Training the Mind, One Breath at a Time

Focusing on the breath is central to many meditation techniques. Norman Farb, an associate professor of psychology at U of T Mississauga, is developing an app that makes it feel less like work and more like a game.

Being aware of the breath helps people become better attuned to the sensations in their bodies, says Farb, a skill that’s linked to improved mental health. “The body is where we get our sense of emotion, motivation, and well-being or ill-being. Ignoring or suppressing sensation feels protective in the short term, but it’s a risk factor for depression. Over time, that tendency becomes automatic and leads to a sort of numbness.”

Mindfulness meditation is a proven way to cultivate breath awareness, but Farb says most people find meditating “too hard, esoteric or woo-woo.” So, the new app will aim to build breath awareness through a simple task that presents a challenge and rewards. Users watch a circle on the screen and time their breathing to its size. When the circle gets bigger, they breathe in, and vice versa.

The object of the game is to determine whether the breath is slowing down, speeding up or staying the same over four inhalations and exhalations. “You find out immediately if you’re right or wrong,” says Farb, noting that the app will adjust the difficulty based on users’ accuracy until it’s not too hard or too easy.  It will also ask users how confident they feel after playing.

The goal, says Farb, is to foster a positive attitude about tuning into the body. “How good you are at detecting breathing changes is largely irrelevant to mental health. But how confident and comfortable you feel checking in with your body can increase resilience.”

Farb describes the app as “training wheels” because it will prompt experienced users to try their breath-awareness skills in the real world – for example during stressful conversations. “Those are the times when you most need to know what’s happening in your body and feel confident about staying with these feelings, even if they’re unpleasant. That’s how we recover from stressors.”

So far, about 1,000 students and online users have tried prototypes of the app as research participants in Farb’s lab. Preliminary results show users gain confidence after a few weeks of playing.

Farb hopes to start testing the app at UTM later this year and release it to the public in 2027. “This summer, we’re fully gamifying the experience, adding in leaderboards and dashboards to track progress and avatars to substitute for the circle. Some of my students have used a blowfish.” 

Farb’s broader research program explores how to make the mental health benefits of meditation more accessible. Embracing the technology people already use is one way. “We know apps are a powerful way to engage people. Why not meet them where they are?”