If you still think that meditation involves moving to Nepal, turning vegetarian and chanting nonsense, it’s really time to bring you up to date.
As it happens, meditation might soon be taught in business courses alongside time management and communication skills. In the world of medicine, it’s now even being recommended for things like treating depression, improving concentration, managing chronic pain and developing self-confidence.
So, if meditation is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? The thing here is: meditation is unbelievably hard to master. Many people don’t want to pay for training, or confuse meditation with hypnotism or religion. Others claim they don’t have time, even though 10 minutes of meditation is far more rewarding than 4 hours watching Game of Thrones. But for most who actually try it, the problem is simply that they’re no good at it the first, third or thirtieth time, decide they never will be and simply give up.
When it comes to something physical like doing pushups, it’s easy to see what progress you’re making and figure out what helps or hurts your performance. In our internal lives, things are much more confusing. It’s difficult even to know whether you’re doing well or lousily.
There are quite a few meditation support apps out there, but mostly these only provide guidance and allow you to enter the details of your sessions manually. This device, however, tracks your heart rate, your brain’s electrical activity, your breathing and bodily movements. All of these are good indicators of how calm you are, and are automatically sent to the associated app running on your phone, so you’ll have no trouble tracking your progress empirically and in detail.
While you’re meditating, your phone provides audio feedback to remind you to relax when you’re veering off course. This kind of insight is invaluable for beginners who’re only starting to figure out what meditation is actually about, as well as people who’ve been practicing for a while but feel like they’ve plateaued.
An older version is also still available, but measures only brain activity and comes with a less feature-rich app.
