A Gaming Mood

Quantifying and optimizing learning, sleep, and meditation

As a life-long gamer, I am always in a gaming mood. “Gamification” is the practice of applying game rules and scoring to other areas. Lately, I’ve gamified three areas of my life to improve my mind. While a smartphone and accessories may not be cheap, the improvement one can gain is priceless.

Gamified Learning with Smartly

How do you spend your extra moments in your day? If you’re like me, you pop your phone out of your pocket and poke at it until your brain is washed in dopamine. Usually, this means Facebook, News, or something even less useful. Lately, I’ve swapped that time-wasting for gamified learning with Smartly.

Smartly is a mobile app intended to teach the basics of business in a fun, any time format. Across topics like finance and economics, it supplies an educating distraction during the day. What starts as “killing five minutes” while waiting for my kids to be ready to go turns into a couple rounds of “one more lesson”.

In just a week I’ve completed the equivalent of five hours of learning! I had no idea I was wasting so much time poking at my phone and having it scored and measured makes learning fun.

Gamified Sleep with Pillow

When I was younger, I found sleep incredibly inconvenient. The entire notion of it perplexes me. How did we survive being monkeys if we spent 1/3 of our time completely vulnerable? Yet, as I grow up, I depend more and more on a night’s sleep to create a foundation for my day.

Pillow is a sleep tracking app that measures and scores your sleep using an Apple Watch and sound recording on the iPhone.

While it doesn’t directly incorporate gamification into the user experience, it does score your sleep with a quality percentage (scoring = gamification). Between a score and a time for every night, I definitely think of having a “high score” at sleeping. I even feel like I fall asleep faster when I’m racing the clock. Add in the ability to keep notes about my daily habits and this is probably the biggest improvement to my personal routine I’ve made in years.

Gamified Meditation with Muse

I used to think meditation was literally made up nonsense. You sit there and do nothing — ridiculous! If you had told me it would turn into one of the cornerstones of my daily life, I would have laughed.

Calming my thoughts and turning my feelings from chaos to order is now one of my favorite things to do. If I don’t do it daily, I feel like I haven’t really woken up. But I had a challenge feeling like I was making “progress” in my meditation practice or that I was “good” at meditating. I knew I was sitting with my eyes closed, but I didn’t know if what I was doing was doing it the right way.

Muse is a headband and mobile app that reads your mind. It is a personal electroencephalogram (EEG) which is a noninvasive way of measuring activity in your brain. Considering what it does, it’s pretty magical.

Using the companion mobile app, it will generate a dynamic soundtrack based on your thought patterns. It will be loud when you’re high-strung and quiet when you’re relaxed, rewarding your with bird chirps when you’re really calm.

While somewhat expensive for a single-use accessory, I find the feedback and tracking it provides priceless. The soundtrack increases my patience to sit alone — setting a new personal meditation record of 45 minutes with it in the first three weeks — and beating my “high score” has me coming back every day. It’s like a Fitbit for sanity.

Conclusion

Learning, sleep, and meditation are three key states for the mind. I am always working to rewire my brain and these are tools to make it fun. Every day I am able to challenge myself to reach a higher level and — working with them together — I’m ready for any boss battle.

Erik Ralston is Chief Architect at LiveTiles where he leads the team building the world’s only Intelligent Experience Platform (IXP). Erik is also co-founder of Fuse Accelerator in Tri-Cities, WA where he works on connecting people and sharing knowledge to turn new ideas into growing startups. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or the next Fuse event.