Promoting wellbeing in pregnancy: a multi-component positive psychology and mindfulness-based mobile app

Pregnancy involves important changes for women of all ages: it is a time of physical and psychological change. Women may experience anxiety and negative emotions, which can negatively influence their wellbeing and make difficult their adaptation to the new role of mothers. Furthermore, poor mental well-being and difficulties in emotion regulation can negatively affect obstetric outcomes, development of the child and neonatal adaptation. The aim of this work is to present a new self-applied multi-component positive psychology- and mindfulness-based intervention (MPPMI) supported by a mobile App addressed to pregnant women. The core of this MPPMI is to combine traditional positive psychology activities with mindfulness-based exercises. The purpose of this MPPMI App (available in both Android and IOS versions) is to increase positive feelings, behaviors and cognitions and to learn strategies to better cope with anxiety to get adaptively and positively through pregnancy. The intervention is composed by five modules, for a total length of five weeks, and each module includes three activities. The future steps will be to carry out a pilot study to examine the program implementation and preliminary evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention on women’s mental well-being, both at the end of the intervention and after childbirth.