Best Meditation App

The concept of meditation as an adult is similar to being told “to eat your greens” when you were a kid: deep down you know it’s probably right but you don’t understand why and you’re most likely not going to stick with it yourself. I often say that people cannot really ever say they’ve hit rock bottom until they’ve embraced and understood meditation because (and this is going to sound a little dark) it’s the only thing left to turn to which can create balance. You realize material and chemical indulgences aren’t helping you and you have nowhere else to turn. So you turn inward.

It’s extremely cliché but we cannot always control things that happen to us but we can try to improve the way our mind reacts to things. Easier said than done, obviously. As nice as it would be to be able to meditate completely on our own, most of us need some help and guidance. While you can likely find good sources/teachers of meditation everywhere, for our purposes, when looking at phone apps, there are really only two logical choices: Headspace and Calm.

You really cannot go wrong either way and we applaud both companies for their missions. Headspace sports a more animated and simpler approach/design to their app with narrator Andy Puddicombe being the main voice on the platform. Calm, on the other hand, has more picturesque visuals combined with a variety of celebrity voices/songs/teachings. Calm’s Head of Meditation is Tamara Levitt who has one of the most soothing/caring voices you will hear.

I have paid for and used both premium versions exclusively for over a year each and the choice for me is clear: Calm’s design is brilliant and it is one of the best apps ever made. I prefer Tamara’s voice and look forward to sitting down and listening to her Daily Calms each morning. The meditation choices are plentiful and well organized so you can try to address the specific emotion/feeling you are dealing with. The sleep offerings are great and range from sleep stories to guided sleep meditations to sleep songs. The celebrity cameos are fantastic too including sleep stories by Matthew Mcconaughey, mental training by Lebron James and music by Sam Smith. Finally, I absolutely love the daily check-in option where you can assign an emoji to how you are feeling each day and track it. It’s absolutely worth downloading and doing the free trial to see if you feel the same connection to it that I do.