What's New

Member Plus users now have access to premium timers. Over 15,000 free meditations. Users have the ability to filter content by need, time, and specific benefits. The app includes a free built-in mood calendar with clear visuals, allowing users to track their progress within the app.

Summary

Insight Timer is a meditation app that includes meditation courses, a library of guided meditations, a special sleep section, and a customizable meditation timer. It provides a variety of social features that one can use if desired, but are secondary to the meditation content of the app. The Insight Timer app is available on both iOS for iPad, iPhone and also found in the Google Play store for Android users.

Short How To

Users can access over 60,000 meditations, and new free tracks are always being added. From the home page, they can personalize shortcuts for specific meditations they enjoy. A couple of examples are:

morning mediations
sleep meditations
music
a workplace toolkit that includes workday content to help you focus during the day and unwind after, mindful breaks, and essential skills for tackling common workplace scenarios.
mood check in to track how they are feeling
inspiring quotes they can save
a journal to write down their thoughts and feelings
live events with teachers and gurus

The Bookmarks tab allows users to quickly find their favorite meditations, and the search tab allows them to search and filter by various settings. It has a special “SOS” category of meditations for when immediate calming assistance and guidance is needed. Lastly, the Community tab allows users to browse through groups, find friends and teachers, and browse live events. Users who don’t want a guided meditation can customize their own “insight timer.” They can choose its length, bells, and background sounds, with an option for silence or vibrations as well. These vibrations can be helpful for people with hearing impairments who still want a structured meditation experience.

Reviewer Experience

Our reviewer loved Insight Timer and thought that a standout feature of Insight Timer is its free introductory course, “Learn How to Meditate in Seven Days.” This introduction to meditation covers a number of different skills and strategies of meditation, preparing users to explore other guided meditations with confidence. The guided meditation library is fully searchable and can be filtered by length, category, meditation practice, and conceptual origin. Its categories include meditations for depression, healing, addiction, stress, and anxiety, in addition to meditations designed to support users in a quest for individual skills such as compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, confidence, focus, motivation, creativity, and happiness.

Insight Timer’s Sleep menu has a curated selection of guided meditations specifically for falling asleep. It is presented in a simple format on a dark background for easy night use and includes sleep music, soundscapes, meditations, bedtime stories, and a special “sleep for kids” section. This Sleep menu is unique among meditation apps, and shows how meditation strategies can be tailored to specific situations. Its bedtime tales include classic stories, like Alice in Wonderland and The Velveteen Rabbit, read in a soothing voice more conducive to falling asleep than a traditional audiobook. These bedtime stories are perfect for a parent to listen to with their child while falling asleep, or to provide independent access to calming bedtime stories without a reader.

BridgingApps trialed Insight Timer with a stroke survivor who experiences bouts of nausea and moderate levels of pain. He has found the introduction to meditation series very useful, saying it gave him confidence to meditate as he wishes without needing to be a spiritual meditation guru. He has used breathing exercises learned from the How to Meditate series during physical therapy to soothe nausea and avoid vomiting, and likes that course so much that he’s listened to it many times. He also meditates with his daughter using Insight Timer for important together time, and occasionally uses guided meditations at night to help him fall asleep.

Benefits

BridgingApps sees great value in Insight Timer for anyone experiencing anxiety, stress, pain, depression, and difficulty sleeping. It is very well developed in both its depth and breadth of material, thoroughly covering a wide range of issues people face. It’s an excellent introduction to meditation, especially for those who may be intimidated or unsure about beginning a meditation practice. While it has a great array of content, it takes some familiarity with the app to fully discover the range of features available. Insight Timer is far more than a timer, it’s a great tool for anyone to pull out of their back pocket when needed.

The social features of Insight Timer also provide an opportunity for users to come together around a specific problem or life circumstance. At the time of this review (May 2024), there were two user groups providing community for caregivers - “Mindfulness for Caregiver Stress” and “Parents and Caregivers Community.” The app currently has a wide array of groups for veterans in addition to “Autistic, ADHD and Neurodivergent Meditators” and “Meditating with Autism.” Users can also create their own groups as desired. The app’s homepage shows a lot of information about other users, but first-time Insight Timer users should know that you have to opt-in to having this information shared--where you live and what you listened to is limited to your Insight Timer “friends” unless you’ve chosen to make that information public.

Additional Comments

Insight Timer is a free app, but users have the ability to subscribe to a premium membership. While this is not necessary as Insight Timer has an extensive free version, the Member Plus subscription costs $59.99 per year or $9.99 a month. Some of the features that the premium membership offers are: Insight Timer’s meditation courses, the ability to listen offline by downloading guided meditations onto their devices, and an advanced player that includes repeat mode, fast forward and rewind (making it easy to pick up where you left off). Premium subscribers also have high-quality audio. Check out our video on how to use Insight Timer in the Media tab!

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