Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars

Waze and Headspace Want to Make Your Drives Less Stressful

Trevor Mogg
By

There’s no getting away from it. Driving can, at times, be so darn stressful. Whether you’re trying to negotiate a complicated road layout or simply wasting your precious time sitting in traffic, there may be moments when you feel your temperature rising as you try desperately to get from A to B.

Aware of how some driving experiences can test even the most patient of people, popular navigation app Waze has just launched a new mindfulness feature “to encourage drivers to enjoy their drives.”

Related Videos

Waze has teamed up with meditation app Headspace to launch the new experience, which includes a selection of five new Moods — Aware, Bright, Hopeful, Joyful, and Open — to help you express how you’re feeling during different parts of your journey. You can even swap out the in-app car icon “for a serene ride in a hot air balloon.” And yes, you can still choose one of several less positive avatars if things really aren’t going at all well.

Related

To dissipate any tension that’s building inside the car during your drive, you can dive into Headspace’s carefully curated Spotify playlist, called Find Joy in the Journey (also available via the Waze audio player).

Waze’s new experience also includes custom navigation prompts from Eve Lewis Prieto, Headspace’s mindfulness teacher and director of meditation.

Prieto, who describes mindfulness as “the quality of being in the present moment, intentionally resting your attention and your awareness with or on whatever it is you are doing with a sense of curiosity, openness, and kindness,” says the new Waze experience can help drivers “learn ways to cultivate a more aware, open, and curious mind by bringing your attention to the task of driving by letting go of emotions that are not serving you and engaging the senses,” adding that it’s amazing “how much of the time we drive on autopilot and we actually miss a lot of the journey.”

Waze said that as more people get back into the routine of commuting to school or work, “many are finding themselves stuck in traffic again. To find a way to help combat the negative effects of traffic and encourage drivers to enjoy their drives, on the heels of World Mental Health Day, we turned to our friends at Headspace, a global leader in mindfulness and mediation.”

The Headspace experience on Waze is available for a limited time in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. To activate the experience, tap My Waze to find the Drive with Headspace banner.

New to Waze? Here’s how to get started with it.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
These 5 apps completely changed how I live with my ADHD
Phone with app on screen laying over a notebook with a pen.

I have spent nearly my entire life thinking I was bad at, well, everything. It turns out it was actually ADHD — something I was diagnosed with later in life. I've never learned the necessary coping mechanisms to organize myself and function like others might have in their formative years.

Since then, I've learned that I can structure my thoughts and actions with the help of apps. I won't remember everyday tasks, but the apps do. Together, they provide me with the help I need to function without a second thought.

Read more
Fitbit’s excellent sleep tracking is about to get even better
Fitbit Inspire HR tips and tricks

Fitbit has been helping people track their sleep information for over ten years. Now, the company's latest Fitbit Premium feature, Sleep Profile, will provide personalized data to improve sleep quality across the board. Previously, Fitbits were able to track nightly patterns such as sleep duration, restfulness, and REM sleep. While that information can be helpful for understanding a person's sleeping habits, Sleep Profile will up the ante by tracking even more data points and, perhaps more importantly, will help users understand how to interpret the data.

In addition to sleep duration, restfulness, and REM sleep, your Fitbit can now track sleep schedule variability, your time before sound sleep, and disrupted sleep. Users will have access to the individual data points after each night but won't receive any interpretation of the information until the end of each month. Sleep Profile will then analyze the data, compare it to other users, and give a full report on your sleep patterns.

Read more
Do mental health apps really help? We asked the experts
Photo of a young woman holding her smartphone in bed.

Nearly one in four U.S. adults have a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, and many more experience transient stress symptoms. Therapy and other professional mental health interventions can be crucial to finding appropriate treatment, but many of these services are expensive and inaccessible for people -- especially people of color, low-income families, and remote households. 
This is where free (and even paid) mental health apps can help. While not designed to replace therapy, they can be a good supplement to an existing treatment plan and offer helpful exercises for less serious symptoms that may not require continuous professional consultations. But do they really help? We asked people who use them to find out.
Mood and symptom trackers
Take, for instance, Anna Chiranova. Anna has had severe anxiety since her college days. Seven years ago, in search of ways to cope, she found mindfulness meditation which helped her calm down whenever she had an anxiety attack. However, she couldn't focus during any of the guided meditations on YouTube. That’s when she turned to Calm, a “freemium” guided meditation app. The combination of soothing vocals and relaxing sleep music helped her truly unwind, and improved the quality of her sleep over time. 
The Sanvello app.
There are many people like Anna who turn to mental health apps when other ways of coping aren’t enough. “These apps can be a helpful addition to your coping toolkit and increase one’s readiness to talk about their mental health before they seek a licensed professional,” says Ariana Alejandra Gibson, CEO and founder of the STIGMA app, a platform working towards normalizing conversations about mental health struggles.
Apps like STIGMA offer people a safe space when a therapist isn’t available. For example, in-between appointments, during a moment of crisis, or if you’re just having mild mood fluctuations that don’t necessitate booking a therapy appointment. That’s where mood and symptom trackers can help. 
"These can help people learn to examine their patterns of thinking, feeling, and/or acting by serving as a way to track patterns that we all fall into,” says Heidi Kar, a licensed clinical psychologist and principal advisor on Mental Health, Trauma, and Violence Initiatives at the Education Development Center (EDC).
A therapist can examine this data during a session or even guide users to do this themselves. Consistently tracking mood and symptoms this way can help people understand what triggers them and how to prevent relapse. Some apps, like Sanvello, make this easier by giving you access to your medical history, tracking symptoms and triggers, and creating daily or weekly visual graphs. This is what Theola Tinny told us, who regularly uses the app to manage anxiety.
It really helped me see the ups and downs of my mood

Mental health tracking apps can also help gain insight and awareness about how mood fluctuations affect everyday life. “I used Daylio when I first started going to therapy, and it really helped me see the ups and downs of my mood,” says Thomas Vibe, an interior designer who uses the app to manage depression. “By using the app, I got better at recognizing that I will have periods where I feel worse and that, eventually, I will feel better.”
Connection and a sense of belonging
Call it venting, thinking out loud, or expressing your feelings, talking about your emotional experiences can be helpful during rough times. While therapists are trained to offer this kind of support, a growing number of mental health apps are using volunteer listeners or “peer counselors” to lend an empathetic ear to people in need. 
The 7 Cups app.
Take the 7 Cups app, a platform with over 160,000 listeners from 189 countries providing support in 140 languages. While 7 Cups also offers paid therapy, more people are drawn to the free chat option that connects them with volunteer listeners who have experienced similar problems.
“I'm a firm believer in talking things out rather than keeping them bottled up inside,” says Ravi Davda, a marketing professional who regularly uses the app. “But sometimes I just want to be behind my laptop and speak to someone via text.” 
That’s where apps like 7 Cups, HearMe, and BlahTherapy help. They offer free, anonymous chats to people who just need to talk things through. Alternatively, meditation apps offer a wide range of features that can be helpful for people experiencing a variety of mental health conditions. This is especially true for people who perhaps don't feel the need to speak to someone.
Apps like Calm, Headspace, Simple Habit, Insight Timer, and Shine offer free and paid meditations of varying lengths, designed for different purposes like improving focus, increasing mindfulness, feeling grateful, promoting relaxation, managing anxiety, and more. Many also offer guided sleep meditations or relaxation music to help with insomnia. 
Mental health apps can’t replace therapy
Mental health apps can be a great resource to help guide people through a tough time, but experts warn they can’t replace professional mental health care. 

Read more