Not only is meditation an effective way to increase self-awareness, but it can help you get rid of stress and anxiety. And meditation is not limited to Buddhist monks and New Age hippies; just about anyone can do it. Fortunately, if you're not familiar with meditation or you want to develop your skills, you can use a meditation app to get started in no time.
Balance is an award-winning meditation app that adapts to you! And that's a key feature in this crowded app category. Learn more about how Balance leans into personalization to set itself apart from other popular options.
What's Different About Balance?
Meditation is an uncomplicated practice that requires no expert skills or fancy equipment. Balance is one of the best meditation apps, as it offers hundreds of free personalized meditation sessions that aim to help you improve your sleep and reduce stress less. Everyone can benefit from using Balance, whether they are learning, improving, or maintaining meditation.
The personalization aspect of Balance is what makes it different from the rest of the other meditation apps out there, such as the Headspace meditation app. The app works by regularly checking in on you and asking various questions. The more information you share about yourself, the more distinctive your meditation sessions become.
Download: Balance for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
How to Build a Personalized Balance Meditation Plan
Your first task when you first begin using the app is to answer a handful of questions that cover your goals, mood, age, and your meditation experience. The app asks you these questions to get an idea of your experience level, primary challenges, and desired outcomes. In addition to selecting your reasons for wanting to use the app, it asks you to rank them in terms of importance.
Throughout your journey on the app, Balance will continue to survey you to make sure your meditation program stays perfectly suited to your needs. For instance, before you begin any new meditation plan—whether it's meant to help you embrace change or ease loneliness—you have to answer a few simple questions. Based on your responses, Balance personalizes your upcoming meditation session on demand.
That functionality is what makes Balance especially unique. While other apps, such as Calm, feature huge libraries of pre-recorded sessions, Balance creates a session by searching through its collection of thousands of audio files, each of which contains only a part of a session that focuses on a specific topic in a certain way. It weaves those clips together to form a unique session. Over time, the app aims to learn more about what you need and what works best for you to continue to tailor the experience.
The Balance app gives further customization options: you can select your favorite voice narrator to make the experience more comfortable or pleasant. In addition, you can choose the meditation duration that works best for you, adjusting based on your available time and level of focus. These customization options mean you can meditate according to your preferences and constraints, whether you only have three minutes to spare or a full 30 minutes. In other apps, such as Headspace, most sessions are narrated by only one person, so there's little ability to choose a narrator or duration.
Customized Meditation Library and Quick Singles
Balance offers a huge selection of meditation plans that can focus on any of the nine distinct meditation skills: breath focus, body scan, labeling, loving-kindness, visualization, awareness, spotlighting, breath control, and innovation. Meanwhile, the app also includes Singles—quick sessions that focus on a specific feeling. As with the meditation plans, you can select the duration and voice narrator of Singles.
Similar to other meditation apps, the Today tab features one meditation every day. Based on how you're feeling and your specific mood, Balance will guide you through a quick meditation session that usually lasts for about 10 minutes. Unlike other popular apps, the daily session first asks you a few questions about how you're feeling and lets you select your narrator. Then, it adjusts the guidance of that daily session to your needs.
Instead of listening to the same session as thousands or millions of other people, you get a new custom session every day. If you like the social aspect of a shared mindfulness experience, other apps will work just fine. But if you're looking for personalization, even in the daily one-off sessions, Balance is a better choice.
Soothing Sleep Content
According to results from a study published in the National Library of Medicine, adults who don't get enough sleep have a higher chance of developing obesity. The Balance app features an entire collection of sleep sessions under the Sleep tab. These meditation sessions can help you wind down before bedtime and fall asleep more easily.
This is one section of the app that doesn't include the deep customization features of its meditation plans and Singles. You can still choose a narrator for each section, which could be even more valuable for people trying to fall asleep to these sessions. Unfortunately, that's the extent of the personalization here. Further, the stories are often lacking, and the app would benefit from having more options.
Do the Personalization Features of Balance Make It a Better Meditation App?
The Balance app has plenty of positives. It is clean, easy to use, and well-designed. More importantly, it adjusts to different needs, as not everyone is the same when it comes to meditation. You may need very different support or want completely different outcomes from someone else, and Balance's personalized approach aims to address that challenge. Where many meditation apps deliver pre-written and recorded sessions in a one-size-fits-all approach, Balance aims to assemble tailored sessions using its wide-ranging content and multiple narrators.
Instead of settling in for a preset 30-minute meditation session with a narrator you're not particularly fond of, you can use Balance to adjust the time, topics, and voice of each session to get closer to your own ideal experience. While Balance doesn't have the largest library of content among mindfulness apps, its personalized sessions are what makes it a genuinely amazing app.
Is the Balance App Worth the Cost?
Meditation has numerous physical and mental health benefits, so paying for a subscription to an app like Balance is completely worth it. Plus, Balance's subscription doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and it's less expensive than some other popular options. Plus, there are occasional discounts and other offers, such as a full year for free!
Your experience on Balance might not be 100 percent unique to you, but it's much closer than other popular meditation apps offer, and that could make all the difference as you build this new habit.