Jason Meno
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jason Meno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks, David. Yeah. So quick background. So I've been working on the Feeling Great app for a few years now. And more recently, with the advent of AI technology, there's been all sorts of interesting developments. new ways that we can apply team CBT to like delivering it through an app. But as part of this process, I really have to experiment.
I have to try things out and see what works and what doesn't work. And so I created this tool. I called it the new cool tools club. And it was a group of just people who signed up to help try out all these new cool tools that I was going to be building and see what works and what doesn't work.
The New Cool Tools Club.
No refunds. No, it's free. And basically, we reached out to a bunch of the podcast listeners and people who were on your mailing list, David, and just asked people, hey, who wants to sign up to try out new cool stuff that we're building? And so with this group, I started asking the question, well, what do I want to test? What do I want to try out? And I don't remember what kind of
bit me, that got me to want to do this, but I just thought to myself, well, it would be really cool just to put meditation to the test. Because, you know, in team with methods, you really can use anything as a method as long as you're testing before and after, as long as you look at what changes are happening.
And there's lots of different questions that creeped up here of like, okay, well, if we did do meditation as a technique, how would that work? There's a number of problems that happen with this. For one, how long do you meditate for? There's no real consensus on how long you should meditate to get a maximum or beneficial dose. Should you meditate for 10 minutes? Should it be an hour?
Should it be every day? Should it be multiple times a day? There's all these questions that came up here of how do we even create a good experiment for this? And I started digging into the literature and just seeing what research has been done so far on depression, anxiety, mood changes, and meditation. And there's a lot. I mean, it's been pretty heavily studied.
But one of the big problems is that a lot of these... Research designs have been too focused on long term meditation. It's like, hey, let's meditate for many, many weeks at a time. So they'll enter like a six or eight week meditation program or or mindfulness based stress reduced production program that has meditation in it. So that's where a lot of the studies are kind of hard to parse out of.
Well. we're not interested in spending weeks and weeks meditating. We're interested in seeing like, how can we change your thoughts and feelings right now at this moment? So I needed to come up with a study design that would let us test that. So the other problem with meditation is that there's lots of different kinds of meditation.
So even if you do decide like, okay, we're going to meditate for 10 minutes or an hour, what meditation do you do? What is it that might have an actual effect on your thoughts and feelings? Because there's all sorts of types of meditation that range from focusing on your breath to visualizing things in your mind to purposefully imagining beautiful and wonderful things.
So there's so many directions this could go in. So here's the experiment I set up. I picked five very different kinds of meditations. And I found recordings that were done by professional meditation teachers. A lot of them were actually from the University of California, San Diego.
They have a mindfulness center, and they've uploaded a bunch of their mindfulness training and meditation, guided meditations online. So what I did was I picked five different meditations, and each one was 10 minutes each.
I wanted it to be less than an hour. I really wanted people going to this experiment that they wouldn't have to spend more than an hour meditating at max. So that was just a choice I made to say, let's try to make this experiment one hour long. And I want to put a bunch of different meditations in there. And in my opinion, five minutes is too short. And 20 minutes is quite long.
And actually, a lot of the meditations that I found online with guided meditations were about 10 minutes each. So it just fit in really well to do. Let's do 10 minute meditations. And for an hour, five should be plenty. So, so in reality, there was 50 minutes of meditation, but I had them do a lot of questionnaire answering and, and, and there was a bit of an intro.
So the total experience was one hour long start to finish.
That's right. Yep. So so part part of this was so this this kind of gets into some problems with the study, which we'll talk about later with the data and what this means and how to interpret it.
But yes, this was mostly David's fans, people who are very familiar with David because they're part of they were originally part of the listeners of this podcast and they joined this new cool tools club as well. And so this is kind of how the funnel of people came in. But I essentially I just emailed the club and I said, hey, I've created this course. It's one hour long.
So if you've got an hour to spend, please take this course out and try this experiment with me. And there was about how many people that I have? Let me look at that numbers again. We had a total number of 60 people who joined. Wow. And of those 60 people, and we'll get into these numbers more, 35 of them actually completed the whole thing. And 25 dropped out.
So we have 35 points of data of people who went through this process.
Uh... No, I could certainly. Well, I don't know if I can actually. The app is anonymous, so I don't think I can reverse. No, I wouldn't have a way to reach out, actually.
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