The Calm app has been downloaded 52 million
times (Shutterstock)The evening I fly up to Toronto, my flight is delayed as we wait for thunderstorms to pass over New York.
I’m an anxious flyer, so as we sit on the tarmac, I put on Levitt’s recording “Calming Flight Anxiety”.
(“Since our fears are rooted in the future, we can return to a place of calm by reconnecting with the present
moment.”) The next morning, I walk across downtown Toronto toward Levitt’s recording studio, the
Orange Lounge. I tap into Calm again. I’m an anxious interviewer, so I listen to her “Mindful Walking”
track and reroute my attention towards my movement. (“Your heel lifts,” she tells me. “The sole of your
foot peels off the ground. Then the ball of your foot raises, and your toes follow.”)
When I arrive, I find Levitt bathed in jewel tones: the studio is covered in red and gold tapestries, purple
fringed pillows, an orange swirled shag rug, multiple lava lamps. Levitt has a big smile and wonderful
posture. She looks like her photographs, but her voice is not quite familiar. It sounds faster and harsher than
it does on the app, although it is not at all fast and not at all harsh. It is professional and projected, a little
sardonic and pretty Canadian. Her accent is barely perceptible in the app.
Levitt has been recognised in person, by her voice, only twice. She sounds different because she is
conversing in another realm. She is not here to soothe me and tuck me in; she is speaking to me as if I am an
adult. What sounds relaxing on the app might sound a little woo-woo, even infantilising, in the open air. But
the sudden emotional distance between us feels oddly destabilising. Levitt was a musician and a voice-over
actress before she became a mindfulness instructor, and it, too, is an art. “It’s much more difficult to do
voice work like this than it is to speak normally,” she says. “It’s really hard to maintain a very soft, kind-of-
whispery voice.”
When Levitt records, she stands in an expansive room in the studio, at the centre of two screens covered in
packing blankets and angled in a slim V-shape, her mouth 4in from the microphone. She has arranged the
room so that her audio engineer, Spencer Sunshine, cannot see her from his editing bay. She wants to feel
still and unselfconscious. She wants to drift into a partial meditative state.
Visible from the booth is a paisley-printed easel fitted with an iPad (for her script) and an iPod (for keeping
time), and a footstool crowded with beverages: a bottle of water, a large white teapot steeped with Breathe
Easy tea and a can of Dole apple juice, which helps to quiet mouth smacks. Occasionally Levitt’s hand will
emerge from behind the screen, remove a glass and retract. But mostly she is a voice behind a curtain, an
extremely chill Wizard of Oz.