Developing and maintaining a daily meditation practice is easier than ever before thanks to smartphone apps. Guided meditation videos and audio files can make meditating easier and more accessible to people who choose to learn to meditate alone, without physically attending meditation courses and workshops.
Meditation apps like Insight Timer, Headspace, and Waking up contain tens of thousands of guided meditation videos and are home to millions of users. Do you need a guided meditation to fall asleep quicker? Or perhaps you want guided meditation videos to help you feel energized and alert before you start a challenging workday. Fortunately, there’s literally apps for this, and more.
Insight Timer
Boasting over 14,000 guided meditations, Insight Timer is an app that helps make daily meditation easier. The app offers settings to track one’s meditative sessions, a timer, and other customizable features like ambient sounds, interval bells, and ending bells.
Insight Timer has a flourishing community of users and meditation instructors. There also forums for user discussion. The app hosts over 6,000 discussion groups and nearly 6 million registered users.
Users can browse for meditations that cater different needs including morning meditations, guided nighttime relaxation meditations, and meditation for pain management. The app also hosts discussions and research presentations about meditation from thought leaders to which users can listen.
Headspace
Headspace is home to over 30 million users who utilize the app for guided meditation and mindfulness exercises. The app was developed by a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Andy Puddicombe, who after rigorous meditation training around the world, began a consulting company to help politicians, executives, and entertainers tap into the benefits of meditation and mindfulness. Multinational corporations like Adobe, Delta Airlines, and LinkedIn offer Headspace to their employees to improve their quality of life and work-related concentration.
The app provides short guided meditations with daily prompts that help improve meditation skills over time. In addition to short mindfulness exercises, there are hundreds of meditations from which to choose, some are geared toward activities like starting your day or to improving your ability to fall asleep.
Headspace’s basic course on meditation is free, too.
Waking Up
Waking Up is a mediation app designed by neuroscientist and philosopher, Sam Harris. He earned a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA after earning a degree in philosophy from Stanford University. Before developing Waking Up, Mr. Harris traveled the world to study meditation with Western thought leaders and Burmese, Tibetan, and Indian meditation experts.
The app offers a 50-day introductory course that’s helpful to novices and those with some experience in meditation. Once the introductory course is complete, the app’s users have access to a multitude of guided meditations, all of which are developed by Sam Harris himself.
Waking Up is especially useful for working professionals, including attorneys, who want to improve their outlook on life and meditative abilities without overt religious and spiritual themes. Mr. Harris takes a logical and rational approach to his philosophical viewpoints and his meditations.
Why Lawyers Should Meditate
Think of meditation as strength training for your brain and as an effective tool for developing emotional and mental health. There’s dozens of reasons lawyers should meditate, and many of them are scientifically proven to ease stress and anxiety while boosting cognition, memory, and overall well being.
Here’s a few reasons you might want to consider daily meditation:
- Daily meditation is scientifically proven to reduce stress, including neurogenic inflammation tied to hormonal fluctuations during times of stress.
- Cognitive Therapy and Research published compelling research demonstrating that regular meditation improves symptoms of depression and anxiety by positively modifying cognitive processes.
- Daily meditation is scientifically proven to reduce anxiety.
- Researchers at Stanford University found that routine meditation regulates negative emotional responses and increases empathy for others—which are important traits for attorneys.
Insight Time, Headspace, and Waking Up are helpful apps that make it easier for busy professionals to maintain a regular meditation practice. All apps are available for Apple and Android operating systems.
Mind Over Law provides coaching services for lawyers throughout the United States. Visit www.mindoverlaw.com to learn more.
