Keep calm and (try really hard without much success to) meditate on.

What do you say to someone who is prone to worrying and doesn’t do a terrific job of managing her stress?

You tell her, “Get the Calm app.” Right?

Only, I suppose, if you are my clever friend Liz, who suggested this exact thing to me a couple months ago when I was losing my sh** over one of life’s latest crises.

Liz tends to be ahead of the curve on things like meditation apps, so I listened up. “Calm is better than Xanax,” she told me. “I do it fifteen minutes each day. Taking this time for my mind and body has been transforming.”

Liz and I are similarly wired, so I asked for more details. She said, “In the past, I hadn’t noticed how wound up I was doing simple things like grocery shopping. I’d be irritated and in such a rush, literally feeling my muscles tight and stressed. Now, I’m more relaxed. After meditation in the morning, which is often in a random parking lot after I drop off the kids at school, I feel like a Zen surfer dude gliding through the day.”

I can describe myself using many different adjectives, but Zen is not one of them. I could see the benefit of having a tool right on my phone to help me glide through the day. So I hopped over to the App Store and purchased Calm without a second thought.

When you open Calm, the simple words “take a deep breath” greet you. Beyond that, Calm offers a treasure trove of resources for the habitually anxious, including guided and unguided meditations, sleep stories, and programs for managing stress and promoting gratitude. Best of all, there is a daily exercise that fosters mindfulness and concentration.

Calm encourages you to find a quiet, comfortable spot where you can close your eyes, maintain a wakeful posture (as if a string is pulling you up from the top of your head), and disregard the rest of the world for a while. The lulling voice of Tamara, the narrator – plus the background noise of chirping birds and lapping water – is reassuringly Xanax-like.

Since downloading Calm I’ve been doing it almost every night in bed before going to sleep, but I confess that meditation does not come easy for me. “Return to the breath” is Tamara’s mantra, but it is so hard. I try to concentrate on the air as it moves in and out of my body, but my mind begins to wander like a hyper puppy off-leash. Tamara, ever merciful, instructs me not to fret: “There is no judgment. Let go of your thoughts and imagine them floating away like leaves on a stream.”

As if it’s not challenging enough to follow Tamara’s basic directions, I am plagued with a host of other disruptions that make meditation even more difficult. I’m sitting in my bed, for instance, legs crossed and hands resting lightly in my lap, when I hear my son padding down the hallway toward my bedroom. “Owen is supposed to be sleeping!” I hiss to Tamara. He opens the door. Although my eyes are closed, I can sense him staring at me. He closes the door and races back to his room while shrieking with laughter. I silently appeal to Tamara for support. “Return to the breath,” she says.

A similar incident happens the following night. I’m trying to do Calm, but this time my daughter Caroline barges in. “She should be doing her homework!” I think helplessly. Caroline watches me in what I can only assume is fascination (I’ve never seen my mom so still and quiet before!) and then she asks, “What’s up with the hippie hobby, Mom?” I cannot answer because my brain is mush and I’m getting pissed, so I keep my eyes shut and ignore her. All while – yes, you got it – attempting to return to the breath.  

But the worst interruption to Calm comes from my husband. It’s another evening and I’m just getting into my groove, working on “softening my forehead,” when I hear him hollering for me downstairs. The string holding my spine straight snaps in half. The direction of the stream turns and every messy thought comes crashing on top of me like a tsunami. “What does he want?” I ask Tamara in sheer desperation. I climb out of bed and find my husband in the kitchen, checking his email.

“There’s a message here from Apple indicating that somebody in our family bought an app called Calm,” he says.

“That was me. I bought Calm,” I say.

“But Calm is freaking expensive!” he says. “It was $63.29!”

I’ve only purchased one or two apps in my life, so I have no context for this discussion. He goes on, “Every app I buy is only a couple bucks. I’ve never spent $63.29 on an app!”

“But Calm is different,” I say. “It’s got all these tools and activities. It offers something new every single day. It’s like a meditation curriculum.” I know I sound lame, but I’ve come to believe in Calm, even if can’t achieve it myself. 

“Well you better be doing a lot of Calm to make it worth the price!” he says.

Let me tell you: there is nothing more buzz-killing to Calm than being told by your spouse that you need to do a lot of it to justify the cost. My inner surfer dude wilts a little bit. 

***

I keep thinking of Liz, who, as you’ll recall, mediates in her car in random parking lots. “I’m concerned that someday someone will knock on my car window thinking I’m asleep or dead,” she says. “But so far I haven’t been interrupted.”

Perhaps I need to take my meditation on the road.

***

In my bed, in a car, wherever I can find that sense of peace that continually eludes me, I’m holding out hope that Calm is going to help. My husband and kids can complain and laugh all they want, but the truth is this: if I can be more serene and composed in my daily life, they will directly benefit. All for $63.29.

It's a complete steal, if you ask me. And much less than a yearly Xanax prescription.