Calming Minds Study

Conditions

• Anxiety
• Anxiety Depression
• Depression
• Rumination - Thoughts
• Worry

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

18 Years - N/A

Healthy Volunteers

Not accepted

Interventions

• Be Specific — BEHAVIORAL
  Digital therapy lessons and coaching that emphasize skills in shifting from unhelpful abstract to helpful concrete processing style. Helping participants make changes to processing style to improve problem-solving and reduce emotional reactivity. Training concrete thinking to reduce RNT by increasing specific contextualized detail in description of events and plans.
• Be Kind — BEHAVIORAL
  Digital therapy lessons and coaching that emphasize skills for replacing self-criticism with self-compassion. Helping participants shift toward a kinder, more validating way of relating to themselves to reduce the emotional patterns that sustain RNT. Training self-compassion skills to counter harsh self-evaluation and support emotional regulation.
• Be Present — BEHAVIORAL
  Digital therapy lessons and coaching that emphasize skills for improving attention to present-moment experience. Helping participants redirect attention away from unhelpful mental ruminations by strengthening mindfulness and task absorption. Training present-moment awareness to interrupt the cognitive processes that maintain RNT by cultivating absorption in direct sensory experience.
• Break Habit — BEHAVIORAL
  Digital therapy lessons and coaching that emphasize skills for disrupting repetitive negative thinking as a habitual mental behavior. Helping participants identify early warning signs, use stimulus-control strategies, form implementation intentions, and practice alternative responses to build more adaptive habits. Training new behavioral and cognitive routines to replace automatic RNT patterns.
• Psychoeducation — BEHAVIORAL
  Digital therapy lessons and coaching that provide foundational information about repetitive negative thinking and why it occurs. Helping participants understand explanations for their symptoms and difficulties, which reduces the search for understanding, insight and certainty shown to drive RNT, and normalizes their experiences. This corresponds with the RF-CBT components of individualized rationale, psychoeducation, empathy and understanding.

Study Details

The goal of this study is to understand why certain treatments help people reduce repetitive negative thinking (RNT), which is common in many mental health problems. We want to: 1. Figure out what actually causes repetitive negative thinking to decrease when people use cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). 2. Find out which parts of RNT-focused CBT are the most important - the parts that truly make a difference in reducing RNT. The main result we will look at is how much a person's repetitive negative thought patterns change from the start of the study to the end of treatment (16 weeks). We will measure this using the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire at baseline and week 16.

Key Dates

Start date

Jun 8, 2026

Status verified

May 2026

Primary completion

Jun 14, 2028

Completion

Jun 14, 2028

Study Design

Enrollment

500 participants (estimated)

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Intervention model

FACTORIAL

Primary purpose

TREATMENT

Arms

• Active Comparator: Psychoeducation Only
  Participants receive only core psychoeducation without any additional RF-CBT components.
• Experimental: Be Specific
  Participants receive training in increasing specificity and concreteness ("Be Specific") in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Be Kind
  Participants receive training in self-compassion ("Be Kind") in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit
  Participants receive training in breaking the habit of repetitive negative thinking ("Break Habit") in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Be Present
  Participants receive training in absorption in direct experience ("Be Present") in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Be Specific + Be Kind
  Participants receive training in both specificity/concreteness and self-compassion in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Be Specific + Be Present
  Participants receive training in both specificity/concreteness and absorption in direct experience in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Be Kind + Be Present
  Participants receive training in both self-compassion and absorption in direct experience in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Be Specific + Be Kind + Be Present
  Participants receive training in specificity/concreteness, self-compassion, and absorption in direct experience in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit + Be Specific
  Participants receive training in both breaking the habit of RNT and increasing specificity/concreteness in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit + Be Kind
  Participants receive training in both breaking the habit of RNT and self-compassion in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit + Be Specific + Be Kind
  Participants receive training in breaking the habit of RNT, specificity/concreteness, and self-compassion in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit + Be Present
  Participants receive training in both breaking the habit of RNT and absorption in direct experience in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit + Be Specific+ Be Present
  Participants receive training in breaking the habit of RNT, specificity/concreteness, and absorption in direct experience in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: Break Habit + Be Kind + Be Present
  Participants receive training in breaking the habit of RNT, self-compassion, and absorption in direct experience in addition to standard psychoeducation.
• Experimental: ALL
  Participants receive training in all four RF-CBT components: breaking the habit of RNT, specificity/concreteness, self-compassion, and absorption in direct experience; in addition to standard psychoeducation.

Primary Outcome Measure

Change in Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire score from baseline to post-intervention [ Time Frame: Baseline, 16 weeks ]

Locations (1)

Find similar trials in Imperial, CA

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