Athanas AJ, McCorrison JM, Smalley S, et al. (2019). Association between improvement in baseline mood and long-term use of a mindfulness and meditation app: Observational study. JMIR Mental Health. 6(5): e12617. doi: 10.2196/12617
Stop, Breathe and Think (SBT) is a mindfulness meditation mobile application (app) that allows users to initiate meditation activities. Users are asked to complete mood checks by selecting up to 5 emotional descriptors to describe their emotional state before and after completing meditation activities. Researchers compared number of app sessions initiated to mood check data from users who had completed at least 10 sessions and completed mood checks for at least 6 sessions. Positive, neutral, or negative emotional descriptors were assigned scores of 1, 0, and -1, respectively and user emotional states were calculated as the average score of the emotional descriptors selected at each mood check, resulting scores between -1 and 1. Data from 13,393 users who had completed a total of 569,961 sessions (42.6 per user, on average) and completed mood checks for 302,541 sessions (22.6 per user, on average) were analyzed. Participants who used the app more reported more positive emotional states before meditation initiation. Specifically, users experienced a 2%, 4%, and 6% improvement in mood after completing 1, 10, and 100 sessions, respectively. After initiating 10 sessions in the app, users were 82% less likely to select anxious emotions and 28% less likely to select depressed emotions. Number of sessions initiated was positively related to greater improvements in emotional state between pre- and post-activity mood-checks. The study supports the ability of SBT to improve mood and highlights the importance of engagement in eliciting positive intervention effects.