Become a better you with Headspace
Improve your mental health with meditation and mindfulness. By Tim Bothwell
We’ve spent the last couple of months looking at apps promising to improve physical health, but it’s also just as important to think about your mental health. Like training for a marathon, we can also train our minds to think and respond in particular ways that result in us feeling happier overall. Headspace is an app that specialises in guided meditation and mindfulness, helping you to stress less, focus more, and even get better sleep. One of the most popular meditation services on the app store, Headspace offers hundreds of meditations covering a wide range of topics and issues. While you may think meditation is something that takes a lot of time and energy, Headspace makes meditating something you can do in just a few minutes each day.
The basics
Getting Started. If you’re new to Headspace, you’ll need to start by creating an account. Doing so will allow you to keep track of your progress across all your devices. Start by entering your name, email address and a password. The app will ask if you’d like to sign up to a premium subscription but we’d recommend holding off on this for now (just tap the X icon in the top-right corner). Once registered you’ll be taken to the main area of the app, organised into a series of tabs located at the bottom of your screen.
Your first session. Ready to begin your first meditation? Scroll down on the home tab to the section labelled Basics. The app’s beginner course consists of ten classes perfect for those new to meditation. Headspace suggests doing your meditation on a chair, but you can also sit crosslegged on the floor. To start, choose how long you want the session to run for – either three, five or ten minutes – before tapping the play button. Most classes begin with a brief introduction to what will be covered before a voice guides you through the entire session. If you need a break, just tap the pause button. Meditation and mindfulness are skills that take practice, so don’t worry if you struggle to remain focussed. It’s recommended that you do your meditation regularly at the same time each day to help establish a routine.
Premium. While all users have free access to the app’s ten session beginner course, most of the other classes require a premium subscription. For $20 a month (or $92 on an annual plan) you get access to every class, course and exercise.
With hours and hours of content, we think it’s great value, but would suggest first browsing the app yourself to see what’s on offer – you can even try the first session of some courses for free. The app also offers a free trial to help you determine if Headspace is something worth paying for.
Headspace is an app that specialises in guided meditation and mindfulness, helping you to stress less, focus more, and even get better sleep.
Step it up a level
Explore. If there’s a particular type of meditation that you’re looking for, the easiest place to
find it will be via the Explore tab. It’s here that you can browse the entire Headspace library, organised into categories dealing with things like stress, work productivity, study, and personal growth. Select a category to see a full list of meditation courses, exercises and videos. Alternatively you can use the search tool to find a meditation by keyword.
Sleep. Sometimes it can be difficult switching off when it’s time for bed. Headspace has an entire section dedicated to helping you get some decent shut-eye. In addition to meditations focussed on winding down, the app can act as a noise machine – letting you play the sounds of a tropical rainforest or waves of an ocean. Also available are a series of Sleepcasts – a combination of sound and visualisation, each begins with a brief wind down exercise before a voice narrates visual features of an imaginary landscape. You’ll find all of this in the sleep tab.
Offline playback. Don’t limit your meditation to a Wi-Fi connection. Headspace lets you download meditations so they’re ready to play data-free when it suits you. To save a meditation, simply select a class and toggle the download switch displayed below its description. This can also be done for entire courses. In settings you can see every class that’s been downloaded to your device.
Move. A new feature to Headspace is Move Mode. Guided by expert trainers and Olympians, these sessions focus on the physical body, with exercises designed to improve strength and mobility. In the Move tab you’ll find classes for stretching, cardio and full-body movement. All this is included as part of your premium subscription.
Going pro
Voices. When Headspace first began, the voice narrating each meditation was Andy
Puddicombe – a former Buddhist monk and also the co-creator of Headspace. Now, in addition to Andy, you can choose to be guided by a female narrator. For classes and courses where this is available, you’ll see an option to pick either a male or female narrator before starting a session. Multi-lingual readers will also appreciate the ability to listen to meditations in other languages such as French or German.
Stats. As mentioned earlier, meditation and mindfulness are skills that take time to master. With this in mind, Headspace makes it easy to track your progress over time. On the profile screen tap Stats to see your current daily streak, plus total time meditated, meanwhile tapping Journey will show you a complete history of completed sessions. On the profile tab you can also add fellow users as ‘buddies’ to see when they’ve meditated.
Smart speakers. In addition to being accessed via an app on your Apple or Android smartphone, or from a web browser, you can also meditate using a smart speaker. Google Home owners can listen to meditations by asking Google to “talk to Headspace”, while Amazon Alexa users need to tell their assistant to “open Headspace”. If you own an Apple Watch you can also start and control meditations from your wrist.
Website. Not just an app, the Headspace website has plenty of free resources and articles about meditation available for reading here: www.headspace.com/ meditation. The site’s blog also covers a range of topics such as work, sport, even birth.