After that, the structured courses allow you to go further with the areas and techniques that most interest you. Its onboarding is second-to-none, and the three Basics programs build nicely on each other. Where Headspace really stands out is in its approach to beginners. The Move tab has more physical practices, like Feel Good Yoga and Mindful Cardio sessions, while Focus has sessions and music to help you work better. The Sleep tab has meditations to help you sleep as well as Sleepcasts (sleep stories from people with soothing voices), sleep music, and an all-night relaxing sleep radio. In the Meditate tab, you can explore all the different meditations, from individual sessions and an unguided timer, to courses like Dealing with Regret and Coping with Cancer. Toward the bottom, you can dive deeper into what Headspace offers. There's almost no friction to getting started, and the illustrations that scatter the interface are just flat-out charming. When you open the app, you're immediately presented with the Today view, which features that day's meditation, the next meditation in any course you're doing (like the Basics introduction), a daily Wake Up video, and some guided breathing. A big part of its appeal is Andy Puddicombe, an English (former) Buddhist monk with a ludicrously calming voice who guides many sessions-but the service itself is exceptional. Headspace is the 800-pound Buddha statue of meditation apps, and for good reason: it's largely responsible for the current boom. Not every app is as widely available as we'd like, but all the ones on this list are at least available for iOS and Android devices. That means that you can meditate in the morning without picking up a phone. We tried to find apps that could be accessed not just from smartphones, but smart watches, smart speakers, and web browsers too. For that reason, a decent free trial was an absolute must for inclusion.įinally, meditation is something that should be accessible to everyone, everywhere. No matter how well designed an app is, it's useless if you don't like the style of the guided meditations. I kept failing until I found Tamara Levitt from Calm. The right teacher can make the process seem effortless, while the wrong one will make you give up. Meditation is a deeply personal skill, and how you develop it can depend a lot on your teacher. All the apps on this list are well-made, nice-to-use, and get out of the way, so you won't mind opening them on a daily basis. More than one app didn't make the cut because using it was so unpleasant it neutralized the benefits I got from the meditation. While meditating can be an incredibly relaxing experience, using a badly designed, janky app absolutely isn't. These are all nice to have-but weren't essential for inclusion on this list. Many apps also go further than meditation with things like relaxing sounds, sleep stories, theory lectures, and more. Doing the same series of meditations day after day can get boring, so a deep and regularly updated content library goes a long way. You can sit silently to meditate by yourself if you want, but I've found that I still do better with guided meditations (and most people I know who meditate feel the same way). The best meditation apps also have a lot of varied content you can progress to. Each session is short and builds on the previous one, so you don't get overwhelmed. The best meditation apps help you work through all this, especially if you're just starting out.Īll the apps on our list have some kind of guided beginners course or program that takes you through the very basics of meditating in a structured way. It's easy to feel like you're doing it wrong, to get distracted or disheartened, and just to give up. Meditation is a simple idea in principle: sit quietly, focusing completely on something like your breath, the sound of a bell, or the physical sensation of your body. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.
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