stress-reduction
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The Soapbox: Using MMOs to relax and unwind
Every now and then, everyone needs to take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life to relax and unwind. The outside world can be loud, and the stresses of work and home life can add up quickly, so it helps to be able to switch off for a while. Some of us find relaxation in sitting down in front of the TV, others in zoning out to their favourite music, and an increasing number of people now wind down with computer games. I've personally found MMOs to be incredibly effective refuges from stress and anxiety, but until now I've never really thought about why that might be. Any game can provide a few hours of escape from the daily grind, but there's something special about MMOs that seems to make them more comforting places to be. Certainly MMOs are manufactured to give a sense of solid progress as you play, a fairness that the unpredictability of real life often can't deliver, but there has to be more to it. Do the music and ambient sounds in EverQuest II's virtual forests and glens produce the same reaction as walking through a real life wood? Likewise, does EVE Online trick us into slowing down, and is spending time in a virtual world just more appealing than slogging along in the real one? In this opinion piece, I look at some of the most relaxing areas and activities I've found in MMOs and try to figure out what makes them tick.
Free for All: The healing ability of instant access
Recently I received a diagnosis from my doctor that did not make me happy. While it was far from a death sentence, it was still pretty heavy news. Immediately I went into information-gathering mode, scouring the internet for other people's stories and possible outcomes. If any of you have gone through this sort of thing before, you know how this type of research can actually have the opposite effect on you, only making you feel worse. So, I decided to stop it. I had my medicine, I knew what I had to do, and I decided to concentrate on ending the speculative thinking. Worse case scenarios are just that, and life is filled with them. Worrying about what might happen in 40, 20 or even five years is sort of a waste of time. Yes, you must be prepared and need to make plans to cover any possibilities, but thinking about all those possibilities can cause stresses of their own, making the situation worse. I had enough of it pretty quickly. I'm not a down person most of the time. I wanted to forget about it for a while, so I sat down and loaded up a game that I had been missing lately. Click past the cut and see what I discovered.
Biofeedback anti-stress pen: a great idea that's not so great at reducing stress
We've all known for quite some time that the pen is mightier than the sword, and now science has given us a pen that is mightier (sort of) than the stress of that TPS report your boss needs right now. A student at Delft University in The Netherlands will receive his PhD this week for research that led him to create just such a pen. Based upon the obvious premise that people play with their writing utensils when anxious, the pen uses motion sensors instead of more conventional means of stress detection. When the pen detects stressful movements, internal electromagnets provide corresponding counter-motion feedback to stop your nervous tics. During experiments, the pen did diminish test subjects' heart rates around five percent, but according to feedback none of them actually "felt" less stressed. The pen isn't yet commercially available, and given its dubious value as an actual stress reliever, we would look to more satisfying methods to aid the relaxation process.
Checking In, an app for when you're stressed out
Too much stress can kill. According to the American Medical Association, stress is a factor in over 75% of sickness and the World Health Organization has stated that stress is America's number one health problem. We all experience some degree of stress and that's on the increase due to information overload, the increasing complexity of our lives and a litany of reasons too numerous to count. We all know this on some level, but what can be done about it? One possible solution can be found in a very intriguing app called Check In: The 5 Tools of EBT [iTunes Link] $.99 US. EBT stands for Emotional Brain Training, a method that was developed over the last 30 years at the University of California, San Francisco, to act as an appetite suppressant for obese children. Eventually, in response to new discoveries in neuroscience (the study of the nervous system) EBT reached its present form. EBT is a brain-based emotional response training method that purports to teach people how to effectively process stress so that their stress level returns to one of well being. The method involves 5 specific levels of stress ranging from 1: feeling great, to 5: totally stressed out. Once a level is determined you are given systematic and repetitious tools to raise your level. With enough practice transitory results can become longer lasting as you, in effect, rewire your brain to deal with stress in a positive manner. When the app is first run, you'll see the screen at the top of this post. There are two major components of the app: one that determines your current brain state and another that helps you raise the brain state, eventually getting to 1.
