14 best mindfulness apps to help you keep calm during a crisis

Do you ever find yourself sitting on the train home after a stressful day at work wishing you were actually in Hawaii listening to the waves crash against the beach? Or curled up next to a log fire in Switzerland? Well, this app can help with that. Portal is a mindfulness app with a difference.

Instead of guided meditations, the app transports users around the world, helping them chill out with the assistance of some of nature’s most relaxing sounds. We loved the concept and found it not only helped us relax, but also sent us to sleep when the dreaded insomnia kicked in.

From summer thunderstorms to the rustle of palm tree leaves, there’s a sound to suit everyone – plus you can mix Portal’s audio with other apps to add a little extra ambience to your audiobooks or podcasts. There is also a “relax” function that includes breathing exercises, and a “focus” section, which we found helped us to write the one thing we wanted to concentrate on, boosting our productivity.

Since we last tested the app, users can now be transported to the Scottish highlands and Slovenian alps. We’d recommend those looking for something a little different give this app a go – you’re bound to feel on top of the world in no time.

The app costs around £54 per year or £9.99 a month. You can also purchase a lifetime membership, which saves you a fair bit of money at £230.

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The Anxiety Solution app is the perfect tonic if you’re looking to relieve stress or improve your mood. It’s like having a personal champion in your smartphone; someone who is looking out for you, provides reminders to take moments away from the stresses of daily life and who enables you to find what works best for you.

The app includes over 70 sessions – including mindfulness, breathing tools, sleep stories and fitness routines – and is great for beginners who want a bit more support at the start of their meditation journey.

We loved the interactive practices, which included high-quality graphics, for example showing how our heart rate varied as we changed our breathing. Our favourite was the 12-minute rebalance with mindfulness, which included a full body scan and an interactive graphic so we could identify exactly how we felt in different parts of our body.

More than that, though, the app includes a 28-session course, which helps to explain and reduce anxiety. This course can be worked through one session at a time, using techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy to help you tackle your worries. A big thumbs up from us.

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The Superhuman app is a mindfulness app built with ambitious people in mind, pairing motivational mantras with mindfulness exercises. Instead of calling its daily audio guides meditations, it refers to them as “activations” The idea is that you’re taking active control of your life, your goals and your emotions, rather than taking a passive approach.

There are more than 600 activations to listen to while you’re walking, winding down for sleep and getting ready for work and these span 15 categories. The vibe is much more centred on personal development and manifestation than classic mental health and we found that using the app gave us a lift each day, boosted mental clarity and helped us to focus on our achievements instead of our worries.

Most activations are voiced by Superhuman’s founder Mimi Bouchard and using the app feels as though you have a life coach by your side reminding you of the importance of your self-worth, your ambitions and your unique strengths.

The app is among the pricier options on this list at £25.99 per month or £159.99 per year and is probably best suited to those who are already interested in personal growth and ready to take the next step on their journey.

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This app offers stress relief for busy people. Founder Yunha Kim recognised that many of us do not have time (or at least *think* we don’t have time) to squeeze yet another thing onto our to-do list. To help combat this, the app offers audio meditations as short as five minutes, with good-quality guided meditations that really do help to reduce stress and calm the mind.

The meditations themselves are well paced and offer good guidance. We found there was a little more space towards the end of each recording, which helped us really relax without the need for continual instruction.

We were also impressed by the variety on the app. Users are asked to choose topics that interest them when they open it for the first time and there really is something for everyone – from meditations that will help you find your feet after a breakup, to post-argument relaxation, stress-free commutes and pre-date mindfulness to help you get into the zone.

The app itself is clean and modern, with a simple feed and easy-to-use interface. Lots of the content is free to use if you don’t want to pay for the optional subscription, which is a little on the steep side.

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Aura calls itself the “Spotify of mindfulness” due to the frankly astonishing depth and range of its content. When you first log into the app, users are asked to choose two or more topics from a long list including calming anxiety, increasing happiness, improving focus and dealing with anger.

Once in, you get access to the “world’s largest premium library” of meditation tracks, life coaching, stories, nature sounds and music. The app is fairly easy to navigate, although the amount of content perhaps ends up being its Achilles’ heel. There is so much to choose from, we found it hard to know where to start.

We liked the shorter three-minute guided meditations, which we used to help frame our day positively, and the fact the app uses AI to build an understanding of your preferences, so over time it becomes more personal and tailored to your needs.

A premium subscription allows you access to all of the content, as well as full mood tracking and offline use.

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Buddhify boasts that it is “designed to fit into a busy modern lifestyle”. It’s certainly unique in its design, with a daily wheel divided into segments to map out your day – waking up to going to bed.

The colourful disc is designed to help you find relevant mindfulness and meditation exercises depending on the time of day, with plenty of short, spoken sessions for use on the go. We loved the “work break” exercises, which help you relax at the office, while the “travelling” segment was perfect for the dreaded commute.

Sessions range from four minutes to around half an hour, and there are also guided exercises if you can’t sleep or if you’re feeling particularly stressed. We liked the idea, but found that many of the other apps also had the variety we needed to fit them into our busy lives.

There’s also a kid’s version – Buddhify kids has sixty meditations led by youth mindfulness experts and the categories span sessions for feeling better, going to sleep, calming down and growing wisdom.

This is one of the only apps that makes you pay an upfront fee of £24 a year – so while it is on the more affordable end of the spectrum, you might want to consider trying a few free trials of other apps before you settle on this one.

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The Soaak app takes a slightly different approach to stress reduction, using tailored sounds and frequencies to help with anything from poor sleep to mood elevation. The idea is that each soundscape affects the brain in different ways and that by listening to these frequencies you’ll be able to tune into moments of calm, focus and boost serotonin.

The app also offers 21-day programmes delivered by wellbeing experts across a range of topics, from confidence to mindset shifts and overcoming addiction. So it’s not just a soundscape library. Each expert session is five minutes or less so it’s easy to fit into your daily routine. However, many of the sound meditations are up to 20 minutes long so you’ll have to carve time out of your day to engage with these.

When you open the app, you’re met with a daily mantra, a mindful intention for the day and the opportunity to fill in a gratitude journal. You can also link your Apple Watch to sync up your biometrics with the app, which will make it easier to track things like your heart rate, sleep quality and stress levels before, during and after your sessions.

Soaak is pretty unique in that it blends many of the features of other mindfulness apps with health tracking and sound healing – ideal if you’re the sort of person who’s considered trying a sound bath to tackle stress.

The app offers a free trial so you can see if it’s right for you before committing but if you do, it’ll cost you £23 a month for the full version and for the sleep-only version (which includes sleep frequencies and daily mindfulness tips) it’ll be £3.85 a month.

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