3 minutes can change everything
It only takes three minutes a day to beat stress, anxiety and anger. It only takes three minutes a day to start feeling better.
According to the Mayo Clinic and the Oprah Winfrey site, three minutes of meditation a day is all it takes to start feeling a difference in your life.
The Personal Relaxation Pod is more than just meditation, though. It’s a multi-sensorial experience that will calm you down and get your life in balance in just three minutes a day.
Your inner peace is just 3 minutes away
The Personal Relaxation Pod helps you find a space of your own so you can manage stress and anxiety anywhere, any time.
The Personal Relaxation Pod is a natural alternative to help you feel better in as little as three minutes, the length of a relaxation exercise! It’s the fastest way to help you be your best. It shuts out stressful sounds, images and surroundings and offers a multi-sensorial personal safe haven in which you can relax and find your center.
When you put on the soft mask and start the app, the guided relaxation exercise and lights will work together so that the colors match exactly what you hear. This will help you center and stay in the present. Staying firmly in the present is the only way to stop worrying about past problems or future worries. Aromatherapy further creates the feeling of a safety bubble which protects you from stressful surroundings so you can find inner peace quickly and effectively.
Click here for more information on the different types of relaxation exercises.
3 minutes a day keeps the stress away!
The less time we have for ourselves, the more important it is to find it in order to keep a healthy balance in our lives. Getting a massage or taking yoga classes might be a great idea, but not all of us have the time or the means to do this regularly. Meditation is now recognized as a great way to find long lasting benefits, but it can be hard to start and not everyone has the time to dedicate to it.
The Personal Relaxation Pod is designed to help you find your way into the world of meditation and the benefits of relaxation. It can help you as you start your journey by giving you short manageable exercises that last as little as three minutes while giving you all the benefits of meditation. As you listen to the guided relaxation exercises, the soft, pulsing colors will match exactly what you hear to help you stay centered and feel positive more quickly. The aromatherapy can further enhance the concentration, extra energy or relaxation that you need.
Relaxation, quickly and easily
Lower stress to be your best
How does stress stop you from being your best? Whether you get headaches, suffer from anxiety, have a hard time getting to sleep or are familiar with any of the other hundreds of stress related problems, stress can get between you and your family or you and your work goals. It can leave you feeling unable to cope with difficult office situations, short of patience or like you aren’t really 100% there for your family and friends.
The science of meditation, aromatherapy and color light therapy
Although meditation is an age old practice, it has recently entered mainstream and been taken up in its secular form in order to help in a wide range of health areas including anxiety disorder, stress, depression and ADHD. Several recent studies have shown both the short term and long term benefits of taking up mindfulness meditation. The benefits are so positive that the Mayo Clinic released an article on using meditation to relieve stress quickly.
Color light therapy has been used for some time now to affect behavior and health including Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), jet lag, PMS, sleep disorders as well as calming violent outbreaks.
Aromatherapy, which is the use of essential oils to affect behavior or help other health problems, has also been tested in a long series of clinical studies. It is shown to help in a large range of areas including decreased anxiety, lower blood pressure, lower stress levels, improved brain activity and memory and even improved results in Alzheimer’s patients.
What’s in the kit
The mask
The soft cloth mask can be worn in the office, during flights and even to bed. The velcro strap means that the mask can fit any head size comfortably. You can easily wash the mask by opening it and removing the electronic component.
Color therapy LED lights
The color LED lights are programmed to work exactly with the guided relaxation exercises. This means that they will work differently depending on the type of exercise. During an exercise aimed at helping you calm down and take you out of a stressful moment, the colors will be active at the beginning but will fade during the exercise. Then, a sunrise effect will help bring you back to the present in an improved mood. If the exercise is a longer one to help you fall asleep, instead, the lights will fade and will not come back on at the end of the exercise in order to allow you to move into deeper sleep without having to take the mask off.
Guided relaxation exercises
The length of the exercises will depend on what you need. You can just put on the mask, choose the result you want to achieve and a voice will guide you as the lights work to protect you from outside stress triggers. Exercises for instant relaxation are designed to be 3 to 5 minutes long whereas those for sleep aid will last much longer.
There will be a range of exercises using a variety of techniques including:
– Guided meditation
– Guided visualizations
– Mindfulness exercises
– Binaural beats therapy
– Autogenic training
– ASMR
More types will become available in the future. These will be created with an array of different voices, accents and methods to help you relax in the way that best suits you.
Integrated headphones
The headphones in the mask are flat and comfortable so that they don’t interfere with your sensations whether you’re at the office and calming down or in bed trying to fall asleep.
The App
The app, which can also be used as a standalone, will be organized according to what you need so that using it is easy and intuitive. It will include sections on instant relaxation, improved concentration, power napping and sleep aid. It will work on both iOS and Android devices.
Aromatherapy
The aromatherapy strip will sit just inside of the mask above the nose which means that a very scant drop will be enough for several uses. The essential oils will be mixed in order to induce the mood you’re most in need of at that moment: happy, relax, concentration and energy. These mixtures will come from one of the highest quality suppliers in the US.
Powering the Personal Relaxation Pod
The mask will last for 7-10 hours before it needs to be recharged. Both the chip and the rechargeable battery will sit within the mask in a way that is nearly undetectable and which will not have any negative impact on your comfort. The mask is USB rechargeable and comes with an attachable wall plug so that you can charge it anywhere.
The Perks
Where we are and where we’re going
We have agreements with an electronics company for the manufacturing of the chip.
The mask has undergone several upgrades during its short life.
We’ll be using one of the absolute best suppliers in the US for natural, organic essential oils.
We’re in contact with Giorgio and Stéphanie Regni, creators of one of the most popular binaural beats therapy apps on the Google Play Store. We’re also speaking with ASMRtists and other individuals for the guided relaxation tracks.
Now we need to take the next steps: get the electronic component and mask manufactured and create a range of guided relaxation exercises with matching sounds and colors so that you can relax quickly and easily.
Flexible funding
We’ve chosen flexible funding because $15,000 is what we’ve calculated is the bare minimum necessary to start “walking on our own two feet”. With this amount, we can start the manufacturing process with the team as is. If we get funded for less, we can still go into production but it means that we’ll have to start partnerships or get loans to do so. We’d obviously prefer to keep our freedom fully intact at this stage.
The Team
Andrea Sallese: Cofounder
As a long time believer in holistic wellness, Andrea Sallese has always been interested in oriental fields of study and practiced martial arts. He studied computer science and law at university and started his first successful company in computer programming when he was 26.
In 2002 he started to get stress headaches. During his day to day life at his company in northern Italy, he started to feel caged in. He needed a place of his own. The stress got so bad that he sometimes felt like the best solution might be to hide under his desk. That’s when he got the idea for the Personal Relaxation Pod.
Over the years, he’s investigated a series of relaxation techniques including different types of meditation and autogenic training. His main goal when beginning to design the Personal Relaxation Pod was to quickly, easily and naturally create a personal space to help with stress or anxiety at any time and anywhere.
Suzanne Schumacher: Cofounder
Suzanne has worked in communicative roles including teaching English as a foreign language, translation and interpretation and social media marketing and communication since she moved to Italy in 1997.
She went to school on a small ashram in the northeast. Because of this alternative upbringing, she began meditating at the age of seven. She majored in psychology while studying at the Open University and became interested in stress and stress management during a particular difficult period at work in 2008. Since then, she has used a variety of techniques including meditation and mindfulness to handle stress related symptoms such as insomnia.
During her research for the Personal Relaxation Pod, reading up on ASMR led her to discover that she experiences a phenomenon called “musical frisson” which is in some ways similar to ASMR.
Francesca Rho: Industrial Designer
Francesca got her degree in Design & Engineering from the Politecnico of Milan in October 2014.
During her last year of university, she developed the “Cementofono” in collaboration with Italcementi. This is a passive loudspeaker made of innovative cement material. Her role in the project involved researching the necessary shape on a formal level and the perfect material on a functional level.
Every once in a while she needs to leave the overly high-tech world behind in order to find a bit of inner calm and fresh air. She does this by heading for the mountains to spend some time in alpine nature.
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Special thanks
There are a lot of people who have been extremely helpful and supportive along the way. Thanks to all of you for doing as much as you’ve done to help us get started!
- Matteo, photographer extraordinaire and an endless source of help in videoing, post production and all things video and audio
- Kathleen and Sergio, silent partners and moral supporters
- Ray, photographer, videographer and so very much more
- Jackie, communications game changer
- Samantha, illustrator of our early ideas