It's no secret that meditation has several benefits for your mental and physical health. But it's a myth that you need to do it only in the morning or for a long time. Try even a minute of mindfulness in the middle of a hard day, and you'll see how meditation can improve your work.
These minimalist sites offer different types of micro-meditations for a quick session to relieve stress, manage anger or anxiety, deal with negative thoughts, or center yourself. They are all free, work in any browser, and don't require you to sign up. You can simply start the site and go on your meditation journey.
Table of Contents
1. This Is a Thing (Web): 100-Second Meditation Based on Stoic Philosophy
This Is a Thing (TIAT) is a 100-second meditation that aims to put your problems and thoughts into perspective. It's a guided exercise with a soothing tune (which you can mute if you want) playing on an animation. It's a calming collage of floating circles, which change color and move in random patterns.
Once you click a circle, TIAT starts the guided meditation. The animation is then accompanied by a set of writing with the base premise that we can't control everything in our lives, but we do have some agency in how we feel. The developer says the guide is based on stoic thinking philosophers like Socrates.
2. Draw Aurora (Web): Meditate to the Animation of a Moving Train Journey
Aurora is another meditative space by the same developer as TIAT, but a more free-flowing meditative experience. It's designed as an animation of what it's like to look outside a train window and watch the days, scenery, and weather change.
There is soothing background music playing the whole time, you can zoom in and out to decide how big the landscape looks, and even draw aurora lights or fireworks. Again, drawings set off their own sounds. You can also dive into the settings and change any of these aspects, as Aurora is eminently customizable in every way.
3. Xhalr (Web): Free Customizable Online Breathing Meditation App
Xhalr is a minimalist meditation web app that works on the principle of using breathing exercises for relaxation and mindfulness. All you see on the screen is a pulsating circle that says "inhale", "exhale", or "hold breath" and changes colors periodically. In the settings, you can switch between day and night themes, switch off the words and just use the pulsating circle as a guide, and even get audio prompts.
Xhalr also lets you customize how many seconds you want it to issue instructions to inhale, exhale, or hold your breath by adjusting sliders in the settings for inhale-hold breath-exhale-hold breath. The default is set to four seconds of inhaling and six seconds of exhaling. You can also use presets for square breathing (4-4-4-4), pranayama yoga (7-4-8-0), or ujjayi (7-0-7-0).
4. Connected Breath (Web, Android, iOS): Breathing Meditation With Others Online
Connected Breath is another meditation app that makes you focus on your breathing to enter a state of mindfulness and calmness. But it adds a layer on top of connecting you with other humans practicing the same principle at the same moment, maybe half a world away.
Once you start the app, you see a large circle that expands and contracts, which sets your breathing rhythm. In the night sky behind this circle, you'll see stars twinkling. Those are the other people using the app, the stars being their circles that expand and contract. Connected Breath also includes guided words and tells you how many other people are using the app with you at this moment, invoking a sense of connectedness to other humans.
Download: Connected Breath for Android | iOS (Free)
MindfulDevMag is one of the web's best spaces to learn the benefits of mindfulness. They've created a series of tools that help you in your journey, a few of which are worth bookmarking for a quick meditation session.
Online Meditation Timer lets you quickly start a meditation session for 3, 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes, with no guided audio or ambient relaxing sounds. It'll only chime when you start and the time ends, and you can check the clock at any time to see how much time is left. There's a similar digital timer also if you prefer that.
Mindful Break is a guided 2-minute meditation to take a short break during a stressful activity or a high-pressure situation. Set to the sound of waves crashing at a seashore (and an accompanying image), the guided meditation makes you more mindful of your body, breath, and environment, helping you center yourself and calm your mind.
6. Qi (Web): AI-Generated Absurd and Quirky Meditation Scenarios
Here's one more mind-blowing tech creation by AI apps. Qi offers guided meditations that were entirely generated by artificial intelligence. And more importantly, instead of the usual scenarios like sitting on a beach or under a tree in a park, Qi pushes the user to try out absurd and quirky settings.
Scenarios include being abducted by aliens, hiding from dinosaurs, next to a crying child in a subway, getting caught cheating, and more. Now, while the scenario is weird, that's just the imagination part. The actual guided meditation is like any standard practice. The developer writes, "Early listener feedback has been that the absurd scenarios are actually more engaging and hold their attention much better." Give it a shot, you never know what's going to work for you to get to a state of mindfulness.
7. Pixel Thoughts (Web): 60-Second Meditation to Deal With Negative Thoughts
Made by the same team as Connected Breath, Pixel Thoughts has been around for a long time and is one of the best sites for instant stress and anxiety relief. It's a great site to go to when you're consumed by one thought and want to deal with it through meditation.
Pixel Thoughts asks you to write that thought and puts it in an on-screen bubble. It then starts a 60-second guided meditation that aims to make you put this thought into perspective by contextualizing the larger picture. It won't always be what you need, but sometimes, Pixel Thoughts is exactly the medicine to turn off negative thoughts.
Try a Combination of These Meditations
Each of these sites brings something different to the table. The good news is that you don't need to pick one favorite. As mentioned at the start, they're all free and don't require registrations, so you can start using one when you need a certain type of meditation. It'd be best to make a bookmark folder with all of them and use the right meditation app at the right time.
