5 Meditation Apps to Try When You Need a Little Zen

Calm offers a wide range of meditations to fit any mood. You can find walking or movement-based meditations, short meditations to help you work through strong emotions, longer meditations, celebrity-led meditations and even meditations to doze off to. The app keeps track of your meditation minutes and streaks, too, motivating you to keep up with your daily practice.

Headspace makes it easy to add meditation to your daily practice and even gives you tools to better manage your mental health. It features a unique social aspect, allowing you to participate in live, virtual meditations as a group or with friends. You’ll find quick meditations when you’re short on time or longer varieties when you want to really relax or even drift off to sleep. Users also receive personalized recommendations based on their previous meditative activities in the app.

One of the most popular free meditation apps available, Insight Timer, is a great option for those who want variety in their meditations. The app features thousands of meditations to choose from, taught by meditation experts from around the world. You can find meditation courses, informative conversations, sleep meditations, music for relaxation and even kid-focused meditations for family meditation sessions. Premium members get access to more content and features, including longer courses and offline functionality.

The neuroscience-backed Healthy Minds app focuses not just on meditations but also lessons to help users learn more about their minds. There are foundation lessons to learn more about awareness, connection, insight and purpose, the four pillars that form the app’s Well-being Framework. The app will track your meditation sessions and minutes as well as your progress in lessons with well-being reports. As a bonus, the app is not subscription- or ad-based and instead is donation-based.

Medito is a free app that allows you to completely customize your meditations. You can select the visuals, the length of your meditation and even the narrator. You can even join a 30-day meditation challenge or learn more about the benefits of meditation, making this a great app for beginners. The sleep feature offers not just meditations but bedtime stories or soundscapes to help you sleep. Because the app is designed and run by a non-profit, there’s no worries over ads popping up while you’re trying to unwind.