The world we live in today is full of things that can happen when we least expect it. Sometimes it brings things that make us happy. On the other hand, we can’t deny the fact that we still encounter problems that worry and stress us so much. People should always focus on their well-being. You must pay attention to how you can relieve yourself of unexpected occurrences. This is why downloading the Calm app is essential.
The Calm app serves as a meditation and relaxation app that helps its users to have better sleep, be more confident, and reduce stress and anxiety. This is done with the help of guided meditations, comforting music, and bedtime stories.
Additionally, this app has sessions that will help the users to train their minds to focus, to avoid being depressed, and to be able to face difficulties and challenges.
In this article, we will discuss the Calm App, its features, and how it can benefit its users.
What Is Calm?
Calm is an app that is perfect for meditation and mindfulness. It is considered as the “World’s Happiest App” because it makes the users happy. Calm produces distinctive audio content that helps to strengthen mental fitness. Moreover, it deals with some of the biggest challenges in people’s mental health, which include stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia.
Additionally, this app is filled with more than a hundred of guided meditation practices and sleep stories developed by top experts. This can be a perfect mindfulness app not only for beginners but also for intermediate and advanced users to help manage their anxiety, lower their stress, and make them sleep better. It covers a variety of programs and sessions for different topics.
Mental health experts including therapists and psychologists recommend this app. The guided meditation sessions can last a few minutes or up to half an hour. You can choose from three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes depending which will fit your schedule.
Topics Covered By The Calm App
- Calming Anxiety
- Managing Stress
- Deep Sleep
- Focus and Concentration
- Relationships
- Breaking Habits
- Happiness
- Gratitude
- Self-Esteem
- Body Scan
- Loving-Kindness
- Forgiveness
- Non-Judgment
- Commuting to Work or School
- Mindfulness at College
- Mindfulness at Work
- Walking Meditation
- Calm Kids
Functions Of The Calm App
- Relieving one’s anxiety
- Controlling stress
- Helping you to sleep soundly
- Improving your relationships
- Enhancing your concentration and focus
- Breaking habits
- Making you happier
- Encouraging gratefulness
- Removing the urge to judge others
- Helping you to be more polite
- Mentally examining your body through Body Scan
Features Of The Calm App
- Basics of mindfulness
- Returning to the “Here and Now”
- Paying attention
- Natural Calm sounds effects
- Pulling out of autopilot
- The value of “Non-Doing”
- Learning patience
- Awareness
- Seven to 21 days of guided meditation programs for both beginner and advanced users
- 25 guided meditation sessions
- Unguided meditation sessions
- Sleep Stories
- Open-ended meditation
- Original Daily Calm every day
- More than a hundred of Sleep Stories
- Life-changing Calm Masterclasses taught by world-renowned experts
- Different breathing exercises that will help you to relax
- Comforting music that will help you to focus, relax, or sleep
- More than 30 soothing nature sounds and scenes to use during meditation, yoga, or to help you sleep
Daily Calm App Highlights
- One week of Managing Stress training
- One week of Calming Anxiety
How To Use The Calm App
Your Top Goals
For the first time, when you open Calm after downloading and signing up or logging in using your Facebook account, you will be asked to choose the top goals. These goals are the ones that you want to accomplish via meditation. You can choose as many as you want from the choices.
Background Scenes
The home page contains helpful instructional bubbles. You can customize your home page’s background scene for it to be more appealing. This is possible by tapping on the mountain icon found at the top left corner of the home screen. Also, you can do that by swiping left and right on the image.
You can choose from different moving background scenes. Each of them comes with a distinctive atmosphere and soothing sounds that can be outdoors or indoors. However, you can turn them off from your screen if you want to.
The Meditate Tab
After having a soothing scene as your default background, you can check the Meditate tab, which is the app’s main event.
The Meditate tab lets you browse hundreds of calming podcasts. These will guide you to achieve the goals that you hoped for through different types of meditation. The tab that you will see at the top of the page shows the various targets of the different meditations. They range from two minutes to 35 minutes long.
7 Days Of Calm
The app suggests you start with the meditation series called the “7 Days of Calm.” This is the introduction to mindfulness and the basics of meditating. You will hear a female voice that will ask you to have deep breaths and clear your mind. You will then hear your default calming sounds playing in the background.
Meditation Player Buttons
If you’re using Spotify, Calm’s meditation player may look familiar. The media player controls, such as the pause, skip and fast-forward buttons, and the progress bar, can be found at the bottom of the screen. The equalizer icon (three horizontal bars) on the left side takes you to the volume control so you can adjust your sounds while using the app.
Meanwhile, the heart icon on the right side lets you bookmark your favorite meditations so you can easily go back to them later. However, if you want to download your meditation to be used offline, click on the download button found on the top left corner of the screen.
While your chosen meditations are playing and you are not doing anything with the screen for a few seconds, the controls will not be visible. With that, you’ll be able to focus better on the moving background that you chose. Simply tap anywhere on the screen to see the controls again.
Locked Screen
The meditation will continue to play even if you lock your phone or if your screen goes on sleep mode. You can still pause, skip forward, and rewind even if your screen is locked.
The Beginners Section
In this section, you will see the “Breathe Bubble.” It is a very calming and instinctive feature that will help the user to have stable breathing. This feature uses animations that you can customize. These will guide the user to proper breathing exercises for a few minutes, one at a time.
Motivational Poster
This will be given to you at the end of each medication. Also, you will be asked to rate the session.
Personal Profile
After each session, you will be led to your profile, so you can track your progress. You will be able to see the record of the days that you have meditated, your longest streak, the total number of days that you are meditating, and the total number of sessions that you used in the app.
You can open this profile by clicking the circular profile icon that can be found at the top left corner of the home page.
Share Options
If you want other people to learn about your new meditation practice, you can share it on social media. From the profile screen, scroll down and find the “App Settings” and “Share Options.”
Mindfulness Reminder
If you want to make a concrete habit of meditating, this is one of the most important settings to consider. It lets you set a timer for your next meditation session.
The Masterclass Tab
You can see this tab at the right of the Meditate icon on the gray bar at the bottom of the app. Masterclasses give more information than meditations. Moreover, they aim to give teachings about different challenges and problems that a person can encounter while pursuing mindfulness. They are more like an online or an informative class rather than a meditation session.
Additionally, Masterclasses differ in length and content. Also, even they present audio recordings made by the instructor played over a still photo, there is a short video trailer after each class.
The Music Tab
You are given hundreds of choices for the selection of calming music, just like the meditations. They are all categorized and arranged depending on what you hope to achieve for your listening experience. Furthermore, all the sounds are instrumental, and each lasts for an hour. With that, you won’t be disturbed on your meditation by hitting the “Next” button.
You can minimize the music player, unlike the meditations and Masterclasses. Because of that, you can still check some of the apps while the music is playing.
Sleep Stories
It features a large collection of short bedtime stories that are read slowly and calmly by the narrators. Moreover, they are only stories about nature scenes, far-off lands, and big and great adventures. They will help you to unwind and bring back the wonderful feeling of being read a wonderful bedtime story.
How to Fall Asleep With the Calm App
You need to consider the Calm app if you need help falling asleep. Here are the recommended app settings if you want to fall asleep.
Music
You should use the Music sleep timer if you would like to listen to music as you fall asleep.
- Start a music track.
- Tap the player bar that can be found at the bottom of the screen.
- Tap the clock icon above the pause button.
- Select how long you would like to play your selected music.
- The Calm app will automatically close when the music sleep timer ends.
- If you want your song to loop or the next song to play, use the “Autoplay Settings.”
Meditations Or Sleep Stories
If you want to listen to meditations or sleep stories, adjust the “Play Sounds Outside of App” setting. The setting controls until when your chosen scene will continue playing after the meditation has ended.
- Tap the “More” button that can be found at the bottom right corner of the home screen.
- Tap “Scenes.”
- Here you can find an option to play sounds outside of the Calm app.
- Tap the duration selector.
- Choose how long you like the scene to play.
You can also adjust the volume of the background sounds at the “Scenes” menu. You just have to slide the Scene volume bar left or right to adjust to whatever you prefer. However, you can also choose between “Silent Earth” and “Silent Clouds.”
How to Change the Background Scene and the Scene Settings
- Look for and press the “More” button found at the bottom right corner of the app’s home screen.
- To access the “Scenes” menu, tap “Scenes.”
- You will then see the background options.
- Scroll through all the scene options given.
- Tap on the scenes that you want to download.
- After downloading new scenes, swipe left or right to change your current scene.
How to Use the Calm App Offline
There are a lot of sessions and tracks in the Calm app that you can download for offline listening.
Downloading A Masterclass, Meditation, Or Calm Body Program
- Tap on the program that you would like to listen to.
- Go to the program description page.
- Tap the download cloud icon that can be found at the top corner of the screen.
- If the download is successful, you will see a checkmark in the center of the cloud icon.
Downloading A Music Track Or Sleep Story
- Start the track or story that you would like to listen to.
- Tap the player that you will see at the bottom of the screen when the session begins.
- You will then see the download cloud icon at the upper right corner.
- Tap on the icon to download the current music or story that you are listening to.
- After the download, you can play it offline.
How to Download and Install the Calm App
The app is available for download on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Here are the steps on how to download and install the Calm APK on Android.
First, download the Calm.APK on your Android device.
Next, allow “Third-party Apps” on your device:
- Go to “Menu.”
- Click on “Settings” and “Security.”
- Enable the “Unknown Sources” function. This is to let third-party sources install an APK on your Android device.
Go to “File Manager”:
- You have to find the Calm.APK file that you downloaded.
- You can also download a file manager, so you can easily find the files that you downloaded on your Android device.
- Click on the Calm.APK file when you find it.
- The normal installation process will then begin.
- When asked for anything, just tap “Yes.”
You can now enjoy using your downloaded Calm App.
The Seven Days Of Calm Program
- Day 1 is for guided breathing meditation.
- Day 2 is about paying attention. It lets you be in a habit of accepting all your thoughts but letting them be carried away.
- Day 3 is all about body scans.
- Day 4 is working with thoughts. This is to help you deal with what comes in your mind.
- Day 5 is about returning to the “Here and Now.” It tackles the importance of calmness and immobility to let ourselves to heal and recharge. With that, you will be able to avoid the feeling of being exhausted and empty.
- Day 6 is about patience. You will learn how to respond to different situations with compassion and not just respond. We usually feel so frustrated and exhausted with the challenges and failures that we encounter that sometimes we forget no to pay attention to ourselves.
- Day 7 is about awareness, which is described as freedom to change. Through this, we will be reminded that the more awareness we pit in our lives, the more freedom we have to make choices that will bring changes to our lives.
Pros and Cons of the Calm App
Pros
- Introductory seven-day program with some additional content for free
- Statistics and meditation tracking with voluntary daily reminders
- Personalized audio and visual prompt that helps in relaxation
- A vigorous curriculum that includes sleep stories
- “Daily Calm” new meditation content every day
- Contents for kids
- Easy to use
- Calming voices of narrators
- Quite a selection of meditations that are categorized by emotions
- Customizable nature sounds in the background of each meditation
- Guided meditations
- Mediations for non-meditating people
Cons
- Paid features
- Requires user engagement and commitment to achieve goals
- Kid’s sleep stories are too long
- Reminders are not that strong enough
Alternatives For Calm App
Headspace
This is considered as one of the most popular meditation apps. It is a great choice because it offers hundreds of guided meditations, sleep sounds, meditations for emergencies, and meditations for kids. It added animations that help in a better understanding of the meditation. Moreover, it will help you learn the importance of mindfulness and meditation. The sessions included are easy to follow. Most sessions are focusing on breathing and scanning the body that helps to check how you feel.
Insight Timer
It has the most number of experienced mindfulness teachers that provide help. Moreover, it has a customizable timer feature that gives you the freedom to choose how long you want to practice, the style that you want, or just set a timer and sits without interruptions. In addition to the variety of guided meditations that it offers, it has a tracker that lets you record your progress and earn badges that will encourage you more.
Buddhify
This is the only meditation app that can fit into your busy modern lifestyle. Its unique design provides a daily wheel that is divided into segments, from waking up to going to bed. Moreover, you can choose from among multiple teachers, so the voice and the style satisfy your preference. Also, it has mindfulness exercises that you can do anywhere. They are also very specific. Buddhify helps with issues like anxiety, stress, sleep, pain, and tough emotions.
Enlighten Your Mind With The Calm App
Every day is a busy day. It is because we use our energy physically, emotionally, or mentally whether at home or work. However, mental exhaustion poses serious problems. Because of that, we have to pay more attention to our mental health.
Calm App provides great help for us to relieve our stress and everything that suffocates the mind. It offers a lot of exercises that focus on how to deal with daily stress and anxiety. The meditations and mindfulness exercises can lead to healthy living. Not only does the app help to calm us, but it also helps us to have a clear mind. With that, we’ll be able to deal with our problems reasonably. We can achieve a better working environment because we can focus and concentrate more. Concerning our relationship with other people, we’ll be able to deal with them with compassion.
Additionally, this app can help lessen the number of people who suffer depression. Their minds will be enlightened, thus they can think reasonably. A lot of suicidal attempts are due to mental illness and depression, so the Calm app is such a big help.
If you want to maximize the effects of this app, you should invest in wireless earbuds. Wireless earbuds can help you focus while meditating. To know more, here is our article that talks about the best true wireless earbuds available today.
If you want to find more useful apps, check our article on the different types of social media apps or the best hiking apps you can use today.
