LIFE HACKS: PAUSE AND TAKE A BREATHER

SET ASIDE SOME TIME EVERY DAY TO BUILD BETTER THINKING HABITS.

THERE’S EVEN an app for that. Or rather, several. In our headless-chicken routines, most of us don’t stop to take a breath, let alone stop to notice what’s going right in our lives. Of late, the sheer value of looking back at each day, if only just for a moment, and thinking of what went right and what one is grateful for, is beginning to emerge as important to one’s overall mental well-being.

People are actually scheduling time for gratitude; some, like Oprah Winfrey, are even writing regular gratitude journals. She says if you can’t think of anything, start with your breath and think of being grateful for being alive to begin with. The idea is to focus on what you have versus on what you don’t. “Focusing on the $3 you have in your wallet will get you $5 sooner than focusing on the $50 you don’t have,” she says. It is well known that positive thinking sets in place a cycle of positive events.

A collection of apps help structure your time for gratitude – and it’s not as soppy or forced as one would imagine. A popular app called Mojo,

BLISS PRESENTS THE USER WITH A CHOICE OF SEVERAL POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY EXERCISES TO CUE THINKING

on iOS, promises to give users a method to ‘rewire the brain in just five minutes, if used for a minimum of three weeks’. Mojo encourages capturing the seemingly minor things in a day that make a person feel good – with a photo to back it up, if wanted. It is mindfulness repackaged. The app’s colourful and bright interface makes it a pleasure to use.

Bliss, an app on Android, iOS and Chrome, has a much simpler interface as it presents the user with a choice of several positive psychology exercises to cue thinking. Predictably, it pops up sometime during the evening to prompt the user to do something. For instance, think of three good things for that day. The promise is that the brain will get into a habit of looking for those positive things, almost become reflexive, bringing immense benefits to the person, such as enhancing one’s creative problem solving ability. It is also believed that positive thinkers live longer. Other exercises on Bliss include transforming problems into something beneficial, focusing on what could be worse and working with what isn’t, and finding new meaning in work.