Product review: Meditation app proves useless in reducing stress

All college students have to deal with stress. Whether it’s a class project, an upcoming test, making the team or simply going to class, stress doesn’t go away easily.

Luckily, there are many ways to cope with the day-to-day stresses of life, and meditation is one.

Simple Habit is the five-minute meditation and mindfulness app for busy people. This app claims that with its help, it’s easy to begin a daily practice of meditation. At work, home or on commute, the user can meditate wherever they are.

I was eager to try this out because, like anyone else, I have my fair share of stress. Who wouldn’t want to take a free opportunity to try and reduce it?

First of all, the app is a little misleading in that it’s free to download. Once it’s installed, only two of the 10 sections are free, and the others cost a
subscription fee.

So, I tapped the “taking a break” tab, then the “stressed” tab. A woman with an Australian accent came on and gave me instructions to find a comfortable spot to sit and close my eyes.
She then told me to breath in deeply and breath out slowly. She continued by saying we should take a moment to focus on the stressors in my life and then to slow down my breathing.

Next, I was instructed to do a relaxation technique. The woman told me to tense my entire body and take a deep breath and hold it. When releasing the breath, she also told me to release the tension. We continued to breathe and picture the tension melting away.

Finally, we took one last, long inhalation and slow exhalation. And then the meditation was over.

I continued to do this exercise throughout the week. I tried to do it at about the same time every night to be consistent. As the week went on, I found myself growing tired of having to do the same thing when I wanted to meditate.

I knew what was going to happen every time, and it got boring. Although I was supposed to feel less stressed from using this app, it just added another task onto my busy schedule and added stress.

I think this app has good intentions, but as a broke college student, I can’t afford to buy all the amenities that go with the app, which limits what I could do. I think had I been able to try out the different features of the app, I would’ve been a lot more satisfied with it.

Because I was limited to just the two options, it wasn’t something I’d recommend to someone who was looking for an easy, free way to start meditation.