Find Your Distraction and Recharge
Here you’ll find a collection of calming, creative, and uplifting distractions designed to help you reset your focus, soften the noise, and find a little space to breathe.
Whether you’re looking for soothing sounds, lighthearted fun, art, music, learning, or something to keep your hands busy, explore whatever feels supportive in the moment. You get to choose what you need and take your time.
relax and be calm:
Calm – A ton of meditation and mindfulness excercises for different things. plus you can choose various scenic backgrounds and the length of your guided relaxation session.
Coffitivity – Ambient sounds of a coffee shop.
Rainy Mood – Focus, relax, or sleep with the sound of rain.
Rainy Cafe – A mix between coffitivity and rainy mood.
Sounds of Nature – Huge master-list of the nature sounds based on elements and seasons.
Calm Sound – Relax with these calming sounds of nature.
My Noise – Custom background noise machines.
Do Nothing for 2 Minutes – Be calm for a couple minutes and just relax while watching the endless sea and listening to the crashing waves in the background.
Mood Lighting – Colorful mood lighting with different presets.
Weightless by Marconi Union – Most relaxing music ever according to scientists.
Noisli – Mix different sounds and create your perfect environment for relaxing.
This Is Sand – A unique playground for creating and sharing amazing sand scapes.
Zen Photon – A relaxing and interactive place where you create own photo-reactive patterns.
The Color Clock – Watch a clock that translates time onto the hexadecimal color scale in real time; hours are mapped to the red channels, minutes to green and seconds to blue, with a measure that cycles from black to white over 24 hours.
Sleepy Ti.me – Incredibly useful sleep timer.
Ideas for Bad Days – Keri Smith’s ideas for bad days.
here’s some love:
Emergency Compliment – Awesome non personalized compliments.
search the wealth of the internet’s knowledge:
Hobbies Master-post – Long list of really interesting hobbies to learn (check out: make your own tea // make your own terrarium // online free guitar lessons)
DPLA – Digital Public Library of America
TED Playlists – Playlists ranging from science and medicine, art and design, to self help.
Wolfram Alpha – Brings expert level knowledge to everyone, everywhere.
Coursera – Take the world’s best courses, online, for free.
Khan Academy – Learn anything for free (requires an email to sign up).
Academic Earth – Access a collection of free online college courses from the world’s top universities.
Memrise – Learning powered by the imagination.
edX – Interactive online classes from the world’s best universities, colleges and organizations.
Open Education Consortium – Open educational resources, open textbooks, and open courseware to expand access to higher education and improve teaching and learning.
Future Learn – Free online courses.
OpenStax – Free educational content organized into textbook style books.
Internet Archive – Universal access to all knowledge. (click here for an archive)
Minute Labs – Cool science shown through different media (text, images, audio, video, interactive simulations and games).
Zooniverse – Home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects.
Refdesk – Lists of encyclopedias.
Worldometer – Real time world statistics about world population, government and economics, society and media, environment, food, water, energy, and health.
Quotery – An encyclopedia of wit and wisdom.
Forvo – A guide where all the words in the world are pronounced by native speakers.
Freerice – With every correct answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the World Food Programme to help end hunger.
If you want to read online, try OnRead – you can download and read free e-books on this website and all the books are available in several versions.
Planet eBook – Download 80+ free ebooks of famous classic literature.
Online Reading – Read any book for free (or here – Open Library)
Poem Hunter – Poems from different poets from all around the world.
Exploratorium Activities – You can browse by topic and explore different activities ranging from optical illusions and human anatomy to the arts and space exploration.
Wilderness & Urban Survival Strategies – Techniques on how to survive in every natural environment.
Instructables – This website specializes in user created and uploaded do-it-yourself projects.
BioDigital – An interactive way to understand health and the human body (requires an email to sign up).
Duolingo – Learn a language for free, forever.
Google Arts & Culture – Discover exhibits and collections from museums and archives all around the world. explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail, from hidden gems to masterpieces.
Open Culture – Free cultural and educational media on the web.
Scholarpedia – A peer reviewed, open access encyclopedia.
express your creativity through music and art:
MUSIC
The Nostalgia Machine – Pick a year and listen to your favorite jams.
Patatap – This is a fun portable sound kit that turns your browser into a musical animation. Control it easily by your keyboard. It’s also an app.
HighC – This is a graphical music creation tool. Simply draw the music you want to create. Download it here.
Dinahmoe Labs – A multiplayer music experience where you can create music in real time.
Incredibox – Create and record music quickly and easily by running a band of beatboxers.
Musicshake – Create your own song in very little time.
Music Theory Lessons – Learn about the basics: rhythm and meter, scales and key signatures, intervals and types of chords. Also available are a variety of exercises (such as identifying notes and chords) and tools that will make learning an instrument easier.
Flash Laboratory – An archive of laboratory music experiments.
Every Noise at Once – An algorithmically generated, readability adjusted scatter plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1371 genres by The Echo Nest. Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like or click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.
Labuat – Paint a song (make sure your sound is turned up).
sophisticated music making program
Audiotool – A powerful online music production studio right in your browser. Sign up is free.
Soundation Studio – A web based sequencer application with loops, effects, and virtual instruments.
ART
Silk – Create beautiful flowing works of art with this interactive website.
Hero Machine – Unlock your inner artist and create professional looking illustrations.
Ctrl+Paint – Teach yourself digital painting for free.
Jackson Pollock – Splatter paint everywhere, it’s fun and mess free.
Free Painting – A full screen canvas to paint on (move mouse to paint, use space bar to erase, click again for a random color).
Wildflower – Create and share a virtual flower.
Harmony – A simple drawing tool with a special set of brushes.
bomomo – Create colorful abstract images.
diverse interests:
Trigger Warning Database – Track and avoid your triggers with crowdsourced emotional spoilers for movies, tv, books and more.
Hatnote – This is a way to listen to changes to wikipedia. You are actually listening to knowledge being added to the world. Pluck sounds are an addition, strings are subtractions, and the pitch says how big the edit is.
Mini Interactive Websites – Created by Rafaël Rozendaal (**possible epilepsy warning for some of the websites**)
Northern Lights – Watch a live feed of the Aurora Borealis.
Neave Interactive – **possible epilepsy warning**
Neonflames – Create your own nebula.
Twitch – Watch livestream gaming.
Instant Google Street View – seriously awesome places to look at: Canals of Venice // Metropolitan Museum of Art // Taj Mahal // Eiffel Tower // Château de Versailles // Burj Khalifa // MOMA // Canadian Parliament // The White House // Acropolis Museum // Diagon Alley // National Portrait Gallery (USA) // National Gallery (UK) // Mount Fuji // CERN // Grand Canyon // Angkor Wat // Railway in the Swiss Alps // Musée d’Orsay // Chateau de Fontainebleu // Wieliczka Salt Mine // Colosseum // Everest Base Camp // Mudslide Bridge // Tengboche Monestary // Tokyo Tower // Trafalgar Square // Central Park // Royal Palace of Amsterdam // TARDIS // Kunsthistorisches Museum // The Frick Collection// Smithsonian American Art Museum // Tokyo National Museum
GeoGuessr – Journey through the world and try to guess where you are.
The Oatmeal – Look at comics.
Into Time – Interactive, meditative and super colorful.
100,000 Stars – interactive 3D visualization of the stellar neighborhood (only for Google Chrome).
Virtual Travels – High resolution spherical panorama shots from a bird’s eye view.
Puppy Love – Cutest puppies on video.
games:
Drawception – Register to play “the social picture telephone game”. It combines drawing with the classic telephone game.
Color Game – A unique and fun color matching game
Akinator – A fun web genie that can guess characters by asking questions.
Lite-Brite – Interact with the classic childhood toy, virtually.
helpful games:
Habitica – Gamify your life by turning all your tasks (habits and to-dos) into little monsters you have to conquer.
SuperBetter – Increase personal resilience.
Tale of Tales – Play something calming meant to help lessen anxiety.
stress-reducing games:
Samorost 1 – Slowly explore a surreal asteroid based universe by wandering around and poking through anything interesting that crosses your path.
Echogenesis – A calming and immersive experience of exploring different natural worlds; roam freely and enjoy both visual and audio interactions.
XGen Studios – Float around as a tiny geometric creature and watch your evolution as you explore and consume other tiny organisms.
retro games:
SNESFUN – Play retro Super Nintendo games.
fun and fascinating:
Hype Machine – Hype machine keeps track of what music bloggers write about. There are about 840 blogs to look through and if a post contains some kind of media, you can preview the songs and buy them on amazon or iTunes if you want to.
Geocaching – A real world treasure hunting adventure near you.
Tunefind – Find music from TV and movies.
Vision of Humanity – An online portal for peace research, news and initiatives around the world. You can also see interactive global peace maps.
Windy – Worldwide animated weather maps (wind, temperature, pressure, clouds, humidity).
World Records – Explore categories of people everywhere breaking records.
Your World of Text – An infinite grid of text editable by any visitor. The changes made by other people appear on your screen as they happen.
Macaulay Library – The world’s largest library of wildlife sounds and videos.
HERE IS TODAY – An interactive timeline that will put your day in perspective.
FutureMe – Write a letter to your future self.
peoplemovin – A visualization of human migration patterns worldwide.
Font Space – Browse and download a huge collection of free fonts or create your own font.
who sampled – Explore the DNA of music through samples, cover songs, and remixes.
Build Your Own Earth – Create your own world and explore its climate and weather.
Brain Build – See inside the human brain by using some of the same techniques neuroscientists use – from MRIs to PET scans.
The Cutting Room Floor – Dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games.
uplifting and inspirational:
Public Thnx4 Journal – A gratitude journaling website that helps you appreciate all the goodness in your life – join now and share your thanks with the world (they have a public journal or you can remain anonymous if you wish).
1000 Awesome Things – A countdown of life’s little joys.
Awakin Readings – offers thought provoking passages that are full of wisdom from famous thinkers, writers or philosophers.
the perfect music for any moment:
Mood Music – Playlist generator that’s personalized to both your mood and your unique music taste (requires connection with a Spotify account).
Playlists Ideas – Music playlists to try out in different moods.
Chillstep Radio – An online chillstep radio, combining dubstep rhythms with the mellow grooves of chillout.
