Developer: Doolally Holdings Ltd.
Price: $4.49/£4.99 per month [1 month trial]
Size: 25 MB
Version: 2.2.2
Platform: iPhone & iPad
Despite what its name and presentation might suggest to you, Minderful is not a mindfulness app, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s more of a structured podcast app aimed at disseminating information that makes the listener “mentally fit”.
It’s positioned as a means of pursuing mindfulness through something other than the usual routes of yoga or meditation.
Stories are linked into thematic ‘journies’
To that end, the app splits its various educational and motivational audio snippets into five main themes: Nature, Create, Me, Social, and Expand. These are accessible through the app’s main Explore tab, and each contains between eight and fifteen ‘journeys’.
These journeys offer you a whistle-stop tour of a particular subject, linking together multiple narrated stories on a single topic, from jigsaws to community radio. Complete a journey and you’ll get the associated badge, lending a welcome gamification angle and a further incentive to listen to everything.
Complete journeys, earn badges
When it comes to the content itself, Minderful’s highly professional hosts consult experts in each particular field to give you a well informed outlook on those activities. For example, the foraging journey at one point talks to Biomedical Sciences expect Rebecca Lazarou, while the Team Sports journey gets the perspective of British paralympic athlete Laura Sugar.
Just to emphasise, this isn’t a ‘how to’ app by any means. Rather, Minderful’s aim is to showcase the mental benefits of taking part in a given activity, and to help users discover relaxing new pastimes.
It’s essentially a walled-off podcast app
In terms of features you might recognize from more convention mindfulness apps, Minderful does periodically enquire about your mental state using a rather crude slider system, but there’s no real mechanism here (that we could see at least) for responding to your feedback with custom content or advice.
All in all, Minderful feels a bit like an audio-based magazine. The temptation here is to skim across the surface, flicking about looking for something that piques your interest.
The app will periodically ask how you’re feeling
With that in mind, it’s possible to come away from the app feeling like you’re not getting anything like a comprehensive view of one of its subjects. But if you’re looking for the inspiration to take up a new stress-relieving hobby, or to find peace and meaning in some other hitherto unexplored avenue of life, it’s an extremely inviting place to start.