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Stress-reducing Gadgets: Stressed out? There’s got to be some way to better deal with everyday stress. Obviously some people effectively deal with a lot more stress than I’ll probably ever face; I wanted to understand how. Studies show that meditation, conscious breathing and heart-focus all reduce stress. Two gadgets use biofeedback to help increase the effectiveness of breathing exercises. I recently gave each a three week test-run. The emWave by Heartmath After attaching the earlobe clip and seeing that your pulse is showing up, the next step is to regulate your breathing. On the front of the device, there is a strip of lights. When the lights travel up the strip, you breathe in, when the lights travel down the strip, you breathe out. Once you’ve got your breathing established, it’s time to increase your coherence, a measure that the makers of the emWave use to signal that your breathing is particularly effective. According to the Heartmath website: “Stress creates incoherence in our heart rhythms. However, when we are in a state of high heart rhythm coherence the nervous system, heart, hormonal and immune systems are working efficiently and we feel good emotionally. EmWave Personal Stress Reliever helps you reduce your emotional stress by displaying your level of heart rhythm coherence in real time. But emWave does more than just display coherence levels. It guides you toward stress relief by training you to shift into a coherent, high performance state.” One light on the device is dedicated to giving you readings on coherence. The light shining red is normal, blue is better and green is ideal. A chime also sounds when your coherence is blue or green. Other lights keep track of your cumulative score of blue and green zone. Ideally, you’re always in the green zone. There are three steps to increasing coherence and getting in the green zone. First, while breathing, focus on your heart. Second, imagine breathing around your heart, so your breath surrounds your heart. Third, think positive thoughts, for instance focus on a pleasurable memory or something you appreciate. The first week I tried the device, I had fun playing around with it. It sometimes took a bit of fussing with the clip to get the reading, but, if I took off my earrings, it was generally unobtrusive and easy. After three weeks, I still hadn’t gotten the hang of using the red button on the front to measure my pulse. It took a couple of days of experimenting to establish basic trust in the concept of coherence and the ability of the gadget to read my coherence. I experimented with evoking different feelings and thinking different things and monitoring if I got corresponding blue and green lights. The first time I used it, after twenty minutes of making the light turn green, I felt great. Another time I picked up it up when I was very stressed out. After five minutes of looking at the red light, I quit. After several days, I found staring at the lights slightly hypnotic and kept nodding off. Another feature of the emWave is different levels of difficulty. The default level I mastered in a session or two, but there are four levels of difficulty. Each level requires more coherence; you can build up points or have points subtracted, depending on your level of coherence. On the easy level, I found my mind could wander to neutral or positive thoughts and I’d still maintain the green light of good coherence. On the second level, more concentration was required. This increasing challenge kept me interested in the device. In week three, I worked on the third level of difficulty and wasn’t able to achieve more than 50% of the time in the green zone. While at times the increasing challenge made me look forward to using the device, at other times, usually when I was more stressed out, I found having hard-won points subtracted disheartening. The StressEraser by Helicor To use the StressEraser, you breathe out while counting to four. The theory behind this product is that when you’re stressed, your out-breath gets too short. Breathing with the StressEraser helps you lengthen your out-breath and thus reduces stress. This refreshing lack of dogma is perfect for someone not looking for enlightenment, but simple breathing exercises and stress relief. The makers highly recommend using the StressEraser before bedtime, which they call the “Relaxing Nights Program.” According to Helicor’s website: “The key is using your StressEraser 15 minutes each night right before you go to sleep. By using your StressEraser to activate your parasympathetic system at this time, your parasympathetic system can remain active all night long while you are sleeping. This simple 15 minute routine can result in hours of ergotropic reversal. Within two weeks, you will feel a difference all day long. And within a month, you will feel like you did when you were younger, before the stress caused by ergotropic tuning became a part of your life.” This sounded like a lot of pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo to me. It seemed more likely that using the contraption before bedtime would just ensure that I actually used it, effectively getting me to meditate for 15 minutes a night. I wasn’t expecting “ergotropic reversal.” Although skeptical, I figured I’d give the Relaxing Nights program a try. Once, after taking the StressEraser from 0 to 100 before sleeping, I woke up in the middle of the night and noticed my breathing felt and sounded a lot like it did while I was using the StressEraser. During waking hours, I found myself using the four count out-breath technique during times of stress. In the final analysis, I preferred the StressEraser because looking at the screen showing waves of my pulse was more engaging than monitoring flashing lights. I also liked the positive reinforcement inherent in building up points. I never set the gadget down frustrated over its readouts. I also found that the StressEraser more effectively spilled over into regular life. This gadget actually trained me in a simple but effective stress-reducing technique.
Bridget Sullivan (www.bsullivancpa.com) is a money coach who specializes in helping people who are anxious about their finances. |
n the front of the device for the pulse reading. A light on the bottom of the device flashes with your pulse so you can tell if the gadget is properly reading your pulse. 
After the count of four, you breathe in without any particular count. When a triangle appears on the top of the screen, you begin your out-breath again, counting to four. As you breathe, the screen draws your heart wave, similar to an EKG machine or polygraph test. A bar appears under each wave that indicates how well that breath went. Each breath holds the potential for one point, but you can get 1/3 or 2/3 of a point for each breath. It beeps when you score either 2/3 of a point or a full point. The makers recommend accumulating 30 points for an effective session and a total of 100 points per day.