The Best iPhone Apps for Meditation

What do meditation, kale, yoga and spin class all have in common? Aside from an Instagram full of them – sometimes in one picture – we are told how good they are for our health and yet somehow never get around to incorporating them into our lifestyle.

While the other three all have their own health advantages few are as holistically beneficial as meditation, so let’s explore the concept of iPhone apps for meditation!

The irony is there, it’s true – mobiles and meditation don’t seem to go together very well, and the general advice is indeed to limit your time in front of the screen.

However, as long as you’re not glued to your phone for the rest of your day dedicating ten to twenty minutes per day to one of these iPhone apps for meditation could have transformational effects on your life.

The beauty of these apps is that if you find it hard to make changes to your busy schedule, they will bring you that calmness and mindfulness through coaching you at any point you have free during your day. It can revolutionize and streamline a practice that you may have assumed required you to backpack to the peaks of Nepal.

Take a look at this list of the best meditation apps out there and decide which one could work for you!

Headspace

An Emma Watson favorite, Headspace is a fabulous app for newbies cutting their teeth on the curious idea of meditation. Arguably the most accessible app for beginners, Headspace is free to download and offers a starter ten-session pack of ten minutes each.

Renowned for turning skeptics into believers with its no-nonsense and practical approach to mindfulness and peacefulness, Headspace is the one for you if you still harbor doubts about meditation.

Stop, Breathe & Think

This free app is a fabulously user-friendly tool from non-profit Tools for Peace, a charity devoted to coaching inner-city children and teenagers how to meditate and remain mindful.

With echoes of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Stop, Breathe & Think coaches you to reflect on your emotional condition and use the app to select guided meditations in reaction to the identified most prevalent emotion at that time. You are presented with a choice of meditations on a range of subjects in response to your emotional state.

Calm

Calm caters to both the novice and the most experienced meditation enthusiast. You can choose from options like a three-week-long guided program for your overall health and one-off exercises that can last for as long or as short as you want them.

It also offers something called a Daily Calm, which focuses on a different subject or theme every day, thus encouraging you to be aware of something that may not have been obvious to you initially.

Buddhify

This app proves just how versatile meditation can be and how it brings different benefits to your life depending on your situation – even things as seemingly insignificant as the time of day.

Buddhify offers over 80 meditations, which are categorized by state of mind, setting and circumstance including tracks for traveling, bath time, cleaning sessions and coping at your 9-to-5. Various speakers narrate the tracks, so there are quite a few different voices and accents to choose from. Be sure to find one that helps you to reach your Zen sooner rather than later!

Meditation is a life-changing practice. Incorporating it into your day for as little as two minutes could improve your stress levels, mood and resource base of coping mechanisms.