JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The general public is largely aware of meditation and there is compelling evidence that the practice has health benefits. But, many people who are aware of meditation have not tried it, and those who do often struggle to establish a regular practice. The barriers to meditation are generally understood and include a lack of knowledge about meditation, pragmatic barriers such as a lack of time, and unclear benefits. These barriers may present an impediment to self-efficacy in establishing a meditation practice. Despite these challenges, current communication strategies for promoting meditation may fail to address these barriers, leaving a gap in health communication efforts aimed at fostering meditation practices.

Objective:

The objective of the current research is to leverage a large-scale, real world digital messaging-based platform to understand whether breaking down the known theory-based barriers to meditation can serve as an effective strategy for promoting meditation.

Methods:

This research is a digital messaging-based experiment that includes approximately 1.3 million people, ages 18 and older, in the United States. The experiment was conducted on the Spotify mobile app and includes one control condition and four test conditions. Each of the test conditions was a brief message that attempted to address and break down one of the specific theory-based barriers to meditation. The control message only included the call-to-action without any theory-based messaging accompaniment. When users clicked on the message, they were redirected to meditation content that was hosted on Spotify. The click-through rate and the activation rate of each message were the dependent variables in the experiment.

Results:

The most effective message, which was designed to break down the pragmatic barriers to meditation, had a click-through rate 1.6 percentage points higher and an activation rate 0.4 percentage points higher than the control. The least effective, which was designed to break down knowledge barriers, had a 0.3 percentage point lower click-through rate and 0.2 percentage point lower activation rate, compared to the control. All pairwise comparisons of each of the click-through rates and activation rates between the test conditions and the control condition were significant at P<.001.

Conclusions:

Theory driven messaging can potentially encourage people to explore meditation content on streaming platforms, but not universally so. Two of the experimental conditions performed better than the control and two performed worse than the control, indicating that activating theory in the context of meditation messaging should be pre-tested. The most successful message, Condition 2, broke down the barrier that meditation requires one be alone and in a quiet place. Addressing this barrier may have potentially boosted self-efficacy by aligning the practice with more accessible, everyday settings that fit into people’s busy lifestyles, subsequently enhancing their belief in their ability to find time for the task. This information may have also been novel and broken down preconceived notions about how one meditates.