I Can’t Live Without: Calm
Like any true Texan, I got hooked by Matthew McConaughey.
“How often do we really feel what’s happening within and around us?” he asks in that all too familiar drawl, his words spaced a little too far apart. The story he tells is called “Wonder,” and it’s one you aren’t supposed to finish. This is a story meant to put you to sleep, a bedtime story for adults. It’s featured on the homepage of the first billion-dollar wellness app: Calm.
My therapist recommended the app to me in early December during a particularly stressful work experience. For weeks, I ignored her. I had tried other meditation apps she suggested over the years, only for them to feel like they were another obligation I couldn’t get right, like exercise or taking my antidepressants. But Calm followed me around the internet after her recommendation. I saw ads for it on Instagram and while streaming television. In early February, my therapist mentioned that Matthew McConaughey read a bedtime story on the app — and I caved.
Calm is the top-grossing health and fitness app on iOS and 20th highest grossing overall. It was declared a unicorn company, valued at just over $1 billion shortly after I downloaded it. The company says it has more than 40 million downloads and 1 million paid subscribers, of which I am one.
Using the app is, yes, calming. Between clicking on the app and reaching the homepage, there is an intentional moment spent on a gradient blue screen that reads “take a deep breath.” At first I thought this was my phone being slow, but the more I engaged with the app, the more I realized this screen functions as a kind of transitory space to give your mind a moment to recognize that you are seeking calmness, that tranquility requires time.
So much of what makes the Calm app work is small like this. It is intentional because it is asking you to be intentional. The app’s basic functions are free. For $12.99 per month or $59.88 for a year, paid users unlock seven- and 21-day programs that target specific issues — stress, anxiety, self-esteem, happiness — as well as the sleep stories, often narrated by celebrities. I paid for the app almost immediately to listen to Matthew McConaughey, but many of the pieces I use most frequently are available for free. The paid tier, in my opinion, is worth it for the background focus music alone.
At its most basic, the Calm app is all about daily meditation. A peaceful river plays in your headphones, and a soothing voice guides you to sit up straight, become aware of your body, and breathe, slowly. This basic guided meditation is 10 minutes long—uncomfortably long for my first 10 tries or so. But it eventually became a manageable amount of time I could easily squeeze in between phone calls or after my morning coffee. The narrative interjections are not jarring and are frequent enough to recenter me from distraction.
In one morning meditation this week, the narrator introduced a Welsh word, hiraeth, meaning a nostalgia for a place one cannot return to. This two-minute speech was part yoga class introduction, part trendy evangelical pastor, and part kitsch. But it came across as earnest—a gentle, helpful reminder to be gracious.
Once you have completed one guided meditation, the app shows you a calendar featuring your “longest streak,” or the number of days meditating in a row and total time spent in meditation. This is the only mild gamification of meditation. There are no points to accrue, no levels to unlock, no contact integration to race your friends.
I have never enjoyed gamified apps and actively (whether out of rebellion or stubbornness) rebel against them. Whenever my streak gets too high on Duolingo, for instance, I will intentionally break it and choose another form of language learning instead. I do not want to be told to meditate or learn a language or drink water by my app; I want to learn to want to do it on my own, to reach for what the app can bring me without needing competition to do it. Where Calm shines is in its reassurance that this effort to breathe is enough on its own. Meditation alone, you alone, it seems to say, is reward enough.
Many of the guided meditations allow you to pick your time to focus: anywhere from five to 30 minutes. I found the ones focused on walking to be particularly helpful. Instead of listening to a podcast or music, I will sometimes find myself following a guided meditation to walk, noticing the small buds on a tree, the uneven bricks on the sidewalk, the shadows of leaves trembling.
Yes, there are many apps to guide you through meditation, Headspace being the most well-known. I found Headspace more intimidating to begin, and it’s more focused on longer meditation. Calm attempts to offer more than that. In its “Music” tab, Calm offers long ambient sounds to play in the background. I listened to the exclusive ambient album commissioned from Moby while responding to emails last week and found it soothing and more sonically interesting than many of the ambient albums offered on Spotify. The sleep stories are a nostalgic comfort. It is so rare to be read aloud to as an adult and so enjoyable to drift off to sleep in the midst of a good but not too good story.
My favorite part of the app, though, is one that isn’t prominently displayed on the homepage. Click “More” in the bottom right corner, and you’ll see the option to “Breathe.” Sometimes you don’t need the nature background and the celebrity names and the narrator guiding you. Sometimes the need to feel peace is more urgent, and here in this space is the answer.
This small corner of the app is meditation at its most simple: the flow of breath in and held and out again. A blue circle and gentle tone guide you through mindful breathing.
Calm is an easy app to use, no matter how difficult meditation may be. Matthew McConaughey may have sold me on it, but he’s not what keeps me opening the app when I’m stressed. I keep opening it for that simplest reminder of all: just to breathe.
I Can’t Live Without: Calm
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