The pandemic has turned mobile mindfulness into a booming industry, as millions of Americans download meditation apps hoping to boost their attention, mood, and sleep. Major companies concerned about worker productivity have also contracted with app makers to provide their employees with free subscriptions to the services (Lowery 2021).

With the average American meditation app user generating $70 in annual revenue, this year the industry is expected to earn nearly $1 billion in U.S. sales—double what those companies earned prior to the pandemic (Statista n.d). “Once Covid hit, we got a lot of feedback about how hard it was to disconnect from emails because people are constantly home. These apps allow people to disconnect and spend some purposeful moments thinking about, where’s my head at?,” an executive told CNBC about why his company offers employees a free Headspace app subscription (Levi 2021).

Yet as the author of a recent study concludes, given that people are using their smartphones to access their guided meditations on apps engineered to distract them, it is unlikely that they will experience benefits to mood or attention. Instead, meditation apps most often lead users to “reinterpret their experiences as mindful, even when digital platforms ironically lure them into practices that are distracted and compulsive,” writes anthropologist Rebecca Jablonsky (2021).

In other words, meditation apps are likely to be substituting one form of carefully designed behavioral addiction for another.

Merchants of Distraction

In a study published in the journal Science, Technology, and Human Values, Jablonsky reports on the eighteen months she spent observing numerous tech industry events, conferences, and meetings. Her research also drew on interviews with seventeen meditation app company managers and designers, visits to two meditation app headquarters, and interviews with twenty-one meditation app users.

Many in the meditation app industry believe that they are “channeling the addictive properties of digital technology toward a healthier form of attention that could restore for users a sense of agency, control, and even personal meaning,” writes Jablonsky. In doing so, they are making a bold promise that using their app will “somehow reduce or reverse the negative mental effects of other popular contemporary digital technologies.”

When an app company lures new users by way of a carefully targeted social media campaign, the typical offer is free access to a sample video or audio meditation designed to elicit a positive emotion. “Meditation app companies thus capitalize on their knowledge that potential users are already anxious—they are in some form of pain that needs relief—and use this to their advantage by making the first experience of meditation pleasurable and easy,” notes Jablonsky.

Among mobile meditation companies, Headspace spends the most on media advertising, sometimes in collaboration with other brands. For example, as part of the “Food for Mood” campaign, Headspace partnered with Whole Foods to offer free guided meditations promoting curated and commodified experiences, such as “Joyful shopping,” “Cooking with gratitude,” and “Mindful eating.”

In September 2021, Headspace launched a YouTube ad campaign¹ targeting users beyond its U.S.-based market. The ad suggests that the global pandemic is on the wane. Images feature actors wrestling with their children, floating on their backs in the ocean, hugging elderly relatives, and tickling babies.

Testimonials from app users read by actors declare how much meditation has helped them: “This year has been stressful, but then I found Headspace.”

Once an individual downloads the meditation app, the app sends a constant stream of notifications intended to promote greater frequency of use and more downloads—which generates more revenue for the company. “The attention designed into meditation apps thus is not the mindful attention that is promised, but rather reflects forms of attention considered more valuable and profitable to the broader technology industry—an attention that is malleable, compulsive, and distracted,” Jablonsky writes.

In one interview, a meditation app company executive described its typical user as looking to escape the “fundamental conditions of modern life,” an existence that involves millions of demands on their attention. Examples include “people going to bed feeling upset with themselves because of their friend’s Instagram accounts” or someone who “can’t focus their way through a conversation with their partner because their Apple watch keeps buzzing.” According to the executive, meditation apps were the “technological antidote to the problems that technology has created.”

In a second interview, a former design director at Muse said that he considered his work a form of “attention activism,” because meditations apps are “not just about health and well-being anymore. It’s about exercising your right to decide what to pay attention to. It’s about resisting those who want to profit from selling something that belongs to you.”

His former company’s main product is a $300 “brain sensing” meditation headband. According to its Amazon page, the Muse device allows users to discover their “mind-body connection through powerful, accurate real-time feedback on brain activity.” By way of just four electroencephalography (EEG) sensors embedded in the headband (a scientific lab uses about forty sensors), the device is supposedly able to notify a user if they have a “busy mind” (signaled by way of “stormy weather” noises) or a “calm” mind (“peaceful weather” noises).

The headband also comes with a “work out plan” that helps the user review their data, set goals, “build a rewarding meditation practice,” and “discover incredible insights” into their “inner world.” This gamification strategy is intended to promote frequent use of the band by rewarding users with diamond-shaped “Muse points” and bird-themed milestones. “Is this what happens when Angry Birds get therapy? It’s fun, but should it be?,” mused a Guardian journalist after trying out the device (Sammader 2019).

Binging on Mindfulness

Among the twenty-one meditation app users whom Jablonsky interviewed, most “regularly described their broader technology use habits as through the lens of popular critiques of technology ‘addiction,’ while turning a blind eye to their compulsive use of meditation apps,” she writes.

Several users blamed themselves (rather than the app) when their efforts at meditation did not seem to work, concluding that “they needed to be more mindful and pay more attention—reinforcing the value of the meditation app in a circular fashion.” One said that using Headspace was similar to her “binge-watching” television habits. She purchased a thirty pack of meditations, binged them quickly, proceeded to try to meditate on her own once a week, and then stopped. If she tried a meditation app again, she expected to repeat the cycle of binging and purging.

Another user recognized that his Calm meditation app could not replicate the likely benefits of in-person meditation classes or therapy sessions, but it was the only option he could fit into his hectic work schedule. “His use of meditation apps thus remains palliative, providing a temporary fix that is interchangeable with other fixes,” writes Jablonsky. “He doesn’t expect to achieve a state of mindful attention from the meditation app—he simply expects to feel better in the moment.”

A third user described using her Headspace meditation app like a podcast, listening to the calming voice of Headspace founder Andy Puddicombe (a former Buddhist monk) while doing chores and writing emails. “The meditation app doesn’t absorb her full attention but simply reminds her of the things she would like to pay more attention to when she has the time—notably her own self-care,” writes Jablonsky. But this also leaves her stuck in “a state of distraction from which she must recover continuously through efforts to pay attention.”

But some interviewees were aware of the traps involved in using mediation apps, optimistically believing that they had the ability to exert control over them. One said she typically used the timer on her device as part of self-guided meditations that she would do in a quiet room. As she told Jablonsky, this allowed her to use the “better tool, which is the real mindfulness—either focusing on your breath or paying attention to your thoughts.”

A second user had spent years studying meditation in his native country of India. He described meditation as “building a muscle” and attention as a form of discernment. His experience allowed him to know when he needed to use an app versus something else, and he says he uses an app to meditate twice a day for thirty minutes.

The quest to design an app that facilitates mindful attention is “impossible to fulfill as the affordances of the smartphone and its suite of digital tools capture attention in equal—if not greater—measure as meditation apps claim to give it back,” concludes Jablonsky. Meditation apps most often lead users to “reinterpret their experiences as mindful, even when digital platforms ironically lure them into practices that are distracted and compulsive.” The meditation app therefore “signals the expanding power of behavioral design, which not only changes how people behave but changes how people think and feel about their behavior,” Jablonsky writes.

Note

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB8o4iBZAAY

References

Jablonsky, Rebecca. 2021. Meditation apps and the promise of attention by design. Science, Technology, & Human Values (October 4).

Levi, Ari. 2020. Companies are offering benefits like virtual therapy and meditation apps as Covid-19 stress grows. CNBC.com. Available online at https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/10/covid-stress-companies-turn-to-virtual-therapy-meditation-apps.html.

Lowery, Annie. 2021. The app that monetized doing nothing. The Atlantic (June 4).

Sammader, Rhik. 2019. Muse 2: A wearable meditation device worthy of the Riddler. The Guardian (April 1).

Statista. N.d. Meditation Apps—United States: Revenue Growth, 2017–2025. Available online at https://www-statista-com.