I’m a Therapist and I Tried Insight Timer to Improve My Sleep and Mindfulness

I’m in a stressful season of my life—and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m in the midst of studying for my board licensing exam, working on a large personal writing project, and navigating an overall constriction of my time, resulting in some pretty substantial stress. I also have a guilty pleasure that I’m ashamed of: I’m a doom-scroller, especially before bed. Rather than avoiding blue light, turning off the television, and cracking a book, I open my phone and scroll through Pinterest, various news outlets, Reddit—whatever I can get my hands on. While I prescribe mindfulness and sleep hygiene recommendations galore to my therapy clients, I often fail to follow my own advice.

Tired of feeling stressed out and exhausted, I was eager to see if a month of using the Insight Timer app could help me out. It’s a meditation app available for iOS and Android that targets sleep and stress while promoting total relaxation. I’ve tried plenty of meditation apps in the past, many of which I’ve found rather generic, so I was curious to see what set Insight Timer apart. Above all, I was hoping to find something that would help me develop healthier habits quickly. Keeping in mind that mindfulness meditation can decrease stress and enhance sleep, I eagerly jumped into the app.

I’m pleased to say, by the end of my month using Insight Timer, I have built a mindfulness practice and my sleep hygiene has significantly improved. The app exceeded all my expectations. Here’s why.

Getting Started With Insight Timer

On its website, Insight Timer dubs itself the #1 app for sleep, stress, and anxiety. It offers breathwork and mindfulness exercises, bedtime stories, guided visualizations, soothing music tracks, multi-day courses on wellness-related topics (think along the lines of manifestation, tarot, and connecting with your spirit guides), talks with wellness experts, and even podcast episodes. Its name is derived from its most simple function—to serve as a timer for meditation where you can set the time, ambient background sound, interval timer bell sound, and ending timer bell sound. 

Before signing up with the app, I was already familiar with Insight Timer. In fact, my former clinical supervisor swore by its Internal Family Systems-informed guided meditations and recommended them to her psychotherapy clients as resources. Internal Family Systems is a compassionate therapy modality that adheres to the belief that every human is made up of different parts that take on different roles. Some of these roles can be maladaptive (as in, not a healthy response to a situation or problem), but that doesn’t mean they’re “bad.” Instead, the goal is to come into overall alignment with all parts of the self. Knowing that Insight Timer was inclusive of progress modalities only piqued my interest further.

There is a free version of the app that provides access to over 146,000 guided meditations, talks, podcasts, and music tracks. However, it doesn’t allow access to any of the app’s courses, offline listening, or the option to rewind or fast-forward. You can opt for a free seven-day trial of the paid version.

While the website states it costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year, I couldn’t find an option for a monthly subscription when signing up. So I shelled out the $59.99 and embarked on my pursuit of destressing. 

Building a Mindfulness Practice With Insight Timer

As soon as I opened the Insight Timer app, I was shown a positive quote by the philosopher Seneca that read, “While we wait for life, life passes.” 

Below the quote were five different emoticon faces I could select, ranging from a dark blue frowny face to a deep green smiley face, and above the faces was the question, “How are you feeling?” 

I didn’t realize this initially, but it turned out this is a form of a mood tracker, allowing me to track how my moods were each time I reached for the app. Since this wasn’t clear to me at first, I often skipped over it (there was a tiny button at the bottom that read, “skip”). When I did rate my moods, I was then presented with a page that read, “Why do you feel ___?” and the blank would be filled in with the mood I selected.

For example, if I was having a bad day and clicked the dark blue frowny face, I was presented with the question, “Why do you feel awful?” Below the question were various buttons I could click, including family, food, spirituality, travel, finances, and more.

It wasn’t until a few days of exploring the various pages of the app that I noticed I could see my progress by heading over to my account page. There was an option on this page that said, “Mood Check-in.” Once I clicked on the “Mood Check-in” option, there was a graph that displayed the moods I had tracked. The graph just listed out the emoticon face selected on each day, connecting them with a line to illustrate the trajectory of my moods throughout the week.

On the landing page of the app, there are various options to choose from—a meditation timer, sleep exercises, courses, exercises targeting workplace stress, and then one that simply says “Breathe.” This was confusing—when I clicked it, I was only shown breathwork options. I had assumed I would be shown general mindfulness offerings, as breathwork felt a bit too intense for me. This led me to fumble around the app while searching for beginner-friendly mindfulness and meditation features.

After looking around for a minute or two, I headed to the search function of the app, which was conveniently located in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. As soon as I clicked it, I was taken to a page that had a search bar at the top of the screen and below that said, “Explore.” Underneath “explore” were eight categories to choose from: Beginner, Meditation, Breathwork, Sleep, Music, Yoga, Live Events, and Courses.

Below these categories were various topics I could choose from, including stress and anxiety, beauty and aging, boundaries, and productivity. This experience was only made smoother by the app’s excellent quality—the audio was crisp and I didn’t experience a single glitch. Finally, I was ready to dig into my new meditation practice.

I went ahead and ventured into the stress and anxiety portion of the app. There was a pleasant array of options—guided meditations, soothing acoustic Irish music, and even yoga. Exercises ranged in length from one minute to over an hour. The longer exercises were generally limited to soothing music tracks. The majority of exercises hovered between 10 to 30 minutes. Throughout my month of testing out exercises, I opted for ones that were shorter than 15 minutes. The only exception to this is when I played relaxing music in the background while I made lunch or got ready for my day.

Led by Angele Close, PhD, a psychologist and certified mindfulness meditation teacher, I loved how practical it was. In this meditation, Dr. Close guided me to connect with a part of myself that might be unkind, critical, or even cruel. From there, she invited me to connect with that part and express compassion. This was powerful and even cathartic. Afterward, I was relaxed and throughout the week, I noticed myself drawing on the experience and turning towards myself with more compassion.

The content of the talk was fantastic, well-researched, and easy to digest. However, the format of listening to a talk wasn’t the best for me.

It was essentially a mini-podcast, so it felt like I was consuming more content. While there isn’t anything wrong with that, I need to zone out and breathe, rather than sit and think, when stressed. In the final four minutes of the talk, Dr. Close does lead listeners through a mindfulness exercise, but I personally would have preferred to just get into the exercise.

Tackling My Sleep Hygiene

When it was time for bed, I ventured from the homepage to the sleep section app. I could choose from sleep music, soundscapes, bedtime tales, sleep meditations, and sleep exercises for children. I love that you can do as many activities in the app as you like and if you feel like you’d prefer a curated selection of tracks to choose from, the app has themed playlists available.

There were also courses available. The courses ranged from five days to a full month and consisted of educational audio you listened to once a day. Some of the course topics included building a better sleep routine, how to begin lucid dreaming, yoga nidra, and even mindfulness techniques for children. Each daily session was short, ranging from as quick as five minutes to about 30 minutes, depending on the topic at hand.

While some course lessons are experiential and would include mindfulness and sleep-enhancing exercises (think breathing techniques and guided visualizations), I was much more drawn to the various sounds and bedtime tales.

On my first night using the app, I opted for a bedtime tale. Here is where I could have been struck with some decision fatigue due to the volume of available bedtime tales. However, I quickly settled on a 20-minute-long retelling of Rapunzel, reaching for some childhood nostalgia. I pressed play, set it to “sleep mode” (which stops the track after it ends and locks it so you don’t run down your phone battery), and laid my head on my pillow. 

It began with soothing ambient tones that played in the background for the duration of the track. I immediately felt my eyelids get heavier and was shocked at how quickly my body responded to just the sound of the tones. Then, the narrator began speaking. I found her cadence annoying—every word was slow and drawn out to the point where it was distracting from the content. Despite my annoyance, I was becoming more and more relaxed and figured something must be working. It couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes before I fell asleep. Night one was off to a great start.

My husband isn’t a fan of bedtime tales, but he does enjoy soothing sounds to fall asleep to. This led me to choose calming wave sounds—there was a lot to choose from, so I clicked the first one I saw and was swiftly lulled to sleep. Another time, I chose soothing ambient tones. Again, I was falling asleep within 10 minutes or less.

Even with the annoying Rapunzel narration, I was consistently falling asleep quickly. The app was doing exactly what I’d hoped—it broke my nasty phone habit and helped me get some sleep. Even my husband was hooked. 

Pros and Cons

While I loved my experience with Insight Timer, your mileage may vary. Keep in mind these pros and cons when determining if this app is a fit for you. 

Final Thoughts

Insight Timer’s mindfulness offerings can be generally overwhelming—there are thousands to choose from and for the novice meditator, it may feel intimidating to make a decision. Interestingly enough, I didn’t feel this way when checking out its sleep exercises. I attribute this to sleep exercises being generally more approachable. After all, who doesn’t want to hear a bedtime tale or listen to some ambient sounds?

That being said, it didn’t turn me into a daily meditator after a month. However, my goal in using the app wasn’t to spend the rest of my life meditating every single day. I simply wanted to destress as needed and Insight Timer helped me do that. Besides, in a culture of always needing to do more, maybe the greatest win is to turn to the support you need when you need it instead of feeling like you must add in another wellness practice on a daily basis. Plus, if you struggle to remember to use the app, there’s an option to set reminders, which I found super helpful.

I am impressed by the app’s value, namely the huge library I get to access for just $59.99 a year. I also love that the Insight Timer app is of fantastic quality—it never glitched, the audio was always crisp, and it was thoughtfully curated. As for my stress levels? I’m sailing through my study days with far less anxiety about passing my licensing exam and I’m consistently getting excellent sleep. I’d say Insight Timer did exactly what I hoped it would.