Gamification and Mindfulness

Although mindfulness practices can be traced back over 2,000 years, their popularity in modern western culture has been exponential.

Here at Gamify, we believe part of its modern popularity is due to the integration of gamification within its delivery. So in this video, we’re going to take a look at how mindfulness and gamification are working together to help us find a more centred inner state of being. Let’s do it.

Now, before we dive into any examples we want to invite you to take a moment…

Close your eyes and focus your attention on your breath…. as you breathe, try relaxing your shoulders. Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, and slowly breathe out for another 4 seconds, envisioning the air around you flowing into your body and giving you life. Continue this for the next 20 seconds.

Ok now that you’re super relaxed, let’s get started.

Lifestyle Integration

As smart devices have become a central part of our daily lives, they’ve evolved to take our mental well-being into consideration. For example, the Apple Watch’s Mindfulness app brought thoughtful, breathing, and bite-size meditations directly to your wrist. Create custom haptic feedback, breathe schedules and even monitor your heart rate as you spend time centring yourself.

Other subtle and less obvious integrations we’ve seen have been bedtime reminders on most smartphones which align with your sleep schedule and encourage you to wind down - away from any screens and notifications before a good night’s sleep.

In addition to our phones and watches, smart speakers like Google Nest and Alexa have joined the rank in offering multiple ways of practicing mindfulness.

With these gadgets integrating into our homes, you can now turn your living room into the ideal place to practice mindfulness - dim your smart lamps, draw the blinds and start your favourite mindfulness practice all with a single voice prompt.

Apps for mindfulness 

As you probably know, there are many apps out these days that can assist you in practicing mindfulness activities. A Gamify favourite is Headspace, which gives users an extensive library of lifestyle-focused meditations to choose from.

We love this app because it not only broadens the focus of meditation to every area of life but it keeps you accountable with gamified mindfulness stats, streaks, goals, visual timelines, and animated guides.

The most popular mindfulness app however is called “Calm” - with more than 100 million people currently using it. The app focuses on helping people no matter how experienced they may be with guided meditation to improve their sleep, focus, reduce stress or anxiety, and self-improvement.

The app’s gamification elements are simple but effective. Gamified user feedback through program progress, daily streaks, and something they call “mindful minutes” gives the app a tasteful amount of gamification without losing the app’s original intention. 

Conclusion

And that about wraps up our video for today. What’s your experience with gamification and mindfulness? We’d love to hear more about it in the comments. And as always, for more info about gamification, read more of our blogs here.