New Research: Are Well-Being Apps Actually Harming Us?

The article discusses a new research project called Well-being Struggle, which examines the use of positive psychology, mindfulness, and meditation in digital mental health products. The project is a 2023 Mozilla Creative Media Awardee and part of a cohort investigating AI and responsible design.

The team behind Well-being Struggle studied more than a dozen popular digital mental well-being apps, including Calm, Headspace, and Insight Timer, to understand their content and psychological methodologies. They then shared their findings with a diverse set of mental health and technology experts, including psychologists, psychology scholars, Buddhist practitioners, cognitive scientists, and AI experts.

The team found that despite the apps' claims to help vulnerable workers, they frequently harm them in three key ways:

1. Promote unrealistic expectations: The repeated messages in these apps often embed an end goal and a few steps, leading to disappointment when one's current state falls short of those standards. This can create an unrealistic expectation of the meditation practice itself, which yields results with time, patience, and consistency.

2. Shift responsibility for creating healthy workplaces: By offering a mental well-being app as a perk, companies may be attempting to shift the responsibility for employee mental health onto the individual, implying that mental health issues are solely the employees' problems to solve. Additionally, presenting access to these apps as an employee perk can send the message that work-related stress is an inherent part of the job, which employees should manage themselves. This fails to acknowledge that excessive stress and burnout often result from unhealthy work environments and unsustainable workloads.

3. Accelerate a cultural shift toward "performative positivity": The expectation to be positive is increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday interactions, more explicitly in professional environments. The digital mental well-being industry not only commodifies this trend but also accelerates the shift toward a societal attitude that negative emotions should be stigmatized.

The team used their research to inform a video about these findings and created a generative meditation that highlights the apps' platitudes. They argue that despite employers' and tech companies' protest to the contrary, mental well-being in a workplace is not something that can be solved just with an app. Instead, they suggest that it requires systemic changes and actual mental health resources.