Driven to Distraction - What's Behind the Success of Meditation Apps?

Let’s jump into an exercise. Pick a point on the ground and focus on it. Set a timer and do this for one minute. Mark a dash down on a piece of paper each time your mind wanders from that point. This includes wondering if you are doing it “right,” why you are looking at the point, remembering that you have to feed your dog – it includes everything. That means any time you find yourself having wandered into random thought, whether it's triggered by a noise in the room or a bodily sensation – it all warrants a dash. Any conscious mental activity other than focused attention on that point.

All done? Good. Now turn on a podcast you like and repeat the exercise, substituting the content of the podcast for the point on the ground. Which was easier? Which resulted in more dashes?

Last time I discussed that, in meditation, it’s often easier to inhibit distraction when we’re given something on which to rest our attention. We discussed that the more stimulating the object of our attention, the “easier” it is to block out distraction. And at the end of the last post, I said that this time I’d get into why I think meditation apps have precipitated such a jump in meditation practice in the US population. If you consider the content of the first post in this series, An Arms Race for Your Attention, it shouldn’t surprise you that I believe the reason for this jump has to do with the fact that modern technological environments have conditioned us to crave stimulation, which makes meditation more difficult. It results in more dashes on the page.

One way to alleviate the difficulty caused by having been conditioned to crave stimuli is to occupy the practitioner with some degree of stimulation, and this is what meditation apps do. They introduce their users to a guided practice. When I started meditating, I had read about it in a book and also in some academic studies. The latter were what ultimately convinced me to give it a chance. I went to a local yoga studio and took a class in which the instructor guided us through some techniques in mindfulness meditation – the most popular and most studied meditative approach. As mentioned in my prior post, mindfulness meditation involves nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. Once aware of deviation into thought, attention is simply returned to the present moment, the breath, or some neutral object. Such was the teacher’s instruction in the class I took and in books I read. But outside of class, I was on my own. Which is to say, most of the meditation I did was predominantly unguided – the presence of an instructional voice, while at times helpful, was a relative rarity. I found it extremely difficult; it was a grind, especially at the beginning.

As mentioned in my last post, if we’ve picked an object of focus for meditation, the degree of arousal the object our attention creates in our nervous systems matters. The more arousal elicited, the less likely we are to be distracted. But also, importantly, the less “work” we are doing and the less progress we are making. The capacity for a set of stimuli to cause arousal can depend on a lot of things. Whether they are representative of opportunity or threat, for instance – it’s easier to get stuck thinking about a coworker undermining our performance at work or about the potential for a romantic relationship with someone you met at a party last week than it is to become completely absorbed in a tree, the breath, or a point on the ground. Another factor at play could be novelty. How new or unfamiliar is the information being taken in? We’re much more likely to pay attention to things to which we haven’t been exposed before. How well do you remember your commute on a daily basis? Is the route so familiar that you can find yourself getting from point A to point B without seemingly having paid any deliberate attention at all?

Here’s the thing: Meditation apps provide us with a stimulus, in the manner of a voice, and that voice is delivering new information in which we are interested – we installed the app, after all, didn’t we? What’s more, the sheer amount of content and the ease with which producers can deliver it to users almost guarantees a steady stream of novel experience. Granted, the information being delivered bears directly on the practice of meditation, so it has instructional value beyond simply acting as something to occupy attention – and that matters, a lot, especially to novice practitioners. But listening to guided audio tracks is not the same as sitting, lying, standing, or walking in unguided, silent meditation. That’s where the real work and progress occurs. Would you be surprised to know that the introductory ten-minute meditation provided for free by the Calm app has just 80 seconds or so of silence on it wherein the user’s attention is not being occupied by a voice? This is an important point and I believe it heavily influences the rate of adoption of these apps and subsequent reporting of individuals having begun a meditation practice – to the CDC, for instance, as mentioned last time.

None of this is a bad thing. I’m not attacking meditation apps or this approach. In fact, it’s a very good thing, particularly in the technological context in which we currently live. We’re conditioned to crave stimulation, and any time one tries to teach a new behavior, it’s best to meet the learner where they are, not where you want them to end up. This means that it’s not practical to expect a novice meditator to sit in silent meditation for 45 minutes. Or even 10 or 5 minutes. It’s also beneficial to provide a stimulus that helps the user get from a higher arousal state (i.e., the one we’ve been conditioned to crave) to a lower arousal state. There are a number of ways of achieving this, including the tonality and pacing of instruction. Have you heard Andy from Headspace’s voice? It’s like a sonic Xanax. In any case, by providing a stimulus (i.e., a voice) and communicating through that stimulus information that has to do with meditative practice, users can gradually be introduced to the real practice of silent, unguided periods of meditation. Just 80 seconds at a time, if that’s what it takes.

So, what does this mean for the space? Well, as they say, “content is king.” A key driving force behind the success of these apps and their stickiness with the population is that they are able to provide a very large quantity of content, allowing the meditations to remain novel to users. As mentioned above, this novelty can play a big role in the amount of arousal the experience produces and as a result, how “easy” or “difficult” it is to remain engaged while the instructors do their work, guiding users toward a state conducive to meditation. So, look for these apps to be putting plenty of resources into expanding the breadth and depth of their content libraries. This endows them with novelty and, equally importantly from a revenue standpoint, replay value. Deep content libraries extend the useful life of an app and justify subscription-based revenue models to users and, as we’re all aware, SaaS is today’s preferred revenue model for startups looking to scale.

Next time: A deep(ish) dive into what it means to call something “meditation,” as well as some moral and ethical implications of invoking the word.