Life is full of uncertainty at the moment, and with that comes feelings of dread and overwhelming anxiety.
According to an ONS survey, over half of UK adults have reported that stress and anxiety is affecting their wellbeing.
The pandemic, coupled with a cold and dark winter, is having an understandable impact on our lives. This can cause difficulty sleeping and make concentrating on daily tasks challenging.
Martina Witte, a Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, recommends mindfulness practises to her clients using body scan and mindful breathing to help reduce anxiety and worries, whilst also being more present.
Mindfulness and meditation can be very beneficial, whether it’s to help us get to sleep, start the day off feeling positive, helping to increase concentration, or to reduce our anxiety and stress levels. Spending just a few minutes listening to soothing music or following meditations can restore our calm and inner peace.
So, we have compiled a list of our favourite user-friendly meditation apps that we hope will help you get some of that stress out of your system.
Insight Timer
With 10 or more free guided meditations added every day, this app has a meditation for every mood from a diverse range of contributors, with specific sections for parents, yoga or beginners.
Find their discussion groups to connect with a community and join live sessions every day, where you can meditate with people across the world.
Or have a listen to thousands of music tracks and playlists on the site, including sacred meditations, self- care and sounds of yoga.
Balance
The balance app creates a programme tailored to your preference, filled with three-minute meditations, a coach to help guide you and skills to help you get to sleep faster while avoiding stress at night.
The meditations vary in length so you can find time to fit it into your daily routine.
You can also listen to sounds of nature to help calm and soothe yourself.
Mindfulness
This app has a range of music and nature sounds which include rain, ocean, storms, muse or campfire.
These white noises can help to create a more relaxing bedroom environment that encourages healthy, high-quality sleep.
It also features 12 mindfulness categories which help to ease anxiety and find inner peace.
Breathe
The app opens to relaxing music which instantly makes me feel calm.
You can tailor the meditations and daily breathes to your needs and it is very accessible for users.
It also has a section for ‘dealing with pandemic stress’, with self-care and anxiety reduction meditations for healthcare workers and sessions for dealing with loneliness and boredom for those stuck in quarantine.
Tapping solution
This app takes on a completely different angle of meditation.
Tapping or Emotional freedom technique (EFT) is a combination of ancient Chinese acupressure mixed with modern psychology. The guided meditations will encourage you to tap on certain acupressure points which will send calming signals to the brain.
It is believed that tapping the body can create balance in your energy system and help to treat pain.
Happy Not Perfect
Finally, we have ‘Happy Not Perfect’. The concept of this app is probably my favourite. It focuses on happiness workouts and daily affirmations.
These ‘workouts’ follow a range of activities that allow you to take a break and check in with your emotions.
Through writing down your stresses and anxiety and digitally burning them in the app, taking time to draw and create an image that you find freeing and ending with a gratitude diary, to refocus our minds from stress to things we can be grateful for. The app is very interactive and really gives you the change to check in with yourself. Whilst listening to calming music.
The app also has courses from clinical psychologists that can help with a range of experiences, such as change, attachment styles and burnout.
We hope that these apps can help you to feel a little better in such a turbulent time. However you are coping, remember that you are doing amazingly.
