Posted on February 12, 2009 by Stephan Wiedner

Oops. Were you looking for the article about Positive Psychology and Coaching? If not, read on.

Stressed out about an upcoming presentation or exam? Worried about not completing your commitments from last week’s coaching? Take a 5 minute break to de-stress and prime yourself for positivity with MindHabits, an online video games that can be purchased and installed on your computer. MindHabits is based on social intelligence research conducted by Dr. Mark Baldwin at McGill University and the games are designed to help players develop and maintain a more positive state of mind.

Here at Noomii headquarters, Chrissy and I independently tested MindHabits for two weeks to see if it works. The games are not like eating chocolate or watching Monty Python where the results are immediate and obvious. Instead, some of the benefits are probably linked to psychological “priming“, a term discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

In his book, Gladwell discusses a clever study in which students are asked to read a scrambled set of words and then meet with a professor who pretends to be busy, indefinitely. Students who were primed with aggressive words such as “bold”, “rude”, “bother”, and “disturb” interrupted the professor on average after 5 minutes. Meanwhile, 82% of students who were primed with polite words such as “respect”, “considerate”, “appreciate”, and “patiently” never interrupted the professor at all.

Like the students primed with polite words, I was primed with positive words and images and my actions directly following and perhaps for the rest of the day were more positive. (BTW: I played MindHabits during my morning bus commute to the office for about 10 minutes a day for two weeks). I didn’t feel intense pleasure or overt positivity during or after playing the MindHabits games but I probably did engage people in a slightly more positive and optimistic way.

On one occasion, I recall solving a nagging usability problem on our website with a unique and creative solution that I couldn’t help but attribute to my morning positivity intervention. Rather than dwell on what wasn’t working, I looked at the situation as an opportunity for improvement. Is that the placebo effect? Maybe. But the research suggests that it actually works. And I believe it.

Give it a try for yourself. They offer a free 60 minute trial and you can buy a downloadable version of the game for only $19.99.

MindHabits in Action

There are four training games but the folks at MindHabits say they are working on more. Here are some screenshots of the four games they have: “Matrix”, “Who You Are”, “Words”, and “Grow Your Chi”.

Matrix

Click on the warm smiling faces as quickly and as often as you can. The game trains you to focus on positive emotions, while ignoring sad and angry faces.

Who Are You

When you click on the words that are relevant to you (i.e. your name, nickname, year of birth, and birthplace) happy, smiling faces are flashed on the screen to help you form positive associations. This game is supposed to boost self-confidence.

Words

This game is quite simply a word search puzzle except the words you are supposed to find are a combination of positive words such as “love”, “accepted”, “warmth”, “caring”, and “cherish” and words that are relevant to you like your name, year of birth, and place of birth. Does this remind you of the clever experiment in Gladwell’s book Blink?!!! Lots of positive priming going on here.

Growing Your Chi

Similar to “Matrix”, click on the warm smiling faces as they float across the screen. Words that relate to you fly across the screen too. Click on them for bonus points.