By Anne Levin
Noom, the behavior change program known originally for its weight management platform, has introduced an art therapy initiative. Announced this week, the “Mindful Art Break” marks the first venture for the company, which operates from offices at 1 Palmer Square, into mental health.
The initiative is designed to induce awe, reduce stress, and improve psychological well-being via a weekly art habit.
“Blending the science of positive psychology with the emotional resonance of fine art, Mindful Art Break encourages members to pause, reflect, and reconnect,” according to a press release. “Each week, members are invited into a short ‘microhabit’ designed to ease anxiety, reduce stress, and cultivate positive feelings like joy, calm, awe, and fascination.”
The idea came to Geoff Cook, Noom’s CEO since 2023, through a suggestion by a client that art therapy be added to the company’s offerings.
“She connected to me first by email,” Cook said. “We were in a new concepts phase, and were new in the building. She suggested art therapy — not a fully hatched idea, just the concept of bringing art into the Noom experience to boost mental health. We said great, let’s look into it.”
The company began extensive research of the idea. “Noom set out to examine whether making art a habit for our members might produce flourishing benefits for them,” according to the release. “We did extensive research in neuroaesthetics and positive psychology. We surveyed over 5,000 people to see which works of art sparked the strongest emotional uplift, and leveraged AI with custom prompting, leveraging our data to score thousands of public domain artworks.”
“We felt this was an area that could help our members,” Cook said. “We saw the ability as well to advance some of the thinking in the field. We’re working on our own peer-reviewed study coming out of the work we did.”
Users of the program get 10 works of art weekly on their home screens. They earn rewards, or “seeds,” Noom’s “microcurrency,” for each mindful art break they complete. This “motivates people to take action,” Cook said. “We use it to get you to do healthy action. At the moment, you can cash it out for gift cards or donate to charities we support. It’s relatively small, but a little incentive can boost motivation. We like this concept of giving you this really small microhabit of positive activity.”
Works of art scoring in the top 10 for boosting wellbeing include Solar Eclipse by Howard Russell Butler and St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch by Claude Lorrain, both in the soon-to-reopen Princeton University Art Museum. Additional high scorers are by Frederic Edwin Church, Adolphe Bouguereau, and J.M.W. Turner, and George Caleb Bingham, in the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Noom, which also has offices in New York City, moved into 1 Palmer Square just over a year ago. The company has since expanded to include more space in the Princeton building.
The new program “underscores Noom’s continued expansion beyond weight management into whole-person, everyday well-being,” the release reads. “Mindful Art Break is a direct result of Noom’s Blueprint of Everyday Wellness, which guides the company’s product development and strategy.”
“We treat the whole person,” Cook said. “We consider mental health the foundation. Eating healthy is the tip of the iceberg.”