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An app that can actually gauge and realign the state of your mind, body, and soul?
With a projected launch date in June, 2012, Arianna Huffington at HuffPost and a team of partners are busy working on GPS for the Soul, an app that is supposed to help us better balance our lives. According to Huffington, the philosophy behind the new app is based on two basic human truths. The first is that "we all have within us a centered place of wisdom, harmony, and balance." The second is that human nature causes us to repeatedly veer away from that place, taking us off course on a regular basis. What we need, says Huffington, is a course-correcting mechanism to help us get back on track and live healthier, less stressed, and more meaningful lives, and she believes that this new app will do just that.
While the Internet and social media sites have given our world limitless opportunities to connect, there also is a dark side to what for many has become chronic overconnectedness, which results in us disconnecting from what's going on around us and inside of us. In developing the app, Huffington says that she realizes the irony in the idea that an app is going to help free us from our overconnected lives. Yet, she notes that the answer to the problems created by technology is not anti-technology, but rather better technology—technology that works for us, not against us.
So what is GPS for the Soul going to offer? Huffington says that the app will provide users with various measures of their stress levels when they tap into their phone's sensor, including measures of their heart rate and heart rate variability. From those readings, it's supposed to connect you with "whatever you need to get to a place of balance. It might be music, or poetry, or breathing exercises, or photos of a person or place you love—or a combination of all of these."
Each person will be able to personalize the feedback they receive from the app, allowing them to program it to send them what they need to bring about a better sense of balance when they're stressed. For instance, Huffington says that she plans to program her app to send her meditation instructions, pictures of her daugher, favorite musical moments, and other things that will help her course-correct. Huffington says that she hopes the app will be the beginning of a journey to reconnect people with their creativity, intuition, wisdom—and themselves.
So what do you think?
(To read more about this app, see GPS for the Soul: A Killer App for Better Living.)
© 2012 Sherrie Bourg Carter, All Rights Reserved
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Sherrie Bourg Carter is the author of High Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout (Prometheus Books, 2011).
