Anxiety disorders are one of the most common mental disorders in the US, and are believed to affect more than 40 million adult Americans every year. There are more severe anxiety disorders and relatively mild symptoms, including feelings of worry and uneasiness, to symptoms that interfere with daily activities, such as panic attacks.
It appears that, in addition to the talk therapy and medications, such transformative measures as lifestyle modifications, including meditation, can also help reduce anxiety. It’s the practice that aids in the reduction of stress and anxiety and those in getting the mind into a relaxed state. This is why with the current availably of many meditation apps, people no longer have an excuse to integrate meditation into their daily lives, even for those leading busy lives.
If you have anxiety issues, you may want to give a shot of a meditation app and see how it may help you overcome it. So here are the seven best meditation apps for anxiety in 2024 for you.
1. Calm
Calm is probably the best and most used meditation application in the market today. Living up to it name, Calm has a plethora of guided meditations, sleep stories, breathing programs, and music to improve sleep, decrease stress, and provide relief for anxiety.
With the help of the Calm app, it is easy to make meditation for complete novices as simple as it is possible. In this respect, it provides session’s durations ranging from 3 to 25 minutes which makes a perfect fit for meditation no matter how tight the schedule is. In the current list, over 100 guided meditation sessions are available, of which many of them are indeed dedicated to anxiety.
Besides, there is a 7-day and 21-day basic plan for those who seek more instructions at the start of using the app. Calm is available for the free version with a subscription to access all the programs on the app.
2. Headspace
Headspace is another monolith of the meditation apps with a bright, accessible, and youthful interface. Like Calm, Headspace is also fundamentally grounded, and helps people figure out how to meditate in their early stages.
As a result, over 1,500 hours of guided meditation are in the series. Topics of the sessions include dealing with anxiety and stress with focus, sleep, self- development, physical concerns, and more. The meditation sessions describe how to concentrate on the breath and let herself follow it, how to let the thoughts come and go without any embracing of them, and to come back into the room, as it were.
Available free time can range from 3 minutes up to half an hour, depending on the users’ choice. It is also possible to request SOS sessions for an immediate anxiety relief and there is a “get some calm” button to provide anxiety reducing mini-meditations.
Though there is some content available for preview, there is much more you’ll get when you join. Special student and family rates are also offered to make the usage more accessible.
3. Insight Timer
Currently, Insight Timer boasts of having more than 18 million customers making it the most extensive free meditation application. However for the user to be able to access, Insight Timer still has a lot to offer considering that they are free with about over 130000 guided meditations by over 10000 teachers of different origins.
All in all, Insight Timer may seem a little cluttered, but it’s excellent for anybody who is nervous about trying meditation for the first time since it’s free. Apart from anxiety-focused meditations that number in thousands, the app provides over 25 thousand tracks of relaxing music and other consciousness calming content.
Some of the other remarkable features are availability to monitor one’s meditational schedule, creating groups, and male and/or female voiced instructions. Since there is so much content that is available completely free of charge, Insight Timer is easily the best free meditation app to reduce anxiety.
4. Ten Percent Happier
Ten Percent Happier differs from many of the other apps in the ways that it approaches the concept of meditation. In addition to over 1000 guided meditation sessions, Ten Percent Happier focuses a lot on explaining the basics of meditation to build healthy long-term habits.
The main program of this app is on providing the logic of meditation and how people can engage in it naturally in their everyday activities. It states that although one cannot be absolutely worry less, then, by performance, one can exclude ten per cent of worry to acquire additional measure of happiness or less anxiety.
If you are a person who would like to turn to meditation as a means to constantly support herself to live an anxiety free life, then Ten Percent Happier has some great tools. Not only that, there are optional special programs that can be done to respond to anxiety response mechanism and psychological issue which adds to stress.
5. Oak
Still, most apps offering guided meditation have quite similar and unostentatious design philosophies, and that is why Oak can be appreciated for its warm, favorable, individualistic atmosphere. Meditations and programs present true stories and how people from all walks of life can describe their own experiences. Instead of feeling like you are getting advice from someone going on or went through some experience in a far land, Oak’s sessions feel like you listening to a friend with same beliefs as you.
Oak also employs visualization and story most especially for those who find it hard to meditate with mantra or breathwork methods. Hear them take you to calming places in nature or listen to them share calming stories to help occupied minds stop churning over worries.
Stress, relationship, growth, purpose, health, abundance and lots of other topics are covered through the programs and Oak has many options for dealing with anxious thoughts. There are also special bedtime stories and music programs to help induce better sleep to prevent anxiety.
6. Stop, Breathe, & Think
Not surprisingly, the program known as Stop, Breathe, & Think places a rather significant emphasis on breath control as a means for regulating one’s feelings. The app enables a user to select the emoticon of their current mood to either happy, neutral or sad and from there the it offers a list of short guided meditations and some acupressure videos related to the selected emoticon.
In case of anxiety, the check-in feature allows you to pause and see your level of overwhelmed and get tips on how to self-regulate quickly. There are also nature backgrounds, journal prompts and a phase bell timer in Stop, Breathe & Think to apply mindfulness all day.
As the title suggests there are no frills – but for content devoted to giving tools to help stop the anxiety, to fall asleep and wake up refreshed, it does exactly what is advertised – guidance to STOP the anxiety and re-Engage with the present through breath and awareness.
7. Simple Habit
Last but not the least, Simple Habit is quite different from other meditation applications as well. While the complex, over-arching framework of Headspace focuses on deep, multi-week meditation journeys, Simple Habit speaks to sneaky ways to incorporate more mindfulness into the day.
Intended for the current rub-and-hurry 9-to-5 business folks, Simple Habit offers 5-minute meditations to address various stressors as they occur. It should be used to calm the mind, or bake/make cup of tea/ take a brief period allowing you to regain your state of mind when being overwhelmed by anxiety.
But Simple Habit also has what it calls standard length meditations and yoga classes in addition to the short sessions. But the standout feature of it is, of course, those bite-sized micro-lessons, perfect for people with tight schedules. Also, people with the busiest schedule could spare a few minutes for practicing mindfulness with help of this application.
Another stress relieving technique, which may in fact help to alleviate anxiety in the process, is meditation.
Everyone knows what anxiety is, but not everyone knows that it can be divided into many types and different levels of severity. However, the latter does make sense occasionally because many situations do need a professional approach, yet one of the easiest techniques to lessen the pain is meditation.
In essence, meditation can make wonders for anxiety by assisting in taming an overactive mind, soothing an overloaded nervous system, and anchoring us to the present time. Luckily, in the last few years more and more great applications appeared which makes practicing of meditation everyday routine.
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