Take a break and relax: Top 7 relaxation sites.

1- Calm.com

http://www.calm.com/ After the site has loaded (which does, on occasion, take a while) you can customize your period of “guided relaxation.” You can choose whether to relax for 2 minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes, and pick your animated background with its accompanying soundtrack. These include waves breaking on a beach, birds singing around a lake, and falling rain.

2- Weave Silk

http://weavesilk.com/ Silk bills itself as “interactive generative art,” which is a rather apt description. You’re presented with a dark background and asked to draw on it in freehand. Your paintbrush lays down a woven silk effect that builds the longer you hold your cursor in one place. Everything you draw is also mirrored, so you end up with Rorschach-style patterns that draw in the eye and make recognizable images appear from the mess.

3- Rain for me

http://rainfor.me/ Rain For Me forgoes all visual distractions and focuses on delivering a sound that many of us find incredibly relaxing. On top of a background showing a simple still image of a woodland being doused in water, you’ll hear the sound of falling rain. If that’s a little dull for your tastes then you can open a second tab or window and play some soft music as well; much of which benefits from the accompanying sound of rain falling to the ground.

4- Liquid Particles

http://spielzeugz.de/html5/liquid-particles.html This HTML5-powered webpage features multicolored liquid particles “trapped in a wormhole discoball.” Without any external input they’ll center on wherever your cursor sits, forming a bright white focal point. If you move the cursor around the screen they’ll form swirling patterns while trying to catch up. If you click your mouse button the particles will be attracted away from the cursor and eventually form a perfect circle around it.

5- Into time

http://www.intotime.com/ Into Time offers an insanely simple premise, but it’s one which will help chill you out thanks to the ever-changing colors and infinite possibilities. You start off with a blank square, and every time you click within that square the space will halve. You get to choose which squares to divide in this way, or you can just sit back and watch the colors swirling and blending before your eyes.

6- Tone matrix

http://tonematrix.audiotool.com/ Taking a break for two minutes doesn’t necessarily mean closing your eyes and emptying your head of all thoughts. You can instead enjoy that peaceful interlude by doing something entertaining, which is what Tone Matrix offers. You’re presented with a 16×16 grid of squares, and can choose which ones to fill in. The squares you fill will define the simple tune that then plays in a loop. You can even write words as I did in the screenshot above.

7- Do nothing for two minutes

http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ Do Nothing For Two Minutes is one of the most useful single-serving websites I have ever seen. It offers nothing but an image of the sea with the sound of waves crashing played over the top. Your mission is to remain static for two minutes, not touching the mouse or keyboard in that time. It’s a simple reminder of the need to take small breaks from the barrage of information we’re subjected to on the InterWebs.