Calm is an app that I’ve been using for almost a year now on my personal cell phone. It focuses on breathing and meditation exercises and on the improvement of sleep. I first heard of it when I came across this article ranking the happiest and unhappiest apps and my interest was peaked, though I didn’t end up actually using it until much later.

There are many Sleep Stories within this app, which are being added to and updated frequently, just in case you get bored (though boring you to sleep is the goal). You can choose to sort them by narrator if you prefer a certain voice, or by fiction or non-fiction. The stories range from things like the rules of tennis to chapters from classic stories like Anne of Green Gables. There is also an excellent children’s section with soothing, child-friendly stories and music; I use them every night as part of my son’s bedtime routine.

I seldom have trouble falling asleep, but I still enjoy the “winding down” of either listening to a story or following a short meditation exercise before bed. However, for those more prone to insomnia, there are several options of longer tracks designed to help lull someone back to sleep if they have woken in middle of their night.

There are also so many different meditation and mindfulness exercises that I feel like I have only scratched the surface of exploring them in this app, so if you were a daily practitioner it would take you some time before you could exhaust your options.

There are also meditations specifically geared at goals the user may have for their mental or physical health, such as guidance in stretching or practicing good listening skills.

The app will track your success with using it, which adds an aspect of gamification and builds a sense of accomplishment in the user. I think that the app designers could have left this aspect out because it feels counterintuitive to measure your success with something like meditation so quantitatively.

Overall, Calm is an app I really enjoy. A personal yearly subscription is currently US$69.99, so it is not cheap. Until a few months ago, the developers of Calm were offering it free for educators to use in schools, but the program page now says that they are “not accepting new applications at this time.”