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This Popular App Uses AI to Feed You Personalized Meditations

This Popular App Uses AI to Feed You Personalized Meditations

We’re all looking for a way to decompress and level out the daily stresses. With a host of app services aimed at soothing your soul flooding the market, Aura Premium is already distinguishing itself in this exploding field. Find out why with a lifetime subscription to this in-demand service for over 80 percent off — just $59.99 from The National Memo Store.

Aura has earned some quick notoriety as one of the rising stars in the app meditation market, scoring a coveted #1 New App designation from Apple last February. Following featured status in TechCrunch, Forbes and TeenVogue, fans are catching on to Aura and catching on fast.

The app pulls together meditation and brain relaxation techniques from top teachers and therapists worldwide into a system that not only reads your responses, but learns what approaches work best for you.

No matter your preferred method of stress reduction, whether you attack with a full frontal assault or cut away at it with short orchestrated bursts, Aura stands ready to back you up. With their groundbreaking machine learning processes, Aura guides you through 3- to 10-minute meditations to chip away at your anxieties.

Meanwhile, Aura tracks your mood, gauges your patterns, offers daily reminders and even displays your stress relief progress visually so you can track your improvement.

In addition to the lifetime option, you can also get Aura under equally affordable one-year ($29.99) and two-year ($49.99) plans while this offer lasts.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce. 

Meditate For Success

Meditate For Success

We ambitious strivers seeking guidance from fitness pros, decluttering experts, and TED talks often find the day divided in two unequal parts. Three-quarters goes to overworking. The remaining quarter is for countering the ill effects of overworking. We do the latter not necessarily to nurture our souls but to boost performance during the working hours.

You see, overworking and stress slow our productivity. Herein lies a paradox.

Relaxation, vacations, and a good night’s sleep could be seen as key to personal well-being. But gremlins have taken a wrench to our puritanical brains and put dollar values on our inner peace and repose. They are now a means to goose our output.

Consider the advice to get eight hours of sleep a night. Good sleep leaves one feeling refreshed, less depressed, less stressed. But it also has a utilitarian purpose. It boosts our performance at work. Thus, we use apps to ensure we’re maintaining eight-hour sleep periods incorporating five REM cycles.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the numbers: Sleep deprivation costs the U.S. economy $63 billion a year in lost productivity.

We seek techniques to do more per unit of time. For example, there are articles on how to “optimize” a three-day weekend. (To think, Americans used to have three-week vacations.)

Our employers are famously ungenerous with paid vacation. But many of us don’t even use the time we’re given. A study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association estimates that in 2013, Americans left 429 million paid vacation days on the table.

Why? Some said their workload is so heavy they can’t afford to get away. If they don’t complete their assignments, they may not have a job upon returning.

The travel association is now selling vacation time as a tool to raise the gross domestic product. If workers used all their available time off, the study says, U.S. business revenues would rise by $160 billion, and tax collections would rise by $21 billion.

Meditation, the great teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn tells us, is “for no purpose other than to be awake to what is actually so.”

But suppose it helps us better focus our attention. Wouldn’t that make us more useful worker bees? Sure.

A Google executive told Bloomberg TV that “wisdom traditions like yoga and meditation help us operate better.” He noted that the most important technology we have is the human body and brain. Yoga and meditation help us, he explained, “optimize this technology.”

Thanks to Google’s yoga program for its employees, he added, “there’s been a huge impact on both people’s productivity and culture.”

So yoga has become a get-ahead tool. Small wonder yoga teachers see participants aggressively jostling for mat space in their classes, according to The Wall Street Journal.

There’s also a smartphone app that lets students follow the instructors of their choice. That way, if a star yoga teacher is not going to lead a particular class, they don’t have to waste their time on a B-lister.

What healthy habits don’t do for productivity, drugs will. Many American workers are apparently taking medications for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder solely to improve their output at work.

Taking these stimulants can cause addiction, anxiety and hallucinations, but for intense competitors, they are jet fuel. As a woman in her late 20s told The New York Times, they are “necessary for survival of the best and the smartest and highest-achieving people.”

We really can’t blame health advocates for toting up the economic benefits of more relaxed living. That’s often the only argument anyone notices anymore.

Meditation improves concentration. Heck, let’s meditate — and medicate — to better meditate. It’s the American way.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Balint Földesi via Flickr

Meditation Could Be The Key To Your Stress Problems

Meditation Could Be The Key To Your Stress Problems

By Shelby Sheehan-Bernard, Tribune News Service (TNS)

Stress. It seems everywhere we go, there’s an email to read, a text to send, a task to complete. If you’re seeking a way to ease your response to modern life’s stressors and overstimulation, mindfulness meditation may be the answer. Current research in the field, including a 2014 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine from researchers at Johns Hopkins University, is continuing to uncover the benefits of a consistent meditation practice, such as its ability to help reduce anxiety and depression, as well as physical pain.

Think meditation is some complex, transcendental, or even a hokey experience? It’s actually simpler than you may think.

“There are so many misconceptions about a mindfulness practice,”said Sharon Salzberg, a meditation teacher and New York Times best-selling author of books such as Real Happiness-The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program. “Sometimes people think it needs to be tied to a certain belief system, or you have to sit in a pretzel-like posture, or there is a lot of preparatory work before you can start. None of that is so.”

She said it can be as basic as starting with five minutes each day, just focusing on your breath. “The trick is to realize that your mind will likely wander a lot,” said Salzberg, who notes that this isn’t a problem or a bad sign despite popular belief. “The goal is to gently let go of the distraction and begin again by bringing your attention back to the breath.”

If you find that this exercise doesn’t work for you, there are also guided meditations available online. Ashley Turner, a yoga meditation instructor and mind/body psychotherapist, is one of many teachers who have accessible online practices. (You can check out hers and a range of others available through the My Yoga/Gaiam TV.)

The key, Turner said, is consistency, not necessarily duration. Like Salzberg, she recommends starting with five minutes a day, adding one minute each week until you work up to an optimal 15 to 20 minutes each session.

The process may sound easy enough, but it’s not without its challenges. Elena Brower, a yoga and meditation instructor and author of the book and audio course “Art of Attention,” sees many beginners struggle with racings thoughts and feeling powerless to control them. “We think a lot. We all do. Our minds go a mile a minute and we can’t stop them until we learn how to meditate.” Like anything worth learning, she said, “it takes time and practice.”

Time is also a sticking point for many. “The biggest misconception is that we don’t have time to meditate. The truth is we don’t have time not to. Our bodies need us to take time in that healing state, to bring us back to neutral, and find a fresh experience of ease inside,” Brower explains.

A few tips to get you started:

1. Keep it simple. To begin, Salzberg suggests finding a comfortable seated position and focusing attention on the feeling of breathing in and out for five minutes.

2. Consider the many different forms of mindfulness meditation. Feel like sitting down doesn’t work for you? Salzberg notes there are a range of methods, and they aren’t all about stillness and silence. She suggests finding the one that works for you, whether it’s standing, walking or lying down. There are also practices for activities, such as mindful eating or drinking tea.

3. Start fresh each day. To get the most out of your practice, Turner suggests practicing in the morning, as it can help change the trajectory of your day. “It cultivates a sense of gratitude and helps slow you down,” she said. “It’s really about changing your relationship with your mind and allowing yourself some distance from your thoughts.”

4. Don’t expect immediate results. “Give it a month rather than evaluate it every moment because then you are not actually doing the practice; you’ve stepped away from it to assess it,” Salzberg said. When the time comes to evaluate its effectiveness, consider the big picture and how it’s affecting your life. “Look at how you speak to yourself when you’ve made a mistake, how present or distracted you are meeting a stranger, how you speak to your children or your neighbors. That’s where you’ll see the changes.”

5. Remember that it’s not about erasing thoughts. “That’s a whole misconception,” Turner said. “You’re just trying to notice and not get caught up in them, to have a little distance and shift your response to them.”

(c)2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: longtrek home via Flickr

Meditation Offers Slight Relief From Anxiety

Meditation Offers Slight Relief From Anxiety

Washington (AFP) – Meditation may help ease anxiety and depression in certain patients, and in some cases the practice may be as effective as taking anti-depressant medications, said a study Monday.

However, a review of scientific literature on mindfulness meditation published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the effects of meditation are limited.

For instance, little or no evidence could be found of meditation’s impact on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep and weight.

Mindfulness meditation is a form of Buddhist self-awareness designed to focus attention — not judgement– to the moment at hand, the JAMA study said.

“The evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation programs could help reduce anxiety, depression, and pain in some clinical populations,” it said.

“Thus, clinicians should be prepared to talk with their patients about the role that a meditation program could have in addressing psychological stress.”

The systematic review and meta-analysis was led by experts at Johns Hopkins University and included 47 randomized clinical trials with 3,515 participants.

Of the thousands of studies the authors found on the topic, just three percent were scientifically rigorous enough to meet the criteria for inclusion in the JAMA review.

Those that were reviewed found some small to moderate benefits, but lacked evidence of leading to better health.

“Contrary to popular belief, the studies overall failed to show much benefit from meditation with regard to relief of suffering or improvement in overall health,” said an accompanying commentary by Allan Goroll, a doctor at Harvard University.

“With the important exception that mindfulness meditation provided a small but possibly meaningful degree of relief from psychological distress.”

The patients who received these benefits did not typically have full-blown anxiety or depression.

Mindfulness meditation is usually practiced for about 30 minutes per day, and emphasizes acceptance of feelings and thoughts without judgment. It also requires body and mind relaxation.

“A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing,” said the JAMA study’s lead author Madhav Goyal, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.”

Photo: ~T.Man via Flickr