What’s your perspective on meditation? One thing’s for sure if you’re a newbie meditator — it can be daunting and straight up hard. It’s also often not the type of “hard” we’re used to but the uncomfortable, sit with your thoughts type of hard. The origins of meditation date back to thousands of years ago in many different cultures, which tells you right there that it’s probably pretty beneficial. 

Today, certain apps are really starting to turn meditation and overall mindfulness mainstream again — and I’m all for it. How are they doing this? They’re using modern technology to make it easy, allowing you to start with meditation for very short periods to ease you into it — and they even have targeted meditations specific to your goals. Let’s discuss some of the top meditation apps and how they can be helpful for you. 

Best mindfulness apps

Headspace

This is the first meditation app I was exposed to. From my personal experience using it and from client feedback, I can say that it’s a good gateway to meditating. It’s known for its practicality and individualization, allowing for more of a targeted meditation practice and helping you progress.

Some meditations are generalized, while others are specific to anxiety, compassion, confidence, calm, sleep, body image, and focus, to name a few. They also offer “Headspace for work,” in which your business can collab with Headspace with the goal of less stress, burnout, sick days, and more focus.

If you’re curious about Headspace’s humble beginnings, I encourage you to check out their episode on How I Built This and listen to the story of their quest to make meditation more mainstream and accessible. 

Insight Timer 

If you’re going for sheer numbers and variability, Insight Timer is your best bet. This app has a pretty large database and can be translated into 44 different languages — oh, and it’s free! This has a large variety of different features, including meditation (of course!), sleep stories, breathwork, yoga, journaling, quotes, and a mood check-in.

It’s safe to say it’s a pretty holistic and comprehensive approach to mental health and wellbeing, which I’m all for. They also have a huge reach for corporate partnerships as 75,000 companies around the world use Insight Timer. 

Calm

Calm is another influential and user-friendly meditation app that has changed many lives. They have meditation, specific music for focus or relaxation, programs on mindfulness, lessons on mindful movement, and nature scenes/sounds. All are helpful if you want to connect back to yourself and be more present in everyday life.

Throughout their site, they keep using the fairly recently coined term “mental fitness,” based on the premise that we can train our mind just as we can train our body. 

All in all, meditation apps can be very supportive of your health

In a world where many of us are disconnected from our bodies, this can really help us bring back body and mind awareness. I talk about this all the time, but many of us are “running on stress hormones,” which 100% impacts our physiology.

Meditation is one tool to bring us into the “rest and digest” state — and meditation apps are an easy way to bring this to everyday life. Also, be on the lookout for other new and related apps focusing on breathwork and “emotional fitness,” which can be very complementary to these apps.

No matter what your “why” is for meditating, I encourage you to give these a try and find the right app for you.