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Portland, United States. 79 teachers. The best meditation app with the world’s largest FREE library of more than 200k guided meditations, 17k teachers & the world’s most loved meditation Timer.
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Founded by brothers Christopher and Nicho Plowman, Insight Timer is the number one free app for Meditation, Sleep, Anxiety, and Mindfulness worldwide. It's one of TIME Magazine's, and Women's Health Magazine's "Apps of the Year" and according to Tristan Harris, a technology ethicist, is the "Happiest App in the World".
- Overview
- Getting Started With Insight Timer
- Building a Mindfulness Practice With Insight Timer
- Tackling My Sleep Hygiene
- Pros and Cons
- Final Thoughts
I’m in a stressful season of my life—and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m in the midst of studying for my board licensing exam, working on a large personal writing project, and navigating an overall constriction of my time, resulting in some pretty substantial stress. I also have a guilty pleasure that I’m ashamed of: I’m a doom-scroller, especially before bed. Rather than avoiding blue light, turning off the television, and cracking a book, I open my phone and scroll through Pinterest, various news outlets, Reddit—whatever I can get my hands on. While I prescribe mindfulness and sleep hygiene recommendations galore to my therapy clients, I often fail to follow my own advice.
Tired of feeling stressed out and exhausted, I was eager to see if a month of using the Insight Timer app could help me out. It’s a meditation app available for iOS and Android that targets sleep and stress while promoting total relaxation. I’ve tried plenty of meditation apps in the past, many of which I’ve found rather generic, so I was curious to see what set Insight Timer apart. Above all, I was hoping to find something that would help me develop healthier habits quickly. Keeping in mind that mindfulness meditation can decrease stress and enhance sleep, I eagerly jumped into the app.
I’m pleased to say, by the end of my month using Insight Timer, I have built a mindfulness practice and my sleep hygiene has significantly improved. The app exceeded all my expectations. Here’s why.
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On its website, Insight Timer dubs itself the #1 app for sleep, stress, and anxiety. It offers breathwork and mindfulness exercises, bedtime stories, guided visualizations, soothing music tracks, multi-day courses on wellness-related topics (think along the lines of manifestation, tarot, and connecting with your spirit guides), talks with wellness experts, and even podcast episodes. Its name is derived from its most simple function—to serve as a timer for meditation where you can set the time, ambient background sound, interval timer bell sound, and ending timer bell sound.
Before signing up with the app, I was already familiar with Insight Timer. In fact, my former clinical supervisor swore by its Internal Family Systems-informed guided meditations and recommended them to her psychotherapy clients as resources. Internal Family Systems is a compassionate therapy modality that adheres to the belief that every human is made up of different parts that take on different roles. Some of these roles can be maladaptive (as in, not a healthy response to a situation or problem), but that doesn’t mean they’re “bad.” Instead, the goal is to come into overall alignment with all parts of the self. Knowing that Insight Timer was inclusive of progress modalities only piqued my interest further.
There is a free version of the app that provides access to over 146,000 guided meditations, talks, podcasts, and music tracks. However, it doesn’t allow access to any of the app’s courses, offline listening, or the option to rewind or fast-forward. You can opt for a free seven-day trial of the paid version.
I was interested in getting the full experience, so I chose the premium Member Plus subscription.
As soon as I opened the Insight Timer app, I was shown a positive quote by the philosopher Seneca that read, “While we wait for life, life passes.”
Below the quote were five different emoticon faces I could select, ranging from a dark blue frowny face to a deep green smiley face, and above the faces was the question, “How are you feeling?”
I didn’t realize this initially, but it turned out this is a form of a mood tracker, allowing me to track how my moods were each time I reached for the app. Since this wasn’t clear to me at first, I often skipped over it (there was a tiny button at the bottom that read, “skip”). When I did rate my moods, I was then presented with a page that read, “Why do you feel ___?” and the blank would be filled in with the mood I selected.
For example, if I was having a bad day and clicked the dark blue frowny face, I was presented with the question, “Why do you feel awful?” Below the question were various buttons I could click, including family, food, spirituality, travel, finances, and more.
I liked that I was able to provide more detail as to what could be influencing my mood on any particular day.
It wasn’t until a few days of exploring the various pages of the app that I noticed I could see my progress by heading over to my account page. There was an option on this page that said, “Mood Check-in.” Once I clicked on the “Mood Check-in” option, there was a graph that displayed the moods I had tracked. The graph just listed out the emoticon face selected on each day, connecting them with a line to illustrate the trajectory of my moods throughout the week.
When it was time for bed, I ventured from the homepage to the sleep section app. I could choose from sleep music, soundscapes, bedtime tales, sleep meditations, and sleep exercises for children. I love that you can do as many activities in the app as you like and if you feel like you’d prefer a curated selection of tracks to choose from, the app has themed playlists available.
There were also courses available. The courses ranged from five days to a full month and consisted of educational audio you listened to once a day. Some of the course topics included building a better sleep routine, how to begin lucid dreaming, yoga nidra, and even mindfulness techniques for children. Each daily session was short, ranging from as quick as five minutes to about 30 minutes, depending on the topic at hand.
While some course lessons are experiential and would include mindfulness and sleep-enhancing exercises (think breathing techniques and guided visualizations), I was much more drawn to the various sounds and bedtime tales.
Since I take in so much content on a daily basis, the courses weren’t my preference, but I see how they could be perfect for someone who really wants to understand some of the science behind their sleep patterns and general wellness.
On my first night using the app, I opted for a bedtime tale. Here is where I could have been struck with some decision fatigue due to the volume of available bedtime tales. However, I quickly settled on a 20-minute-long retelling of Rapunzel, reaching for some childhood nostalgia. I pressed play, set it to “sleep mode” (which stops the track after it ends and locks it so you don’t run down your phone battery), and laid my head on my pillow.
It began with soothing ambient tones that played in the background for the duration of the track. I immediately felt my eyelids get heavier and was shocked at how quickly my body responded to just the sound of the tones. Then, the narrator began speaking. I found her cadence annoying—every word was slow and drawn out to the point where it was distracting from the content. Despite my annoyance, I was becoming more and more relaxed and figured something must be working. It couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes before I fell asleep. Night one was off to a great start.
While I loved my experience with Insight Timer, your mileage may vary. Keep in mind these pros and cons when determining if this app is a fit for you.
Insight Timer’s mindfulness offerings can be generally overwhelming—there are thousands to choose from and for the novice meditator, it may feel intimidating to make a decision. Interestingly enough, I didn’t feel this way when checking out its sleep exercises. I attribute this to sleep exercises being generally more approachable. After all, who doesn’t want to hear a bedtime tale or listen to some ambient sounds?
Once I got the hang of the app, I found it to be a great resource in my toolbox and my sleep hygiene was transformed.
That being said, it didn’t turn me into a daily meditator after a month. However, my goal in using the app wasn’t to spend the rest of my life meditating every single day. I simply wanted to destress as needed and Insight Timer helped me do that. Besides, in a culture of always needing to do more, maybe the greatest win is to turn to the support you need when you need it instead of feeling like you must add in another wellness practice on a daily basis. Plus, if you struggle to remember to use the app, there’s an option to set reminders, which I found super helpful.
I am impressed by the app’s value, namely the huge library I get to access for just $59.99 a year. I also love that the Insight Timer app is of fantastic quality—it never glitched, the audio was always crisp, and it was thoughtfully curated. As for my stress levels? I’m sailing through my study days with far less anxiety about passing my licensing exam and I’m consistently getting excellent sleep. I’d say Insight Timer did exactly what I hoped it would.
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406.2K Ratings. Editors’ Choice. As its name suggests, Insight Timer started as a simple timer app for meditating. But it’s evolved into a comprehensive (and award-winning) way to help people reduce anxiety, improve their sleep, and maybe even gain a little insight along the way.
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Insight Timer. The number 1 free meditation app. Guided meditations and talks led by the world's top meditation and mindfulness experts, neuroscientists, psychologists and teachers from Stanford, Harvard, the University of Oxford and more. Music tracks from world-renowned artists. Join millions learning to meditate on Insight Timer to help calm ...
