Written by Hamza and Binh
As students and as working professionals we are always pressed for time to deliver a project or finish an assignment. Time is of the essence and procrastination and distractions are lurking in the shadows, ready to strike and nudge us to take the path of least resistance and do it later. Working in a workspace sometimes cause the focus lost because of the ambient noise. We could use headphone to listen to music trying to isolate the noise, but noise level could change, and we need to adjust the volume of the music, this step already made we lose our focus on working. If this sounds familiar and you’re looking for a technological solution to this problem, then this blog post is just what the doctor ordered.
Before we dive into our description of wellness technology examples, let us understand wellbeing and the parts it consists of. Wellbeing and health are commonly used interchangeably because it is difficult to differentiate between the two. However, health is more concerned with activities in the clinical setting as result of some major or minor ailment requiring healthcare professionals. Wellbeing or wellness has more to do with motivation and self-management to achieve our goals and create positive habits.
Our wellbeing is combination of a multitude of factors and circumstances that overlap and affect one another. These can be grouped broadly into three parts: social, mental, and physical. It is a direct consequence of our daily habits. The food we eat, our social circle, our hobbies, exercising routines, sleeping habits, time management, etc. all contribute to how we feel with our lives. Furthermore, our cultural and environment also play a part in how we perceive wellness and wellbeing.
The products we’ve chosen to discuss focus on the mental aspect of wellness. A healthy mind is better able to manage the thoughts, emotions, and feelings that spring up during the day and keeps itself in the present moment. Acceptance and Commitment Theory is used to treat people with problems such as anxiety, depression, stress, etc. It can train the mind to be more aware and observant of itself and its surroundings and not be controlled by these feelings and emotions. The products described below aim to produce similar results.
Mindset headphones that improve your concentration
Mindset is a unique device – part EEG, part headphone that measure brain activity and improve concentration while working. It is equipped with EEG sensors that are used to monitor brain signal and store it using its application. With active noise cancellation, ambient noise is isolated. Mindset detects the patterns in the EEG signal that indicate a focused or distracted mental state. With the data collected from ambient, the signal comes from brain and AI that analyze brain signal, Mindset could increase the volume of the music to keep user refocus.
Mindfulness/White Noise Applications (Headspace, Calm)
Among the top most popular mindfulness applications, Headspace and Calm offer guided meditation dealing with a plethora of needs and situations such as stress and anxiety, personal goals, work and productivity, sleep, student meditation, self-esteem, forgiveness, focus and concentration, and many others. They want users to meditate as a daily habit to inculcate mindfulness and focus for handling the situations when their brain starts churning out negative thoughts. The interfaces are designed to inspire calm with natural sounds and backgrounds or eye-pleasing colours and fonts. The navigations are simple and inviting and the available sessions can be easily selected based on the user’s needs.
Another group of minimalistic but very useful applications are white noise generators. They work by generating a decent, ignorable amount of calming background sounds to create a soundproof blanket that helps block noisy distractions and keep you focused on your work or help you sleep better. And judging from the positive user feedback, they work. Some even claim to use it to help babies sleep and, therefore get a good night’s sleep themselves.
Overall, these applications aim to remove stress, anxiety, distractions, and other hindrances, be it with better sleep, better emotional management, laser like focus, or just being mindful and aware. This translates into better clarity, control, calm and focus for users which naturally spills over into other parts of life and can help improve the way we communicate, achieve our goals, sleep better and, ultimately, have a positive impact on our general wellness.
References
· Ahtinen, Aino and Chowhury, Aparajita. 2018. Psychology of Pervasive Computing lectures. Tampere University of Technology.
· https://thewritelife.com/10-concentration-apps-that-will-help-you-get-down-to-business/
· https://thinkproductive.co.uk/top-5-concentration-apps/
· https://www.thinkmindset.com/#homedesk
· https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.relaxio.relaxio&hl=en_US
I agree with you that we will be affected by people or environment noise around us and our productivity of our work will decrease. That phenomenon could decrease feeling of well-being because we will stand the pressure of work that hasn’t finished. Therefore, how to enhance our quality of wellbeing is important for everyone.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the introduction of those application about how to prevent us from distracted by others and release our negative emotion. They would be great method for people who suffers for these problems. However, those two applications focus on how to make our mind peace. I think maybe could add more applications about the field of physical health because well-being integrates mental health (mind) and physical health (body). That would be another choice for people to increase their well-being.
I-CHEN
I agree with your points. There are many applications and technologies which try to help us to restore our mind or prevent from occurring depression, stress, etc. It is a good way to use technology to help us to schedule our daily life, see if there are some issues which have to be changed that we can get a better well-being. Additionally, if there is available some guided help to concentrate better, to exercise restoring your mind or to follow your wellness.
ReplyDeleteTechnology still doesn’t help us in all problems. I think that technology can preempt but in many cases it is crucial to get help from other human (e.g. psychologist) that our wellness is good enough. Only one unsuccessful part of well-being can throw us off well-being and healthy mind so it is important to handle them all.
Jane
Thank you for the excellent blog post. I think your text describes the are of technology and the psychological aspects well.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, wellbeing is one of the most common topics I see in media. The news have usually negative accents: we are not okay. People are stressed and feel that they are in a hurry all the time.
In my opinion it is great that the technology we use all the time can also be used to relieve our stress and anxiety. The applications are easy way to develop rutines for everyday life. It would be important to develop them so that we aren't dependent on the technology but those applications just help us on our way.
Well said. I have never used a white noise applications or mindset headphones myself but I do agree that silent music and ambient sounds can improve focus on challenging settings. Yet, I am also a firm believer of mindfullness and meditation and I like to think that time and focus always comes from the mind and not from what is outside of it. I use headspace too every now and then and it can definitely help bring back the focus and feeling of wellbeing.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your blog post and I definitely believe that technology can help bring wellbeing into our daily life and that applications like these should be further studied by psychologists.
Thank you for this very good post that explains in detail the technologies for a healthier mind.
ReplyDeleteThe post is well structured with first an introduction and then a detailed description of the subject with examples. (I didn't know the Headspace and Calm applications, it was a great discovery!)
So, I understood the subject well.
On a more personal level, I am someone who is often stressed and I have particular difficulty concentrating when I am studying. So, I use these methods a lot to have a healthier mind and especially when I study.
Personally, I put on a headset with noise reduction and I start a "relaxing" music that I find on Youtube (for example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPni755-Krg)
This helps me a lot to concentrate and be more efficient in my work.
However, I have noticed that these methods do not work on me to sleep better, indeed it is impossible for me to sleep when I have headphones with relaxing music or something else.
So finally, from a personal point of view, I could say that for some areas, technology allows you to have a healthier mind, to be more focused but that it doesn't always work (at least not always on me).
Raphael NACHAR
I feel that this is a really important topic, as I and pretty much everyone around me struggles with kiiping up with the demands from school and work. And it’s easy to drown in the work if you don’t manage your time and mind well enough, as we’re not robots and can’t keep up with just working and working without relaxing every once in a while.
ReplyDeletePersonally I don’t have a problem with noise cancellation as I work from home where there’s only the cat distracting me - and he’s a luckily quite quiet fellow. But the other concept you focused on, mindfullness and meditation, was something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. How to stay afloat in the middle of all these deadlines and pressure? And I think, like you also suggested, that meditation would be a good help and I think should give it a try, maybe with either Headspace or Calm.
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ReplyDelete