Research news: Virtual Reality (VR) Mindfulness for service users

After an initial test with staff, Forward recently ran a six-month pilot mindfulness intervention using the Flow mediation app loaded onto Meta Quest VR headsets. Each weekly session was facilitated by a member of Forward staff who would guide three participants (all Forward clients in recovery engaged with our Forward Connect service) through one traditional and one VR meditation. Each meditation on the Flow app involves guided audio meditations delivered in photo-realistic natural visual surroundings.

Immersive mindfulness

Mindfulness is a widely used and encouraged practice for those in recovery. It can provide a range of benefits including stress and anxiety reduction as well as improved ability to cope with difficult thoughts.

Mindfulness involves deep levels of concentration which can be difficult to achieve, particularly for those living in environments with many visual or auditory distractions. Using VR headsets with guided audio meditations – as offered by the Flow app – offers an immersive experience that may help to overcome these potential barriers to the necessary concentration required for mindfulness practice.

Replicating natural surroundings

Research has shown that exposure to natural surroundings can have a powerful positive impact on mental health and wellbeing – and even videos of natural landscapes has been shown to have a calming effect on high security prisoners.

The Flow app transports participants to photo-realistic VR replicas of natural surroundings filmed in Iceland including lakes, mountains and waterfalls. Soothing nature sounds and music is also played in the background of the spoken audio guided meditations.

The benefits of this VR mindfulness are therefore two-fold; it offers both an assistance with overcoming distraction which can impede mindfulness practice, as well as visual and audio nature exposure which comes with its own wellbeing benefits.

Feedback

The participants who took part in the trial were largely positive and enjoyed the interactive, immersive and visual elements of the experience. They also gave us some really useful practical feedback on the headphones that we used and the content of the meditations we selected.

The meditation was very soothing and I really enjoyed it…It was amazing having never used a VR headset before. It was a really positive experience and for people who say they can’t meditate or won’t, giving them something visual to look at where you are completely submerged in the headset is a really great idea.

Mary Taylor, Forward Connect member

Forward now plans to expand this project into other service areas, offering the experience to more clients whilst building on participant feedback to refine the intervention.