Using Meditations and Mobile Applications to Increase Mindfulness and Self-Compassion: A Scoping Review

Background. Taking care of mental health is a concept that is becoming increasingly popular in the media. One of the most popular methods of improving emotional state is the use of meditation, but little is known about the impact of such practices on a person. Objective. This review is aimed at studying the current state of the literature on the use of meditation and mindfulness applications to improve mental health. It attempts to answer questions related to the effectiveness of using meditation techniques, as well as to find out how the frequency of using the COVID topic in articles in this area has changed. Methods. This review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR recommendations for the search and selection of studies. The search was conducted on the popular scientific database Scopus. Results. This review included 40 studies from 153 search results. The thematic synthesis of the documents led to several definable analytical topics: the use of mobile applications for meditation, the use of meditation as a method of preventing emotional and professional burnout. The review found that covid 19 has increased the popularity of using mindfulness and self-compassion to prevent mental problems and burnout. Conclusion. Not all the articles had enough information about the sufficient influence of meditation on human consciousness, some of them were on the topic of the influence of meditation more from a medical point of view than from a psychological point of view, and some of them were incorrectly formatted or did not have links to sources.