Posts tagged psychology
Zeo : Personal Sleep Coach
Mar 22nd
Step 1: Wear the Zeo Headband
You begin by wearing the Zeo Headband each night. The headband uses our patent-pending SoftWave™ sensor technology to accurately and safely measure your unique sleep patterns through the electrical signals naturally produced by the brain. As you pass through different levels of sleep – lighter to deeper and back again – the Zeo Headband tracks how you are sleeping. Find out more about the headband.
Step 2: Review Your Sleep Data on the Bedside Display
The Zeo Bedside Display puts last night’s sleep data at your fingertips and will store up to two weeks of data for easy viewing. When you wake up, it gives you a personal sleep score – your ZQ – and shows a graph of your Light, Deep and REM sleep over the course of the night. The bedside display will also present you with information about last night’s sleep and how it compares to previous nights. The optional SmartWake™ alarm feature will look for a “natural awakening point” based on your sleep patterns to decrease the grogginess associated with waking from Deep sleep. When SmartWake is selected, Zeo will find a time to wake you within a half-hour of your set time, never later. The result should be a slightly easier way to wake up. Learn more.
Step 3: Upload and View Your Sleep Data
Your personal sleep discovery doesn’t stop with the bedside display! The Zeo Bedside Display allows you to store your sleep information on an SD memory card (like the memory cards used with digital cameras). With your SD card and its USB adapter, you can easily upload all of your sleep information to the myZeo Personal Coaching website, and begin to spot trends in your sleep that you have never been able to see before.
Sleep Journal
Uncover the links between how you live – including exercise, diet, stress, and environment – and how you sleep. Available both online and on paper, your Zeo Sleep Journal allows you to record lifestyle, environmental, and consumption factors that can disrupt your sleep. You’ll learn about the 7 Sleep Stealers™ and how much they can affect your sleep data each night. You can also define your own lifestyle factors to record. The more sleep stealers you track, the more insights you’ll find about how your actions may be affecting your Sleep Fitness.
Sleep Tools
Using Zeo’s online tools, you can begin to understand how your ZQ and morning feel scores change from night to night. You’ll also spot any connections between your daily lifestyle choices and your nightly sleep and find out for yourself some of the cause and effect patterns in your sleep.
Step 4: Start Your 7 Step Sleep Fitness™ Program, Your Personal Guide to a Better Night’s Sleep
The 7 Step Sleep Fitness Program is a guided self-discovery process for your sleep. This personalized sleep coaching program asks you to set goals for your sleep and then provides you with customized strategies to help you to achieve these goals. In addition, you can learn more about the latest sleep research, and receive recommendations on how to track the items that are most beneficial for you. Through this program, you’ll experience the power of seeing your own sleep data and learn about which factors may be affecting your sleep. You will have full control over the program to skip, repeat or start-over any step you wish. Special features of the program include:
- A series of personalized e-mails that incorporate effective sleep tips and advice, customized to your sleep data, lifestyle and goals.
- A customized action plan to deal with each of the 7 Sleep Stealers as they relate to you and your sleep.
- Goal-oriented assignments that are realistic and achievable, and will not require you to drastically rearrange your lifestyle or even your sleep style.
- Positive, supportive, and easy to understand suggestions and exercises, in everyday language that is easy to follow.
- The Zeo Sleep Information Center is an online library for sleep information and science. In addition to offering another kind of self-guided, personal coaching tool, you can use the Sleep Information Center to discover what sleep is, and why it’s important.
Dan Gilbert: Mistaken Expectations
Jan 3rd
Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness — sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself. Watch through to the end for a sparkling Q&A with some familiar TED faces.
Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes — and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way — Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.
The premise of his current research — that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong — is supported with clinical research drawn from psychology and neuroscience. But his delivery is what sets him apart. His engaging — and often hilarious — style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to. This winning style translates also to Gilbert’s writing, which is lucid, approachable and laugh-out-loud funny. The immensely readable Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages.
In fact, the title of his book could be drawn from his own life. At 19, he was a high school dropout with dreams of writing science fiction. When a creative writing class at his community college was full, he enrolled in the only available course: psychology. He found his passion there, earned a doctorate in social psychology in 1985 at Princeton, and has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for his work at Harvard. He has written essays and articles for The New York Times, Time and even Starbucks, while continuing his research into happiness at his Hedonic Psychology Laboratory.
Dan Ariely: Behavioral Economics
Jan 3rd
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.
Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as predictable. Why, for instance, are we convinced that “sizing up” at our favorite burger joint is a good idea, even when we’re not that hungry? Why are our phone lists cluttered with numbers we never call? Dan Ariely, behavioral economist, has based his career on figuring out the answers to these questions, and in his bestselling book Predictably Irrational (re-released in expanded form in May 2009), he describes many unorthodox and often downright odd experiments used in the quest to answer this question.
Ariely has long been fascinated with how emotional states, moral codes and peer pressure affect our ability to make rational and often extremely important decisions in our daily lives — across a spectrum of our interests, from economic choices (how should I invest?) to personal (who should I marry?). At Duke, he’s aligned with three departments (business, economics and cognitive neuroscience); he’s also a visiting professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. His hope that studying and understanding the decision-making process can help people lead better, more sensible daily lives.
He produces a weekly podcast, Arming the Donkeys, featuring chats with researchers in the social and natural sciences.