A Brief History Of Mindfulness Online
We have to get offline, we can’t get offline. Buried deep in millennial memes, in Twitter’s bitterly amused nihilistic humour and Tumblr blogs going off the deep end, the fundamental problem of being constantly online is ticking away. Instagram is the worst social media channel for mental health; Nomophobia — the fear of being without a mobile phone — has proven that we’re so addicted to our phones that it’s making us afraid to be without them (and not just because of the stupid name). Surrounded by fake news and barraged with images of what we’re missing out on, it’s unsurprising that millennials are desperately searching for ways to calm down and peace out. It feels typical that a lot of those searches are happening online.
And it seems fair, in an eye-rolly, Of Course This Is How We’re Managing It kind of way. After all, if the internet is making us sad, can’t it make us better, too?
“If you lay it out in terms of time spent and happiness [raised], Insight Timer was voted as the happiest app on the planet,” Christopher Plowman, the CEO of Insight Timer, tells me from his home office in Bali. He’s explaining a recent study led by Time Well Spent (now known as Humane Tech) and Moment, who surveyed 200,000 iPhone users to find out which apps made people happiest — and unhappiest. Insight Timer, the app store’s highest rated free meditation app, actually came in fourth, behind other popular meditation apps like Calm and Headspace, as well as — bizarrely — Google Calendar in spot #2.
Mindfulness was officially recognised by the NHS as an effective therapeutic tool in 2004, originally in the form of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and now updated to be prescribed for people with three or more episodes of depression. But leaving aside some truly excellent mindfulness memes, it took longer for the internet to follow on. Partly, perhaps, because there was no immediately obvious option linking mindfulness and online behaviour.
Early websites like Mindful.org — created in 2005, and now a magazine — offered articles and stories about how mindfulness could enrich daily life (9 Tips for a Mindful Home!) as well as a few slim resources for potential practitioners. These ranged from practice audio guides to a variety of courses on mindfulness, but most were directed at would-be mindfulness teachers or leaders, rather than your average lay-person looking to use mindfulness personally.
It wasn’t until the launch of Apple’s app store, in 2008, that the first meditation apps started to crop up, and with them a nearly instinctive link to mindfulness theory and practice. Rohan Gunatillake, the creator of buddhify — whose earliest version launched in 2011 — writes, “I made it for my friends so that I could give them an authentic and effective introduction to mindfulness and meditation but in a way that fitted into time-poor urban lifestyle… but there was a deeper reason still. The deeper reason I made buddhify is because I love the mindfulness tradition.”
Gunatillake wasn’t alone for long. In 2010, Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson founded Headspace as an events company that hosted mindfulness lectures in and around London, and in 2012 they launched its app version online. Since then, Headspace has become the dominant heavyweight in the mindfulness game, with 20 million downloads across 190 countries. But it is far from alone, with other multimillion user platforms like Calm and Insight Timer lining up, not to mention the hundreds if not thousands of lesser known apps all clamouring for our meditative minutes. Mindfulness has arrived online. The only remaining question is: what will it do for, or to, us?
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“You enter any Twitter or Facebook discussion and it’s vile, essentially,” Plowman says. “But if you go into any Insight Timer group and someone will express disagreement or sadness or frustration, or they’re going through something, and everyone dives in. They say, ‘this is what I did’. I just don’t know where else [online] it exists.”
Is it because meditating makes people kinder, I wonder?
“It’s definitely not,” Plowman says, laughing as he mentions some of the angry comments he receives from users when there are bugs on the app. “They’re still normal people. [But] I think we’re getting to a point where people are sick of bile. People want to be nicer. That’s going to look so terrible in print, but, you know, anger is exhausting!”
If we take Insight Timer as a case study, there’s interesting potential in the way it approaches meditation online as a group exercise. You meditate alone — or with a guiding recorded teaching of your choice — but join Insight Timer’s discussion forums in the form of groups with common mediation goals or themes, like “Beginner’s Mind” or “Women Meditate Worldwide”. Every time you log online, Insight Timer’s interactive map shows you how many other users are online and meditating at that moment.
When I bring up the dichotomy of meditating alone and Insight Timer’s social experience, Plowman gently corrects my assumption. “A lot of people say ‘oh, meditation is such a solitary experience’,” he says. “I’ve come to believe that it’s entirely the opposite. It may be that when you sit on your bed at six o’clock in the morning meditating, that’s a solitary experience, but the reason why you’re doing that is because you want to be happy, you want better relationships to others. I think that connection with others and meditation are absolutely linked. They’re symbiotic.”
It’s interesting to consider carving out spaces on the internet reserved for goodness. Twitter is overrun by Neo-Nazis; Facebook is full of your racist relatives. The idea of an online mindfulness community that offers some tools to begin to address depression and anxiety is an appealing one. (Obvious footnote: depression is a complicated and personal disease, and meditating should by no means be seen as the best or only way to tackle it. If you can, you should always talk to a doctor, rather than a series of screennames). But even as mindfulness has gained credibility in the public arena and early studies have shown that online mindfulness tools do have a “small but significant impact” on depression and anxiety, it can be difficult to draw the line and understand exactly how well our phones can support our mental health.
“Nothing beats a retreat,” Plowman says, “because guess what you find at retreats: people. But obviously millions of people don’t have the time or the money to go on retreats and technology does allow for the very real sense of connection between the teacher and the meditator, or between a group of meditators, which you just can’t get [otherwise] because of the physical limitations, the distance. Of course we’d all love to go and sit on a hill. But it’s not possible.”
With technology’s possibilities, of course, come a host of new issues. Plowman’s big concern is apps which are commodifying the meditation process in order to make money. “If you don’t meditate, they don’t get paid. And so if you extrapolate that out, it’s like, ‘50% off consciousness! Two-for-one happiness! Buy your mum a happy 2018!’ It’s toe-curling, horrendous stuff.” Other issues lie in the very nature of these guided meditations, particularly for users who are looking to improve their mental health. Plowman tells me that one of Insight Timer’s biggest sources of word-of-mouth referrals are from healthcare practitioners, which begs the question: who should be allowed to teach? Particularly when approaching mindfulness as a therapeutic, medical technique with which to tackle depression and anxiety, the risk of online quacks is a serious one.
The future of mindfulness online has potential for good and evil… like most of the internet. But we should be paying close attention; Gunatillake believes that “nothing will influence how mindfulness is perceived and practiced in our culture more in the next twenty years than how [mindfulness apps] are designed in the next five.”
Hills are pretty appealing; a hill that I don’t take thirty photos of to send my mum and distribute via social media sounds even more appealing, if faintly impossible. But rather than denying ourselves technology entirely, or beating ourselves up for being addicted to the internet, the possibility of creating spaces online to counter some of our digital depression seems hopeful. Mindfulness apps, with their engaged online communities and daily therapeutic tools, are a good start. But finding someone to do it with you, whether out on that hill or over a Skype call, is a better one. It’s a big, scary online world out there — let’s look out for each other.
Written by Mikaella Clements/images by Rosalba Porpora
This month’s theme is HAPPINESS, because March = spring and with it, the knowledge that you’ve made it through the waking nightmare that was winter 2017–8 (RIP).
