Essential in increasingly challenging times, meditation can help calm troubled thoughts, clear our minds, and help our bodies find equilibrium. But with the current marketplace saturated with meditation apps, it can help to branch out and draw in elements from modern mindfulness to help stand out.
So, what exactly is mindfulness and how can it play an essential role when added to your current or proposed app?
What is mindfulness?
Roughly defined as being quietly aware of the present moment, mindfulness is an officially recognised mental health aid that trains users to pay close attention to their thoughts and help quell anxiety or restlessness. Inspired by eastern traditions such as Buddhism, the discipline has a number of therapeutic applications and carries a number of additional benefits.
Choosing to make it a part of your platform quickly allows you to expand the remit of your app or find a solid base to build a suite of tools around. Emphasising daily use and enjoying a wealth of materials, making your product ‘mindful’ can help secure a place in a crowded market and help individuals when it’s arguably needed the most.
What elements should I consider?
If you are considering adding mindful elements to your app or starting afresh, there are a number of elements you can add to your system when it comes to meditation app development. These include, but are not limited to-
Mindfulness Lessons: While mindfulness is a skill, having guided lessons and instructions can help make the process less intimidating for users and allow them to get up to speed faster. These can be dispersed on a regular basis or be hand-picked by the end user to suit their lifestyle and interests.
Exercises and Advancement: Having dedicated mindfulness exercises can help users build their skills or bolster their weaknesses. These can be bracketed into different categories and allow users to develop a wide spectrum of mindfulness skills and practical knowledge.
Timings and Guided Meditations: Building your capacity for mindfulness is at the core of the discipline and being able to give users set times to work around can be extremely effective. Coupling this with guided body scans, breathing exercises or timed visualisation can help add value throughout the app and make the system more appealing for a wide range of users.
What else should I bear in mind?
If you’re looking to extend your system’s functionality it’s worth taking the time to review other adjacent elements to mindfulness, namely ASMR and Sleep Assistance. Short for autonomous sensory meridian response, ASMR content can help individuals cope with anxiety and give stress-relieving ‘tingles’. Adding triggers to your app, sound profiles, or asmr ‘chapters’ can help with the mindfulness journey.
Extending the platform to provide sleep meditations, stories, and soundscapes can help users get to sleep at the end of a long day, wake up energised, and ensure that the app is used throughout the day and adopted more readily by users.