Stress and anxiety is a big part of many people’s day-to-day lives. While everyone has their own unique ways of dealing with stress, focusing on your breathing is a guaranteed way to tackle stress and unsettling feelings head on.
When you feel anxious, your breathing becomes short and shallow, and you might feel a tightening in your chest. On the other hand, when you’re relaxed, your breathing is deeper, longer and fuller. To reduce feelings and symptoms of stress and anxiety, concentrating on breathing deeply relaxes the body and has a positive effect on the mind.
As someone who deals with anxiety, I do a lot of breathing exercises to soothe my nerves, so when I found out there was a breathing exercise device that’s designed for wellness and mindfulness, I knew I had to give it a try. Enter: Melo by Theawellbeing (opens in new tab).
The Melo is a breathing exercise device designed by Theawellbeing. It’s a petite piece of technology that’s made to alleviate stress, anxiety and help people get more in touch with their emotions and breathing. By using a combination of vibrations and coloured lights, the Melo teaches and guides you through breathing patterns to help lower your blood pressure and control your breathing.
I gave the Melo a try for a few weeks to see if it worked and this is what I found…
Melo Unboxing & Design
When the Melo arrived, it came in sleek attractive packaging with the Melo device, wireless charger and a range of accessories, including a silicon sleeve, key fob and lanyard. The Melo also came with handy breathing instructions that shows you how to use the device and walks you through the 3 breathing patterns that it will teach you.
Image 1 of 4
My first impression of the Melo was that it’s teeny tiny! It fits nicely into my hand and has copper buttons on the sides of the device which are easy-to-use and self explanatory. On one side, there’s the power button and next to that is the feedback button. When you press this, you choose between lights on and vibrations off, lights off and vibrations on or both lights and vibrations on. On the other side of the Melo, the slider button lets you choose which breathing pattern you want to try.
The Melo is smooth and has multiple ribbed circles on the top of it which feels nice to touch. Due to its petite size, it’s incredibly easy to pop in your bag and carry around with you. This is exactly what I did when trying it out, and I put it in the silicon pouch and attached the key fob loop accessory to attach it to my keys so I could use it when I needed to.
Does the Melo work?
Like I said before, I’m a very anxious person and often need to practice breathing exercises to calm my nerves and become more in touch with myself. I’ve tried many different techniques and found that these 5 breathing exercises for anxiety (opens in new tab) work best for me, but I was excited to try out different patterns with the Melo in hand.
The Melo has 3 breathing patterns to choose from: beginner, intermediate and advanced. The beginner pattern is 4-4, where you breathe in for 4 and breathe out for 4. Intermediate is 4-4-4-4, also called box breathing, and you breathe in for 4, hold for 4, breathe out for 4 and hold for 4. Advanced is the 4-7-8 technique (opens in new tab).
All exercises are guided by light and vibrations, with a yellow light telling you to inhale and exhale, and a peach light telling you to hold your breath. Once I picked my exercise, the Melo started vibrating and lighting up. I enjoyed the lights but the vibrations were my favourite and I found it really helpful, especially if you (like me) tend to close your eyes when you’re focusing on breathwork. The mix of both lights and vibrations is clever as you can be more aware of the device or more aware of yourself, depending on what works best for you.
My overall thoughts on the Melo is that I love how small and portable it is, and I enjoyed the calming and intelligent mix of light and vibrations. One thing I think people might be hesitant about with the Melo is whether they need it or not. As it’s all about breathing, you might feel better or more comfortable just practicing breathing patterns on your own, but I think if you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed and find it hard to get in touch with yourself, the Melo is definitely a good device to focus on and improve your mindfulness.
The Melo is priced at just £49.99 and is available on the Theawellbeing website (opens in new tab) or at select retailers, like Amazon (opens in new tab).
