When Stress Is Treated as Symptom, Not Signal
When Wellness Becomes Intervention
In April 2025, researchers at MIT and Bar-Ilan University published a paper in Mindfulness with the cautious title Smartphone Mindfulness Intervention Reduces Anxiety Symptoms and Perceived Stress in Autistic Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial. The authors — Cindy Li, Kimberly Wang, Isaac Treves, Lindsay Bungert, John Gabrieli, and Liron Rozenkrantz — wanted to know whether a customized mindfulness app could help autistic adults manage stress and anxiety.
The Headline
A smartphone app lowered anxiety and stress in autistic adults. That’s what the press release on psypost.org says. And yes, it’s true. But the way the story is told matters. When stress is presented as an autistic symptom instead of a rational response to hostile conditions, even good news carries a silence: the world itself is never asked to change.
Inside the Study
Eighty-nine autistic adults — average age 36, mostly white, most were women, some men, and a few transgender folks — used a customized mindfulness app for six weeks. Ten to fifteen minutes a day. A narrator of their choice, pacing that could be slowed or quickened, options for sitting or active practice. The intervention was built to be flexible, at least at the surface level.
In other words, it was a regular old mindfulness app — the kind marketed to anyone for stress relief — only this time tested on autistic people. And that’s the telling part: when neurotypical people use it, it’s called wellness. When autistic people use it, it becomes intervention. The results? Lower anxiety, lower stress, less negative mood. Trait anxiety scores dropped, though participants were not clinically diagnosed with anxiety disorders. More reported mindfulness. These gains held six weeks later. No adverse events. Almost three-quarters of participants completed most of the curriculum. Nearly everyone said the app was easy to use. By clinical trial standards, this is what success looks like.
The Frame
But notice what is not said. The paper introduces autism with deficit language: social communication difficulties, restricted interests. Stress is treated as an internal flaw to be managed and corrected. External causes — inaccessible workplaces, sensory-hostile environments, the ongoing demand to mask — go unnamed.
For neurotypicals, using an app for mindfulness is framed as self-care. For autistics, it becomes intervention. That shift in tone tells you whose comfort is being centered (hint: not autistic people).
Who Gains, Who Loses
The people who participated did walk away with relief. That matters. But the structure of the research still benefits institutions more than communities. Researchers get publishable results. App developers get validation. What autistic people get is another tool for coping, not a changed environment.
And who is left out? Anyone without a smartphone. Anyone with significant intellectual disability. Nonspeaking autistics. Exclusion criteria kept the sample narrow, and privilege defined the boundaries of who could be studied.
Why It Matters
By research standards, it was a solid trial. Groups were balanced, the effects were noticeable and most people stuck with it. Participants appreciated small touches of choice: which voice guided them, whether they could move while practicing. These design details should not be overlooked.
But the absence of autistic collaboration shows. The intervention was adapted for us, not with us. The authors admit as much. What might the program have looked like if autistic people had been partners in building it, not just subjects to be measured?
One more detail worth noting: while negative affect decreased significantly, positive affect did not show the same improvement. Even in success, the picture is partial.
The Unasked Questions
What if the app had been offered to teachers, clinicians or managers — the people who create so much of the stress autistic adults endure?
What if autistic designers had shaped the curriculum to reflect our sensory realities and cognitive rhythms?
Why stop at symptom relief when the structures causing distress remain untouched?
And who decides whether mindfulness apps become supports for autonomy or just cheaper stand-ins for systemic change?
The Signal Beneath the Symptom
This study proves something worth remembering: autistic adults can benefit from mindfulness. But the deeper signal is still being missed. Autistic anxiety is not a disease to be managed. It is a rational response to a world that refuses to bend. Until research turns its gaze outward — to the environments that keep us in survival mode — the burden will remain ours alone. That doesn’t make the relief less real for those who used the app; it just makes the bigger question harder to ignore.