Breathe in, hold, breathe out: The minds behind Calm, the mindfulness app

At his charitable foundation in Texas, Matthew McConaughey gave out the Calm mindfulness app to some of the kids who had been stressed out by devastating storms and natural disasters of all kinds. And now you can hear him telling a bedtime story on the app, “Wonder”, or meditating (“Living with Intention”), and suggesting we might like to “drift away” with him to “peaceful dreams” – and not “fear the dark”. He has a very calm and soothing and reassuring voice. So too, I discovered, do Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew, the co-founders of Calm, albeit with a distinctively English accent.

It turns out that LeBron James also has a powerful and very deep voice as well as being a top basketball player. Now he is talking about his mental moves on the app too. And fans of Harry Styles might like to know that they can “fall asleep and fall in love with the dreamy voice of Harry Styles” in “Dream With Me”, also on the app. The fact is (in case you were wondering) that Acton Smith and Tew didn’t send any of these A-listers a cheque and persuade them to attach their names to an endorsement. Nothing so cynical.

“It was important that their support was authentic,” says Acton Smith. “We heard on the grapevine that they were fans of Calm. LeBron James wrote about it in an article. It was that way around. Then they became ambassadors.” Michael Bublé for one ­– completely unsolicited – sang the praises of Calm on The Graham Norton Show. McConaughey and James and Styles are just a few of the 100 million or so movie stars, rock stars, and mere mortals who have downloaded Calm to restore peace of mind amid all the mayhem.

Both Tew and Acton Smith were seekers of serenity long before they even dreamed of an app. Back in the 1990s, before setting up the “Million Dollar Homepage” and starting an online business, Tew was already meditating and devouring books on self-improvement. “Most people thought I was into something weird,” says Tew. Which is exactly what Acton Smith thought when the two of them ended up sharing a house together in Soho in the early 2000s. He was a sceptic, or indifferent. “I didn’t get it.”

And above all he was too busy setting up Mind Candy, the entertainment website. In particular Acton Smith was working on “Moshi Monsters” for kids, blending online and offline with games, trading cards, toys and movies. The whole business was flying. Then, as spectacularly as it had taken off, the kids side of the business crashed. Acton Smith was severely stressed out. “It taught me how fickle the space can be,” he says. It was no coincidence that suddenly meditation started to seem like a really viable option.

Soon the two men were brainstorming with a view to creating a website that would help you to meditate, shorn of any mystic Maharishi overtones. “Meditation is simple,” says Tew. “It does things to your brain that make you feel better.” “Yes,” chimes in Acton Smith. “I realised that it’s basically neuroscience, it’s not mysticism. It’s a way of rewiring the mind. It’s real. It works.”

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They went from Soho to San Francisco in search of the talent and the capital required to set up. “It was the best place in the world to start Calm,” says Tew. The Calm app finally emerged in 2012. “The world needed calm, more than ever,” says Acton Smith. “I needed it.”

Tew reckons that Calm has probably helped in the destigmatisation of mental health. “The stiff upper lip used to be the norm. Bottling it up. You didn’t talk about it. Now people have opened up about their mental health. You go to the gym to look after your body. This is all about mental fitness, looking after our minds. We’ve changed the narrative.”

Acton Smith agrees that stress can be a good thing and a natural part of getting things done. But “chronic stress” is not. “When we’re stressed our systems are filled with cortisol. It’s like you’re jammed in top gear. You’re in fight or flight mode, when what you need is more rest and digest.”

The world, as Acton Smith says, “is not particularly calm”. It probably has enough stress in it already. The point of the Calm app is to provide a counterpoint to all that. But isn’t there a risk of everybody becoming too laid back and not really wanting to get out of bed in the morning? “Mindfulness is not all about everyone being calm all the time. It’s more about being in the moment. Finding a balance to our lives. So few of us can achieve that.”

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Exploring the multiple options on the app, I found myself listening to Ariana Grande singing “Breathin’” – a very chilled and toned-down version that lasts the best part of an hour. I took her advice to “Just keep breathin’ and breathin’ and breathin’ and breathin’”. And one night at 3am I tuned in to a story about riding a paddleboat down the Mississippi in a long, slow, gentle way and listening to the sound of the birds twittering in the trees and the water lapping around the boat. It was definitely relaxing. After listening to the train ride “soundscape”, I understand now why those timbers laid athwart railway tracks are called “sleepers”. Without wanting to go on The Graham Norton Show to go on about it, I also recommend my own personal product-tested technique, soundlessly chanting the word “ataraxia” over and over again.

But if you want to listen to Alex Tew very soothingly narrating “Peter Rabbit and the Greatest Gift” or Michael Acton Smith revisiting “Alice in Wonderland”, you will need the app. The co-creators of Calm also have dreams of Calm shops, Calm hotels, even a Calm island. Meanwhile someone somewhere in the world downloads the Calm app every second of every day. “That shows how much it’s needed,” says Acton Smith.

@andymartinink