Immersive Wellbeing Platform YourHaven Creates a Mental Health Awareness Month Campaign with a Difference, Reminding Public Figures to "Chill the VR out."

The VR wellness startup has created humorous personalised sessions for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a host of European and US business leaders, encouraging them to step up and lead the way on role modelling an active mental health practice.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM / ACCESSWIRE / May 15, 2024 / The mental health crisis is reaching epic proportions. Almost three-quarters of adults in the UK have been so stressed in the past year that they feel unable to cope. Around 1 in 4 people experience mental illness, but an estimated 75% of people with a mental health condition are not getting treatment, and this same proportion of young people have to wait so long for treatment that their condition is getting worse.

Mental Health Awareness Month comes on the heels of Stress Awareness Month, and yet so often this observance passes and nothing has changed to fix our broken system. So YourHaven, a new startup providing scalable, personalised mental health support through immersive technology, has created a campaign with a difference.

Instead of preaching to the converted, this year the YourHaven team is highlighting the ways our society has reached breaking point with chronic stress, anxiety and mental health by reaching out to some of the world's most stressed public figures, with a word of caution.

From Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg, busy celebrities to stressed founders, YourHaven has created personalised meditation sessions just for them, which all users can try, with a humorous twist. Teasers of the cheeky videos can be found on Twitter/X at @yourhavenapp and on Instagram and TikTok at @yourhavenofficial, and on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/yourhaven/

If people find themselves struggling with stress - at work, in their own businesses, or just in their daily lives, the startup is inviting them to step into the shoes of some of the most stressed entrepreneurs in the world, and see how therapeutic sessions can help. Their hope is that by drawing attention to the ways in which we are ignoring stress and pushing through while things get worse, they can help to shed light on the action that needs to happen to urgently fix our mental health system and give people the tools to proactively manage their wellbeing before things get really tough.

Every time a public figure such as Elon or Mark reposts their session, YourHaven will give away free annual subscriptions of mental health content to all employees of their companies. And for the rest of the month, the YourHaven team will send personalised sessions to a host of major business owners and public figures - drawing attention to the fact that no one is too busy to deserve to seek support.

CEO and Co-Founder Claire Barnett said "It's so easy for Mental Health Awareness Month to become an echo chamber. We wanted to create a campaign with a difference.

As well as hopefully encouraging a chuckle in an otherwise stressful world, our lighthearted campaign is also making a very serious point: that often the individuals and industries who most need to take action on mental health are exactly the ones who aren't being engaged in these campaigns. If some of the world's most powerful people became active advocates for mental health, the impact would be felt by the people - including young people, marginalised groups, struggling employees, and new mothers - who so often feel unsupported by their employers, the mental health system, and society at large.

We've got a serious problem with the way we manage mental health. And unless we talk about it - with business leaders, celebs and decision-makers - the internet becomes a more toxic place every day. These people wield such power over the mental health of their employees and communities, and we want to see them taking active steps to stop, breathe, and find support. So at YourHaven we've built a personalised solution for them.

Technology is here to stay, and we have to use it to find better ways to help people get access to specialist support before they need to join a long waiting list or spend money they don't have seeing someone in person because things have already got really bad. We want to be part of a trend towards it becoming normal to build a mental health practice before we reach breaking point."

CTO and Co-Founder Alex Simón said "Immersive technology is a hugely powerful tool to help people learn techniques to manage everyday stresses better. PwC found that VR helps people learn 4 times faster, feel 275% more confident to put those learnings into action, and 78% of learners prefer it to traditional learning methods.

This is because being able to focus, practise breathing, and unpack experiences in an immersive environment is incredibly powerful. It's effective for treating a host of common mental health issues, as well as managing pain and overstimulation. At YourHaven we have used VR, mixed reality and spatial audio to create a groundbreaking platform where users can have personalised therapy, meditation, breathwork experiences and more to help them manage their everyday.

We hope our campaign, #ChillTheVROut, will help to get the attention of people who have the power to make a difference to the mental health of tens of thousands of employees, and hundreds of thousands of followers."

Users can try the full sessions created especially for public figures on the YourHaven app, in Meta Quest, alongside our regular content, with new sessions by different experts dropping every week - just search YourHaven on the Quest store.

About YourHaven

YourHaven is a groundbreaking mental health app providing access to scalable, personalised sessions and courses with therapists, coaches, breathwork instructors and meditation experts. The YourHaven team works with expert guides to create immersive sessions, personalised using AI, to lower the cost of mental health support and make it available in a host of languages, at any time, to people all over the world.

From anxiety to low mood, peak performance to self-compassion, new content is launched onto the platform every week, based on user feedback and scientific research.

The YourHaven Co-Founders include Claire Barnett, former Executive Director at UN Women UK, second-time wellness founder and former McKinsey & Company consultant, and Alex Simón, who has led teams of up to 80 engineers at companies including Unity, Sony Computer Entertainment and Electronic Arts. The team Richard Bang, Ruben Brockhaus, Jack Hyde and Nina Carlos-Bose bring experience from FitXR, Condense, London College of Contemporary Music, Hypercrunch and more.

The team of advisors to YourHaven include Dr Junaid Bajwa, Chief Medical Scientist at Microsoft, Michael Horvath, Co-Founder & former CEO of Strava, Tim Shannehan, former Chief Revenue Officer at Peloton, Steve Fitzgerald, former Chief Talent Officer at Bridgewater Associates, Marine Gallois, former General Counsel at Niantic, Professor Rafael Calvo, Professor at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, and Tom Ffiske of Immersive Wire. The organisation was founded with support from HodlCo as well as backing from FOV Ventures.

YourHaven is available now on the Meta Quest platform, where over the course of Mental Health Awareness Month, users will be able to try out the full sessions created for public figures and celebrities. The app subscription is $5.99 per month, with a free trial available to all users.

For images, videos, interviews and quotes, reach out to Nina Carlos-Bose at nina[@]havenvr.com

Website: www.yourhavenapp.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/yourhaven/
Twitter / X: @yourhavenapp
Instagram: @yourhavenofficial
TikTok: @yourhavenofficial
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAbKb6LCUZFHsC0OjXgO6pQ

Download YourHaven on the Meta Quest store: https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/5878653762226869/

Sources: Mental Health Foundation; WHO; Department of Health; Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer; Young Minds; Sifted; PwC.

SOURCE: Haven Studios

View the original press release on accesswire.com