Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Oct 26, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 30, 2018 - Dec 11, 2018
Date Accepted: Mar 24, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Long-Term Use of a Mindfulness & Meditation App Improves Baseline Mood
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of mobile phone apps to monitor and deliver health-care guidance and interventions has received considerable recent attention, particularly with respect to behavioral disorders, stress relief, negative emotional state, and poor mood. Unfortunately, there is little experience with the long-term effects of apps meant to impact mood.
Objective:
We aim to determine the effects of immediate and long term use of a guided meditation and mindfulness application on user’s long term emotional state. We describe an analysis of data obtained from a mobile phone app developed by Stop, Breathe & Think, Inc. (SBT) for achieving emotional wellness.
Methods:
The SBT app collects information on the emotional state of the user prior to and after engagement in one or several mediation and mindfulness activities provided by the app. We considered data on over 120,000 users of the app who collectively engaged in over 5.5 million activities during an approximate two-year time period. We focused our analysis on users who had at least 10 uses of the app over an average 6 months. We compared the long-term emotional-wellbeing of individuals with different emotional states at the time of their initial use of the app using mixed effects models. We also compared two different methods of classifying emotional state 1) expert defined classification and 2) empirically driven clustering.
Results:
We found that the long-term use of the app has a positive effect on baseline emotional state (2% increase per 10x sessions). We also found that individuals who are anxious or depressed, tend to have a more favorable long-term emotional transition after using the app for an extended period (odds ratio 3.2 and 6.2).
Conclusions:
Our analyses suggest that there is great potential for the delivery of stress reduction and emotional wellness maintenance through mobile devices. We consider future analyses and further development of meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction apps in light of our findings.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.