How do you find zen in your busy life? Life is stressful, and the creative mind can be a hurricane of thoughts. Try these 10 apps to help find your daily zen and support a healthy creative lifestyle.
Does your creative work take priority over self-care? It may seem more productive to only focus on working harder, but this can often lead to burnout and other creative problems. Hustle culture has been a popular fad for some time now, and we’re seeing the results with higher numbers of anxious and depressed creatives.
There are many ways to prioritize rest and self-care. These apps are one way to find some daily zen to clear your mind, improve focus, and support your well-being for a more creative life.
The Insight Timer zen app is the #1 meditation app with more than 80+ guided meditations, customizable meditation timer, and music tracks from world-renowned artists. A lot of thought went into this app, making it great for both beginners and experienced practitioners. To add more to your meditation practice, try using Mala beads.
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Mesmerize is a creative visual meditation app to help you clear your mind and relax, using audio and visuals to guide the relaxation of the mind. Mesmerize combines engaging visuals with soothing psycho-acoustic music and expertly crafted guided meditations to give you an all-encompassing meditation experience.
Features:
- Engaging Visuals – Uniquely hypnotic visuals designed to mesmerize you.
- Soothing Psycho-Acoustic Music – Designed based on clinically validated principles to ease your body into a state of relaxation.
- Nature Sounds and White Noise – Rain, ocean, thunder, train, fan, and more.
- Sleepy Stories – Doze off quickly with drowsy tales.
- Visual Breathing – The speed of visuals will automatically adjust to your selected breathing pattern.
- Privacy Focused – No ads, marketing emails, logins, or crazy permissions. Mesmerize is specifically designed to leave you alone.
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Headspace is a great app to learn the the life-changing and creative skill of meditation in just a few minutes a day.
With so many different types of meditations to choose from, you can find what works best for you and your goals. From stress relief to supporting creative skills like curiosity, you can dive into the relaxing and enlightening practice of mindfulness.
Try Headspace and other creative meditation apps to meditate anywhere, anytime, and start living a healthier, happier, and more creative life.
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Calm is one of the best apps for sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Winner of multiple awards and recommended by psychologists, therapists, and mental health experts, it’s more than just a relaxation app. It’s a tool for healthier creative minds. Mindfulness is one of the most important creative and wellness skills a person can practice and experience the results immediately.
Calm features guided meditations, breathing programs, stretching exercises, and more to become more mindful in addition to other helpful skills for creativity and well-being.
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Buddhify is a meditation app designed to fit into a busy modern lifestyle. Known for its beauty and incredible value for money, it is loved and used around the world to help you bring more calm, clarity and kindness to all parts of your life. Whether you’re looking to reduce stress and anxiety or get a better night’s sleep, Buddhify has easy-to-follow guided meditations to help you live happier and healthier.
This zen app includes over 200 meditations to help overcome life’s challenges for people that complete beginners to those with more experience. It even has meditations for kids.
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Thisissand is an app for making and sharing pictures out of colorful sand.
Watch and listen to the sand piling into beautiful layers of sand on the bottom of your screen and get relaxed during the slow and therapeutic process. Once finished, share your creation and become a part of the community!
Originally created as a website in 2008 as a school art project, this relaxing experience has grown into an international app with new tools and colors to create sand art and find your daily zen.
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Healthy Minds Program App is a free meditation app focused on 4 essential mindfulness skills; awareness, connection, insight, and purpose.
Developed by world-renowned neuroscientists, the Healthy Minds Program App is backed by scientists, contemplative traditions, and skill-based learning methods to help you develop the skills for a healthy mind.
Most notably, and unlike many apps these days that require a subscription, this zen app is driven by mission and supported by donation, so it can be free.
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Cultivate what matters. Cutaway the rest. Prune is a zen app that is wildly creative and a love letter to trees. This zen game is about the beauty and joy of cultivation. With a swipe of a finger, grow and shape your tree into the sunlight while avoiding the dangers of a hostile world. Bring life to a forgotten landscape, and uncover a story hidden deep beneath the soil. The game includes 48 carefully chosen levels with meditative music and sound design for you to zen out to.
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Built by a team of leading scientists and mobile developers and backed by clinical research, playing Personal Zen retrains your brain to lower stress and anxiety. In fact, clinical studies show that Personal Zen can decrease stress and anxiety when used for only a few minutes a day, a few days a week. Meant to be used during breaks in your day or for brief sessions while relaxing at home, Personal Zen is on-the-go, fun, and easily fits into your day. Just like exercising a muscle, stress reduction takes practice, so come back to Personal Zen to build stress resilience or to combat stronger feelings of anxiety.
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Coloring isn’t just for kids anymore. With studies showing the creative and health benefits of coloring, like stress/anxiety relief, mindfulness, creative flow, and more, many companies have started making adult coloring books and apps.
Pigment is an award-winning coloring app for all ages that lets you discover a world of color, relaxation, and creativity. Featuring thousands of coloring pages and access to exclusive content from brands like Marvel, this is a fun and relaxing app to support creative living.
Features:
- Create with oil, watercolor, and pastel tools
- Try different types of brushes
- Unlimited number of colors
- Import your own images, or choose from the largest collection of illustrations and grayscale images including flowers, mermaids, people, animals, landscapes, anime, mandalas, and tons more! Or start with a blank page and use Pigment as a sketchbook.
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Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
