Shea Simmons
Meditation is one of the most cited ways to manage stress, but for anxiety sufferers the practice can be difficult. Now, there’s Calmer You, a new mindfulness app specifically designed for those with anxiety.
Calmer You was created by former Headspace Head of Research Nick Begley. The app includes a mix of curated cognitive-behavioral courses, recommended activities like journaling, and more traditional guided meditations.
Begley explained his motivation to TechCrunch, saying:
“I realized that it doesn’t have to be limited to just mindfulness. There’s so much good advice out there, but just passively digesting it—watching videos or reading books—which is what most of us do when we want to improve, simply doesn’t deliver the changes that they promise.”
Given that the foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy is action-oriented engagement with unwanted behaviors, it makes perfect sense to create a toolkit that moves beyond passive interaction with the ideas and encourages the user to act on them.
Begley worked with hypnotherapist Chloe Brotheridge whose book The Anxiety Solution: A Quieter Mind, a Calmer You inspired the app’s 28-day course on understanding anxiety.
Brotheridge, no stranger to anxiety, is intimately acquainted with what people need from such an app.
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with anxiety and I had to work out what worked best for me. This is why as a therapist, I teach people many different techniques so they can find what works best for them, not just mindfulness. While it took a lot of work to include multiple approaches in the app, I think it’s essential to help empower people to find the practices that work best for them and their situation.”
If you want to try the Calmer You app, you can download it for free from the iTunes store (and an Android app is currently in development). To unlock the advanced features of the app, however, it will cost you $7.99/month, or $49.99 annually.
