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How to use Calm, the award-winning meditation app that's now valued at $250 million
How to use Calm, the award-winning meditation app that's now valued at $250 million
Mar 27, 2018, 06:36 IST
You'll get started on your meditation journey by downloading Calm in the App Store or Google Play Store.
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You'll notice right away that the app has overwhelmingly positive reviews, which has landed it in the top spot for meditation apps on both the Play store and the App Store
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Upon opening the app for the first time, Calm asks you to choose the top goals you want to accomplish via meditation. "Calm can change your life," it says.
Next, you're prompted to create a login or attach your Facebook account.
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After successfully logging in, you'll be reminded that although Calm is free to download, you have to pay up after a 7-day free trial — it's normally $60/year.
In order to unlock the free trial, iPhone users will be required to sign up for the full price of the service, but won't be charged for the first seven days.
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The app will then ask you to allow for push notifications, so it can remind you to meditate even when you don't have the app open.
Finally, we arrive on the home page. For first timers like myself, the app will offer helpful instructional bubbles. I suggest starting by personalizing your homepage's background scene.
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There are many moving background scenes to choose from. All of them come with unique ambient, calming sounds that can also be turned off from this screen as well, if you so choose.
After you've chosen a soothing scene as your default, we'll begin to explore the app's main event: The Meditate tab.
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This menu will allow you to browse through hundreds of soothing podcasts that will guide you through various types of meditation, classified by different goals you're hoping to achieve.
The app suggests starting with a meditation series called "7 Days of Calm."
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The meditation player looks a lot like Spotify. The pause and skip buttons are at the bottom, just above the progress bar.
This button will allow you to change the volume of the ambient sounds that play when you visit the home screen, and during your meditations.
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When selected, a volume bar appears and all other controls are hidden. Be careful: It's easy to confuse the volume bar and the progress bar, so make sure you don't lose your place in the meditation.
The heart button allows you to bookmark certain meditations, making them easier to find later.
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If you want to download your meditation for use without Wifi, you'll click on this download button in the top left.
While meditations are playing, if you don't interact with the screen for a few seconds, the controls will disappear so you can better focus on the moving background.
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If you lock your phone, or your screen goes into sleep mode, the meditation will continue to play, and you can pause or skip forward and backward from your lock screen.
In the "Beginners" section of the meditations menu, you'll find the "Breathe Bubble," a very soothing and intuitive feature that helps the user slow down and steady their breathing.
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The feature uses customizable animations to guide the user through breathing exercises for a few minutes at a time.
At the end of each meditation, you'll be rewarded with a motivational poster of the day, and asked to rate the session.
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You'll then be brought to your personal profile, to track your progress.
From the profile screen, you can scroll down to find your app settings and some share options, in case you want to brag about your new meditation routine on social media.
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One of the most important settings for anyone looking to make a real habit of meditating is the "Mindfulness Reminder," which allows you to set a timer for your next session.
Now that we've mastered how to open and listen to meditations, we'll move to the Masterclass tab, just to the right of meditations on the gray bar at the bottom of the app.
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While the actual Masterclasses only feature an audio recording of the instructor over a still photo, each one comes with a short video trailer.
Masterclasses also vary in length and subject matter, and look just like meditations in the app while playing.
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Because Masterclasses are not intended to be spaced out like meditations, they'll autoplay the next class after one ends.
Next, let's look at the music tab. Like the meditations, there are hundreds of choices for calming music selections, all sorted and categorized by what you hope to get out of the listening experience.
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Unlike meditations and Masterclasses, the music player can minimize to the bottom of the screen, so that you can surf the rest of the app while songs play.
Finally, we have a massive collection of short bedtime stories, read by extra soothing and slow narrators.