Meeting people where they are: Crowdsourcing goal-specific personalized wellness practices

Objectives: Despite the development of efficacious wellness interventions, sustainable wellness behavior change remains challenging. To optimize engagement, initiating small behaviors that build upon existing practices congruent with individuals’ lifestyles may promote sustainable wellness behavior change. In this study, we crowd-sourced helpful, flexible, and engaging wellness practices to identify a list of those commonly used for improving sleep, productivity, and physical, emotional, and social wellness from participants who felt they had been successful in these dimensions. Method: We recruited a representative sample of 992 U.S. residents to survey the wellness dimensions in which they had achieved success and their specific wellness practices. Results: Responses were aggregated across demographic, health, lifestyle factors, and wellness dimension. Exploration of these data revealed that there was little overlap in preferred practices across wellness dimensions. Within wellness dimensions, preferred practices were similar across demographic factors, especially within the top 3–4 most selected practices. Interestingly, daily wellness practices differ from those typically recommended as efficacious by research studies and seem to be impacted by health status (e.g., depression, cardiovascular disease). Additionally, we developed and provide for public use a web dashboard that visualizes and enables exploration of the study results. Conclusions: Findings identify personalized, sustainable wellness practices targeted at specific wellness dimensions. Future studies could leverage tailored practices as recommendations for optimizing the development of healthier behaviors. Author summary: Despite many proven wellness programs, making healthy habits stick long-term remains a challenge for most people. To help overcome this, our study took a novel approach—crowdsourcing wellness practices that people already incorporate into their current lifestyles and routines. To capture these wellness practices, we gathered input from 992 individuals who felt they had been successful within specific wellness dimensions (sleep, productivity, and physical, emotional and social wellness). Intriguingly, we found little overlap in practices across different wellness dimensions, suggesting that practices are specific to dimension. Within each dimension, the most popular practices were fairly consistent across individuals, no matter their background. However, an individual’s specific health conditions did influence some of their preferred practices. For example, experiencing depression impacted which wellness practices participants gravitated towards to improve their emotional wellness. To facilitate visualization and exploration of these results, we developed an online dashboard that displays the wellness practices individuals reported as effective for improving each wellness dimension and allows users to filter by demographic, health, and lifestyle factors. Through this work, we aim to help researchers develop wellness interventions that can be tailored to each individual matched to their personal factors. By recommending wellness practices tailored to each individual, users may feel more engaged and be able to better incorporate the practices into their lifestyle and sustain them for longer.