I’ve been dabbling with wearables a bit the last few months. I purchased my mother a Fitbit for Christmas and I’ve been paying close attention to the rising number of people with devices on their wrists at my office job. While I’ve yet to compare notes with any of them, I’ve found that my wearable doesn’t always benefit me. It’s nice to see what my resting heartrate is at various times of day, but it doesn’t really help much when I’m sitting at a desk crunching numbers instead of counting steps. Worse yet, I’ll get a buzz occasionally asking me while I haven’t been active lately.
A major trouble that exists at our office jobs is the amount of stress we may be experiencing in our day to day without anything to help it. Face it, our blood has all boiled at the thought of something at work at some point. Have you noticed any triggers on your end? Do you start breathing faster or louder? Do you inadvertantly hold your breath? Chances are your behaviour (and breathing) changes somehow to accompany the stress that comes with that anger.
Workplace stress is a massive issue that affects us all.  A now infamous 1995 study conducted by the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration suggested that it was costing Americans approximately 300 Billion Dollars a year for stress relief. That was 20 years ago.
The importance of breathing and posture are key impactors to maintaining a safe and healthy workplace. If you think about your daily routine at work, do you even give yourself the time to de-stress or calm yourself down?  Make time for it. There’s a wearable coming soon that will do the thinking for you while encouraging you to keep up the good habits through fun and engaging ways. That wearable will be called Prana and Best Buy will be your exclusive Canadian home for it later this summer.
What is Prana and how does it work?
Prana is primed to be the ultimate stress reliever for your every day life. It’s geared to channel into your body’s relaxation response. This response (called the parasympathetic response) is what our body taps into in order to get to its relaxed state. Prana finds ways to teach you how to breathe in the positive energy and breathe out the stress. One major purpose of Prana is to make those usually difficult to learn/obtain stress relief breathing tactics accessible to everybody.
Prana is a small clip-on device that you wear on along your waistline and observes your breathing. It notifies you when it detects your breathing is off due to undue stress or poor posture and asks you to correct it. Notifications come through either your smartphone or by the device itself buzzing you.
How does it help my breathing?
Prana can show and teach you the benefits of proper breathing. While monitoring and notifying, Prana also has exercises designed to help steady and encourage healthy breathing. Through its app (available for iOS and Android,) you can play a series of short games geared at teaching and encouraging the right habits if you prefer to be shown through their game mode.
Clinical mode appeals to the more analytical or mechanical thinkers. If you have an interest in how things work, this is the mode for you. Using 10 different tracking stats, you can get an in-app readout of posture and breathing stats (including inhalation, exhalation and retention times) in order to get a readout of how relaxed you are when you’re breathing. Prana also aims to help shallow breathers and those with breathing disorders such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (or COPD) gain back control of their breathing habits and encourage deeper breathing through their diaphragm.
Prana’s app will also come loaded with a comprehensive library of breathing exercises aimed to help with some day to day needs like increasing energy, focus and even helping to fall asleep. You’ll rarely have to charge it too. One charge will provide you with up to 7 days of battery life.
You can get it now without waiting
If you feel that you want to take the plunge and get your Prana right away, you can still support the Indiegogo campaign and commit to it now. Otherwise, as I’d previously mentioned, Prana will be available this summer exclusively in Canada at Best Buy.
In the meantime, for all of your wearable needs, please look no further. From wrist wearables to smartwatches and everything in between, visit the wearables category at Bestbuy.ca to get acquainted with everything that’s out there.Â
