I Try Apples Mindfulness App for 60 Days to Reach Enlightenment! (A GREAT and Free App)
3I Try Apples Mindfulness App for 60 Days to Reach Enlightenment! (A GREAT and Free App)
BreathWrk App Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uudpQo9yknk
Blog Post: https://jack-jenkins.com/i-try-apples-mindfulness-app-for-60-days-to-reach-enlightenment-a-great-and-free-app/
Script:
I recently reviewed the Breathwrk App, and I thought it was amazing! Little did I know, Apple has its own App to breathe along and meditate to with the Mindfulness app. How great is it? Well, I decided to try it out for sixty days to see if my stress level would go lower. Gotta stop the stress-induced heart attack somehow!
The mindfulness app is a free application developed by Apple. It comes pre-installed on all Apple Watch devices starting with WatchOS 5 and continuing on to this day. That’s a good deal because Breathwrk and other meditation apps I am looking at costs some money. As it is an Apple Watch app, it’s incredibly hard for me to record, so you just get to see me breathing in the background and any advertisements I can find from Apple. Capturing Watch footage is such a pain unless you got an overhead camera mount like the legendary Marques Brownlee.
The Mindfulness app is set up to quickly allow you to add some mindfulness minutes per day. These mindfulness minutes are recorded in the Apple Health app for you to track later on. All you need to do as a Apple Watch User is click that blue-green icon and select your session. There are two sessions available. The Reflect option gives you a prompt to think about or talk to yourself about in order to bring some self-reflection. Here is me going through a full prompt:
The breathing session will have you following a breathing pattern with the watch vibrating, representing to breath in and out. It also gives this trippy screensaver thing that’s pretty cool to look at. I don’t need to show footage since everything is pretty basic. You just breath in and out for whatever duration is set in the settings. Both the reflect and breath session types are set for a minute and can be adjusted up to five minutes by clicking the three dots. Any more than that, you will need to do two sessions. The instructions are also on that page giving you some tips on how to complete a successful session. As far as I can see, there isn’t a way to view history and revisit an old prompts per day or anything like that. It’s very simple but works as a free thing. If you want something more complex, then purchasing a full-on meditation app like Breathwrk is recommended in general and now by me.
The settings you can adjust within Mindfulness are minimum. In the settings App, you can turn on or off reminders, get a weekly summary report, change the breathing rate, disable haptics, and enable the ability to download new meditations. There isn’t anything to disable certain categories in the reflect category or add your own. There aren’t any other settings to adjust the time. It’s an incredibly basic application that does what it needs to do. After all, I have to respect that. It wasn’t until a few WatchOS versions ago that the reflection option was added, so things do change with it. I hope one day it becomes a bit more expanded upon for power users.
One nice thing that this app does is recording your heart-rate. I wrote down my heartrate every time at the end of the session. It varied from a hundred and twelve beats per minutes to a sixty-four beats per minute. That big gap is do to when I did my meditation sessions for the day. Usually, I try and do it either before work or before bedtime but other times I did it right after a workout. Taking some time to do some calming breaths after the stair stepper is a great way to bring the heart rate down and is something I probably should get in the habit of. Overall, the heart rate feature is great for tracking and something that all meditation apps should have. I will also give props to apple as the heart rate history is visible in the Health App for mindfulness.
Now I wanted to do an experiment. I wanted to see if spending a few minutes a day would help reduce my stress from work and life. I began this challenge back on January 22nd, which was a decently busy time work-wise. As such, my stress level was at about a six out of ten. It’s not nearly as bad as the holidays, where you have to rush to get any projects done before the winter break, but it’s still a busy season. From there, I used the Mindfulness app every single day to lower my stress level. By the time I ended this challenge, my stress level was at a seven, according to my writing. By then, I had an increased workload and preparing to go on vacation. Spending a minute or a few minutes daily breathing with this thing wasn’t nearly as effective as doing a full-on twenty-minute session as you could do with a full-on meditation app. For me, I need something a little bit more intense.
Does that mean the mindfulness app is completely useless, and Tim Apple...
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