Kaiser Permanente offers Calm mental fitness app at no cost to millions of members

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Med­i­ta­tion app Calm is now free for Kaiser Per­ma­nen­te’s mil­lions of mem­bers (CNBC):

Kaiser Per­ma­nente is try­ing to give its 12.4 mil­lion mem­bers a lit­tle bit of calm.

Start­ing Tues­day, the health-care provider is allow­ing patients to down­load the Calm med­i­ta­tion app for free as part of a way to help cus­tomers man­age anx­i­ety as they deal with the fall­out from the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Calm is the most-pop­u­lar health and fit­ness app on Google-pow­ered devices and No. 2 on the iPhone, accord­ing to App Annie. Paid sub­scrip­tions nor­mal­ly cost $70 a year … Calm was see­ing surg­ing growth even before the coro­n­avirus forced Amer­i­cans to shel­ter in place and led to sky­rock­et­ing unem­ploy­ment. The San Fran­cis­co-based start-up was val­ued by investors last year at $1 bil­lion, two years after being named Apple’s app of the year back in 2017. The app has been down­loaded over 80 mil­lion times.

The Need in Context:

Three ways to pro­tect your men­tal health dur­ing –and after– COVID-19 (World Eco­nom­ic Forum):

How many of us right now are expe­ri­enc­ing a heady cock­tail of con­fu­sion, anx­i­ety and even some sur­pris­ing moments of respite from our pre-COVID-19, always-on-the-go culture?

Our tra­di­tion­al media and social media feeds are filled with urgent and often con­flict­ing imper­a­tives to change our rou­tines and be con­stant­ly vigilant.

The online onslaught of rapid­ly updat­ing media sto­ries report­ing worst-case sce­nar­ios can fuel fear and pan­ic. Uncrit­i­cal over­con­sump­tion of such mes­sages can erode one of our most pre­cious and essen­tial human resources for weath­er­ing the COVID-19 storm: our men­tal health…

How can we boost our men­tal health in the COVID-19 era to min­i­mize the impact of the virus and the “social dis­tanc­ing” in our lives, and to devel­op a health­i­er and more resilient “new nor­mal” for the future? Will we final­ly pay seri­ous atten­tion to the link between stress reg­u­la­tion and our health and well-being?

News in Context: