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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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18,000 of the world's best teachers are on Insight Timer....
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davidji is the founder of The Meditation Academy where he...
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Sarah Blondin is the founder, writer, videographer and...
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- Deep Sleep | Insight Timer
- For Your Kids: Breathing With The Fluffy, Friendly, White Cloud | Insight Timer
- Heavy Thunderstorm Sounds For Relaxing, Sleeping & Stress Relief | Insight Timer
- Deep Healing | Insight Timer
- Five-Minute Morning Practice On Gratitude | Insight Timer
- Breathing Into Sleep | Insight Timer
- Om Shreem Hreem - A mantra to remove all obstacles | Insight Timer
- Guided Practice For Deep Sleep | Insight Timer
- Happiness And Inner Freedom | Insight Timer
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- 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.
The 7 Best Meditation Apps of 2024
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Apr 9, 2024 · Insight Timer is a meditation app that features an extensive free meditation library. The easy-to-navigate app is good for beginners and great for advanced students of meditation. Insight Timer also has live events like yoga, mood tracking, private mentoring, and workshops available.
- The best meditation app. This app has the largest variety of meditations, with guided sessions for beginners and less-structured programming for more-advanced practitioners.
- Less-structured meditations, ambient soundscapes. This app offers guided and unguided meditations that focus on relaxing in general and keeping steady in tough times.
- A basic meditation app that’s free. Unburdened by bells and whistles, this free app offers a clear sequence of well-structured courses. It’s a great option for anyone who wants to see if meditation is right for them.
- A free app aimed at younger people. This free option packages well-structured beginners courses in a lighthearted, simple app. It’s a particularly good choice for kids and young adults.
Insight Timer is one of the best investments I've ever made to help me with personal growth. I recommend to anyone who shows interest in meditation. Bug in Insight Timer. I use Insight Timer with an Android phone. Unfortunately, when using the meditation timer, there is an audible click every 4-5 seconds.
Apr 26, 2018 · When you first open the Insight Timer app, it tells you how many other users are meditating right at that moment. The morning was when I noticed the highest numbers—at times, I would be meditating in the morning alongside more than 5,000 people. 2. Having flexibility and choices make meditating easier.
Apr 4, 2021 · April 04, 2021. What's my pick for BEST meditation app? I'll tell you why it's the Insight Timer app and why it's so good to say "Goodbye, Stress!" with it. I break down my favourite features of the app and also share my favourite teachers in this Insight Timer app review!
