Is driving stressing you out? Turn on the Headspace experience on Waze

Is the thought of commuting back to work or driving for interstate travel stressing you out? Waze has a limited-time Headspace experience to help drivers deal with traffic. — ZHAFARAN NASIB/The Star

Back on the road to work? Find yourself increasingly stuck in traffic jams and feeling your stress levels rising? Waze wants to help mitigate that with a new mindfulness and meditation experience on its app.

Available for a limited time, the Drive with Headspace feature – the result of Waze’s partnership with Headspace, a meditation app – aims to go beyond countering the negative effects of being stuck in traffic for too long (like worsening blood pressure, sleep, back pain and risk of depression) and help drivers actually enjoy their time behind the wheel by offering custom navigation prompts.

According to an announcement on Medium, the navigation voice is provided by Eve Lewis Prieto, Headspace’s mindfulness teacher and director of meditation.

Apart from the usual directions, Prieto’s voice can also be heard asking users questions like “Sometimes the journey takes you back to where you came from, what’s different about this time?” and reminding users to take a moment to notice the sights surrounding them, to promote mindfulness and a more active awareness during the drive.

To activate the Drive with Headspace feature, users can go to My Waze on the app and choose from five new Moods (Aware, Bright, Hopeful, Joyful and Open), change their in-app car icon to Cloud Nine (Headspace’s icon of a hot-air balloon) and enable Headspace as the navigation voice, which is currently available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

To complete the experience, users can also stream a custom Spotify playlist with music and content on mindfulness from Headspace through the Waze audio player.