Apps: Mental Workout and Headspace

I remember when I was in elementary school, a teacher tried to teach us meditation. She told us that would be very helpful for our mind and would facilitate our learning. She asked us to do a 3-minute meditation before or after class ( I can’t remember, it was too long ago). We did it like a whole semester, however, I guess I was too young to get it then. All I was thinking during the meditation was to leave the classroom and very I was usually distracted by the train ran by our classroom. I’ve never try meditation since I graduated from elementary school… until now.

Mental workout has a neat interface, and it offers four programs: Mindfulness Meditation for overall mediation, Good Night for exercises that help you fall asleep, Freedom from Stress for de-stressing and Up in Smoke which helps you replace smoking with meditation. I’m very curious about the last one! However I don’t smoke, so I can’t know if it works. I’ve tried Mindfulness Meditation, I tried 3 sessions of meditation practice, they are interesting! I was told to focus on my breath, to imagine a light going through my body, and surprisingly I could feel it!  I also tried the Good Night one, the doctor shared a tip in addition to meditation: to count down from 300 by 3, haha! But it works. I did the Good Night session before I go to bed, but I didn’t feel I had a better sleep. Maybe it takes more practice (and I’ll keep trying).

Headspace is another interesting app I tried. The name itself is very attractive, it says it can help me to get more space in my head, (which I do need). It has a very different interface from Mental Workout. It’s kind of cartoonish, which makes it more interesting to me. (If we could have had this in elementary school, maybe I would learn meditation better :p )   Headspace explain mediation with very cute animations, and I really love the way they describe meditation: They describe mediation is to manage the traffic in our minds.  The meditation instruction are similar to what’s in Mental Workout, the only difference is the accent, (and I have to pay more attention to understand it). Headspace offers a 10-week plan called Take 10, I will share how I feel after I finish this 10 week plan.

Cute animations from Headspace

Cartoonish instructions from Headspace