Need a Moment? Mini-Meditations Are Now Available Inside Snapchat for Free
In addition to keeping up with your friends, you can also now meditate on Snapchat. The company recently rolled out the Headspace Mini, one of many bite-size applications developers and companies can launch on the platform.
As part of an initiative “to help support the mental health and emotional wellbeing of its users,” the company announced at its Virtual partner Summit in June that Snapchatters would soon have access to free Headspace meditations.
You don’t need to have the Headspace app or even be a subscriber to use the feature because the application lives within the chat. All you have to do is open a chat, click on the rocket icon at the bottom right of the screen to launch the Headspace Mini. You can then choose from six guided meditations, all between three and five minutes long: “Just Breathe,” “Get Out of a Funk,” “Kick the Panic,” “Be Nice to You,” “Pressure to Succeed,” and “Me Time.”
What makes this even more special is that you can do it with friends. Once you launch the Headspace Mini, the other person or people in the chat can click to join. But according to Mashable, everyone in the group can choose their own sessions and they aren’t synced over video or audio. “If friends are doing a session ‘together,’ their Bitmoji will appear in the bottom-left corner of the screen…The true purpose of the Bitmoji presence seems to be a digital signal that you’re not alone.”
As Dr. Megan Jones Bell, chief science and strategy officer at Headspace told Wall Street Journal, “We wanted to give that community some tools that would allow them to share time together, learn new skills together.”
Since more people are on their phone because of quarantine, these short meditations can bring some calm amid the influx of news, and bring people together. Whether you do it by yourself or with someone, take advantage of these simple moments that can add some quiet to your day.