Photo: Fizkes (Shutterstock)

As part of Lifehacker’s fitness challengeI try different meditation techniques for 30 days. This is the second week of my challenge, and I’ve taken a new step in developing a consistent meditation routine: I’ve lengthened the length of my meditation sessions and tried to meditate at noon instead of sitting in the morning. The results were … less than desirable.

Experiment with different times of the day

In my first week My level of comfort with meditation increased, but it did not necessarily relieve my stress. I suffer most of the stress during the work day – the ever-growing to-do list can be overwhelming and most of the time I let it exceed my waking hours. In the second week, I decided to meditate for five minutes in the middle of the day.

I continued to use the Headspace app but found that the sessions I wanted to do during the day jumped from three minutes to ten. My plan to last five minutes wasn’t going to work. It was ten minutes.

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Meditate as a multitasker during the day

Meditation requires a willingness to give up responsibility for a set period of time. For someone who enjoys multitasking, it was impossible to let go of that responsibility in the middle of my day. I was unable to let my thoughts slip by as the session dictated. I would think of a deadline or meeting I had later that day and couldn’t shake it off. My persistent thoughts forbid the moments of calm that I wanted to achieve. This could be due to a deeper issue: high functioning anxiety.

According to the advice center Better helpHigh-functioning anxiety manifests itself in many ways – for example, an compulsion to work extra hard or an overwhelming fear of the future. Although I have not been diagnosed with high-functioning anxiety disorder, these symptoms seem awfully familiar to me and I could benefit from the methods available to relieve these symptoms. Better Help explains that mindfulness was an effective treatment:

Incorporating mindfulness into cognitive therapy helps counselors of people with high functional anxiety give their patients the tools they need to anchor themselves in their own thoughts and feelings in the moment, rather than worrying about what others are doing People think or what might happen in therapy in the distant future.

Learn to pan and move on

After reading about the benefits of mindfulness and fear, I felt empowered to hold on to my challenge. Since the midday meditation was negatively affecting what I wanted, I decided to switch to meditation before going to bed. I often stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., watch TV and sometimes work. I hope that nighttime meditation will force me to set aside the day at an appropriate hour and position my body so that it can fall asleep more easily while I sleep more restfully. For me this can be the key to consistency and potentially less stressful during my work hours.

Photo: Girts Ragelis (Shutterstock)

During the pandemic, many former office workers were inevitably glued to their computer monitors. With work migrating online, video tools like Zoom and Google Hangouts have become the rare place for regular conversations with coworkers. However, video conferencing is not an alternative to seeing your employees with no screens in the way and has created a “zoom fatigue” epidemic.

According to a new study by Stanford researchers published in the journal Technology, mind and behaviorZoom fatigue is basically what it sounds like – resulting from the increased stress of keeping connections at a distance through video chat – and leads to burnout, stress and monotony at work. However, there are ways you can lessen the stranglehold video conferencing can have on your mood.

What is zoom fatigue?

This isn’t specifically true of Zoom, and company executives would likely argue that the term does a disservice to their marketing efforts. According to Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, the problem applies to all video conferencing services. In general, it describes the fatigue caused by having to constantly feel turned on when switching between browser windows for different online meetings. It also makes sense given that studies have shown This longer screen time – especially when combined with a sedentary lifestyle – increases your chances of developing moderate to severe depression.

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Typically, when you suffer from this, you are drowning in a large virtual meeting schedule feeling like you can barely keep your head above water.

What causes it

Bailenson’s research reveals four reasons why video conferencing can be so mentally stressful:

• Intense eye contact is exhausting. Turning a blind eye to your co-workers to show that you are paying attention can be a challenge. Doing this several times a day can feel oppressive. If you don’t make concerted eye contact during much of the meeting, your co-workers may think your attention is falling.
• Watching yourself during video chats is exhausting. Watching yourself in a meeting only increases performance anxiety. The psychological cost of living during the pandemic is onerous enough – why worry about how you look to your co-workers?
• Video chats mean we move less. When you’re constantly chained to a desk, you’re not moving nearly as much as your body needs. In a traditional office setting at least, you may need to go to a conference room on a different floor. When we switch between different video meetings, we sit more and move less. to the detriment of our mental wellbeing.
• Nonverbal cues are harder to interpret. The challenge of deciphering nonverbal cues only adds to the stress video chats cause. This can lead to what Bailenson calls “cognitive overload,” where your head may float in the supposed subtext of the conversation.

Ways to Combat Zoom Fatigue

Fortunately, Bailenson did not uncover the problems without offering solutions.

• In case of eye contact: The researcher recommends not using the full screen setting. That way, your coworkers will at least look a little smaller so you won’t feel so pressured to keep your eyes on theirs.
• For self-confidence: It is not essential to leave the camera on every time you meet. If you don’t present something, what’s the point of filming yourself? If you need to keep your camera on, Bailenson recommends adjusting your settings so that only the other person can be seen in the chat, rather than having both videos available to both parties. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to turn off the camera.
• For mobility: Bailenson recommends using a different camera that you can link to your feed so you can still move around and possibly present from a standing position if you so choose. Another option is to turn the camera back off and wear bluetooth headphones so you can walk around your house or apartment.
• If you are afraid of non-verbal cues: Turning off your camera also works fine. However, to reinforce it even further, the researcher recommends listening to the meeting outside of your computer. That way, if all you have to do is use audio and feel comfortable joining the meeting while putting away the dishes for example, you no longer have to worry and analyze any micro-cues that routinely pop up.

I’ll admit that as someone who loves to rock, I was thrilled that my favorite streaming service – Spotify – announced it was introducing a new level of service for them lossless audio streaming. Sure, it costs more than what I’m paying now, but throwing away the expected $ 20 a month on perfect audio sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? My future road trips are now ten times better.

May be.

Here is the thing. I wouldn’t pay a penny more for enhanced audio for a streaming service just because the option was there. At least not without seeing whether I can tell the difference between the existing, high-quality offerings of the streaming service and its lossless offerings. I will argue that for the most part, most people are probably unable to tell the difference – and I’m not the only one to say so.

As Napier Lopes from The Next Web writes::

“Spotify Premium (the existing, ad-free level for 9.99 US dollars) already transmits streams with a maximum of 320 kbit / s (256 kbit / s on the web) activates this in the settings of the app. While at low bitrates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be obvious, I’m willing to bet that most people can’t tell a lossless file apart from a 256 kbps MP3 file – let alone a file that does more modern Ogg codec compressed the Spotify was used.

Our hearing is subject to a lot of placebo. Just assuming that a certain upgrade or key specification will make your speakers or headphones sound better often results in an “improvement” rather than an actual change. Still, many gold-eared audiophiles will swear they can hear a difference without evidence. ”

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Since Spotify’s “HiFi” service isn’t coming out later this year, you can’t test lossless streaming directly. However, it is pretty easy to see if you can currently tell the difference between audio files with different bit rates and compressions. Lopes recommends that Digital Feed ABX testThis gives you two audio files – an A sample and a B sample – and a destination sample. Your job is to say whether A or B fits the target, and you can choose between a faster five-track test, a ten-track test, or a mega-20-track test.

In other words, the test is to see if you can tell a difference between a lossless and a lossy version of a song. And if you think it will be easy then when you use it, the test setup looks like this:

Screenshot: David Murphy

You click A, X or B to play a track and you can switch between the different versions by clicking A, X or B. Even then, in most situations, I found it quite difficult to tell the difference between the files. Either my hearing is bad or it’s really, really difficult to separate Spotify’s 320kbps streaming – the highest quality – from a lossless file.

I’m not even going to show my results because honestly, most of the time I was just guessing. It’s plausible that my home audio setup – basically $ 150 headphones plugged directly into my desktop PC’s motherboard – just isn’t good enough to tell the difference between a high quality file and a lossless one to recognize. But even with a pimped up setup, it’s a tough test for a Reddit user describes::

I ran this test with LS50W in a treated room. I’m about 65-70% correct. I had to concentrate REALLY hard and listen critically in a completely inorganic way. And I still have a high percentage wrong. The difference was so negligible that I switched from Tidal to Spotify after this test. I haven’t looked back since.

If you want a quiz with more bones, NPR published a similar study back in 2015 that you can use to test your ears. In this case, I picked the 320kbps file superbly. But the lossless file? Not as much.

And if you happen to have a lossy and lossless file of the same song, you can try this old school trick to compare the differences between the two:

Regardless, I wouldn’t bother with a more expensive “hi-fi” audio service if you could tell the difference between this and the “regular” offerings of a streaming service for everything you have at home – your headphones, speakers, or yours Ears. You are going to be spending money on a “benefit” that you will never appreciate, and that seems silly.