Caregivers deal with a lot day to day on the job. Take a break from remembering specific dietary restrictions of your senior clients, coordinating with their family members and worrying about personal matters to meditate. Devoting eight minutes a day to meditation with the Relax: Stress and Anxiety Relief app will help improve caregiver mental health.
When caregivers first download and open the Relax app, they can choose between nine different background themes. All of the background themes reflect different calming scenes from nature, such as a mountain scene, a flower in a field or a beach. Users also have the option to customize the music playing within the app.
The app layout and structure may be quite basic, but that makes it easy for the user to click into the meditation session. In the free version of the app, all users have access to the eight minute meditation session. The eight minute session is adequate for meditating to relieve stress, but for longer sessions caregivers need to purchase the paid version of the app.
The narration in the app lays out the basic guidelines for choosing an area to meditate. Caregivers should find a spot where they can lie down on their back, but not on a soft enough surface that they will fall asleep during meditation. The app recommends finding a good spot on the floor or on a firm mat. The room should be quiet and free from the chance for interruptions.
The meditation starts with the narrator coaching participants through breathing exercises, and then moves on to focusing on specific parts of the body. The narration aims to help users become aware of each part of their body to properly relax it. All the while, caregivers should continue to breathe deeply and focus on inhaling and exhaling deeply at the same rate.
For meditation beginners, the app also offers exercises to assist in learning to breathe deeply. This portion of the app shows a bar with a sliding dot and a pie chart underneath it. Users can select from different levels and then follow the instructions above the bar to practice meditative breathing.
For example, one of the first levels has users practice a basic technique to inhale for three seconds and then exhale for three seconds. As the three seconds passes, the dot on the bar slides from left to right and the first section of the pie chart fills up. Once the sliding dot has reached the end of the bar, it pops back to the beginning and the word above changes to say exhale. Users then exhale for the same amount of time as the dot moves across to the right again and the pie chart fills up entirely.
Having both visuals to look at in addition to an audio clip lasting the length of time for each breath makes training yourself to breathe in sync simple. As users master the lower levels and move higher, breaths get longer and retaining a breath between the inhale and exhale is added to the exercise. Users can practice breathing between sessions to make their overall meditation experience better.
The Relax: Stress and Anxiety Relief app is available for Apple and Android platforms.
Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discovers additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist.
