Mindfulness Coach

US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

About this app

Mindfulness means noticing and paying attention to what is going on in the present moment, without passing judgment on it. Mindfulness has been shown to be effective for reducing stress, improving emotional balance, increasing self-awareness, helping with anxiety and depression, and coping more effectively with chronic pain.

Mindfulness Coach 2.0 was developed to help Veterans, Service members, and others learn how to practice mindfulness. The app provides a gradual, self-guided training program designed to help you understand and adopt a simple mindfulness practice. Mindfulness Coach also offers a library of information about mindfulness (for example “What is Mindfulness?”, “How to Anchor Your Attention”), 12 audio-guided mindfulness exercises and a growing catalog of additional exercises available for free download, goal-setting and tracking, a mindfulness mastery assessment to help you track your progress over time, customizable reminders, and access to other support and crisis resources. Mindfulness Coach is free, doesn’t take or share any of your personal information, and doesn’t require add-on purchases.

Mindfulness Coach was created by VA’s National Center for PTSD.

Ratings and reviews

Great app and even though I have only been using it for a couple of weeks it has helped me. I do wish though that in "Build Expertise" I could mark favorites. For example, in "Mindfulness for Difficult Emotions" it would be beneficial for me if I could mark "Strategy for Painful Emotions" as a favorite. Also, I think it would help me to be able to highlight parts of the readings in what I need to reread over and over in "Build Expertise" because of my poor memory.

Good range of resources on what mindfulness is and how to do it, including dozens of guided practice sessions (you can choose to download extra, entirely free, from within the app). You can choose to track you practice sessions, dates plus your commentary/thoughts. You can also set reminders if you want to check in daily, weekly, etc.

I like that there are readings to help understand mindfulness. And it goes in levels so you can add more concepts as you go. You can choose how long to meditate and keep adding time. And you can set goals and reminders, and track progress. Haven't had any problems with it. The voice that leads the meditation is nice, other app voices have put me on edge, so this is a relief. I notice now, when my thinking is getting chaotic and I need to bring it back and breathe

What’s new

* photo picker compatibility