Resources

Price: Free

With Calm, you can choose from an assortment of guided meditation experiences. The selections range from three-minute to 25-minute sessions. Another option is Daily Calm, a 10-minute program you can practice right before your day begins or as it’s about to end. Other features include more than 20 sleep stories, breathing exercises, unguided meditations, and more than 25 soothing sounds to help you get to sleep.

Calm

Price: Free

This meditation app features over 4,500 free guided meditations from over 1,000 meditation practitioners. It also features 750 meditation music tracks. Insight Timer also lets you customize your intervals and background sounds so that your meditation session is exactly what you’re looking for. 

Insight Timer

Price: Free

Targeted to anyone who wants to learn meditation to reduce anxiety and stress and improve their attention and awareness; good for a beginner to establish a regular meditative routine. The skills taught include mindfulness and cognitive diffusion, breathing exercises, meditation practice, tips for increased relaxation, concentration; may be applied to anxiety and depressive disorders, PTSD, and OCD, especially in conjunction with a health provider.

This app does a terrific job of describing basic concepts with a creative animated interface, presenting meditation in a user-friendly way with clear instructions; creating an online forum; supplying podcasts; normalizing mind-wandering; and illustrating main points with videos.

This app is not intended as a treatment substitute for those with serious anxiety and related disorders or depression.

Headspace is a great app for people just starting out, with 10 newbie-focused 10-minute meditation exercises, known as Take 10. It’s designed to help you quickly understand what the practice is all about. There’s also a personalized progress page, a reward system for continued practice, and even a buddy system for you and your friends to help each other stay on track. Once you’ve completed Take 10, the app contains other meditation exercises that can be purchased in the app.

Headspace

Price: Free

Sattva is all about inspiring you to meditate every single day. The app carries a host of unique features. Along with the standard components of pre-loaded guided meditations and chants, timers, and mood trackers, users can also check their heart rate and receive “trophies" for taking on new challenges. The app also does a great job of explaining why and how meditation can be an important and necessary component to improving your life. New features let you integrate with the iPhone’s built-in Health app. 

Sattva

Price: Free

This online MBSR training course is 100% free, created by a fully certified MBSR instructor, and is modeled on the program founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. 

Price: Free

The Marinara Timer is used to break down work into intervals separated by short breaks. The method is based on the Pomodoro Technique idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility. See the Pomodoro Technique description below for more details.

Marinara Timer

In college, final exam season prompts a two-week-long cram session. Everyone has their own tales of studying all night, downing dangerous levels of caffeine, and rubbing their eyes at lecture notes. But after a while, extra studying doesn't really help; you're reading the same material, but your brain is so zapped that you won't retain anything.

That's what Francesco Cirillo discovered during his first year of university. After realizing he was getting distracted and not using his study time efficiently, he grabbed a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, set it for 10 minutes, and tried working solidly for those 10 minutes without doing anything else. And it worked—forcing himself to focus before rewarding himself with a break helped him get more done, even with the break time.

With more testing and tweaking, Cirillo settled on a structured framework for what he called the Pomodoro Technique (named after the Italian word for "tomato," in reference to his original kitchen timer). The final technique is just about as simple as his original idea: you use a timer to break your work into focused time blocks (usually 25 minutes) separated by a 5-minute break. After 4 consecutive working time blocks, take a longer break, around 15 or 20 minutes.

Each 25-minute work block is called a "Pomodoro." If you feel the urge to do something other than work during a work period, make a note of it. Over time, you’ll train yourself to be more productive during each Pomodoro block.

The benefits of the Pomodoro Technique come from the frequent breaks, which help your mind stay fresh. The focused time blocks also force you to adhere to fixed limits, so you’ll be encouraged to complete a task more quickly, or in the case of a large task, spread it out over a number of Pomodoros. 

Pomodoro Technique