Incentivizing Meditation App Habit Formation

Completed · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Stress, Adherence, Treatment

In brief

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.

Key facts

Study ID
NCT05217602
Run by
Arizona State University
People needed
597
Starts
2022-02-22
Expected to finish
2022-10-31
Last updated by the study team
2022-11-22

Who can join

Age: 18 and older. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

You may not qualify if…

Where it is running

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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