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

Creative Media Awardee Well-being Struggle interrogates the motives and consequences of digital mental health products, especially in a corporate setting

(FEBRUARY 27, 2024) -- There is no shortage of apps promising to make us happier, more productive, and less depressed — many of which are offered by employers as a “health perk.” In just a tap or two, employees can meditate, be more mindful, and think more positively.

But is all this actually good for us?

Launching today is Well-being Struggle, an art-and-research project that examines how apps and AI use positive psychology, mindfulness, and meditation to distract from systemic problems in the workplace — and hinder opportunities for tangible cultural changes and mental health resources.

Well-being Struggle is a 2023 Mozilla Creative Media Awardee and part of a cohort investigating AI and responsible design.

The Well-being Struggle team closely studied more than one dozen [1] of the most popular digital mental well-being apps — like Calm, Headspace, and Insight Timer — tracking their content and psychological methodologies. They then shared their findings with a diverse set of mental health and technology experts: psychologists, psychology scholars and thinkers, Buddhist practitioners, cognitive scientists, and AI experts.

The lessons learned? Despite ostensibly helping vulnerable workers, these apps frequently harm them in three key ways. They promote unrealistic expectations; they shift the responsibility for maintaining a healthy workplace away from the employer and toward the employee; and they amplify harmful mentalities such as performative positivity. (See more on each of these findings below.)

The team also used their research to inform a video about this phenomenon, and to create a generative meditation that highlights these apps’ platitudes.

Says Sena Partal, a design researcher and co-creator of Well-being Struggle: “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. This project questions who really benefits from these apps. Indeed, the apps — and many other AI-powered ‘tools’ — prioritize design principles like consumption and productivity, not actual well-being.”

Says Sasha Smirnova, an audio-visual artist and co-creator of Well-being Struggle: “Many of these apps stigmatize negative emotions, rather than helping people manage them. Unfortunately, while this approach harms individuals, it’s also quite lucrative: the market for employee wellness tools and resources is expected to reach $109 billion by 2030.”

Key Findings:

• Well-being apps create deceptively unrealistic expectations. The repeated messages are often embedded in a meditation form, with an end goal and a few steps. However, setting high standards for happiness or ineffective goals to achieve it often leads to disappointment when one’s current state falls short of those standards, as noted by social psychologists Brett Q. Ford and Iris B. Mauss in “The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion: When and Why Wanting to Feel Happy Backfires.” Goal-oriented short meditation exercises not only foster impractical hopes but also create an unrealistic expectation of the meditation practice itself which yields results, arguably with time, patience, and consistency.

• Well-being apps 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.

• Well-being apps 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 it also accelerates the shift toward a societal attitude that negative emotions should be stigmatized.

Press contact: Kevin Zawacki, [email protected]

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[1] The apps most closely scrutinized were Calm, Headspace, Mindfulness with Petit Bamboo, Balance, Liberate, Ten Percent, Simple Habit, Mindshift CBT, Insight timer, Happify, Meditopia, stoic.