7 Best Meditation Apps 2023 (According to a Wellness Coach)

Are daily stressors draining your vital energy levels? Do you know deep down that meditation could help you out, yet on some level, you repeatedly tell yourself you don’t have the time or don’t know how to meditate? Well, you’re going to get to know all about meditation and the best meditation apps to help you out.

By the end of this article, you will know how to get started and have the best apps in your possession to start feeling like your best self.

7 Best Meditation Apps in 2023

As you begin to transcend your ego, you won’t want to turn back once you’ve experienced a taster of selflessness and all the bundle of positive emotions it comes with.

So, let’s dive into the seven best meditation apps out there to help you unlock all these benefits.

1. Calm

This app is among the most popular out there, mainly because it has a kids section with meditations for children between ages three and 17. Whether you’re on the go, at work, or in a quiet place, Calm has a range of features and a mix of voice artists guiding you among the likes of Matthew McConaughey.

Calm releases new original meditations daily and offers users a seven-day free trial to truly get the feel of the experience.

2. Simple Habit

You may have heard of or seen this meditation app on Shark Tank in 2017. It has since exploded in popularity.

Simple Habit is known for its 5-minute meditations, truly ideal if you’re always on the go or struggling to block off a regular meditation slot into your daily schedule.

Among its many guided meditation options, one of its popular selling points is the ability to use the app offline in its premium subscription. You can now take your meditation guide with you wherever you go.

3. Headspace

Headspace is probably the most well-known of all meditation apps out there, so much so that it has its own guided meditation series on Netflix. It brands itself as the “gym of the mind.”

Headspace also offers short meditations for people on the go, but it is largely popular for its complete beginner courses and range of free introductory meditations. Its premium subscription has a larger library of single meditations and courses to choose from.

4. Aura

Maybe lesser known than the previous apps, Aura stands out as it uses AI-powered technology to learn more about you and your emotions to provide you with tailor-made meditation recommendations. It also has a built-in gratitude journal as well as free three-minute meditations if you’re not ready to upgrade to premium yet.

5. Breethe

This mediation app’s main benefit is its user-friendliness. Breethe hosts a 12-week daily meditation program to help you build the habit of meditation.

If you’re not looking for a guided meditation, Breethe also offers loads of other features such as bedtime stories and multiple nature sounds. Who said you had to be five years old to be read to sleep?

6. Buddhify

A subscription-only meditation app, Buddhify hosts over 200 custom-themed meditations. Most of its options are very helpful for anxiety, sleep, and other emotional issues.

Meditation sessions range between three to 40 minutes and are ideal whether you’re new to meditation or are at an experienced level.

What’s great with Buddhify is that it has a timer available for all non-guided meditations. If you’re experienced, you’ll find this will prevent you from zoning out for hours on end.

7. Unplug

Finally, we have Unplug. This meditation app also has a meditation timer as well as a progress tracker to see how far along you’ve come on your mediation journey. It offers a 30-day challenge as well as multiple short and long meditations suitable for all daily and life stressors.

Although expensive compared to its peers, it does offer a seven-day free trial to truly feel the app for yourself.

Your Life Is Energy

If you didn’t know it already, everything in the universe around you is energy. Everything you are perceiving, feeling, touching, and tasting is all a vibration of energy at its core.

Life energy, or Prana, as it is referred to in yogic philosophy, is flowing through you every moment of every day, keeping you alive. This energy, when in tune, aligns your body, mind, and soul to work in harmony.

Unfortunately, growing up, most people aren’t taught how to efficiently align these three elements. As a result, the stream of unconscious thoughts you think and focus on every day ends up using up a vital part of life’s energy flowing through you.

How much energy you deplete on your thought process depends on what you’re thinking about.

For example, when you think positive thoughts, you won’t be very likely to want to resist such pleasantness. Hence, your energy levels would most certainly stay well connected to the source supplying you.

Having said that, given the human mind’s negative bias and our tendency to avoid pain, most of what you think unconsciously will be distorted towards negative thoughts, negative emotions, and stress. These tend to cause you to resist the life energy flowing through you, making you feel depleted.

Just like a dam, every time you engage and persist in negativity and negative emotions, you’re building on and strengthening the barrier blocking your life force from flowing freely. In fact, every time you engage in an anger burst, your immune system gets depleted for up to eight hours.^[1]

Many stress-related health issues nowadays often arise because of depleted and blocked energy levels and uncontrolled thought processes. Luckily, meditation can be a powerful tool to reverse all of that and even empower you towards significant lifestyle changes.

What You Stand to Gain

Meditation isn’t complicated to define. It’s the process of instilling a state of deep peace within yourself, all the while training your attention and awareness. This can be done by following the guidance of a trained practitioner or by using any one of the following meditation apps.

Just like any new appliance you purchase, you’re most likely going to have to glance at the instructions manual to get it running. Well, the same can apply to meditation.

Meditation isn’t at all a complex practice. Though, if you’ve never tried it out before, a guide can help get you started by directing your stream of thoughts and focus. A guide will act as your instructions manual to help accustom you to your new meditation practice.

Meditation has many outstanding benefits to your mental and physical wellbeing. Adopting a regular meditation routine with the following meditation apps will help you go a long way in instilling peace in your life.

Here are some of the benefits of meditation:

1. Still Your Mind

When was the last time you counted zero thoughts floating through your head? Wouldn’t it be great to reach such a point and enjoy moments of peace, deep relaxation, and silence regularly after a guided meditation session?

2. Sharper Focus and Cognitive abilities

As you become more conscious, you’ll notice increased capabilities within yourself to act more often rather than react to the circumstances in your life.

This will also allow you to focus more on the solutions rather than on the problems in your environment.

3. Reduce Feelings of Anxiety and Depression

Given most anxious and depressive feelings arise out of cognitive distortions, a regular guided meditation practice can help you get acquainted with your higher self—your soul.

From this place of consciousness, you will find it easier to sit peacefully above your thoughts, untouched by whatever commotion is going on down under.

4. Lowers Your Heart Rate and Blood Pressure

As you relax your body and focus on deep relaxing breaths, you are activating the parasympathetic nervous system in your body. As you do so, this allows your heart rate to decrease and your blood pressure to drop as your blood vessels begin to open up.

5. Help Heal Health Issues

Yes, the body does have the ability to heal itself in certain circumstances, when given the chance. Life energy is also healing energy when you allow it to flow freely undisturbed throughout your being.^[2]

Guided meditation for energy allows your bodily processes to conserve and generate more energy for healing than they otherwise would be able to in a stressed-out and depleted state.

6. Sleep

Guided meditation for energy looks to hack into your deeper brain waves to instill a state of deep relaxation. The more relaxed you feel and the stiller the mind, the easier you’ll find it to fall and remain asleep.

Even better, as your practice becomes a regular habit, you’ll notice you actually don’t need all that much sleep to wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on a new day. Simply because as you live more from a state of ease, your body needs less rest to conserve its energy and operate efficiently.

7. Cultivate Gratitude and Compassion

Love, gratitude, and compassion for yourself are often hard to come by in today’s ego-driven and chaotic world. A regular guided meditation practice can help grow these positive emotions towards yourself and others.

Takeaway

Once you experience the deeper dimensions of your consciousness and higher energy levels, you’ll find it hard to want to go back and remain in a depleted state of stress. So, why not treat yourself to that positive experience daily with the help of these top seven meditation apps?

Just 15 minutes of guided meditation a day is more than enough to unlock all the amazing benefits listed above. The best time to schedule your new habit is first thing in the morning upon awakening or right before bedtime.

It’s important to not expect to notice any of the benefits instantaneously. Like most self-development tools, guided meditation is a lifelong process.

However, with patience and persistence in your practice, your life journey will take on a new positive direction, and these meditation apps will make it more fun in the process.

Featured photo credit: Benjamin Child via unsplash.com