It's an understatement to say that the last year caught most of us off guard. Between homeschooling, working from home, and cobbling together home gyms, we spent most of our lives, well, in our homes. City-dwellers with limited outside space felt like their walls were closing in on them, while those in more rural areas felt isolated and cut off from other humans. It was hard to win in 2020, and no place seemed perfect.
The angst we collectively experienced wasn't about external geography so much as it was about our internal landscapes. Regardless of where we live or what amenities we had access to, 2020 took a toll on us. Most people were unprepared to live through a pandemic, and anxiety piqued as the pandemic evolved and our lives felt increasingly uncertain. As a result, our physical and emotional health suffered.
As a massage therapist with almost two decades of experience treating clients' minds and bodies, I know a few things about self-care, but many of those tools were no longer available. With limited access to our previous ways of living, we all had to find alternative ways to take care of ourselves inside and out.
Despite the vaccine rollout that started mid-December, there's no guarantee that 2021 will be easier, but we know it will be different. If there's anything 2020 prepared us for, it's unpredictability.
2020 was full of lessons, and one of them was to develop resilience and a willingness to embrace the unknown and accept what is. We're entering 2021 with profound potential for understanding ourselves and more resources than ever to help us live healthy, productive lives despite the ever-changing circumstances. There's never been a better time to take control of our health, and these tech-based health companies are a great place to begin.
Ten Percent Happier was born out of ABC News anchor Dan Harris' nationally televised panic attack. Harris knew he needed to make changes after that, so he set out on a journey with a cast of characters that included a pastor, a self-help guru, and a flock of neuroscientists. Harris started the process as a skeptic and wrote about it in his 2014 memoir, 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works.
Harris' goal was to rein in the voice in his head, but he found the idea of meditation "repellant," though further research led him to a long list of science-backed health benefits. The keyword—that's tossed around lightly, but often misunderstood—is mindfulness, which Harris defines as "the ability to see what's going on in your mind at any given moment without getting carried away by it."
In 2016, Harris connected with CEO Ben Rubin, and they launched Ten Percent Happier the company. "The ways we seek happiness as a society isn't effective," Rubin says, "and Ten Percent Happier has a larger message that while having our basic needs met are prerequisites to building a happy foundation for a life, happiness isn't going to come to us via material needs such as, "a wife and two kids, a dog, a house in the suburbs, and financial security."
Many people realize that they do all the things and get all the stuff, but they're still not happy. "Trying to relax more, trying to give ourselves time for self-care, and trying to make our bodies appear a certain way will quickly lead us to the conclusion that something is missing," Rubin says. So what is it? What are we missing?
Rubin says that the secret isn't well kept. "For thousands of years, religious and spiritual traditions have looked at the human mind and helped us understand how to orient ourselves in ways that lead to sustainable happiness." Buddhism calls it mindfulness, but most spiritual traditions have a similar aspect that encourages leaning into the present moment and accepting it with self-compassion.
Ten Percent Happier's goal is to make this way of thinking and moving through the world accessible to the average person who might otherwise turn away from mindfulness practices because they seem too New Age-y or out there. The app and service try to connect the dots and deliver relatable wisdom that people can use to improve their lives.
One thing that makes the Ten Percent Happier app unique is the "relatable wisdom" that it packages into doable 10 to 15 minute blocks. Each one begins with Harris chatting with one of the meditation teachers about a universal topic (like how they relate to emotion or how they seek happiness) followed by a five- to 10-minute meditation with that teacher. Relatable wisdom is this combination of learning and instruction that can help guide you toward happiness in manageable amounts of time.
Most people define happiness by proxy measures—exercise, eating well, and getting sleep—but Rubin says that, "True, sustainable happiness is a deep understanding that regardless of what the world brings you, that you are okay and you can have compassion for yourself and others and exist in that moment."
Rubin acknowledges how hard this is and that it's not something that can just be done like making a decision to “just be happy,” but rather it's a path we move along. The Ten Percent Happier podcast is free and a great place to begin learning about this process. The seven-day trial membership unlocks all the features so you can see if the service is a fit for you and your needs.
If 2020 showed us anything, it's that we need human connection. But connecting with humans in real life during the pandemic has been limited at best. While a meditation app is a great resource to have in our pockets because more mindfulness will always benefit us, Coa offers something different: therapist-led, interactive, emotional fitness classes.
Coa—short for coalesce, which means "growing together" was cofounded by Alexa Meyer and Dr. Emily Anhalt, a clinical psychologist and now, chief clinical officer of Coa. Their goal is to treat mental health the same way people treat physical health—like a proactive, daily practice you commit to. Coa has been offering live community classes for free, but officially launches February 10 with an eight-week series of classes that will cost about $30 each. They’ll also continue to offer drop-in classes starting at $25.
During the pandemic, Coa offered timely classes such as "Dealing With Anxiety During COVID-19," and "When the Celebrations are Cancelled - Dealing with Missed Milestones." Coa also offers non-pandemic-related classes such as "Working Through Imposter Syndrome" and "Adulting for Real." The service’s classes are all online for the moment, but when it's safe, they plan to start live classes in New York and San Francisco. "Our belief is that the true mechanism of healing is through relationships," Anhalt says, "And it's really hard to have a one-way healing relationship."
Coa's classes require active participation, complete with breakout rooms and accountability exercises. They don't want to "create a culture where people put this on in the background and go do other things," Anhalt points out, and "Like a gym for physical fitness, Coa's gym for emotional fitness requires presence and commitment. We're creating an intentional space where people are there to spot and support each other."
I can attest to the power of this method. I was moving when I took my first Coa class with Jamie Goldstein, Coa’s Therapy Experience Lead. Exhausted, I set up my laptop on a footstool in the corner of a room full of boxes. I couldn't even find a pillow to sit on, but I quickly forgot how uncomfortable the wood floor was under me, and I left the class feeling inspired, excited, and motivated.
Because emotional fitness is like physical fitness—something we need to continually work on—Coa's team is creating their next-level 201 classes with names such as Emotionally Fit Parenting, Emotionally Fit Partnership, and Emotional Fitness for Grief.
The mind is in the body, so it's ineffective to treat them as separate things. Enter Parsley Health. The service’s sole founder is Robin Berzin, a woman who was a yoga and meditation teacher before she became a doctor. Berzin's second child was born in February 2020, which also coincided with the start of the pandemic and a quick pivot to take her entire practice online.
Berzin's inspiration started back in college, when she wasn't pre-med but where she took a course on cancer. The comprehensive course including everything about cancer—the biology, genetic research, and sociology—which coincided with Berzin's grandmother's struggle with and death from colon cancer.
That combination of that college course and her grandmother's death gave Berzin an understanding that her grandmother had died "because of smoking cigarettes, SAD (the Standard American Diet), and poor preventive care," she said in an interview. Berzin didn't grow up knowing anything about self-care, but discovered yoga after college, and that's when she had her lightbulb moment of realizing "the body is the ultimate vehicle to a positive, healthy mindset."
Berzin now considers herself a bit obsessed with the connection between the body and mind. While a medical student at Columbia and Mt. Sinai, she was trained to see the mind and body as separate. "They literally have different departments," Berzin said, "and one has nothing to do with the other."
"We'd refer patients with mental health issues to psychiatrists, " Berzin said, "The wait might be three months and in the meantime we'd refill the Zoloft, but there wasn't any connecting of the dots between what was going on in the body and how it might affect the mind."
Parsley Health's approach brings together the best aspects of conventional primary care with the functional medicine paradigm, which looks at the root cause and asks why. Why do you have low blood sugar? Why do you have headaches? Why are you depressed? Parsley tries to answer those questions and personalizes the healthcare experience as a result.
"We bring nutrition, mental health, lifestyle change, sleep, fitness, supplements to the prescription pad alongside prescription drugs and testing," Berzin says. When a person starts with Parsley Health, their first interaction is to answer a lot of questions. Berzin says it won't look like any previous medical experience a patient has had in the past. Patients are asked what they're eating, how they're moving, what their relationships are like, how stressed they are, if their lives have meaning and purpose, if they're happy—and that's just for starters.
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