What to Look For in a Mindfulness App
by Intelligent Change
When you combine the genius of software and the app market with scientific discoveries in the field of positive psychology and mindfulness, you get a mindfulness app.
These apps are geared towards improving our life quality by helping us implement new healthy habits––often through guidance, empowering reminders, and a certain degree of flexibility to tailor the contents of the app to our personal needs and goals.
As creators of the 5 Minute Journal app that thousands of our customers have downloaded, we’re happy to share a few tips on what to look for in a mindfulness app for a thoughtful and rewarding experience.
1. A Variety of Options
A good mindfulness app should have many options for customization. This way, you curate and create your own mindfulness practice, tailored to your mood and goals.
We designed the 5 Minute Journal app so that its users can unlock the full potential of a gratitude practice. You can customize daily journal questions, use extra Notes section for free-writing and self-reflection, choose how you prefer to browse through your entries, and how often you want to receive inspiring reminders.
2. Elegant Simplicity
This goes for any digital product. UX design is by far one of the most important features when it comes to app experience. Everyone likes clean design and simple navigation, having all the essential information at hand, in logical places and order, sorted and categorized so that it makes sense.
The 5 Minute Journal app is designed to be super-straightforward and intuitive when it comes to navigation and information accessibility. It’s user-friendly for any generation––for tech-savvies and technophobes alike.
Another reason why design is so important is that you want your app to be enticing for you to use and to actually stick to it day after day and, for that, it has to be aesthetically pleasing. If you enter the app and the interface is a mess of poorly matched colors, bold overwhelming text, and unintuitive navigation, you probably won’t find it appealing enough to return.
But if you open the app and you’re greeted with a calming, welcoming color palette and a streamlined interface, you’ll be more likely to get inspired to use it, and you’ll continue your mindfulness practice without skipping.
3. Inspiration and Structure
Mindfulness is a skill that requires practice and patience. It may sound simple at first, as it seems that all you need to do is to keep a journal, meditate 10 minutes every day, practice affirmations, spend less time doomscrolling, and shift your focus to the good things around you. Yet, instilling new habits is difficult.
Sticking to a new behavior doesn’t happen overnight. It requires inspiration, determination, practice, consistency, and constant reminders. Some apps even prompt you to do challenges that can help you get started and stay on track with your mindfulness practice. That’s why we think that a good mindfulness app should have guidance to stop you from feeling confused about where to begin from. Guidance and structure is what builds lasting habits.
The 5 Minute Journal app has been designed to capture the physical Five Minute Journal experience. Getting around the app is a breeze thanks to the helpful hints, and adding entries is easy with a new guided flow and text suggestions to boost your ideas when you feel stuck.
Furthermore, there are written explanations at each step of the process. For example, the app may advise you to get as specific as possible or ask you what would you do if you could magically go back in time to inspire you to think about all the ways your day could have been even better than it was.
In addition to all this, every page of the app hides carefully selected moving quotes and wise words to live by, designed to inspire you to reflect on your life, put things into perspective, and journal through your thoughts. But not only that, the 5 Minute Journal app is oriented towards motivating its users to keep up with the practice through science-backed facts about gratitude, available to read at any moment.
And if you get bored with basic journaling and want to level up your experience, you can always switch to a premium plan and enjoy numerous thoughtful features. Check in with yourself, express how you feel, and gain insights into how your emotions influence your days. Capture and view your daily highlights with a photo and video, and get reminded of your special memories with the Look Back snapshots. Add smart widgets to your homescreen and use them as gentle reminders to keep up a gratitude habit.
4. Time Efficiency
Given our hectic schedules, a mindfulness app should give you an opportunity to enjoy simple, short, and rewarding activities that help you think about yourself, your life, and what brings you joy and calmness.
If it’s a meditation app, it should offer short meditations you can easily fit in your average day. If it’s a yoga app, it should have several 10-15-minute stretching sessions available. A mindfulness app shouldn’t disconnect you from the outside world. On the contrary––it should help you regain focus and be more mindful in the real world with yourself, your environment, and with those around you.
The 5 Minute Journal app takes only five minutes of your time each day. You can also pick half-an-hour meditations or journaling sessions. The important thing is that you have freedom and flexibility in how much time you choose to spend in your app every day.
5. Offline Use
A good mindfulness app should allow you to enjoy what it offers even when you’re offline. This comes particularly handy when you travel abroad, when you’re in nature, or when you’re stuck without the internet signal.
You can fill out the 5 Minute Journal app whenever you want–even when you are in airplane mode or disconnected from the internet––and the app will sync your entries when you get online later. Also, you can download your previous entries as a PDF file and do something creative with them, like print them out and stick them into a notebook or make a digital collage.
6. Free Trial Period
As we mentioned above already, it’s important that you are fond of your mindfulness app. If it’s a meditation app, you need to find the voice of your instructor appealing and soothing, otherwise, you won’t enjoy your meditation.
Look for an app that gives you the freedom to check it out and decide whether you like the experience it offers, whether the interface is appealing to you, whether the app brings value to your life and helps you unleash your full potential.
5 Minute Journal app has one mission: to use proven principles of positive psychology to make you happier in five minutes a day. And with one million of Five Minute Journals sold around the world, we brought gratitude journal experience based on its physical bestselling copy in an improved app, now available for free with optional premium features.
You can use the 5 Minute Journal app and discover the benefits of daily gratitude journaling using the free basic version. This means that you get endless access to the physical gratitude journal features at no cost. If you enjoy it, then you can subscribe and first try the Premium plan for 7 days. Once you do, you’ll be able to upload videos and photos, track your mood, create your own custom questions, get insights from your mindfulness habit, add smart widgets to your home screen, and have free-writing space for reflection, notes, ideas.
Now you know what to look for in any type of mindfulness app. We strongly support apps that offer value, bring difference, and help build powerful habits. Creating a habit that sticks is difficult, so all forms of inspiration to stay on track with the mindfulness practice are welcome, whether they’re mind-alike communities, gentle reminders, inspirational quotes, challenges, or helpful reading materials. The 5 Minute Journal app offers all of this and more.
The life most of us are living requires us to find tools that can help us stay grounded and fulfil our purpose in a structured and simple way. Pick and curate daily rituals and tools that empower you.
