For Anxiety, Sleep, & More

Taking care of your mental health can take many forms – seeing a therapist, practicing your hobbies, and nourishing friendships are all good for your mental health. Similarly, taking steps to increase your calmness and decrease feelings of worry, fear, stress, and anxiety may also contribute to mental health and well-being. There is a seemingly endless variety of smartphone and other mobile device apps designed to help promote calmness and relaxation. In this article, we’ll talk about a few of them and about some of the specific ways that these apps may be able to help you feel calmer, less anxious, and more relaxed.
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There are countless calming and relaxation apps available in both the Apple Store and the Google Play Store. These apps all aim to decrease uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings of worry and fear while also increasing the much more pleasant and desirable feelings of calmness and relaxation. They do so in a range of different ways, from providing you with music and sounds created and curated to bring about a state of calmness and relaxation, to teaching you lessons in brain science, psychology, and how to monitor your own mental states, to guiding you through meditations and breathing exercises that promote calmness and relaxation.

In a clinical context, anxiety covers a wide range of disorders including specific phobias, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Bandelow et al., 2022). This is not an exhaustive list – anxiety may cover any condition where feelings of fear or worry interfere with your life in some way or cause you undue distress. Even people without diagnosed anxiety disorders may occasionally get feelings of fear or worry that interfere with daily functioning or that cause undue distress.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be extremely effective in helping people with anxiety overcome their worries and fears (Borza et al 2022). In CBT, patients work with a therapist to learn to identify their maladaptive thought patterns. They then work their problematic thought patterns with the goal of replacing them with positive, less problematic, less distressing ways of thinking and processing. Psychoeducation, or learning about your own mind and about how your thoughts, feelings, and actions all influence one another, is a critically important part of CBT, as is learning strategies you can use to minimize feelings of fear and worry. People in CBT are often taught how to identify when they are becoming worried, anxious, or fearful. They then learn calming and relaxation strategies that they can use to decrease their feelings of anxiety.

Mindshift CBT is an app that introduces users to some psychoeducation exercises similar to those used in CBT. It also incorporates calming, relaxation, and mindfulness exercises.
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So many of us feel that we’re not sleeping enough, or don’t get enough high-quality, restorative sleep. Luckily, there are calming apps that may be able to help you get to sleep faster.

Bettersleep has a range of activities and exercises that you can use to help guide you into sleep. Some of its features include hypnosis, relaxation techniques, sounds, music, meditations, and bedtime stories. 

Pzizz has different settings for nighttime sleep and for naps. Using soundscapes, music, and narration, this app guides you from wakefulness to sleep and even back to wakefulness again after a specific time if you want, helping you transition from awake to asleep and back again smoothly and peacefully.

Hearing sounds at specific frequencies may be able to help you feel calmer. As discussed in the video below, the rate at which the neurons in your brain fire electrical impulses is different when you are in different moods. There are distinct firing frequencies when you are awake and alert, when you are calmly at rest and relaxed, when you are in a light sleep or a deep meditation, and when you are in a deep sleep.

Hearing sounds at specific frequencies may help your brain transition to that specific state of being. Thus, listening to sounds in the range of 432 Hertz may encourage your neurons to fire in a frequency range characteristic of a state of calmness or relaxation (Menziletoglu et al 2021). Listening to sounds in this frequency range may also decrease your heart rate and breathing rate and may reduce muscle tension. Interestingly, the calming effects of specific sound frequencies may be one of the reasons why Tibetan singing bowls are frequently used to enhance meditation practice.

​Rain Rain has over 100 sounds that you can combine to bring about a calm and relaxed state. Some of the sounds available include rain, thunderstorm, ocean sounds, wind, streams, and the sound of a cat purring. 

Noisli is another app that you can use to create your own calming soundscape by combining different sounds.

Much of what was said above about the calming effects of sound also applies to music – listening to music can decrease feelings of stress, anxiety, and worry and can decrease physiological markers of stress including stress hormone levels, heart rate, and blood pressure (de Witte et al., 2022). Music may also promote the release of calming neurochemicals including endorphins and oxytocin.

Calm Radio has multiple channels of calming music in a range of genres including pop, classical, and jazz. It also has channels for calming sounds, meditations, and stories.

Insight Timer contains thousands of tracks of relaxing, calming music in addition to guided meditations and ambient sounds.
Spotify, the all-purpose music and podcast app has a number of playlists and channels dedicated to calming and relaxing music. You can even search for calming music of specific subtypes or genres like calming classical music, calming kids music, or calming guitar music.

School can be a very difficult, stress-inducing environment for students. One survey conducted with students from 72 countries around the world found that as many as two-thirds reported feeling stressed out about grades, testing, or studying (Pascoe et al., 2020). Younger students in the middle grades and older students at the post-secondary level also report high levels of stress. All this stress can have negative effects on academic performance and on mental health.

Smiling Mind is a completely free mindfulness meditation app that you can use for calmness and relaxation. It was developed in consultation with educators and contains meditations and other content specifically designed for children (ages 3-12), youth (ages 13-18), and adults (ages 19+). It also has material specifically for classroom use.

DreamyKid contains a range of content for enhancing calmness through mindfulness mediation, sleep stories, breathing exercises, soundscapes, and more. It even has specific content for people with specific needs that come along with ADHD, overeating, anxiety, and other conditions.

UCLA Mindful is a completely free app from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. This completely free app contains mindfulness education, meditation practices, and access to a weekly podcast from UCLA’s Hammer Museum.
Healthy Minds Program is backed by scientists from the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds and is full of mindfulness and meditation content to decrease worry and stress and increase calmness. It contains psychoeducation content as well as guided meditations and assessments to help you get a sense of your well-being.
In addition to these two apps, many of the apps reviewed elsewhere in this article are also either completely free or are free with limited access to content.

The two most popular smartphone applications for calming and meditation are the “Calm” app and the “Headspace” app. The Calm app has over 1.5 million ratings that average 4.8 out of five stars in the Apple Store and over 500,000 ratings that average 4.4 out of five stars in the Google Play Store. Headspace has over 900,000 ratings that average 4.8 stars out of 5 in the Apple Store and over 285,000 ratings that average 4.4 out of five stars in the Google Play Store. As of 2019, it is estimated that together, these apps have somewhere between five and nine million monthly users.

Both of these apps have a lot of content and both could easily have been discussed in any earlier section of this article. They both include guided meditations, breathing exercises, soundscapes, music, and sleep stories amongst other content. Currently both Calm and Headspace operate on subscription models and both charge the same for their services. Subscribing to either one costs 12.99 USD per month or 69.99 USD per year.

Generally, Calm may be preferred if you have some experience with meditation while headspace may be better if you are new to mindfulness or meditation. Headspace tends to offer more guidance and more structure while the content on Calm is presented in a more “a la carte” format which may suit you if you like less structure. This may be confusing or overwhelming if you don’t have meditation experience or if you just feel more comfortable with guidance and structure.

Notably, a recent scientific review (O’Daffer et al 2022) found 14 published, peer-reviewed studies testing the efficacy of Headspace but only one published, peer-reviewed study testing the efficacy of Calm. Overall, the authors concluded that there is some evidence that using the Headspace app may improve some symptoms of depression, while the evidence for effects on mindfulness, well-being, stress, and anxiety is more equivocal. 

This isn’t to say that Headspace is necessarily more effective than Calm. Simply, that headspace has been more frequently tested. Overall, these findings are great news for people who want to improve their well-being and mental health but who, for one reason or another, are unable to access more traditional mental health support. Using these apps may help you achieve greater mental health and well-being.

Ultimately, both apps have benefits that may help you achieve greater calmness in your life. They also both have trial periods so you can give them each a try and then stick with the one that works best for you.

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.​

• Peaceful Mind: Definition, Tips & Quotes
• How to Calm Down: 11 Tips to Calm Anxiety
• Digital Well-Being: Definition, Apps, and Strategies
• ​​The Wim Hof Method: Definition, Benefits, & Explanation
• ​​Feeling Anxious: When Waking Up, at Night, and More
• ​​Float Therapy: Definition, Benefits, & Side Effects​
• Meditation Apps: For Sleep, Anxiety, & More​​​​​​​

Our smartphones and other mobile devices can be a source of stress and anxiety (Vahedi & Saiphoo, 2018). But, by downloading and using calming apps, like those reviewed in this article, we may be able to turn a source of stress into a source of calmness. The apps reviewed in this article may help you decrease feelings of worry, stress, anxiety, and insomnia. 

Calmness can be achieved through psychoeducation, mindfulness meditations, breathing exercises, calming soundscapes, or calming music. The limited research on these apps is so far very promising – people who use them may be able to achieve improvements in their well-being and mental health. Although smartphones and the digital age are often maligned as the source of poor mental health and unhappiness, the huge range of calmness apps available now is a great consequence of our digital age. Now more than ever, mental health support is available to more people than ever, with barriers like high cost, long waiting lists, and long distance to practitioners virtually eliminated by having access to calming apps in your pocket.  

• Bandelow, B., Michaelis, S., & Wedekind, D. (2022). Treatment of anxiety disorders. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.
• Borza, L. (2022). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.
• de Witte, M., Pinho, A. D. S., Stams, G. J., Moonen, X., Bos, A. E., & van Hooren, S. (2022). Music therapy for stress reduction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review, 16(1), 134-159.
• Menziletoglu, D., Guler, A. Y., Cayır, T., & Isik, B. K. (2021). Binaural beats or 432 Hz music? which method is more effective for reducing preoperative dental anxiety?. Medicina Oral, Patología Oral y Cirugía Bucal, 26(1), e97.
• Morin, C. M., & Benca, R. (2012). Chronic insomnia. The Lancet, 379(9821), 1129-1141.
• O’Daffer, A., Colt, S. F., Wasil, A. R., & Lau, N. (2022). Efficacy and Conflicts of Interest in Randomized Controlled Trials Evaluating Headspace and Calm Apps: Systematic Review. JMIR mental health, 9(9), e40924.
• Pascoe, M. C., Hetrick, S. E., & Parker, A. G. (2020). The impact of stress on students in secondary school and higher education. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 104-112.
• Vahedi, Z., & Saiphoo, A. (2018). The association between smartphone use, stress, and anxiety: A meta-analytic review. Stress and Health, 34(3), 347-358.

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