Can a new class of wearable tech actively boost your mental health?

“You’ve achieved 40 seconds of uninterrupted focus.”

Apparently, this is cause for celebration. For the past 10 minutes, I have been staring at my phone, trying to move a digital ball up a hill using nothing but the power of my mind. The Mendi headset I am wearing is analysing my brain activity and reflecting that back into the game. The more I concentrate, the higher the ball climbs.

This exercise is supposedly working out my mental muscle, just as one might use weights to train physical muscle, ultimately improving my focus and reducing my stress.

Like thousands of others, I have spent years wearing a smartwatch that helps me track my fitness and improve my physical health. But the wearables industry has its sights set on a new target: our mental health. We now have smartwatches and brainwave-reading devices that not only analyse the state of our nervous system, but actively intervene to supposedly improve our well-being, making mental health support more accessible – and wearable – than ever before. “We are leveraging the brain’s ability to rewire itself so that you can increase your emotional control,” says Mustafa Hamada, Mendi’s chief product and science officer.

As someone who suffers from stress and anxiety, I am eager to try anything that will help me control it. But with my background in neuroscience, I am cautious of believing the hype. So I delved into the growing range of devices that target concentration, focus, stress and anxiety to figure out how they might work and which might really make a difference…