Driven to Distraction - Meet Kalibrate (The Prototype)

We’re here, the last post in my series Driven to Distraction, and in it I’d like to introduce you to a passion project/prototype I’ve been working on, Kalibrate. In short: It’s a game meant to help you calm down and focus. But before I tell you what I’ve built, I want to tell you why I built it. But in case you can't wait, here's a quick demo video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjuIm7z0sds

Like those for whom I hope this tool might prove useful, I’ve always been what you might call a ”sensation seeker,” drawn to highly stimulating activities and environments. While it has had some advantages – curiosity, for instance – there have certainly been plenty of downsides. There’s the impulsivity that comes with it – I’ve made plenty of less than optimal decisions as a result, especially at earlier times in my life. And then there’s the distractibility: A consequence of being drawn to stimulating things is that it’s often exceedingly difficult to stay engaged with things that are less stimulating. In other words, concentration can pose a challenge. Not surprisingly, sensation-seeking is a hallmark trait of those at risk for ADHD diagnoses. Basically, what I am describing is what has for me seemed an inherited, in-born predisposition to the types of challenges created for us by the “arms race for attention,” described in the first post of this series. As a child, before the attention economy as it exists today had even gotten off the ground, I was a distractible, hyper, stimulation-seeking whirlwind.

In my young adult years, as I described in an earlier post, I read about meditation in some academic studies while studying psychology, went to take a class, and ultimately started a practice, mostly based on what I had read in books. I found it extremely difficult. My mind, distractible and anxiety-ridden, simply would not settle. Until, eventually, I had a bit of a breakthrough. I realized that in times of high stress, if I gave it something small to do – counting petals on flowers, for instance, as cliché as it sounds – my mind would, over time, calm down, eventually allowing me to cease whatever mental activity I had employed to occupy it and to settle into a breathing exercise or traditional mindfulness meditation.

It seemed logical to me. Essentially, my strategy was to meet my mind where it was before attempting to take it where I wanted it to end up. This is somewhat related to what I described as the advantage of a guiding voice in meditation apps in the third post of this series. The thing about meditation is that it is when we really need it the most that it is the hardest – high-arousal (i.e., stress) states make doing the things with our attention that constitute ‘meditation’ (e.g., sustaining focus on a non-stimulating object) much more challenging. On the other hand, if we happen to already be relaxed when we begin, meditation can seem much easier, not to mention more enjoyable. In any case, it occurred to me that if I was frequently (read: always) starting out in a high-arousal state, I needed a way to do a better job of engaging my mind before trying to coax it into a more settled one. This was my strategy with the flower petals. Or blades of grass. Or specks in the sidewalk. Eventually, I started experimenting with custom audio tracks to further this effect, combining varying levels of sensory stimulation with varying levels of mental activity as I attempted to guide my mind from a higher-arousal state to a lower one. I also had the opportunity to try this with some other people; some expressed the desired outcome, which was that they had an easier time settling into meditation, while others reported the same old familiar problems of difficulty focusing or mind-wandering.

I already knew quite a bit about the relationship between attention and arousal via my studies of cognitive psychology, and soon I became obsessed with how to create an experience that would make meditation more accessible to those, like myself, who may struggle with it. I pored over papers on the relationship between cognition, stress, and behavior. Equally importantly, I thought about what people were already doing to relieve stress. As discussed in the second post of this series, one thing people are increasingly trying is meditation. But between 2012 and 2017, that number tripled to just 14.3%, which isn’t that high in absolute terms, particularly given the incidence of stress-related disease in the United States. What else are people doing? One thing, it turns out, is playing games. About 60% of the US population plays mobile games, and one relatively recent study found that 78% of those surveyed consciously play games to relieve stress. So why is gaming so much more popular than meditation if meditation is supposedly such a superior stress reliever? In the second post of this series, I discussed that, generally speaking, the more arousal an activity or object of focus produces, the easier it is to remain engaged with it. Hence the popularity of top-performers in the App Store and Play Store like Candy Crush Saga, which is essentially a digital slot machine. That’s all well and good if the goal is distraction, but doesn’t seem to be optimal if the goal is stress relief. Generally speaking, the relief of acute stress involves decreasing arousal, not keeping it jacked through the roof, which is what a game like Candy Crush is designed to do. Distraction can be effective, but the problem is that it’s temporary – when we’re done playing Candy Crush, we haven’t reduced cognitive arousal, we’ve increased or maintained it, and so our thoughts are likely to return to whatever it was that was troubling us before we started to play.

So, there’s a bit of a conundrum. The kinds of activities that generally reduce stress and enhance our ability for focus and sustained concentration are, predictably, the ones that aren’t inherently stimulating. But when we’re in high-arousal states, it would seem intuitively even more difficult to engage with a subdued activity like meditation or even reading a book: Can you imagine coming home, mind racing after being verbally accosted by an overbearing boss and easily absorbing yourself in a point on the ground or a piece of dense nonfiction? No. It does happen – people do it – but it’s hard work. The problem boils down to engagement. The reason it is hard to be consistent with a meditation practice, particularly in the context of stressful lifestyles, is that it isn’t “sticky” – it doesn’t provide any external stimulation to establish a hold over attention – and is especially mismatched to high-arousal states, which is exactly when we need it.

But what if there were a way to bridge the gap? What if there were a way to meet the user where they are before trying to take them to where they want to go? In other words, what if there were a game sufficiently stimulating to compete for and establish engagement with someone in a high-arousal state, but which then used that engagement to guide the user toward a relatively lower level of arousal? What if you could leverage the relationship between cognition and arousal to interactively and incrementally “ease” a user into a state more conducive to meditation, making the practice more accessible to all those already playing games to relieve stress? That’s the dream and driving force behind this project. You can sign up here to keep updated about the upcoming testing program for the prototype. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post series and thank you for reading!