The Power of Behavior Change Apps
Apps can support your efforts to create a positive transformation in your life.
Do you want to lose weight, create a regular exercise routine or start cooking at home more? Changing your behavior is hard! That’s why it’s so important to understand the keys to achieving behavior change: autonomy, self-efficacy and competence (Bandura 1977; Ryan & Deci 2017). Behavior change efforts can help support your efforts in all three areas—helping you feel in control and providing support.
Lee Jordan, MS, NBC-HWC, SHRM-SCP, a certified health coach and behavior change specialist in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, and adjunct professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, reviews research about the effectiveness of behavior change apps.
New Behaviors
Change is a uniquely difficult decision. Beyond deciding to do something new, you are also choosing to give up something. That’s really the hard part. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that states how the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure (benefit) of gaining something (Kahneman & Tversky 1979). The change decision is further complicated by time. The benefit of the new behavior invariably takes time and sustained effort.
Using willpower often fails as well. Trying to change often becomes a forceful inner struggle between higher-level cognitive control processes and lower-level automatic or habitual tendencies. Attempting to overcome unwanted habit loops by effortful self-control often fails. This type of willpower corresponds to extrinsically motivated behaviors—that is, norms, rules or ideas that originally came from outside of the person. This expectation to engage in a specific behavior because it’s directed or expected by others often results in a guilt, anxiety or stress response if one fails to follow through (Ludwig, Brown & Brewer 2020).
Conversely, autonomously (self) motivated behavior is accompanied by more pleasant, affective experience than nonautonomous behavior and includes feelings of interest, curiosity and enjoyment (Ryan & Deci 2017; Stanko-Kaczmarek 2012). Interestingly, autonomously motivated behavior change has proven to be more successful than willpower-based efforts when it comes to weight loss, exercise and smoking cessation, among other types of changes, which lends support to its sustainability (Ludwig, Brown & Brewer 2020).
Behavior Change Apps Research
So how can you motivate yourself to adopt healthy behaviors? Significant peer-reviewed evidence supports using apps to make changes. Below are a few highlights:
- There is strong evidence for the efficacy of mobile phone apps for lifestyle modification with type 2 diabetes (Wu, Guo & Zhang 2019).
- The Calm app effectively offers mindfulness meditation that reduces stress and improves mindfulness and self-compassion in stressed college students (Huberty et al. 2019).
- Digital behavior change interventions may increase physical activity and physical functioning and reduce sedentary time and systolic blood pressure in older adults (Stockwell et al. 2019).
- Mobile app–based interventions could be useful for improving various health promotion behaviors, including diet and physical activity for the general healthy population. Most of the app interventions reviewed focused on monitoring health status and behavior change, as well as providing feedback or health-related information (Lee et al. 2018).
As you use the app, ask open-ended questions that invite you to be clear, active and in a state of discovery. Below are some sample questions.
- What is the opportunity?
- What is exciting to you about this?
- What do you want to explore?
- What is the challenge?
- What is your next step?
Choosing the Right App
To determine which app and tech is best for you, ask yourself the following guiding questions:
- Which app will keep you highly engaged?
- How many times a week or a day will you use or interact with the app?
- How does the app cultivate autonomous motivation?
See also: Using Behavior Change Apps
Behavior Change Apps
Below is a selection of top-rated apps that support behavior change. Both Ate and YourCoach can be used with a behavior change coach or personal trainer.
Ate
This mindful food journal helps people uncover habits and realign goals. It uses a visual, mindful and nonjudgmental approach to building a more meaningful relationship with food and makes tracking each meal as simple as taking a photo. Rather than relying on calorie counting, it nonjudgmentally elicits self-awareness as a path to an empowering relationship with food. This app syncs to Apple Health and Apple Watch, and coaches can watch a client’s progress in real time, as well as engage in private and group chats (and more) from a dashboard. Ate includes options such as open-ended questions, reflections and experiments, all of which help increase coach/client engagement.
Calm
As the name implies, this app is focused on relaxation, meditation and sleep, with a “mission to make the world happier and healthier.” Calm offers guided sessions, breathing exercises, visualizations, sleep stories and music designed to assist with focus and relaxation.
YourCoach
This app is a “virtual home for health and wellness coaching,” built for coaches by a health coach. A “practice management platform” for cultivating coaching and client relationships, YourCoach uses algorithms to match dedicated, verified and practicing health and wellness coaches with employers. Marina Borukhovich, founder and CEO, describes the app as “an operating system for behavior change, powered by a technology-augmented force of health coaches.”
Happify™
As the name implies, this app focuses on increasing a person’s feelings of well-being through a science-supported approach. The app is highly engaging and offers several effective tools grounded in positive psychology, mindfulness and cognitive behavior therapy. Happify offers a way to measure emotional well-being to help people see and experience improvement and satisfaction.
References
Bandura, A. 1977. Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84 (2), 191–215.
Huberty, J., et al. 2019. Efficacy of the mindfulness meditation mobile app “Calm” to reduce stress among college students: Randomized controlled trial. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 7 (6), e14273.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47 (2), 263–91.
Lee, M., et al. 2018. Mobile app-based health promotion programs: A systematic review of the literature. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15 (12), 2838.
Ludwig, V.U., Brown, K.W., & Brewer, J.A. 2020. Self-regulation without force: Can awareness leverage reward to drive behavior change? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15 (6), 1382–99.
Ryan, R.M., & Deci, E.L. 2017. Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. New York: Guilford Press.
Stanko-Kaczmarek, M. 2012. The effect of intrinsic motivation on the affect and evaluation of the creative process among fine arts students. Creativity Research Journal, 24 (4), 304–9.
Stockwell, S., et al. 2019. Digital behavior change interventions to promote physical activity and/or reduce sedentary behavior in older adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Experimental Gerontology, 120, 68–87.
Wu, X., Guo, X., & Zhang, Z. 2019. The efficacy of mobile phone apps for lifestyle modification in diabetes: Systematic review and meta-analysis. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 7 (1), e12297.
