The mindfulness app created by Madonna’s tour manager

It seems fitting that on the day I speak to Niamh McCarthy, the 29-year-old founder of a new meditation app that promises to calm you down in minutes, my stomach hurts from stress. She is smiley and sympathetic, a sunny ray of Californian calm (she’s originally from Ireland but her accent is all over the place). And then she tells me she was in a car crash yesterday, which puts my deadlines into perspective.

“I’m fine!” she reassures me, beaming down the Zoom camera. “I thought to myself, I could react to this experience, or I could go with the flow. So I went with the flow.” She shrugs and smiles, the picture of chilled-out health.

It wasn’t always like this. McCarthy used to be the sort of person who “didn’t have time to meditate”, working full pelt in the music industry, on tour with U2 and Madonna — a career that led to burnout. Her app, Mindful Nation, combines music with mindfulness sessions which, she claims, will improve your day and change your life, no matter how busy you are.

She started out aged 20 working in New York for Guy Oseary, then CEO of Maverick, and spent four years on the road as a manager on back-to-back tours with U2 (“the most amazing human beings”), jetting over to support Madonna when needed (“I’ve never met a harder worker”). “It was a dream job,” she says, but it came at a price. By just 24 she was burnt out and suffering from panic attacks.

The app offers more than 1,000 sessions and is organised into different moods

MINDFUL NATION

After collapsing in Germany and being told by a doctor that she needed to change her lifestyle, she stopped touring and moved to LA. But the pressure didn’t stop. “In the Maverick office there are the most talented people, but everyone is so stressed and unhappy. We were living our dream but were so entrenched in deadlines that we forgot this could be fun.”

A doctor told her that taking deep breaths could help her to calm down. It worked. She started studying meditation, including under Deepak Chopra, and launched Mindful Maverick sessions in the LA office, where she’d invite in meditation experts, play upbeat music and peel the managers away from their desks for a few minutes to breathe and relax. “The music was key. It had to be fun. These were people who said they couldn’t meditate, who didn’t have time to be mindful.”

Her new app, including investment by Live Nation and already being used globally by staff there and at Ticketmaster, builds on that idea — that even busy, stressed people who don’t have time to meditate can change their mindset with just a few minutes a day. It’s easy to use, with more than 1,000 sessions led by different “trainers” with British, Irish and American accents, and organised into different moods — Calm, Grounded, Focused — as well as curated playlists called things such as Anxiety Goodbye.

The vibe is inevitably American and they do say things like “let’s realign our intention”, but sessions are gloriously short — usually about three minutes. I’ve dabbled with other apps, such as Calm and Headspace, but Mindful Nation seems to take less commitment. “A lot of people that use our app can’t meditate. They go to the gym and they listen to music to relax.” The music, created thanks to McCarthy’s contacts, is genuinely good — a sort of relaxed Ibiza vibe, with no whale song. When my 11-year-old walks in on me listening to a three-minute session with Marlyn, she says it doesn’t sound very “meditatey” and she’s right, but that’s why I like it. Marlyn, incidentally, is Madonna’s former personal trainer, with a cheerful, husky Latina voice that gets your attention. When she tells me to take a deep breath and be kind to myself, I do as I’m told.

After a few sessions I’m not quite a sunny ray of Californian calm, but the stomach ache has shifted and I’m feeling less jittery. McCarthy tells me how she tested her method at live events, with musicians and mindfulness experts on stage. “We tried it at the Download Festival in Donington Park — it was 20,000 people, all heavy-metal fans standing in a field doing the meditation, hugging each other, grown men crying. It was insane.”
£4.99 through the App Store

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