“If you don't brush your teeth, they'll fall out, we all know that, so we brush them every day.” Why, asks 27-year-old entrepreneur and TV presenter Poppy Jamie, has the same logic not been applied to our brains? “Just like you'd train every other muscle of your body to be stronger for you, your brain works in the exact same way,” Jamie says. Our brains are neuroplastic: “you can rewire your mind – but it takes repetition. It's like everything else in life: the more you do it, the easier it becomes.”
Jamie is on a mission to help millennials manage, understand and reduce the stress and anxiety that beset them, and to help them take charge of their mental health. Happy Not Perfect, Jamie’s brainchild, is an app and ecommerce platform released in April of this year, which offers users a wealth of activities, tools and tips to keep them in the driving seat when it comes to their mental, emotional and spiritual health. “The whole mission of Happy Not Perfect is purely to look after mental wellbeing,” she says.
Social media has, Jamie says, "changed the way we socialise, how we interact.” Now, more than ever before, people compare themselves to others, “maybe not even consciously.” That apps like Instagram and Facebook mean you can, all of a sudden, “feel very very insecure very quickly,” provoked for a Jamie “a moment of, 'oh my god' – what are we doing about it?”
“As far as I can see, and also in my own experience, my self esteem, anxiety and stress are only getting worse, and yet there are so few tools to manage that,” she says. Jamie, who has spent the best part of six years living and working in LA as a presenter for ITV and MTV, and who was voted one of Forbes’ ‘30 under 30’ at 27, says the idea for the app didn’t so much come to her suddenly as grow throughout her life.
Awareness of the importance of mental wellbeing, for Jamie, “started from a really young age, because my mother is a psychoanalyst, so it was kind of ingrained in us since we were tiny that the mind, it was just like our teeth,” and needed care, she says. All children should, she believes, learn about mental health. “Your brain is more important than anything that you have in your body, and yet we've totally neglected it... Our minds now need to be looked after in the same way, so we can handle this incredibly speedy, information-overload, comparison-ensnaring world.”
Technology, Jamie maintains, is not the problem in itself. "I think technology is amazing, so technology is not the thing that's harming us, it's our relationship with it," she says. "We've started to really need technology, rather than using technology to help us be better." People reach for their phones without realising they’ve become bored, like a reflex, Jamie says, and this is creating an addictive relationship. We find ourselves continually scrolling rather than being present in the moment.
The app has a number of personalised tools and features that aim to put users in control of how they feel. “When you're relaxed and your brain knows that you're not in danger, that's when you're able to respond to a situation in the way that most can help you, so it's really making sure that you're able to be in the world how you want to be rather than feeling overwhelmed,” she says.
These features range from breathing exercises, to mental tips and tricks and personalised routines that reset users’ minds at crucial moments. It’s really breathing that is at the heart of what Happy Not Perfect offers. “Breathing is a life tool,” Jamie says, “it's the quickest way to hack your nervous system. The belly breath is the hero breath we should all learn, because at the age of five years old we end up getting into bad breathing habits,” she says – people who are breathing into their chests, with short, shallow breaths, moving their shoulders up and down, are inadvertently making themselves more tense.
The app works by fitting in with users’ routines, and starts with an ‘internal check-in’ which asks them to log how they are feeling. Designed with millennials in mind, users say whether they feel “meh,” angry or anything in between. This in turn personalises what the app will offer that day.
From here, it is split into two sections: recharge and refresh. The refresh routine lays out “a full mind workout, that stimulates lots of different parts of your brain to not only calm your nervous system, but also to help stimulate happy hormones,” Jamie says. This step-by-step routine asks users to have a little compassion and think of a quality about themself they like. Especially as Brits, “acknowledging a quality you like about yourself is almost foreign to us,” Jamie says.
Breathing exercises reduce cortisol levels – the stress hormone – and users then ‘process’ their negative thoughts by putting them in the “burn bin”. This process is complete when users say what they are grateful for that day, “promoting the powerful notion that in those moments when the situation cannot be changed, our perspectives can be,” the app's creators say.
From repairing a broken heart to sleeping more deeply for seven days, Jamie has tried to ensure that the app is “relatable to what young people are concerned by”. Working with focus groups of roughly 30 people in London, LA, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Paris, Jamie and her team have rooted this in sound understanding of what young people are looking for.
Happy Not Perfect’s techniques are based in sound scientific understandings, with an advisory board comprised of respected practitioners across a range of fields, including Dr Belisa Vranich, one of the world's leading breathing instructors, Dr Alex Korb, a neuroscientists at UCLA, and Jamie’s mother Pippa Jamie, a psychoanalyst practicing in the UK.
The app can be bought for £5.99 per month in the Apple Store and on Google Play, and Happy Not Perfect is also about to begin selling CBD soothing sprays and calming mints. Three years in the making, Jamie and co have worked hard to create something that meets the needs of young people. “Hopefully people will find a little bit of something for everyone,” she says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
