I spent months using a research-backed stress management app — and it sort of worked

Victor Ruiz Garcia/Reuters

The American Institute of Stress doesn't mince its words: Stress is killing you.

A full 44% of Americans say they are more stressed than they were five years ago — a trend that has helped drive an increased interest in prescription pills and industries like talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

An app called Lantern could help.

Lantern caters to stressed-out people who want a middle ground between slogging through a self-help book and lying on a couch in someone's office. It's similar to other apps designed to increase well-being, like Joyable (for social anxiety) and Happify (meant to increase joy).

Lantern relies on CBT, which sees thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as inherently intertwined. If you can step back and observe the cause of your emotions, you can change your future behavior and stress levels, the thinking goes. While somewhat contentious, CBT has a great deal of research behind it (Lantern's own program included) suggesting its benefits.

I spent a few months using Lantern to see for myself what the smartphone app could do.

Victor Ruiz Garcia/ReutersOverall, the experience was a positive one.

I'm not a stressed-out person day to day, so I was a little hesitant. But I'm also human, which means I experience the same hangups a lot of people have: money, relationships, work. The usual stuff.

So I kept an open mind the first time my coach sent me a message.

Her name was Maya, and I instantly felt comfortable talking to her. When we had our initial call to discuss my goals for the program, she offered gentle probing questions to learn how I normally handle my stress. She didn't seek to resolve the stress directly, like a therapist might. She was a coach. She wanted to help me help myself.

"This is not therapy," Alejandro Foung, Lantern's co-founder and CEO, told me. "We don't do a diagnosis. We don't do a treatment plan."

Instead, Lantern walks users through techniques like muscle relaxation and deep breathing. Maybe you lie on your bed for five minutes, shutting off all distractions, concentrating only on taking air in through your nose and exhaling it through your mouth.

Or maybe you locate five objects in the room, five smells, five noises, and five textures; then you do it again but only find four of each, and so on until you hit one. The technique is called "grounding," and it's meant to make you feel more present, less scatter-brained.

Victor Ruiz Garcia/ReutersWhen I tried these techniques, I felt less stressed.

The problem, at least for me, was that opening the app began to feel like homework. I don't carry much stress, and when I do I generally look for solutions, not coping mechanisms. So escaping to a coach felt like I was actually escalating the problem, rather than diffusing it.

As a result, my usage fell off.

"We're probably not for everyone," Foung says. "We think we could be used by anyone and have benefits, but it'll depend on who you are and what makes sense."

But like I said, my experience was a positive one.

I've used several of the techniques on my own when stress has bubbled up. My favorite is probably the deep breathing. Closing my eyes and avoiding all technology, even for just a few minutes, helps center me enough to where I can regain my focus.

It was also surprising to learn the difference between self-care activities and self-indulgence activities.

I used to consider exercise and eating a healthy snack to be in line with relaxing on the couch and watching TV, but Lantern warned me against that trap.

The first two are self-care, the second two self-indulgence.

The self-indulgent ones aren't necessarily bad, Lantern tells me, but while they "may provide you with short-term comfort or satisfaction ... they don't alter your state of mind, give you energy, or build your resilience."

Now that I'm aware of that distinction, I'll probably find more productive outlets when I'm stressed than seeing what Netflix shows I have waiting for me.

Ultimately, if I carried more stress normally, I probably would have gotten more of these helpful tips. I would have relied more on Maya to recommend one technique over another. And I would have seen the app as a haven for my negative feelings, not an echo chamber for them.

"Our objective is not to eliminate your stress. That's just not realistic," says Foung. "Our goal is that you feel much better-equipped to deal with the stressful things that will happen in your life. And ultimately, that should result in you feeling less stressed overall."

Foung says Lantern users are encouraged to share as much or as little with their coaches as they want. In that way, I see the ideal user being someone who likes to share their challenges with someone — someone who likes to feel heard. For someone like me, who is more utilitarian and would rather exercise my stress away instead of contemplating it, the system felt forced.

Still, there's a real need for an app like Lantern, and plenty of people could probably benefit from giving the experience a try.

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