Learning mindfulness with the Calm app

I learned mindfulness after a very sad time in my life. It is a wonderful life skill that everyone should learn! Recently we were heading to the O2 to go to the Andrea Bocelli show. We left Godalming at 4:00 leaving us plenty of time to get there (estimated time 1.5 hours) and have  something to eat before the show. Then the skies opened up and torrential  rain, multiple car accidents, a few wrong turns and we only got to the theatre at 6:40, 20 minutes before the show. I used mindfulness to calm myself down and didn't bash my steering wheel or say fuck once. I did my breathing exercises, calmed myself down, listened to my apple satnav and always believed that we were going to make it. We did make it and it was the most wonderful show and it wasn't spoiled by the drain of getting there. 

What is mindfulness?

After my wife died I attended a eight week course on ‘mindfulness for stress’ and it was life changing. I had long wanted to learn mindfulness, but always put it on the back burner as a nice to have. However, I desperately needed help, and it was no longer a nice to have, so I did it. 

I learned how to meditate, use breathing techniques, self compassion, accept my sad situation, but learned to be grateful for all the good things I still had in my life. I soon felt that I had more control over my life, that I could deal with my emotions better and then hope and my passion for living started to come back. 

After the training, initially I used the audio recordings from the course to continue my practice and then experimented with various apps. The app I kept coming back to was Calm, which I liked a lot.

My advice to everyone is learn mindfulness NOW, don't wait for a life event to compel you to find help. There are enough challenges in the world to justify you investing in mindfulness training. You don't have to attend a training course to start practising, just use the Calm app.

The Independent summarised it as follows:-

Open the Calm app and you’ll immediately be greeted with the gentle sound of the outdoors. It varies from person to person, but we loved this touch and found it helped us on the path to relaxation (you can change it 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. But the app has bolstered its already-great offering this year, with the addition of a new daily meditation series called the Daily Trip. Narrated by Canadian author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren, the Daily Trip offers a more adventurous – and enjoyable – practice. We found we learned more in these daily sessions than any of the others we tested. 

If you fancy something a little different, you can also 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 One Direction 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 £29.99 for a subscription that lasts the whole year (there’s no monthly offer but that equates to just under £2.50 a month), we also think this app is great value.

My partner and I regularly use the sleep stories and they work, dare I say it, like a dream! We reckon we are getting at least 2 to 3 hours more sleep each night which makes a difference to our health and energy levels. We take in the daily calm and daily trip, love Tamara and Jeff. 

The following video is a little demo I recorded a while ago covering what to expect from the Calm app.