Is gamification in wellness just a gimmick? | Canada Voices

You could spend the entire day playing games in the name of your health.

There’s the star you earn in the morning when you keep up your meditation streak on the Calm app, followed by an achievement badge when your afternoon workout helps you complete the latest in-app challenge and a reminder that you’re only 50 per cent to your hydration goal for the day. Before you wind down for the day, you might run up and down the stairs a few times to close the activity rings on your Apple watch.

The gamification of wellness – essentially, using games and rewards to incentivize people toward ostensibly healthier behaviours – is everywhere in our tech obsessed world. What’s less clear is whether it actually contributes to our long-term wellbeing, or if these apps are just another clever way tech companies are keeping us glued to our phones.

A 2024 systemic review and meta-analysis published in eClinicalMedicine found using gamified apps led to a “trivial” increase in steps, as well as small but important reductions in body mass index and weight. Still, the researchers acknowledge that, as this is an emerging field, there aren’t yet many long-term studies on these interventions.

That said, the concept isn’t new. Gamifying wellness is just a twenty-first century twist on something humans have done for a long time, says Catherine Sabiston, director of the Mental Health and Physical Activity Research Centre at the University of Toronto.

“It’s driven by a long history of reward systems. Gamification is ultimately a reward system for behaviour, and at the end of the day what we know about reward systems is that it’s extrinsic motivation,” she says. “It’s not building the type of motivation that we need to continue to engage in the behaviours.”

This kind of gamification does have some value: “[It gets] people started, for those people who are maybe on the fence in deciding whether they’re going to engage in mindfulness of exercise,” she notes. “It does create a sense of ‘I can do this.’”

However, gamification can fall short because users are typically not setting goals or metrics for themselves, something Sabiston says is a key part of actually creating a sustainable, long-term behaviour change.

“You’re being driven by something that you’re not necessarily choosing for fun or enjoyment, those intrinsic reasons,” she says. “It’s also a very cyclical situation, where one break of a streak or one day that you don’t do the behaviour, you give up.”

Gamification can also encourage a kind of box-ticking that can turn healthy behaviours into a chore, rather than something you’re consciously choosing because they make your life better. Pacing in your living room to hit your step count on your Fitbit, for example, rather than going for a walk with a friend, which boosts your spirits along with your heart rate.

This gamification may also have a dark side for some people, adds Dr. Lindsay Duncan, who is the co-director of the McGill Theories and Interventions in Exercise and Health Psychology Lab (TIE), where she has studied the use of games in everything from preventing youth smoking to encouraging exercise.

Duncan has found that gamified wellness apps can actually trigger harmful behaviour, including obsessing over the data they collect, which can sometimes translate into disordered action, including working out too much or restricting calories.

“I have enough evidence to say that [for] people who have an established harmful relationship to physical activity, these apps are worse than they are helpful,” she says. “One of the things we try to do if we’re helping people re-establish a healthy relationship with exercise is to take their mind off the numbers and tracking, and help them think about just enjoying movement for what it is.” The relentless monitoring that often comes with gamification, especially in exercise, is “counter-intuitive” to that work.

Duncan is not entirely against gamified wellness apps; she says success rests on the gamified element actually reinforcing a real life skill or habit, like helping you monitor how much exercise you’re getting or helping you plan out your activity in a week. Some apps, she adds, can also help people stay connected to their friends through competitions or leaderboards, or even just seeing where folks went on their morning runs.

Cassey Natura, a B.C.-based content creator and founder of the self-care and self-improvement SimplyHerWellness, has similarly mixed views about how effective gamification can be in this context. She notes that using these apps can encourage consistency, and says folks with ADHD can find them particularly helpful, especially in the meditation space.

“They help break things down and make routines feel more manageable,” she says. “With meditation apps in particular, having guided sessions you can access anytime makes it easier to build the habit. Sometimes, people just need that little extra motivation or structure to get started.”

But, she does see a few red flags with this ubiquitous tech, including the way they can turn wellness into just another digital task.

“I spend so much time on screens already, so I’ve found that doing wellness practices off-screen – like journaling, yoga classes, therapy, hot/cold therapy – actually helps me feel more grounded and present,” she says.

And of course, there’s a built-in hyper focus on performance that Natura sees as a red flag.

“That kind of pressure can be discouraging. I think it’s important to remember that rest is also part of wellness, and it’s okay to fall off sometimes – that’s normal,” she says.