Problem: Research has begun to show a huge benefit to meditation. Just look at these 8 statistics:
It’s estimated that 200–500 million people meditate worldwide.
Meditation can reduce the wake time of people with insomnia by 50%.
Mindfulness meditation can reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder 73% of the time.
Practicing meditation can increase your attention span after only 4 days.
Almost 10 times more children used meditation in 2017 than they did in 2012.
By 2022, the value of the US meditation market will be a bit over $2 billion.
52% of employers provided mindfulness classes or training to their employees in 2018.
School suspensions were reduced by 45% thanks to meditation.
However, meditation is also quite time-intensive. What if there was a way to get the same results in a fraction of the time?
Solution: Today’s idea is heavily inspired by Glance Back, a project created by Maya Man. I’ve recreated her post below as I think it’s a great example of one future of wellness: bite-sized reflection.
You spend so much time staring at your computer...
Doesn't your computer deserve a chance to glance back at you?Glance Back is a chrome extension that acts as a daily photo diary, capturing the moments shared between you and your computer. Once a day, when you open a new tab, Glance Back will unexpectedly take your photo, ask you what you’re thinking about, and save both the photo and written thought to its locally stored archive.
You know that feeling when someone is staring at you for a really long time? It’s super uncomfortable right? Especially if this gaze is unreciprocated. Glance Back grew out of a desire to recognize that this phenomenon occurs between ourselves and our machines when we spend so much time looking at our screen.
With this chrome extension, once a day at random when you open a new tab, Glance Back will quickly snap a photo of you and inquire: “What are you thinking about?”. Once you type your answer and press enter, the photo and thought will be collectively saved to your history of glances, cumulatively creating an archive of moments you share with your screen. Given that most of the digital photos we generate of ourselves today are highly curated (i.e. wait let me fix my hair and smile and please take at least 10 photos just to make sure there’s a good one!), Glance Back also acts as an antidote to this attitude by providing you with unexpected and often… unflattering… photos of yourself.
It’s important to note that all of the photos are saved to your browser’s local storage. This means that they never leave your machine. This is a collection shared purely between you and your computer. If you want the photos for yourself, you can choose to download them under the settings tab in the top right. You can also delete photos from the archive and choose whether the extension requires you to write a caption or not.
When using our devices, we’re pulled into and solely focused on the glowing world that exists on the screen. We lose both an awareness of self and of the real world context surrounding us. This extension aims to disrupt that trance and remind you that you are here and your computer is there and you are just staring at it and... wow is that really what I look like right now?
Peek at others' Glance Back reels here, here, and here.
I found this project absolutely fascinating, hence the reason I posted it almost in full. If we take Maya’s experiment with Glance Back one step further, this business would focus on creating moments of bite-sized reflection: this could be via text message, photo-prompting, or another method entirely.
Monetization: Subscription product that allows people to collect streaks or pay to download their photos as special photo albums of some sort.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)