breethe; the app costs $12.99 per month. The most competitive pricing plan is a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of $170.00.
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Benefits of meditation
Meditation is known to reduce stress in those who practice it. It can also significantly increase self-esteem and inner peace, and is an active tool for combating neurological and mental health problems. Here is a list of some of the benefits of meditation.
- Anxiety control
- Pain control
- Improved emotional health
- Helps with problem solving
- Beneficial for sleep quality
- Reduces attention span
- Reverses present-centered attention
- Reduces resting heart rate
- Stabilizes blood pressure
- Minimizes side effects of attention deficit disorder, cancer, heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, and migraines
- Improves thinking and cognitive skills
- Reduces age-related memory loss
- Helps build self-esteem and kindness
- Prevents addictive behaviors
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Important Meditation App Features
Beginner courses
If you’re new to meditation, look for an app that offers beginner’s courses to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Even if you’re not experienced or haven’t enjoyed previous apps, beginner’s courses will allow you to open the app and learn that simple habits are acquired gradually.
Number and range of meditation options
When choosing the best meditation app, consider the different types of meditation you want to practice. Meditation newbies may be drawn to guided sessions. You can try out Transcendental Meditation or Loving Kindness Meditation practices as you progress. Most importantly, you can meditate at your own pace, according to your preferences.
Clear curriculum
Meditation requires discipline. With a clear study plan, reasonable goals, and incentives, an app can keep you meditating longer. A well-designed plan will allow you to see results.
Well-designed platform
There’s no reason why a meditation app should be clunky or difficult to use these days. Meditation is about reaching a higher level of mindfulness without stress. A streamlined interface should reduce any additional stress or distractions and allow you to focus on the task at hand.
Reasonable trial periods
The easiest way to get started meditating is to try out a good app of your choice. A free trial, free version, or free meditation can help you get to know the goings-on and see which meditation schedule or program works best for you.
Downloadable meditations
It’s great to have everything you need in one app, whether online or offline. If you can download your meditations through the app, you can set up a meditation studio anywhere in the world, even in the most remote locations.
