Mind The Bump App Review

When you're pregnant for the first time you can feel scared, excited, wondering and unsure all at the same time. For a first time parent, it is the beginning of an entirely different chapter of your life, one which you may be approaching with great expectations, concern, or joy. With so many emotions rolling around and so much uncertainty you can feel stressed and worried, or anxious, without even really realising why.

One of the things you can do to help yourself feel calmer and reduce stress and worry is meditation. Specifically, mindfulness meditation. Recent research shows many  benefits of mindfulness meditation, many of which are particularly useful to parents, such as reducing stress and emotional reactivity, and also increasing relationship satisfaction. 

If you're wondering how you could ever become a meditation guru in between having a baby, working and everything else in your life then wonder no more! Beyond Blue and Smiling Mind released a new app called " Mind the Bump" in November last year which aims to " help individuals and couples mentally and emotionally prepare for having a baby and becoming a new parent."

I thought I'd give it a whirl and let you know what I thought so you can decide whether it's right for you.... So here's my review of the Mind the Bump app.

Mind the Bump app

If you search for Mind the Bump in the app store or mindfulness pregnancy you'll find it. The first thing you need to do after downloading the app is Login for existing users, Sign In for new users or sign in using your facebook account. I'm always a bit wary about sharing personal information with apps, so I opted to Sign In. 

I was also asked to sign up for the eNewsletter which I did. I am interested to see what type of newsletters I receive and whether it will be tailored to me as a new parent.

Next up I was asked to decide what type of user I was. I selected "I am pregnant". 

Your Timeline

The app then took me to a timeline of 7 stages:

Stage 1 - Antenatal - First Trimester

Stage 2 - Antenatal - Second Trimester

Stage 3 - Antenatal - Third Trimester

Stage 4 - Postnatal 0-3 months

Stage 5 - Postnatal 4-6 months

Stage 6 - Postnatal 7-9 months

Stage 7 - Postnatal 10-24 months

For every stage there is a brief description of the desired outcomes, or areas of focus, and then a list of Everyday Practices including meditations (with a helpful timer to let you know how long it will take), and informal practices which are tips for you to consider in your day to day life. I like that it is tailored for each stage, and stays with you for your journey through pregnancy and the first 2 years which are challenging times! 

Meditations

I selected one of the meditations to do. At the start of the meditation the app asked me to rate how I was feeling across a number of areas. I have no idea why or what the purpose of this was, other than to assume that the information is somehow collected and used to analyse users behaviour.

The meditation I selected was calming, thoughtful and had a pleasant (slightly bossy) woman's voice. There was no background music, but I enjoyed it. 

I liked that it showed me how long it would take, and at the end, my dashboard was updated to show how many minutes of meditation I'd done and how many meditations I'd finished. A great feature if you're the type of person who likes to see their progress or feel like they've accomplished something. Based on the FAQs it seems that once you've set up an account you can't reset your progress (e.g. if you'd like to start back at zero next time you fall pregnant). The only way would be to set up a new account with a different email address. You can of course keep on doing the same meditations over and over without the progress updates on the dashboard though.

You can also explore the meditations by topic which is great if you're wanting to focus on a specific area.

Privacy Policy

The only thing about the app that irked me was the amount of data collected which seems unnecessary, however it does make sense that Beyond Blue would be using the aggregate data to improve their services and fine tune their marketing. The Privacy Policy is available in the app via the menu, just click on the three bars in the top left hand corner of the dashboard and go to 'Settings'. At the bottom of settings you can read the terms and conditions and the privacy policy. You can also access it on the  Mind the Bump website. Basically it's being used for research, data analysis and marketing.

" We may also use your data, to provide you with information about goods and services that may be of interest to you and we may contact you about these by post or telephone.

Smiling Mind will provide your email address to beyondblue upon consent (requested upon sign up and submitting an Account via the Mind the Bump App) so that beyondblue may contact you to provide you with information, products or services that may interest you.

Smiling Mind may also provide de-identified account usage information to beyondblue for research, data analysis and marketing purposes.

Other than the disclosures to beyondblue, we do not disclose information about identifiable individuals to our advertisers, but we may provide them with aggregate information about our users. We may also use such aggregate information to help advertisers or partners reach the kind of audience they want to target. We may make use of the personal data we have collected from you to enable us to comply with our advertisers' or partner’s wishes by displaying their advertisement to that target audience."

To minimise the amount of personal information being shared I would opt to Sign In manually instead of signing in with Facebook, I would skip providing the days till due date (I actually would recommend having a "due month" instead of "due date" to avoid over-focussing on whether you're 'overdue', al la Kate Middleton), and also skip analysing my feelings at the start of every meditation. Although perhaps I'm over cautious! I do trust Beyond Blue, and I really like that it's an Australian product.

Overall

This is a great app for parents or expectant parents with a LOT of amazing content that has been developed by professionals. It's amazing that it's free, it's well designed, and very easy to use. A great way to easily add some mindfulness to your day to day life. I also love that it's Australian, and my only gripe is the amount of info being collected seems more than I am used to in an app. Overall, I would recommend downloading it and adding some mindfulness to your day to day life. 

Imagine if we all practiced mindfulness, what a world we could live in.