Living Well — meditation

5 Apps to Increase Mental Clarity 0

We all have stressors in our day-to-day that get into our heads and hinder us from reaching a place of peace. Fortunately, scientists and techies are coming up with creative ways to help us combat these things. We’re living in the 21st century, so technology has now come into play as a valid tool to help improve your mental state. You can now utilize brain training apps as a tool to increase your mental clarity.

Some of us want to be able to focus better while at work, release ourselves from distracting thoughts, or even just boost our mood. Mental clarity can be a component that leads to your fulfillment, and allow you to achieve peace and balance through brain training activities. These apps aim to train your brain in several different categories— like positivity, meditation, communication skills, awareness, or memory— and in turn lead you towards a new direction. Many have attributed the change to a healthy lifestyle to these apps, so what have you got to lose? Here are 5 of our favorite apps that increase mental clarity.

Elevate: This app focuses on cognitive function, like reading, writing, and listening. This colorful game gives you three training sessions a day that focus on improving your communication skills. It might sound like your high school english class, but Elevate makes these trainings a lot more fun and intriguing. By using bold color schemes, playful animations, and goal-based directions, you feel as though you’re playing a game instead of teaching yourself a lesson about sentence fragments. Elevate aims to improve things like memory, calculation, decision making, and focus through a variety of games that are short and sweet.

Headspace: This app is all about meditation, promising to teach you how to meditate in just 10 minutes a day. Meditation is the holy grail of peace and relaxation for many, and this app aims to expose it to those who are having difficulty or are unaware of how to go about meditation. The goal is to get you to a place where you can focus better, stress less, and smile more. Headspace will teach you the basics of meditation through breathing and visualization, and from there you can choose a category you’d like to focus your session on. Categories include foundation, health, relationships, and performance.

Lumosity: Arguably one of the most popular brain training apps, Lumosity aims to improve skills that can easily translate to real-world tasks, like remembering a list or making decisions. The format is split into sessions of three race-against-the-clock training games tailored to your goals, including but not limited to: memory, attention, problem solving skills, processing speed, and flexibility of thinking. This app feels like a true educational tool that is used to hone in on your cognitive abilities, so you can gain skills that you can apply in your everyday life.

Personal Zen: This app focuses on two animated characters: a happy, friendly little guy, and an angry, negative one. As they burrow through a field of grass, the player must follow the happy character and remember it’s patterns and routes. The point of the game is for the user to focus on the positive, and not the negative. The scientists who created Personal Zen call it’s method “attention bias modification training”, which means it intends to train your brain to pay attention differently. The game aims to reduce stress and anxiety, hoping that the players exit out of the app feeling happier and more positive having focused on the character that reflects those traits. It has also been used in studies as a precursor for an event that can be stress-inducing, like giving a speech, in order to lessen the anxiety associated with the event. Those who played had significantly less stress levels than those who played a placebo version.

Happify: This app trains you to conquer negative thoughts, and in turn hopes to help you show gratitude, cope with stress, and empathize, leading you to live a happier and more fulfilled life. Happify focuses on “positive psychology” meaning strengths and virtues that the player finds within themselves. Features of the app are quizzes, identifying positives polls, and lists that will grant life-changing new habits to the player. Happify aims to improve your mood and your general outlook on life, by retraining your brain to be happier. Performing these guided reflections daily will surely bring you some newfound positivity. Helping you to become more aware, grateful, and be able to focus on the driving forces in your life.