The increased focus on prioritizing mental health and self-care has led to the creation of dozens of guided meditation apps. These apps give everyone—from meditation newbies to pros—instant access to resources and guides to help them with their meditation journey.
Calm, one of the most popular meditation and mindfulness apps, has features designed to help you fall asleep, reduce stress, and practice positive mindfulness.
Let’s explore how this app can help you prioritize your mental health and improve your wellness.
What Is Calm?
Calm is an award-winning app for sleep and meditation. It aims to help walk you through mindfulness meditation with the help of technology.
Calm features music, scenes, courses, stories, and meditations to help you on your journey to becoming more happy and healthy. You can use Calm to help you achieve many wellness goals, such as the following:
- Improve your sleep
- Reduce your stress
- Enhance your focus
- Avoid feeling overwhelmed
- Build or improve on your skills
Calm’s library offers a wide range of content organized into themes like Stress, Self-Care, Inner Peace, and Relationships, allowing you to choose specific content depending on what you need.
Users can access guided meditations and other features on Apple and Android devices or on the Calm website.
Download: Calm for Android | iOS (free, subscription available)
Best Mindfulness Features of Calm
The Calm app includes a wide variety of features and activities that you can use to practice mindfulness and add to your wellness routines.
Daily Practice
Calm releases a new 10-minute meditation, called a Daily Practice session, each day. These short meditations focus on various concepts that beginners and pros can use to guide their meditation.
Daily Practice sessions include two types: Daily Calm and Daily Trip. The former is led by Tamara Levitt and is more heartfelt, earnest, and grounding. The latter, which is more adventurous but still casual, is led by Jeff Warren.
You can find daily Practice sessions under the For Today section of the app.
Meditations
Calm contains a vast library of guided meditations—they're its central feature. Meditations vary in length and range from 3 minutes to 30 minutes. Some are stand-alone sessions, while others are part of a course or series.
You can easily navigate to and select a meditation of your liking by tapping one of the categories, like Sleep, Anxiety, Emotions, Work, and Relationships.
Calm Kids
Calm Kids is a separate category in the app that contains stories, lullabies, and meditations designed for kids. The feature comprises content from Thomas and Friends, Trolls, the Minions, and others.
Calm Music
Calm Music contains tracks that are specially curated for Calm. These come in various lengths, ranging from 10 minutes to more than an hour. Some include vocals, while others are instrumentals or mixes.
Calm Body
If you’re into mindfulness exercise and movement, the app offers Calm Body, a collection of 10-minute sessions that aim to help you release body tension, relax through movement, and recharge your mind.
Calm Body includes several sessions that you can squeeze in between appointments and other items in your schedule. Examples include Back Care, Morning Wake Up, and Evening Wind Down.
Sleep Stories
Sleep Stories contain a range of stories from categories such as Nature, Fiction, Trains, and Non-Fiction. These stories are designed to lull listeners to sleep.
You can also use Calm’s Nap Stories, which last about 30 minutes—just enough for a quick nap.
Calm has stories told by over 50 different narrators, including Harry Styles, Kate Winslet, and other popular artists. The app adds a new story every week.
Breathing Exercises
Deep breathing exercises can help you relax your body and mind, feel more energized, and help you prepare for the rest of your day.
Calm offers six kinds of breathing exercises that use different breathing techniques to target different goals. For example, Restore aims to bring back your energy, while Energizing aims to boost your alertness level.
Meditation Timer
Once you become more comfortable in your meditation routine, you might realize that you no longer need guided sessions. You might even become distracted by the app’s sights, sounds, and narrations.
If you simply need a timer for your own mindfulness practice, Calm has both a timer and an open-ended meditation tracker.
For the Timed Meditation feature, you can set up a fixed period for your meditation, and the app will use a gentle bell chime to tell you when the time is up.
On the other hand, choose an Open-Ended Meditation to keep time while gentle bells chime at specified intervals to let you stay present with your meditation.
The Spark
As the name implies, The Spark aims to spark your interest, engage you, and give you a fresh perspective. This feature includes bite-sized recordings of information between host Steve Goldbloom and different people, including thought leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs.
While most of Calm’s features are accessible through the web and mobile apps, The Spark is only available in the mobile app.
Calm Masterclass
Calm has partnered with renowned experts in their fields, like teachers and authors, to give exclusive lessons in a series called Calm Masterclass.
While each Masterclass includes a free introductory video that anyone can view, only those with an active Calm subscription can access the entire series.
These audio classes dig deeper on topics like stillness, sleep, addiction, gratitude, screen addiction, and parenting.
Calm Free vs. Calm Premium
You can download Calm for free and use its core features, or purchase a subscription to Calm Premium to gain access to more activities and content.
There's also an option to purchase a lifetime license if you see the app as a potential long-term companion on your wellness journey. And families can share a premium subscription at a special rate.
Calm offers a free trial that lets you test its full feature set and decide whether it's right for your mindfulness routine.
If you decide to stick to the free account, you can still access some features, including daily check-ins for the eve like gratefulness, sleep, and reflections, clocks for timed and open-ended meditations, and select guided meditation sessions.
Tapping Technology For Better Mental Health
Mental health is an essential aspect of human health that's worth prioritizing. And meditation is an excellent wellness practice that can help you slow down, focus at the moment, and drown out the noise.
With many features that you can incorporate into your day-to-day mental health practice, Calm is one of the best apps that can you can use on your mindfulness journey.