Over the past couple of years mindfulness has exploded in popularity. TechCrunch reported that during the first UK lockdown mindfulness apps saw a huge surge in demand, with downloads up to 25 per cent higher in the early weeks. But it’s not just the pandemic that’s contributed to the popularity of mental health focussed apps.
In her book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, journalist and cultural critic Amanda Montell explains that over the past 30 years, our collective mental health has taken a nosedive and as a result, we’re all increasingly seeking ways to feel more grounded, grateful and positive about our lives. Mindfulness has naturally taken centre stage, providing a way – in its various forms – to stave off anxiety, improve wellbeing and support us all through the challenges we face daily.
According to the NHS website, paying more attention to the present moment, and to thoughts and feelings, helps to improve mental wellbeing and enables people to enjoy life and understand themselves better.
Mindfulness as we know it today is rooted in principles from ancient Buddhist and Eastern philosophy mixed with modern cognitive behavioural therapy and sometimes, meditation, breathwork and somatic exercises too. Depending on which mindfulness exercises or teachers you follow, you might focus on quieting racing thoughts and reducing stress, rewiring your thought patterns, practising positive self talk or manifesting positive outcomes for yourself in challenging situations.
Of course, you don’t have to be a monk or remotely spiritual to practice mindfulness, the idea of the practise is to simply be more self aware and to improve your mental health. The issue for many people is knowing where to start with this.
Luckily, as mindfulness has grown in popularity, new apps offering mindfulness exercises, meditations and more have made it easier to start a practice and stick with it.
The vast majority of mindfulness apps are free (at least at first) and are suitable for beginners and pros alike. Each approaches mental health and mindfulness from a slightly different perspective, so it’s worth taking advantage of the free trial period that many apps offer to see which is best suited to your lifestyle and the way you think.
Some apps offer nostalgia-inducing bedtime stories, some calming background noises and others, mantras and daily meditations to help you adjust your mindset. Most use a mix of audio and video but there are also added features like journals and daily questions, so consider when you’ll be using your choice of app and what you want to get out of it.
To help you find the right mindfulness app, we've tested the best – from the more well-known meditation hubs to new innovations developed by neuroscientists and mental health specialists. So whether you’re a total novice or a mindfulness expert, we can guarantee there’s an app on this list for you.
The best mindfulness apps 2024:
How we tested
Our testers tried every app and judged each on its in-app features, the type of content available, the quality of the content, personalisation, look and feel and how each app affected their mood. We also looked for extras like expert support within the apps, features like a mood journal and daily reminders and of course, the cost of each app and its value for money.
Calm
Open the Calm app and you’ll immediately be greeted with the gentle sound of the outdoors. We loved this touch and found it helped us on the path to relaxation (if you don’t like the outdoors, you can change your greeting sound to rolling waves, pouring rain, crackling firewood or crickets). We loved Calm when we tested it previously, particularly its guided Daily Calm sessions, which helped us unwind and refocus our attention.
The app is always bolstering its already-great offering, with the addition of new daily meditation series and new stories. Our tester’s personal favourite was narrated by Canadian author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren. “The Daily Trip” offered a more adventurous and enjoyable practice and we found we learned more in these daily sessions than in any of the others we tested.
If you fancy something a little different, you can pick from exclusive music tracks engineered to help you focus, relax or sleep, including remixes from stars Sam Smith and Ellie Goulding. There are also several new celebrity-narrated Sleep Stories, with calming tales from the likes of former 1D star Harry Styles, and actors Idris Elba, Cillian Murphy and Chiké Okonkwo.
We got a childish pleasure out of these and found they helped us unwind in the evenings, bringing back the nostalgia of being read a bedtime story. The latest version of the app includes a new gratitude check-in feature, which we used to remind ourselves of the things we’re grateful for each day. With plenty of content and at just £39.99 for a subscription that lasts the whole year (which equates to £3.33 per month), we also think this app is great value for money.
Buy now £39.99, https://www.calm.com/
Portal – Escape into Nature
Do you ever find yourself sitting on the train home after a stressful day at work wishing you were actually in Hawaii listening to the waves crash against the beach? Or curled up next to a log fire in Switzerland? Well, this app can help with that. Portal is a mindfulness app with a difference.
Instead of guided meditations, the app transports users around the world, helping them chill out with the assistance of some of nature’s most relaxing sounds. We loved the concept and found it not only helped us relax, but also sent us to sleep when the dreaded insomnia kicked in.
From summer thunderstorms to the rustle of palm tree leaves, there’s a sound to suit everyone – plus you can mix Portal’s audio with other apps to add a little extra ambience to your audiobooks or podcasts. There is also a “relax” function that includes breathing exercises, and a “focus” section, which we found helped us to write the one thing we wanted to concentrate on, boosting our productivity.
Since we last tested the app, users can now be transported to the Scottish highlands and Slovenian alps. We’d recommend those looking for something a little different give this app a go – you’re bound to feel on top of the world in no time.
The app costs around £54 per year or £9.99 a month. You can also purchase a lifetime membership, which saves you a fair bit of money at £230.
Buy now £9.99, Portal.app
Anxiety Solution: Calmer You
The Anxiety Solution app is the perfect tonic if you’re looking to relieve stress or improve your mood. It’s like having a personal champion in your smartphone; someone who is looking out for you, provides reminders to take moments away from the stresses of daily life and who enables you to find what works best for you.
The app includes over 70 sessions – including mindfulness, breathing tools, sleep stories and fitness routines – and is great for beginners who want a bit more support at the start of their meditation journey.
We loved the interactive practices, which included high-quality graphics, for example showing how our heart rate varied as we changed our breathing. Our favourite was the 12-minute rebalance with mindfulness, which included a full body scan and an interactive graphic so we could identify exactly how we felt in different parts of our body.
More than that, though, the app includes a 28-session course, which helps to explain and reduce anxiety. This course can be worked through one session at a time, using techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy to help you tackle your worries. A big thumbs up from us.
Buy now £5.99, Anxietysolution.app
Superhuman
The Superhuman app is a mindfulness app built with ambitious people in mind, pairing motivational mantras with mindfulness exercises. Instead of calling its daily audio guides meditations, it refers to them as “activations” The idea is that you’re taking active control of your life, your goals and your emotions, rather than taking a passive approach.
There are more than 600 activations to listen to while you’re walking, winding down for sleep and getting ready for work and these span 15 categories. The vibe is much more centred on personal development and manifestation than classic mental health and we found that using the app gave us a lift each day, boosted mental clarity and helped us to focus on our achievements instead of our worries.
Most activations are voiced by Superhuman’s founder Mimi Bouchard and using the app feels as though you have a life coach by your side reminding you of the importance of your self-worth, your ambitions and your unique strengths.
The app is among the pricier options on this list at £25.99 per month or £159.99 per year and is probably best suited to those who are already interested in personal growth and ready to take the next step on their journey.
Buy now £25.99, Superhuman.app
Headspace
Headspace was one of the first meditation apps and remains one of the best-known on the market. Following its launch in 2010, it has accrued more than 65 million members across 190 countries – and it’s not hard to see why. The app is a great choice if you want to learn the essentials of meditation and mindfulness, with hundreds of guided meditations on subjects including stress and focus paired with whimsical animations to help you find your feet.
The sessions are free of jargon and easy to follow, focusing on breathing and scanning through the body to check in on how you feel. There are also bite-sized “mini-meditations”, which are between two and three minutes, to help keep you in the present moment. There are also bedtime stories and soundscapes to help you drift off to sleep.
The app has undergone a series of developments since we last tested it, and now offers a sleek and modern approach to meditation. We were particularly impressed with its “SOS” sessions, which have been designed to help users who wake up in the night and may struggle to get back to sleep (we’ve found ourselves turning to these ahead of several particularly stressful days at work). There are also workouts led by Olympians and daily meditations on a new topic every day.
Headspace offers a comprehensive toolkit whether you are an experienced meditator or a beginner looking for a supportive environment at the start of their journey. Pay £9.99 monthly or opt for £49.99 for the year’s subscription.
Buy now £9.99, Headspace.com
Balance
If you’ve never tried meditating before and you want to give it a go in a no-fuss way, then Balance should be top of your list. The app is one of the best at taking users through the basics, using simple language and techniques to help you focus on your breathing and improve your visualisation and awareness.
Although there is an opportunity to subscribe and get access to more content, Balance offers all users a 10-day personalised foundation plan based on your goals – whether that’s reducing stress or improving your evening meditation – for free. Our plan ran through nine skills, from breath focus and breath control to body scan and spotlighting, a technique where you focus all of your attention on a single thing. We loved the short, guided meditations (our favourite facilitator was Ofosu) and found that our focus improved dramatically thanks to the simple explanations.
We also meditated more frequently with this app, as we could tailor sessions to as little as three minutes, helping us to find moments of peace throughout the day. You don’t just have to follow the plan either. The app includes morning meditations, nature sounds and free sessions, including one to help with gratitude.
If you’re looking for something a little jazzier, we tried the app’s “energise” session where we learned about “breath of fire” (which turned out to be a lot less dangerous than it sounded). All in all, this is a great app for beginners or those short of time.
Buy now £67.99, Balanceapp.com
Simple Habit
This app offers stress relief for busy people. Founder Yunha Kim recognised that many of us do not have time (or at least *think* we don’t have time) to squeeze yet another thing onto our to-do list. To help combat this, the app offers audio meditations as short as five minutes, with good-quality guided meditations that really do help to reduce stress and calm the mind.
The meditations themselves are well paced and offer good guidance. We found there was a little more space towards the end of each recording, which helped us really relax without the need for continual instruction.
We were also impressed by the variety on the app. Users are asked to choose topics that interest them when they open it for the first time and there really is something for everyone – from meditations that will help you find your feet after a breakup, to post-argument relaxation, stress-free commutes and pre-date mindfulness to help you get into the zone.
The app itself is clean and modern, with a simple feed and easy-to-use interface. Lots of the content is free to use if you don’t want to pay for the optional subscription, which is a little on the steep side.
Buy now £87.99, Simplehabit.com
Ten Percent Happier Meditation
The Ten Percent Happier meditation app bills itself as “mediation for fidgety sceptics”. “Most of the meditation apps out there have a very traditional tone – very soft and gooey and loving,” co-founder Dan Harris previously told TechCrunch. “But we’re much more in the no-b******* category.”
Harris, a television news anchor with the self-confessed “attention span of a three-year-old retriever”, started meditating after he had a nationally televised panic attack. For the most part, Harris has achieved his no BS goal. We liked the app’s relaxed nature, from the simple interface to the short video lessons, which teach users more about mindfulness.
The guided meditations are very much “no frills”, which we found incredibly refreshing. As well as being asked how often you’ve meditated before, why you want to meditate (do you want to be happier or is it to reduce stress?) and how you’ve been feeling lately, you can also set reminders to ensure you never miss a session.
Pay the subscription and you’ll get more than 500 guided meditations (including sessions such as “tooth brushing” and “in the shower”), as well as several packages centred on performance, relationships or ” how to be 10 per cent nicer”. This app is great if you are keen to feel the benefits of mindfulness without wanting it to take over your daily routine – or if you’re a straight talker who prefers no fuss.
Buy now £12.99, Happierapp.com
Insight Timer
Insight Timer is more of a social network for meditators. As well as a world map showing you how many people are meditating at any one time, it allows you to see who is nearby and to invite friends to join in with you. There are also community groups where you are encouraged to join meet-ups throughout the UK, or discuss anything from poetry to Hinduism.
As for the content, Insight Timer says it’s the world’s most popular meditation timer, with a free library of guided meditations at 30,000 and counting. These range from beginners’ flows to sessions focused on self-love, better relationships and conquering addictions.
The customisable timer feature is perfect for short meditations when on the go and you can choose whether you want ambient background sounds or ending bells. This is a great app with lots of content – but it can be daunting for a beginner.
We recommend sticking with it, though, if you’re willing to put the time in to find out what really works for you. If you need even more content, premium gets you extra courses and offline listening.
Buy now £55.99, Insighttimer.com
Aura: Meditation and Mindfulness
Aura calls itself the “Spotify of mindfulness” due to the frankly astonishing depth and range of its content. When you first log into the app, users are asked to choose two or more topics from a long list including calming anxiety, increasing happiness, improving focus and dealing with anger.
Once in, you get access to the “world’s largest premium library” of meditation tracks, life coaching, stories, nature sounds and music. The app is fairly easy to navigate, although the amount of content perhaps ends up being its Achilles’ heel. There is so much to choose from, we found it hard to know where to start.
We liked the shorter three-minute guided meditations, which we used to help frame our day positively, and the fact the app uses AI to build an understanding of your preferences, so over time it becomes more personal and tailored to your needs.
A premium subscription allows you access to all of the content, as well as full mood tracking and offline use.
Buy now £11.99, Aurahealth.io
Buddhify
Buddhify boasts that it is “designed to fit into a busy modern lifestyle”. It’s certainly unique in its design, with a daily wheel divided into segments to map out your day – waking up to going to bed.
The colourful disc is designed to help you find relevant mindfulness and meditation exercises depending on the time of day, with plenty of short, spoken sessions for use on the go. We loved the “work break” exercises, which help you relax at the office, while the “travelling” segment was perfect for the dreaded commute.
Sessions range from four minutes to around half an hour, and there are also guided exercises if you can’t sleep or if you’re feeling particularly stressed. We liked the idea, but found that many of the other apps also had the variety we needed to fit them into our busy lives.
There’s also a kid’s version – Buddhify kids has sixty meditations led by youth mindfulness experts and the categories span sessions for feeling better, going to sleep, calming down and growing wisdom.
This is one of the only apps that makes you pay an upfront fee of £24 a year – so while it is on the more affordable end of the spectrum, you might want to consider trying a few free trials of other apps before you settle on this one.
Buy now £24.00, Buddhify.com
Reflectly – Journal & AI Diary
Reflectly describes itself as a journal for happiness. More specifically, it claims it will enable users to “deal with negative thoughts and make positivity louder” as it teaches them about the science of wellbeing. It does this by asking easy-to-answer questions, enabling better reflection on the ups and downs of each day.
The idea is a good one. There are many people who would benefit from mindfulness but who do not necessarily want to follow guided meditations, or who can’t quite get on board with the over-the-top mantras that some apps on the market promote.
This handy journal app allowed us to instead track our thoughts and feelings by asking questions like how our day was, why it was good (for example, because of food or work), and how we felt. Our answers were then saved as “stories”, which made up the wider “journal”.
We found that even after a couple of entries, using the app helped us gain perspective, and also increased our gratitude for some of the little things in life. At times, however, the app felt a little childish. The language is extremely simple (think “Nice to meet you! What do your friends call you?” and “super awesome”), while we found the options for the questions – some of which are answered via a sliding scale – slightly restrictive.
If you’re after something a little different though, this app could be a good starting point for your mindfulness journey.
Buy now £41.99, Reflectly.app
Smiling Mind
If you’re obsessed with data and don’t want to spend ages scanning through hundreds of programmes to find what you need, then this app is a great choice. From the moment you open Smiling Mind, you start inputting information to ensure you get a customised list of guided meditations.
From asking you how much experience you’ve had before, to identifying what you’re interested in – from mindfulness in sport to improving performance and sleep (who isn’t interested in that?) – we liked the customisable element and found it saved time.
Like some of the other apps, we also liked being able to check in and out before and after meditations to track our progress. The guided sessions are easy to follow and offer a good balance between silence and narration (we particularly liked the Australian twang). Our favourite was the “body scan”, which encourages listeners to identify how parts of the body are feeling. It may not be as slick as some of the other apps on the market, but we loved it all the same.
Even better, Smiling Mind is completely free, as it was set up by an Australian not-for-profit organisation, which wants to make mindfulness “an accessible tool for all”.
Buy now, Smilingmind.com.au
Soaak
The Soaak app takes a slightly different approach to stress reduction, using tailored sounds and frequencies to help with anything from poor sleep to mood elevation. The idea is that each soundscape affects the brain in different ways and that by listening to these frequencies you’ll be able to tune into moments of calm, focus and boost serotonin.
The app also offers 21-day programmes delivered by wellbeing experts across a range of topics, from confidence to mindset shifts and overcoming addiction. So it’s not just a soundscape library. Each expert session is five minutes or less so it’s easy to fit into your daily routine. However, many of the sound meditations are up to 20 minutes long so you’ll have to carve time out of your day to engage with these.
When you open the app, you’re met with a daily mantra, a mindful intention for the day and the opportunity to fill in a gratitude journal. You can also link your Apple Watch to sync up your biometrics with the app, which will make it easier to track things like your heart rate, sleep quality and stress levels before, during and after your sessions.
Soaak is pretty unique in that it blends many of the features of other mindfulness apps with health tracking and sound healing – ideal if you’re the sort of person who’s considered trying a sound bath to tackle stress.
The app offers a free trial so you can see if it’s right for you before committing but if you do, it’ll cost you £23 a month for the full version and for the sleep-only version (which includes sleep frequencies and daily mindfulness tips) it’ll be £3.85 a month.
Buy now £23.00, App.soaak.com
The verdict: Mindfulness apps
If you’re looking for the right mindfulness app, it’s reassuring to know that there are plenty of great options out there. There’ll be something to suit your personality, your routine and your needs, wherever you happen to be in your life.
Calm was our favourite due to its variety – from the calming bedtime stories to the easy-to-follow meditations. Headspace and Balance were close runners-up and great options for beginners. We also loved Soaak’s 21-day programme and healing soundscapes which were especially effective for soothing the mind at bedtime. But for daily motivation and encouraging positive self-talk and healthy habits, Superhuman has also earned a mention.
As most of the apps are free to download and almost all of them offer a free trial, make sure you try before you buy and find one that makes your daily routine easier, not harder.
If you’re struggling with your mental health Samaritans offers free support and resources online, via email and by phone via its 24/7 helpline.
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