Incentivizing Meditation App Habit Formation

Summary

Over 75% of U.S. adults report significant stress, resulting in major health and economic costs. Mobile meditation apps are a feasible, effective, and scalable strategy for self-managing stress that is rapidly growing in popularity and thus represent a key tool for improving public health. However, existing intervention strategies for establishing persistent mobile health app adherence have largely been unsuccessful. Thus, there is a need for alternative strategies to move those who initiate meditation, i.e. new paying subscribers to a mobile meditation app. The investigators propose to synthesize theory- and evidence-based intervention approaches from psychology and behavioral economics to test novel combined strategies for establishing persistent adherence to meditation using the scalable Calm app.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the use of anchoring strategies in combination with pragmatic in-kind rewards to identify the most optimal strategy for establishing persistent meditation habits with a mobile app. The investigators aim to assess the adherence persistence to a 10 minutes per day Calm prescription in new, paying self-initiated Calm subscribers; investigate the mediating effect of anchoring plan adherence on adherence persistence to the Calm prescription; and estimate the dynamic relationship between meditation adherence and stress. The investigators hypothesize that participants using anchoring strategies in combination with pragmatic in-kind rewards will be more likely to adhere to the Calm prescription than the control condition with greater adherence observed among those participating in the anchoring plus time-contingent reward intervention; greater adherence to anchoring plans will lead to higher adherence persistence; and greater reductions in stress will be associated with more persistent meditation adherence across study groups.

Investigators aim to recruit N=555 new, paying self-initiated Calm subscribers. Participants will be randomized into one of three groups with 185 participants in each group: anchoring plus in-kind rewards conditional on anchoring plan adherence; anchoring plus in-kind rewards conditional on meditating at any time of day; and usual Calm control condition without in-kind rewards.

Conditions

• Stress
• Adherence, Treatment

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

AC+ARwdC

The Calm app is downloadable by participants onto their smartphone to access meditations and other Calm app features during the intervention period. Participants in the AC+ARwdC group will watch a video with information about the study, conditional rewards, and how to create an anchoring plan for their meditation habit. Weekly text message reminders will be sent during the intervention period to reinforce use of the anchoring plan. Participants in the AC+ARwdC group will be offered incentives for using their anchoring plan during the intervention period and for completing the baseline, post-intervention, and follow-up surveys.

BEHAVIORAL

AC+RwdC

The Calm app is downloadable by participants onto their smartphone to access meditations and other Calm app features during the intervention period. Participants in the AC+RwdC group will watch a video with information about the study, conditional rewards, and how to create an anchoring plan for their meditation habit. Weekly text message reminders will be sent during the intervention period to reinforce use of the anchoring plan. Participants in the AC+RwdC group will be offered incentives for meditating during the intervention period and for completing the baseline, post-intervention, and follow-up surveys.

BEHAVIORAL

Usual Calm Control (UC)

The Calm app is downloadable by participants onto their smartphone to access meditations and other Calm app features during the intervention period. Participants in the UC group will watch a video with information about the study and how to create an anchoring plan for their meditation habit. Participants in the UC group will be offered incentives for completing the baseline, post-intervention, and follow-up surveys.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Calm.com, Inc.

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• Arizona State University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Chad Stecher, PhD · Arizona State University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-02-22

Primary Completion

2022-10-31

Completion

2022-10-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations