You know meditation is important for health and wellbeing, and the Muse headband is a fantastic device that can help you meditate, feel better, and improve your life.. Or is it?
Meditation is an amazing tool for tapping into the powerful subconscious mind and achieve great things.
In my case, meditation helps me relax after and sometimes, during, a hard day. Meditation also helped me overcome my fear of public speaking and it made me a stronger, wiser person. I managed to take better decisions, increase my self-awareness and it made me a happier person.
However, there are still times when I struggle to focus on my mindfulness sessions and on my breathing. A friend told me there is a gadget I could use to improve my focus during meditation.
The gadget is called the Muse meditation headband and it measures the brain waves, then it basically tells you how calm you are! Before I go further into this article and tell my own experience with the Muse headband, let’s just quickly talk about what brainwaves actually are and how biofeedback works..
The science of biofeedback
The Muse meditation headband is a biofeedback device, which means it captures the human body’s reaction and translates it into a visual stimuli we can easily understand.
The first biofeedback devices were those big and intricate machines used by doctors and researchers to test their patients. Now, they can be as small and easy to use as the Muse headband. It is a simple headband made from plastic, which sits on your forehead, all the way to the back of your ears, where it has large knobs. The headband is packed with sensors which capture the brain waves and sends the data to your smartphone via Bluetooth.
It’s very user friendly
The instant biodfeedback technology helps you refine your reactions and tweak your mental and physical state. For example, when you are wearing the Muse headband you can see if your stress level is growing, which allows you to stop and relax, before the pressure becomes too much for your body.
What are brain waves and what they mean
All the things we do and feel are in fact signals created in the brain. These signals are electrical impulses between neurons, which can be measured by placing sensors on the scalp. These electrical impulses are divided into multiple types of bandwidths, based on the brain’s activity levels: delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma waves.
Delta waves are found in deep sleep, in adults; theta waves are found in REM sleep, hypnosis and meditation; alpha waves are common when you are relaxed, for example when you are watching TV. Beta waves occur in the awake state, for example, during a chat with someone and gamma waves are characteristic for states of alertness.
How can the Muse headband help you understand brain waves
The Muse meditation headband captures these brain waves and translates them into a simple feedback, but using a special algorithm. The app shows three levels of activity: calm, neutral and active. According to each state, the app plays a series of sounds which enable you to know in which state you are at a given moment. When you are calm, you will hear chirping birds and when you are active, you will hear stronger sounds, which relate to your state, like the sounds of a storm or wind.
The Muse app also gives you a calm score, established by the amount of time you were in each of the three states during a session.
How can Muse meditation headband improve your meditation sessions
This is probably the reason you clicked on this article from the beginning, so here is how you can use the Muse headband to become better at breath focused meditation and mindfulness.
By using the Muse meditation headband you can improve your focus on breathing and make sure your mind doesn’t wander off during the meditation. Another thing I found really useful is that you can use Muse to extend your meditation time. You can also do multiple sessions per day and analyze how your focus change between different times of the day.
For example, I was amazed to find out that my mind was very active in the evening and calm in the morning. So, I began to meditate more in the morning and evening, with the goal of calming my mind in the evening.
An interesting fact I noticed during my sessions with Muse is that a state of hyper excitation leads to a longer meditation session. At first, this was purely because of me: I was unable to concentrate on my breathing, so I often let my mind focus on the sounds of Muse, which lead to a never-ending loop of action-reaction.
I was eager to see how certain activities alter my meditation sessions, so I used the Muse meditation headband to check how my brain works before and after yoga classes and dance classes. The results were not the ones I was expecting, as I found that yoga increases my calm score in Muse but it also increases my alertness. On the other hand, dancing makes my mind enter the neutral state.
All in one, I think the Muse meditation headband is a very useful tool, especially for beginners, who need to focus on their breathing. It might not be useful for people who practice meditation focused on sensations, but it definitely helped me improve my breath-focused meditation. Overall, I noticed I was more relaxed after my sessions with Muse, which is exactly what I wanted when I started using this gadget.
Muse meditation discount codes
At the moment the best place to get Muse is here and you should be able to get a great price on it, there’s also a video and lots of information about how it works and even some more testimonials!
