Calm Your Distracted, Busy Brain With This

If you were to sit and listen to your brain, what would it sound like?

Did the very idea make you cringe?

There has never been more monkey behaviour in the Buddhist theory of “monkey mind.” Your thoughts move from point to point, rarely staying still. It is rare to even read a full article anymore. Why bother, when you have 140 characters or less?

We’ve been told that we should work on stilling the mind. Yet we have no way of telling if we’ve made any progress when we attempt to be quiet.

Until now.

Enter the futuristic (or 2014istic) Muse headband. You place it on your head in the front and around your ears, making sure no hair touches the sensors. You don’t want anything to get in the way of this headband reading your brain waves. 

Whoa.

After you get geared up, place on a pair of headphones that will help you to listen to the affiliated app. You’ll go through a series of exercises to make your brain very active. Then you choose a time between 3 and 12 minutes. You are told to focus on your breath by counting the breath.

In previous meditations, that monkey mind has probably distracted you from time to time. With this magical meditation headband, you can hear when your brain is starting to take you away from the task at hand. Gusts of wind will start to intensify in the soundscape, reminding you that your breath is what matters at this moment.

At the end of the session, you’ll be presented with a graph that lays out the electrical activity of your brain. You were either in active, neutral or calm (or in many cases, fluctuating between all three). As you continue to use the app, you can notice if you become calmer for longer. You’ll even get a vestibular reward in the form of chirping birds. You’ll hear their sweet sound every time your brain waves are calm for a long period.

In our task-driven, goal-oriented society, we are very aware when we get a lot done. Now we can know when we get very little done. We can become better at doing as little as possible. 

Can your Smartphone do that? 

Head on over to Choose Muse to learn more.