Therapy is not easy, but with the right sustained effort, it very reliably reduces symptoms of distress and improves well-being. The scientific community now thinks that many mood and anxiety disorders – like major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder – have in common that they are sustained by changes in how our mind perceives and processes information, chooses thoughts, and makes decisions. For example, when we feel anxious, we are more likely to interpret everyday ambiguous situations as threatening – we may be more likely to jump to conclusions that others are out to get us when we receive a poorly worded email. As a result, our body is more likely to be in a fight-or-flight state, which again predisposes our mind to perceive information in a negative way – and so we may enter feedback loops of physiological and mental processes that sustain our anxiety and depression. Cognitive therapies (like CBT) aim to break this cycle.

There are many different kinds of therapy – scientists have found that the most effective modern therapies are those that tend to “fix” how the mind processes information and the way we make sense of our physiological fight-or-flight discomfort when that does occur. But it’s not easy to change these patterns in the brain and body – after a while, they tend to be habitual. So, to meaningfully improve our experience, we need to build new “attentional habits” that begin to overwrite the old ways of thinking. The good news is that once the automatic cognitive tendencies have been changed for the better, the change is long-lasting. This is why therapy is a key to lasting mental health.

To create these changes in the brain, we use therapeutic exercises, a kind of “homework,” which therapists assign based on clinical evidence. We have strong scientific evidence that the quantity and quality of exercises completed are some of the strongest predictors of healing. And these findings make sense; if our patterns of mind and attention are driving our discomfort, the more such patterns get interrupted (and our mind brought back to a gentle state of optimism), the more we improve. Clinical studies confirm this: symptom improvement is up to twice as significant amongst those who do their exercises between sessions compared to those who do not [1,2] – it is the key to the cognitive habits that support a resilient, healthy mind for the long term.

For strong improvement, the typical therapy format of one hour per week was probably never quite enough; the real work is always done between the sessions. But those unsupervised exercises are hard to stay on top of, if for no other reason than because a lack of motivation and hope are often symptoms of mental health conditions.

Based on scientific research on how we learn and how our brain encodes information, a little bit of practice every day is likely a lot more effective than doing a lot of exercise in only one big session [3]. Our brain tends to encode new patterns every night when we sleep, so it’s best to practice a little bit every day. This way, new patterns can be encoded every single day. This is true with all learning tasks, including learning new vocabulary words [4]. So, in conclusion, daily practice is key to quick and lasting improvement of how our minds work, which in turn is the basis for improving mental health.

At Jimini, we have read this science carefully and are developing solutions that finally make it easy to keep up with daily practice with the help of AI, which can tailor practices and help users stay on track. So, an experience that’s a little more like Duolingo – a few minutes every day – rather than being handed a textbook for a new language we’d like to learn. We are building the next generation of mental health care that works more seamlessly – ‘in the nooks and crannies of our lives’ – and, as a result, helps get our minds back to a healthy, natural state as quickly as possible.