Have you ever wished yourself away for a moment to a beautiful beach, a forest clearing, or a mountaintop? Our surroundings have a significant impact on our mental well-being. Immersing yourself in nature has a beneficial effect on your stress levels and your ability to think clearly, sleep well, and be more clear-headed and productive.

However, as it is not always possible in a busy lifestyle to escape to nature, it is essential to seek out other ways to find peace. Enter Portal.

What is Portal?

Portal is an app for iPhone and iPad that's designed to bottle up the essence of the world’s most extraordinary locations and make them accessible to anyone. This immersive app is packed full of features that can help you to maximize your quiet moments and ensure you have a profoundly peaceful experience.

You can try Portal with a week’s free subscription. After that, you'll have to subscribe or make a one-time purchase for lifetime access to all of the app's premium features. A subscription allows you to share Portal Premium with up to 5 people in your Family Sharing group.

Download: Portal (Free, subscription available)

Getting Started With the Portal App

When you open the Portal app, you are asked: What would you like to do? The options are Focus, Sleep, or Escape.

Focus opens into a roaring log fire in Switzerland. Through your headphones, you can hear the crackle of the twigs while watching the flickering flames. Other free portals include a spring barley field in Devon, UK, and Redwood National Park, California. You’ll need to subscribe to open the full catalog of almost fifty peaceful locations worldwide.

Choose Your Portal

In the Library, there is a list of suggested portals to choose from. Or you can browse by collection, including the Slovenian Alps and the Scottish Highlands. Alternatively, browse by use case:

• Focus invites you to "think somewhere different" and suggests locations such as Hawaii's Pacific waves and the Great Plains, USA, during a summer thunderstorm.
• Sleep portals are an invitation to "drift off around the world." Dreamy locations under starry skies are the order here. Watch the night stars drift over the mountains of Ama Dablam, Nepal, or enjoy dusk in the Austrian Alps.
• Escape promises that you can "find a haven from it all," and here you’ll find wind and waves at the Botallack Mines on the Cornish coast and the birdsong-filled ancient woodland of Fingle Woods, Dartmoor.

There are curated collections for mindful retreats, remote hideaways, and peaceful escapes. In fact, you can choose your portal location in almost every way except on a map.

Each portal is downloaded to your device to give you full offline access. Dynamic Spatial Audio enhanced downloads are considerably larger than the rest, at about 250MB instead of less than 30MB.

Enjoy Portal’s Stunning Visual and Audio Content

Portal’s Retina-quality visuals look particularly impressive on the iPad's larger screen. Once you’ve made your selection, the controls vanish to leave a minimalist UI. Tap the screen to reveal a digital or analog clock.

Sound quality is superb throughout, and many of the portals have been upgraded to support Dynamic Spatial Audio for the most immersive experience possible. These 3D soundscapes are best enjoyed using compatible technology.

You’ll need any of the following headphones:

• AirPods Pro
• AirPods Pro Max
• AirPods (3rd generation)
• Beats Fit Pro

Meditations and Breathing Exercises in Portal Escape Mode

In Escape mode, there are several breathing exercises to choose from:

• 1:1 deep breathing
• 4:6 deep breathing
• 4:7:8 deep breathing
• 4:4:4:4 box breathing
• 2:6 breathing

There is a meditation timer, but no guided meditations are included. Instead, you can use the feature to mix the audio from another source to listen to your favorite podcast, meditation, or audiobook while using Portal. If you prefer fully guided meditation, consider these guided meditation YouTube channels instead.

Use Timers to Keep You on Track in Portal Focus Mode

Simple Pomodoro focus timers are included to help you stay focused. You can name your task and time and allow Portal to keep you on track. Siri shortcuts are available so that you can use voice control for this and other features in the app.

Use Portal to Drift Off in Sleep Mode

Sleep and alarm facilities allow you to begin and end the day in a portal of your choice. You can aid the relaxation process by pairing the app with Apple HomeKit, Philips Hue, or Nanoleaf smart lighting, to match the lighting ambiance of your room to your favored portal.

Is Portal the Best App Choice for You?

Portal may be for you if you want a simple, beautiful, immersive experience. However, you will need to consider the technical requirements to ensure you can make the most of this app. Because Portal uses the latest technologies available on iOS, the app may be too demanding for older iPhones and iPads. The developers recommend using at least an iPhone 6S or iPad Air 2 for the best experience.

You’ll also get more from the app if you have the audio technology to support digital signal processing. And you’ll need smart lighting to make use of the lighting integration feature.

The size of the downloads required for the enhanced portals is another consideration. Spatial audio adds a small amount to each file's size, but you can opt out of spatial audio in the app's settings to save a bit of storage.

There is no shortage of alternative apps to help you relax these days, so if Portal doesn’t suit you, try these calming apps to clear your mind.

Find a Portal to Help You Escape and Relax

Over 800,000 downloads and excellent reviews both in the media and on the App Store show that many people are successfully escaping into Portal. If you have the right hardware, this app is a glorious way to immerse yourself in a beautiful location for a while. Alternatively, you could try instant calming apps for a quick fix if you’re still feeling anxious.