Nowadays meditation is a practice used by millions of people around the globe. Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique, such as mindfulness or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought or activity to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
Meditation has been practiced since antiquity in numerous religious traditions, often as part of the path towards enlightenment and self-realization. If in the past only monks and followers of ancient Hindu traditions used meditation, since 19 century, the Asian meditative techniques have spread to the entire world finding application in non-spiritual contexts, such as business and health.
Today we use meditation to clear our minds of daily worries, increase our focus to perform better throughout the tasks we need to accomplish, to be more present in our own lives or to get into that inner silence that can help us rediscover our true self in order to become the best version of ourselves.
Numerous studies have stated that practicing meditation can help reduce stress, increase focus, awareness and creativity, cure anxiety and many of the known health problems people are struggling with, only by using the power of the mind and without taking any medications. There are many reports of people who claim that they have been able to cure cancer only by using different meditation techniques. We can all agree that meditation can improve our lives, but many people, no matter if they are beginner meditators or have years of experience behind, struggle to maintain that perfect focus during their meditation sessions and gain all the benefits out of it.
So, by researching what actually happens inside the human brain when we meditate, some ingenious scientists who support the benefits of meditation, came up with a device that can help anyone get into a consistent meditation practice and enhance it throughout time.
The Muse Headband is a meditation device that basically tracks your brain activity while you meditate trough EEG technology (electroencephalography sensors) and translates it into guiding relaxing sounds that you will hear through a pair of headphones, thus giving you feedback on how calm your mind actually is. Muse connects to your phone or tablet via Bluetooth. On your phone, you will need to install the Muse App which will capture your brain waves and associate them with sounds from nature like rain in the forest, waves on the beach or desert winds.
Depending on how calm your mind becomes during the meditation session the sounds you will hear will become calmer or chaotic. For example, at the beginning of the meditation, the mind is mostly all over the place so the rain in the forest will sound more like a storm. As the mind is getting calmer and more focused on breathing the storm will lose intensity till the point where it almost stops and you also hear some birds announcing that you are in an alpha state.
The app not only tracks your brain's activity and gives you auditory feedback in real-time but it is also a really powerful learning tool that can teach you all you have to know about meditation if you are new. It can guide you through different kinds of meditations and will show you your progress over time. As the most important thing in creating healthy habits is to be consistent, the app will encourage you to meditate daily. It will help you train your mind to stay calmer and calmer day by day. Muse is not targeted only to people that are new to meditation, actually experienced meditators can also gain lots of benefits by using it.
Moreover, the Muse headband not only scans your brain but also has sensors that monitor your heart rate, breath and of course posture (trough accelerometer) as all those are extremely important in order to have a successful meditation session. The app will guide you through different meditation techniques like breathing, controlling your heart rate, mindfulness and many more.
To sum up, this incredible device is an amazing tool that can teach you how to meditate or help you enhance your experience if you are meditating for a while. It makes meditation easier for everyone because many people are struggling to meditate or just quit it really quickly because they find it too hard. Muse can make the process of getting into a meditation habit fun, relaxing and extremely enjoyable.
Of course, in the end, we have to talk about technical stuff. So the headband's battery can last up to 5 hours, it charges via MicroUSB, it has Bluetooth 4.0 and it is compatible with both Android and IOS devices. Download the Android App or IOS App
UPDATE: Check out the new MUSE S, more comfortable and more stylish!
