Introducing Tough Minds

Building the world's emotional resilience

Time and time again, I’ve written in my Monday Memo about how, in the mental health space, there is too much awareness and not enough action. There is too much focus on illness, and not enough on wellness. Too much focus on diagnoses and not enough on skills. A lot of nice slogans, but no change.

In fact - things are getting worse. Despite a decade plus of increasing awareness, more government spend, more diagnosis and more prescriptions - just about every measure of our national mental health has gone in the wrong direction.

Awareness hasn’t worked and over-diagnosis has created a crisis. We need something new.

Our culture has fundamentally changed, and we haven’t kept up. When humans moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle, we had to start going to the gym to keep our bodies healthy (our ancestors never ran for fun!).

In the same way, in the last 100 years we’ve moved into more stressful, connected, restless lifestyles: the sort that foment mental illness. We need to make a concerted, real, continuous effort to keep our minds healthy.

But too much of our current approach to mental health does the opposite of that. There’s been a push for more and more awareness of mental illness, but no focus on staying well. Emotions are too often diagnosed as ailments that need medication or therapy, leaving too many people stuck on waiting lists. There’s been too much focus on cure, and not enough on prevention. And we keep reaching for an unscalable solution - therapy - to an exponentially growing problem.

So I’m creating something to turn the tide. Tough Minds is my new start-up project that is putting mental wellness and emotional resilience on the centre stage.

The goal? To build the world's emotional resilience.

At Tough Minds, we’re doing two things.

Mental health AI

First, we’re creating the next generation of AI-powered mental health tools. AI for mental health has, until now, been AI therapists. But Tough Minds is creatively applying AI to enable people to better help themselves.

We’re starting by building tools that help people that are the most at risk.

1. Something Else offers guided alternatives to self-harm and other harmful or destructive behaviours. It takes users through exercises like deep breathing, muscle relaxation or grounding and has been built with input from real experts.

2. People that often experience suicidal thoughts are advised to create a mental health plan for times when they are most in danger. Crisis Plan is a web app that guides them through the process of creating that plan, using AI to help them create a genuinely useful plan they can print, download, copy into their notes app or send to a friend or professional.

I’m really proud that both of these tools are being used by the national crisis text line, Shout.

Just two weeks since launching that partnership, 100+ people are using the tools every single week, and soon more charities and private practices will share them with their service users. More users, more people helped, more healthier, happier minds.

Emotional resilience skills

The second thing Tough Minds is doing is building the curriculum for emotional resilience. Not just a school curriculum: resources for everyone, of all ages, to become a mentally tougher, more emotionally grounded person who can stay in control no matter what life throws at them.

Too often, we’re only taught how to care for our mental health after, or during, a crisis. That’s like learning to drive halfway round the M25. Learning these skills before they’re needed will ease the pressure on our health services and contribute to us all leading happier, more fulfilling lives.

This will be a longer-term objective: but it’s already starting. At toughminds.org/skill-boosters you can play games that will boost the skills that are proven to be linked to emotional resilience. Games that expand your vocabulary of emotion words, for example: studies have shown that the more emotion words someone knows, the better they are able to handle distress. Or games that challenge you to reframe faulty thoughts into more real, true ones.

There will be more to share on this soon, but we’re currently exploring academic validation with leading researchers in the space - which will be crucial to creating an offering that truly works.

What’s next?

Tough Minds is a real business (literally - registered as Tough Minds Ltd!). Feedback so far has been really positive, there’s great momentum behind it, and I’ve got some exciting plans for the future.

It’s early days, so the exact methods to drive impact might change, but I see Tough Minds as a vehicle to achieving the ultimate goal - boosting the world’s emotional resilience.

I’m doing this because I really believe it matters. Already, with 250+ users of the tools, I can confidently say that some have been helped out of a crisis: that’s enough of a success for me, even if things go no further.

There’s a better than even chance this will fail (60% of start-ups do!), but I’m hopeful that no matter what form this ends up taking, it continues long-term making some kind of positive impact.

I’ve been excited to share with my family and friends and the few random subscribers I’ve picked up on my newsletter. I’ll start sharing it more widely in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime I’d love your feedback and ideas. Please feel free to share my website, toughminds.org. You can also share (and use!) the tools yourself.

And don’t worry, the Monday Memo will continue (maybe with slightly more frequent weeks off) - and it won’t be all about mental health. Back to the usual programming next week!