Apps + People = Wellbeing Strategy

Apps and people are the ingredients for an effective wellbeing strategy. 

We love apps.

One of the things we love here at Cognomie about how wellbeing has evolved and developed over the last few years is the proliferation of apps that help with our everyday wellbeing and self improvement. Our own phones are well stocked with tools that provide a genuine benefit to help us with exercise routines, providing us a daily flow for yoga or helping us monitor and manage our nutrition.

In particular we’re big fans of apps like Headspace, Calm and 1 Giant Mind and the way they’ve helped us (and many of our colleagues and clients) learn how to incorporate the benefits of mindfulness and meditation into our daily routines. There is an emerging body of research pointing to the effectiveness of these apps in giving people the Mental Fitness tools that help strengthen their resilience and performance.  

A 2018 study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology “was the first to show that a brief two-week mindfulness training app can change a person’s biological response to stress” whilst another recent study showed how regular use of an app helped lower physiological responses to stress amongst students.

But people are a vital part of a wellbeing strategy too. 

We absolutely see the valuable role that apps can and do play in supporting Mental Fitness. Providing access to apps as part of a workplace wellbeing strategy can help support Mental Fitness. 

However, on their own, apps are only part of the story and without a much broader, personalised approach, supported by access to one to one (or one to many) human conversation(s), their impact can in fact be quite partial. 

When making Mental Fitness a focus of genuinely transformative change and performance improvement within a business we believe it takes the skills and expertise of trained Mental Fitness coaches and consultants to deliver wider cultural change within organisations. We strongly believe that apps can play a significant and important role in the facilitation and supplementation of human conversations when delivering at scale, but never at the expense of the human element.

So here is a quick summary of where we believe the power apps can lie, and where we think the power lies with a personal touch.

So we won’t stop waving the flag for apps. But only when they are delivered as part of an organisational wellbeing strategy, rather than seen as the strategy itself.

So we won’t stop waving the flag for apps. But only when they are delivered as part of an organisational wellbeing strategy, rather than seen as the strategy itself.