Millions of people suffer from sleeping disorders due to stress and other environmental factors. Sleep is designed to rejuvenate your body, and if you don’t get good quality o sleep, your overall quality of life can suffer. It is a never-ending toxic cycle of stress and sleeplessness.
Many people suffer from a constant cycle of heavy stress followed by sleeplessness. You’ll be happy to know that there is a simple solution – relaxation. If you’re thinking it’s not that simple, then how about using an app for that?
The Calm App helps reduce stress and in turn improve your quality of sleep at night. To learn more about what this app can do and help you get better sleep, check out the features below.
What Is the Calm App?
Calm is an app for those who are constantly under stress or those who have a difficult time getting proper sleep at night. This app can be downloaded from Google Play or the Apple App Store.
The app shows you different ways you can relax after a busy day. It teaches you the proper way to practice meditation through different methods so you can reduce stress and improve your quality of life.
You also learn about breathing techniques and get sleep stories too. Calm offers many methods according to your liking and lifestyle so there is truly an option that will suit everyone.
Why Reducing Stress Is Important
Health experts always recommend that you try to reduce stress levels so you can sleep well at night. If you are feeling stressed, you’ll have tons of thoughts running through your head that make it impossible to sleep.
Additionally, when you’re stressed, your cortisol levels are high and that means your blood is pumping and you’re more ready to go for a run than sleep. That’s why learning to wind down after a long day can improve your overall quality of sleep and life.
Further, as many of us have been told time and time again, getting good sleep is an essential aspect of one’s overall health.
Guided Sessions
Calm is a mobile application that features different programs depending on the lifestyle of its user. These techniques help calm you down, lift you, lull you to sleep, and help improve your sleep so you wake up in the morning all fresh and ready to take on the world.
Do note that some of these features are only available through a paid subscription and payment is done through your Google account.
Calm App offers guided meditation sessions that run from 3 minutes up to 25 minutes. This allows users to choose the duration of each session as needed.
If you find yourself having to adjust to the meditation session, you can always change it to better accommodate your need for proper relaxation.
What Do They Cover?
These guided meditation sessions cover different topics that will help you cope with stress and ultimately relieve your body. Some of the topics include Focus and Concentration to help you improve your mind’s clarity when you are working or studying.
There is also a Managing Stress section to help you develop coping mechanisms against stress, a Walking Meditation option for when you want your daily walk to be more mindful, and many more topics as well.
Different Programs
The app also features a daily 10-minute program called Daily Calm to help you start up your day with the proper mindset or calm down before going to bed. This feature will surely help change the way you cope with stress every day.
The app also offers other options such as 7 and 21-day programs for beginners and advanced users. These programs will teach you how to cope with stress and help calm your mind during stressful situations.
From breathing exercises to calming music, these programs are backed by research and science and are highly recommended by experts in the field.
Masterclasses
Calm App also offers masterclasses from experts to truly help you manage your stress levels throughout the day. These masterclasses help track down the root cause of your condition and how you can redefine your life through different techniques to alleviate stress.
Music and Sounds
Calm App features more than 30 different nature sounds and scenes that you can use during your meditation session.
These sounds are based on real sounds in nature that will help soothe your nerves and ensure that your meditation and yoga sessions are impactful.
The exclusive music within the app is engineered to help you relax, boost your focus, and help make you fall asleep faster.
Find Inner Peace
Do you feel calmest at the beach or on a mountaintop? Well, luckily for you, Calm’s music and meditation sounds can transport you there at a moment’s notice.
When you close your eyes and play one of these tracks, you are instantly immersed in the sound of waves crashing on the beach or birds chipping from safety amongst a rain storm.
How Calm Works
Calm works through the use of different methods of meditation, music, and breathing techniques. Meditation has been known to be very helpful when it comes to relieving stress. Music and breathing exercises slowly calm you down.
Modern technology has helped develop the Calm app and we now have a thorough understanding of how meditation works and how it affects our brain. Whenever our brain processes information, there is an increase in beta waves.
Meditation helps decrease beta waves in our brain and other brain functions start to slow down giving us time to free our minds from all the stress.
Record Your Progress
Those who want to see their improvement can check their track record through the use of Daily Streaks. The app allows you to see how much time you have spent on meditation. It also keeps track of your progress from day one up until the last time you have used the app.
This way, you get to see how much you have improved and how you can change your meditation program to suit your needs. You can also see which program improves your mood and sleep better so you can gauge how effective these programs are to your health.
How Frontal Lobe Affects Meditation
The more we meditate, the more our brain becomes free from all the barrage of information that causes stress.
The frontal lobe which controls all of our emotions, self-awareness, and reasoning goes offline during meditation. The part of our brain that processes information about our surroundings slows down when we are under meditation.
Meditation also reduces the workload of the thalamus which controls the information that enters our brain.
It reduces the brain’s workload just enough to put your mind and soul at a standstill thus allowing you to get a better grip on yourself. This is why the result of meditation manifests in a calmer and better mood.
Benefits of This Feature
The use of the Calm App enables your mind and body to become attuned with one other. Stress disrupts your connection between the brain and the rest of the body. This is the reason why you begin to feel discomfort whenever stress levels are high.
Meditation trains your mind to focus and your body follows suit through relaxation. You can use meditation to become more aware of your surroundings and be more in tune with your body.
People use the app to develop habits that are beneficial to their health. Below, you will find more benefits of using this app.
Reduce Stress and Anxiety
One of the major benefits of using the Calm app is stress reduction. Stress increases the production of a hormone called cortisol.
This hormone releases inflammatory chemicals called cytokines which lead to many issues in the body including difficulty in sleeping, depression, increased blood pressure, anxiety, and many more.
Meditation and other techniques taught through the app reduces the inflammatory response caused by stress. It is also known that meditation helps relieve different symptoms of other stress-related conditions.
Anxiety is another major factor when it comes to stress. The Calm app helps control job-related anxiety and improve well-being as well as reduce job strain after several weeks of meditation through the use of the app.
Benefits of this Feature
Meditation helps improve our attention span, focus, and concentration. People who regularly use the app to meditate have improved performance on visual tasks due to greater attention span and focus.
Meditation helps you focus on a single task and keeps your mind from wandering.
Improve Sleep
One of the best benefits when using the app is it allows users to get better sleep. After a few weeks of constant use of the app, you will find yourself having an improved sleep quality since you already know how to calm your mind before going to sleep.
Being better at meditation helps redirect your mind from stressful thoughts that cause you to have difficulty getting sleep.
The app also helps relax your mind and body by releasing the tension. This puts you in a peaceful and relaxing state so you are more likely to fall asleep faster. This also means that you have more time to rest so you wake up in the morning well-rested.
Promote Emotional Well-Being
With the Calm app’s heavy focus on meditation and other stress-relieving exercises and techniques, users begin to clear stress and the information overload that contributes to the effects of daily stress.
Users begin to feel an increased self-awareness, reduced negative emotions, increased imaginative abilities, and creativity, as well as increased patience and tolerance.
Accessibility
Since the app can be downloaded on your mobile device, you can easily access your meditation program and other techniques to help calm you down. You can meditate wherever you like or during your breaks.
All you need to do is to launch the app, choose a 10-minute session and you can get back to work with your mind rewired and refreshed.
The Calm app also covers programs from the basic ones to the masterclasses. This way, you will always have something to work on even after using the app for weeks or months.
How to Develop Your Practice
Your journey does not end after each session but instead, it continues until you have found yourself able to cope with stress properly. So each time you do a single activity, you are building upon what you learned last.
You can’t meditate for a week or listen to sleep stories for a week and expect everything to be fixed. Your body needs to learn how to relax and the more practice you can give it the better.
Conclusion
The Calm app offers meaningful ways to help improve your life. The best part about the app is it provides different options that cater to your lifestyle.
The world of meditation, yoga, breathing programs, sleep stories, and relaxing music, may feel out of your comfort zone. But if you want to feel more relaxed and get better sleep give this app a try.
