A team at McLean Hospital says a five-minute, game-style smartphone app helped people pull back from catastrophizing and function better day to day after four weeks of use. In a national randomized trial, the tool, called HabitWorks, posted unusually strong short-term engagement for a mental health app, with roughly three quarters of participants still using it at week four. The developers are quick to stress that it is designed to sit alongside therapy, not replace it, as per The Boston Globe.
According to The Boston Globe, HabitWorks serves up short, personalized scenarios and awards points when users choose more benign or neutral interpretations. The study team describes this as training people to “think more flexibly.” The Globe also notes that the app folds in weekly mood check ins and a habit diary, and that the project grew out of McLean’s Cognition and Affect Research and Education (CARE) Lab.
The trial is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, which lists 340 adult participants across 44 states and a primary completion date in April 2025. Participants were randomized either to use HabitWorks or to a symptom tracking control condition. A preprint of the results on OSF Preprints reports that HabitWorks users showed greater gains in interpretation bias, overall symptom severity and daily functioning compared with the control group, while standard depression and anxiety scores improved in both groups.
How HabitWorks Works
HabitWorks delivers brief exercises that take about five minutes and unfold across roughly 50 game like scenarios, along with weekly mood check ins and a habit diary that tailors content to each user. The app’s website, HabitWorks, explains that its exercises present ambiguous everyday situations, then prompt users to practice less negative interpretations so that thinking habits can gradually shift over time.
Engagement And Evidence
The preprint notes that about 77.8 percent of people assigned to HabitWorks were still active at week four and 84 percent completed the final assessment, retention numbers that outpace what is typically seen with commercial mental health apps, according to OSF Preprints. By contrast, analyses of digital mental health tools often find sharp drop off, with one case series and engagement review reporting that average app use is measured in days rather than weeks JMIR Mental Health, and a retrospective evaluation concluding that only about 3 percent of commercial mental health apps have peer reviewed evidence behind them JMIR.
Funding And Availability
Project materials list support from the National Institute of Mental Health, citing award MH113600, according to HabitWorks, and coverage of the trial notes a roughly 700,000 dollar multi year NIMH grant. The app is not yet available to the general public and currently runs a waitlist for early access, and study authors say they hope to open it up more widely later this year, per The Boston Globe.
Researchers emphasize that HabitWorks is an early stage, self guided training tool, not a crisis intervention, and that more study is needed to understand who benefits most and how long improvements last. The trial record at ClinicalTrials.gov and commentary from the team in outlets such as Psychology Today both underline that larger follow up trials and implementation research will be key before HabitWorks is rolled out on a wide clinical scale.
