What is Calm? How to use the meditation and mental fitness app featuring celebrity 'sleep stories'
Calm is a mental fitness app featuring stories, meditations, and music to help users sleep better, lessen anxiety, and become more mindful.
Calm offers premium memberships worth $14.99 per month or $69.99 per year or a free version with limited options.
The Calm app is popular among mental fitness advocates and for its celebrity sleep stories featuring the voices of Harry Styles, Kate Winslet, and Idris Elba.
Mental health is essential, and one of the best ways to practice self-care is to take a few moments to yourself for a day. Meditation practice is a good way to do that, with many benefits, including decreased stress and negative emotions, increasing self-awareness, and general feelings of relaxation.
For those looking for guidance on beginning a meditation practice, the Calm app can help. Downloaded more than 100 million times since it was released back in 2012, it's available on iOS and Android as well as on the web.
Calm can be a positive part of your self-care practice, whether you've never tried meditation before or you're a seasoned pro.
What is Calm?
Calm is a meditation and mental fitness app that features a variety of media designed to help users relax, sleep, or become more mindful.
One of Calm's biggest draws for many is their collaborations with popular celebrities featured on the app as the readers of Sleep Stories. This tool is meant to help listeners have a more restful night through a growing library of famous narrators including LeBron James, Scottie Pippen, Matthew McConaughey, Laura Dern, Lucy Liu, and Kelly Rowland. Calm also features relaxing remixes of songs and albums by stars, including Ellie Goulding, Moby, and John Legend.
In addition to bedtime stories and relaxing music options, Calm offers mood tracking, breathing exercises, guided and unguided meditations, customizable audio and video content, masterclasses held by leading experts in the field, and regularly updated content. That includes Daily Calms to help users maximize the effectiveness of their practice. There's even a Calm Body section that features small movement and stretching segments to help your physical health and mental health.
Calms users with children can also use the dedicated offerings for kids - from Sleep Stories of classics like "Peter Pan" and "The Velveteen Rabbit" to meditations with popular children's characters like Thomas the Tank Engine.
Calm Free versus Calm Premium
Calm currently offers a free version and Calm Premium, a subscription-based model that costs $14.99 per month or $69.99 per year. In addition, the app offers a 7-day free trial of their Premium service for users to try before they commit.
Quick tip: Calm frequently offers discounts, so you may be able to purchase an annual subscription at a lower cost.
The free version may be good for casual users, as it offers several useful features without cost, including:
Timed meditations
Day 1 of all multi-day meditation programs
A sleep story called "Blue Gold"
Access to Calm's Breathe Bubble breathing exercise
Several free scenes and nature sounds
Calm Premium includes everything the free version does but also unlocks the rest of Calm's content. That includes more than 120 Sleep Stories, hundreds of meditations focusing on everything from anxiety to relationships, specially curated music, masterclasses, and more.
How to sign up for Apple Fitness Plus in 3 ways, and what you'll need to subscribeHow to cancel a Planet Fitness membership in 2 waysHow to cancel your Apple Fitness Plus subscription on any Apple deviceWhat devices work with Apple Fitness Plus? Here's what's compatible with Apple's workout app
Read the original article on Business Insider
