I Wanted to Try Meditation, But Didn’t Know Where to Start—Then I Found Balance

As a neurodivergent mental health professional with a history of anxiety, I am always on the hunt for reputable mental health apps. I often struggle with meditation apps due to a combination of a short attention span and a busy schedule that makes sitting down for extended meditation exercises difficult.

Enter Balance, a highly rated meditation app that, according to its website, has supported more than 50 million users. It also has a 4.9-star rating on the App Store, and it was named Google’s Best App of the Year. But something that makes it truly unique is its accessibility—Balance offers a free first year followed by a low annual cost of $69.99.

What’s more, unlike similar apps that present a variety of meditation options to choose from, Balance is customizable. It continuously asks the user questions about their experience, needs, and goals, and it adjusts each meditation based on this feedback. This means that every user receives a unique, one-of-a-kind program based on their specific needs and preferences. This kind of personalization isn’t always common in apps like this, many of which want you to follow a set schedule for their exercises and lessons.

I found that this customization helped me much more with my foray into meditation than previous programs I’ve tried. For example, I was able to adjust the length of meditation sessions if I knew I would struggle with a longer meditation, and I could give immediate feedback if a particular concept was not working for me.

I tried the Balance app for one month and loved its customization options. Read on to learn more about my experience with Balance.

How Balance Works and How I Signed Up

To be honest, I had not heard of this app before I started this review. According to the website, Balance offers “meditation that adapts to you.” This intrigued me because, as someone who feels like I am “bad” at meditating, I often don’t know where to start.

Balance offers customized meditation experiences based on my feedback each day and my personal goals from using the app. For example, after completing a meditation about a body scan, the app asked me questions about how I felt afterward and if I enjoyed the experience, and it incorporated that feedback into future recommendations. It also regularly asked me if I noticed any change in my focus since that was the primary goal I indicated at sign-up. While research has shown the mental health benefits of meditation,1 Balance does not have information on its website about how its developers researched the effectiveness of this program.

Upon signing up for Balance, the app asked me to indicate my goal or goals for meditation. My choices were to reduce stress, improve sleep, increase focus, and improve mood. The app then asked me which was my top priority, and I chose increasing focus.

The app provided some education about meditation, most of which was familiar to me due to my job as a therapist, and recommended that I use Balance at least five times per week. I was able to set up reminders and alerts, which my ADHD brain found wonderfully helpful.

How I Used Balance

When I started using Balance, it recommended a 10-day series of meditations on getting in touch with my breath. Each exercise built on the last day, reminding me about skills for breath work and encouraging me to practice them during the session.

The app would recommend a length for each session, but I had the option to change the length if I wanted to. I could choose between three, five, or 10-minute meditations, and I could choose if I wanted a masculine or feminine voice.

After I made my selections, the pre-recorded voice talked me through a breathing exercise. I noticed right away that the recording mentioned my specific answers to questions (for example, it mentioned that I was familiar with meditation as a concept and that I wanted to work on improving my focus).

On the first day, the guide spent a lot of time describing the activity causing me to focus on certain sensations in my body. Over time, the guidance was less directive, with the speaker encouraging me to simply practice the breathing skills for a predetermined amount of time.

Each day, Balance prompted me to start my morning with a meditation exercise that built on what I had done the day before. It let me choose when I wanted to meditate and sent me a notification at that time, though I could open the app early or wait until later if I wanted to. It asked me questions about my experience the previous day and took this into consideration with each morning’s practice. It also offered educational information about why each skill was helpful based on my specific goals.

In addition to the morning meditations, Balance had dozens of other meditations I could complete at my convenience. These meditations also mentioned my specific plan and seemed customized based on my responses to other meditations. In this way, Balance both pre-selected specific meditations and let me choose other meditations as I wanted.

Tracking My Progress

Every week, Balance prompted me to complete a progress tracker that looked at my use of the app and whether or not I felt more focused. The tracker included a calendar indicating which days I used the app, how many days I had used it in a row, how much time I spent meditating overall, and which meditations I used. It also quizzed me about the meditations I had done to see if I was benefiting from the educational information.

There were no exercises that I strongly disliked. However, on occasion, Balance would encourage me to purchase and download other apps made by the same creators, which I found distracting. This never occurred during a meditation exercise but sometimes came up when I was browsing the app.

In addition, I noticed an improvement in my ability to gently redirect myself when my mind wanders rather than becoming frustrated.

Pros and Cons

Overall, Balance has some great educational materials as well as guided meditations that helped me improve my meditation skills, though it lacks some features that other apps have.

Final Thoughts

With its customized meditations and structured approach, I found Balance very helpful for improving my focus. It offered sufficient reminders to complete meditations without being overwhelming and had a good mix of pre-selected meditations and options for me to choose from. While the meditation library is smaller than some other apps—such as Breathwrk or Calm, which have thousands of options—that might help users who are easily overwhelmed by too many options.

Although Balance does not have research published confirming its effectiveness, the types of exercises it offers have research backing,2 and I felt that the meditations I completed were high-quality and consistent with what is advertised on the website.

I would recommend Balance for anyone who wants a customizable and somewhat structured approach to starting or maintaining a personal meditation practice. It helped me transform from someone who was intimidated by the thought of meditation into someone who knows exactly which mindfulness exercises will help in her everyday life.