 Let me be honest with you guys, I was the biggest skeptic when it came to meditation. I thought it was a lot of woo-woo, a lot of hippy stuff. I thought it was a fad that people are just trying to make money off of. Like how could breathing in and out really slowly change your entire life? Wow, was I wrong? If it's your first time here, my name is Noah and I make videos on the best health and wellness tech that you should be paying attention to. And today I just wanna share my personal experience of learning how to meditate through the Calm app. So let's go ahead and get right to it. So I started to consider meditation because of the pandemic. I started seeing people around me struggle with their mental health. I struggled with my mental health and the topic of meditation and mindfulness started to just keep coming up here and there. You started seeing companies adopt mindfulness practices and doing more meditation. It peaked my interest so I started doing a little bit more research. And through my research, I started to find science-backed benefits for meditation. Like, one, decreasing your stress and anxiety. Two, increasing your focus and your productivity, having better sleep quality, improving yourself with steam and your relationship with others. They were using it in schools. They were using it in prisons. There was a ton of apps coming out. There was something to this meditation thing. So I went ahead, headed to the app store and looked up meditation. Of course, the first things that pop up were Headspace and Calm. Now, I'll be honest, the reason why I chose Calm was because I had a good deal with my previous company that had me 30% off for the entire year. So I downloaded that one. And once I downloaded it, the first thing that popped up was 30 days. How to meditate with Jeff Warren. Bless you, Jeff Warren. Caveat, I'll be very, very transparent with you. I didn't do 30 days straight. I did complete it. I think my streak level was like, I think seven days at a time and I might miss a day or two and then get back on for like six or seven days. So when I started, the first few days were pretty tough and challenging. I found myself where my thoughts were just always running. It was hard to focus on my breath. Sometimes I would try to focus on my breath but then think, am I focusing on my breath too much? And it got to a point where it just, it would get a little bit frustrating. Let me know in the comments below. Is that the same for you? Was it a little bit difficult when you first started meditating? But I noticed it started getting easier and easier as I kept doing more and more sessions. I ended up learning how to choose a home base which is like choosing, you know, whether it's a body part or your breath or sound and really just focusing on that throughout the entire meditation. I learned about equanimity which is the whole idea of having like inner smoothness and releasing bodily tension. And I learned how to build that internal happiness and friendliness for others. And what I found out was consistency was key even though I was only doing four or five days straight I noticed I was getting more into a meditative flow state when I was doing that versus the one off here in their sessions. And so when I got to the end of the 30 day experience I started noticing I was just more relaxed, more calm before I went to work. And when I was at work I got so much better at focusing on a task at hand. It also taught me how to be self aware of my emotions and my thoughts and how to manage those. And it made me more connected to the people around me. And what was crazy was that this was just the 30 day how to meditate series. They also have other shorter meditation series such as the seven days of focus where the whole idea here is really concentrating on prioritizing, getting rid of digital distractions. They also have a relationship series which the whole idea here is thinking about how can you de-escalate conflict? How can you manage your emotions when you are arguing? And honestly, calm is more than just a meditation app. They have a self reflection feature where basically each day you have daily reflection prompts that you can kind of put in your personal experience of how you're feeling. They have your gratitude check-ins which I really love where every day you can write three things that you're grateful for and I think that's an amazing practice to keep doing. They have specific sessions on improving your sleep. Things such as sleep stories where they have people like Matthew McConaughey, Harry Styles, The Homie from Bridgerton read you stories to help go to sleep. They have background sounds that you could choose from. I think they have something from Dune. They have relaxing music that you can go to sleep to. The whole idea here is to just calm your mind of any type of running thoughts before you go to sleep. That's like a big thing. A lot of people are saying like, my mind is racing, I can't go to sleep. Their sleep sessions are the best at helping to tackle that. They also have high profile guest sessions. One of my favorites are the LeBron James Mental Fitness where basically it's all about grit and inspiration. How can you push through failures and challenges? They also have Shawn Mendes who talks more about mindfulness and the importance of mental health. You could just see how many celebrities are joining this and seeing the importance of mindfulness and inspiration. And then they also have the Calm Masterclass which is all focused on personal development such as Ryan Holiday Stoic Wisdom or Michelle May's Mindful Eating or Alex Peng's whole idea about the power of rest. They also have a specific section called Calm Body which is basically videos and voiceovers that walk you through stretching and mindful movements to release tension in your body. They keep track of all your stats such as your mindful minutes, your total number of sessions and your longest streaks of meditating. Like there is so much to do in the Calm app. It's almost like a digital spa. However, this does lead me to some of the things that I don't like about this app which is because there's so much in here, it is confusing to navigate sometimes. It's easy to get lost and I feel like the organization could be just so much better. Maybe if they had a filtering system where you could just choose what you want. Like if I wanted to focus mainly on meditation and sleep, I could remove music or calm body. Like it just can be a lot to see at once and to kind of sift through. But overall I'm sold, meditation works. I truly think it will help you lower your stress levels, improve your concentration, make you more present, encourage you to be more kinder and calm, no pun intended. But in all honesty, nothing but positive things to say about this app. This video has not been sponsored by Calm, but if you're interested, I'll put a link in the description box below where you can download the app and get access to their seven day free trial. And then I think after that for the premium service, it is $70 a year. And look, even if you don't download Calm, at least look into practicing some sort of meditation in whatever way it works for you. It has changed my life and I truly think it will change yours as well. I hope this video was helpful. If it was, go ahead and compile that like button, subscribe if you haven't already, and as always, stay healthy and embrace the hype. Woo! And then keep track of all your stats such as your total, he's little just doing that to get through here.