Hear and Now is a meditation app that focuses on deep breathing. It only takes a few minutes to do: you hit go, it gives you a 40 second warm up, 12 guided deep breaths and then a cool down. At the end it reports back on how you have done.
Results were mixed. You self-measure how you feel at the start of each session (very stressed, stressed, relaxed, very relaxed). I never felt any better after it. It feels like quite a big jump between each point, though my mood never really changed anyway.
The feedback is a little confusing. For example, it might tell me that my pNN50 has increased from 0.38 to 0.50. It has an explanation of what pNN50 is, but so what? What am I supposed to do with that information? I suppose it could potentially be useful if it fed back into Apple Health, but it doesn’t.
At the end you get an overall breathing quality from 0% (rubbish) to 100% (perfect). This varied from day to day. One day I got 44%, over days I got 20%. It said keep practicing to improve it but after two weeks I had not improved. It was just random. Critically, it doesn’t tell you how to improve or what you are doing incorrectly.
I did like the fact that is was so quick to complete every day. However, I did not feel I gained any benefit from it.
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Tags: breathing, meditation, mindfulness
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2016 at 10:51 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.