Be prepared to be bored.
This is the gist of one of the notifications you receive before you try the body scan meditation from Mindful Mood Balance, a web-based program currently being piloted in a version for therapists. The app allows users to take Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) at a distance using their phone, tablet, or computer.
Once you complete the 30-minute exercise, you navigate to a video featuring a group of people who’ve also just tried it. A few admit the experience was not incredibly riveting at times.
It’s something you don’t often hear from a mindfulness app: you might not enjoy this.
It smacks up against the wonder-drug version of mindfulness we’re so often sold.
In a time when there are so many brain-training apps drumming up excitement for their products through marketing, others have taken to the lab—how else can you try to make good on promises of cognitive gains, they argue.
That’s their benchmark, and it’s a new one. But more app developers may want to follow suit, especially after what happened to the brain-training game Lumosity: in January, the company was fined $2 million for deceptive advertising. Lumosity claimed that its products would improve cognitive performance on a daily basis and protect against cognitive decline, but fell short on providing the appropriate research to back up its extensive marketing campaigns. For instance, Lumosity took out targeted Google ads with keywords like “memory loss,” “dementia,” and “Alzheimer’s.”
“Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease,” said Jessica Rich, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. “But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads.”
When apps target vulnerable populations
Visit the app store, and you’re greeted with hundreds of mindfulness apps, a few dozen of them claiming to benefit your brain in some manner. Some of the most popular ones make health claims with no research to back up their programs—they rely on the science of mindfulness in general to prove the worthiness of their product. It seems enough to simply provide a link to the most recent mindfulness study taking place, or a comprehensive four-year meta-analysis on mindfulness and X, and then mention how their app relates—as if some sort of osmosis was taking place between the research study, in no way connected to the company itself, and the app.
We spoke with two mindfulness researchers who have also developed their own apps on the importance of research-backed mindfulness apps in order to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with Lumosity and have them share lessons for the burgeoning industry of apps that train your brain.
Zindel Segal developed the Mindful Mood Balance (MMB) app mentioned earlier. He’s Director of Clinical Training in the Graduate Department of Clinical Psychological Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and he’s one of the developers and founders of MBCT. Working with individuals recovering from depression, Segal is particularly concerned when apps with unfounded health claims target vulnerable populations—in Lumosity’s case, the elderly.
“The problem is there’s very little evidence that progress on these Lumosity games have any impact on memory and cognitive functioning in the real world when you’re engaged in other tasks like adding up a bill at a restaurant or if you have a very busy day and you’re in a rush,” says Segal, “and that’s really the point of contention here.”
The company was fined in part due to unfounded claims that its games “reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age or other serious health conditions” according to the FTC ruling.
The Lumosity program consists of 40 games designed to train specific areas of the brain. At the time of the FTC fine, the company advertised that if users trained for 10-15 minutes three to four times a week, they would see benefits. In one game aimed at training attention called Train of Thought, users have to match trains to appropriate-colored stations by modifying the tracks. At the highest level, 67 trains come pouring out of a mountain. In Tidal Treasures, a memory-testing game, users have to click beach objects that wash up on shore that they haven’t selected before.
While people might become skilled at these games, it’s not clear that cognitive gains translate into everyday activities. That was the impetus for 70 researchers to speak out against brain-training games like Lumosity in 2014 when they signed a letter of consensus with the Stanford Center on Longevity.
Since Segal’s work and app involves mood disorders, he has one app on his radar right now: Headspace—in particular, their Depression Pack. Last year, the company launched a 30-day pack of mindfulness practices tailored to working with emotions related to depressive symptoms.
“I’ve listened to some of the guided meditations from the depression pack—they’re pretty much straightforward mindfulness meditation: watching thoughts, working with thoughts,” says Segal. “Those practices take a while to build up to for people with depression who don’t really take this material in the same way that people that haven’t had a history of rumination or critical self-judgment.”
For someone recovering from depression, Segal says it’s not a good idea to jump into mindfulness meditation with just simple guided instruction—even if, as in Headspace’s case, that instruction is based on over ten years of experience at monasteries all around the world. Instead, the programs need to be tailored to their needs: as they learn the practices, they also need to learn about how their disorder will crop up during the meditation experience.
“It’s especially hard for people with depression to dis-identify from their own thinking—disorders like depression and anxiety have powerful messages that their thoughts carry vital information,” says Segal. “These practices need to be customized in a way that allows them to build skills gradually and sequentially while also providing them with information about how the disorder might camouflage itself in terms of thinking patterns.”
“It’s especially hard for people with depression to dis-identify from their own thinking—disorders like depression and anxiety have powerful messages that their thoughts carry vital information. These practices need to be customized in a way that allows them to build skills gradually and sequentially while also providing them with information about how the disorder might camouflage itself in terms of thinking patterns.”
—Zindel Segal, Director of Clinical Training in the Graduate Department of Clinical Psychological Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
Thoughts of unworthiness and hopelessness, for instance, aren’t part of the reality that the individual has to face head on, but surface due to the disorder. Once that’s established, “maybe they can start to approach some of these thoughts a little bit more lightly,” says Segal.
Additionally, Segal says there’s a rebound effect of trying the practices and quickly giving up. Compassion practices, for example, are difficult when y