As human beings, we all inherited the "crocodile brain" from our "caveman" ancestors. It is the most primitive part of our cognition, the earliest to develop. This part of the brain was essential to surviving in those days. It was the primary function to detect danger.
This part of the brain functions the same way today even though no real danger exists. The stimuli that were associated with dangers back then triggers the same mental response. This puts our mind into a heightened state of survival mode.
For this reason, the majority of your stress is mental. This is why mindfulness and mediation work wonders for many people. When you encountered a stressful situation, you could remind yourself that it is not a big deal to calm down.
But the problem I see is that stress doesn't tell you when it is going to show up. And when it does show up, it overpowers your mind and diminishing your mental reasoning. It does not allow you to remember your mindfulness. It does not allow you to remember to take time out to meditate.
So how do we know when stress is coming?
The idea is to develop a mobile application in iOS and Android that can track your Heart Rate Variability (HRV). This is the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. Most of the smartwatches today can provide continuous heartbeat data for your HRV calculation.
The increase and decrease of this HRV provide an early signal of a change. By utilizing HRV and AI, we can create a model that can pattern match and associate the causing factors.
By knowing stress is coming, the app could trigger a sound or notification to help your mind snap out of the mental stress trance. It may jolt you to remembers your mindfulness practice or whatever technique you use to deal with stress.
I like binaural beat entrainment to deal with my stress. I developed an app called Entrain Cognitive for my personal use. This app was the result of idea #9 on my list. It is FREE. Use it if you like. Go to https://www.entrainlabs.com for more info.
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