Making Digital Wellness Accessible for Everyone

Wellness and Mental Health is Expensive

The modern wellness industry has evolved into an unfortunate reality: the tools and practices that could help us maintain mental health and balance are increasingly expensive and exclusive. From meditation apps requiring monthly subscriptions to wellness platforms that demand personal data, the barriers to entry keep growing. Each might seem affordable in isolation, but together they create a significant financial burden or time investment. This cost effectively locks out many people who could benefit from these tools.

It's also worth highlighting that wellness is a luxury that naturally falls behind a lot of other necessities and can only be afforded after you've already invested a lot in other areas. Access to healthy food, clean water, shelter, quality exercise equipment or environments, and more are all often precursors to being able to even consider investing in broader wellness. Your fancy Apple Watch or Fitbit, expensive as they are, has nothing to track if you don't have a place, or the time, to exercise.

In contrast to these barriers, accessing negative digital habits like doomscrolling is all too easy. According to Harvard Health, doomscrolling can significantly worsen our mental health by keeping us locked in a cycle of negativity. This escalating concern underscores the urgent need for accessible, affordable wellness tools. Digital solutions are especially crucial because they occupy the same environments where doomscrolling thrives, offering a direct remedy that can compete for mindshare with these less healthy habits.

The Accessibility Paradox

There's a stark contrast in how different types of digital experiences are distributed. Social media platforms, news feeds, and endless content streams are freely available and optimized for maximum engagement. They're designed to capture and hold our attention, often at the cost of our mental wellbeing or we're being profited off of through our engagement data or targeted advertisements.

Meanwhile, tools that could help us regain control of our attention and find moments of calm are hidden behind paywalls. This creates a troubling dynamic where harmful patterns are easily accessible, while healthy alternatives require privilege and resources to access.

The Cost of Experiencing Ocean Wave Sounds

I've been using ocean wave sounds to help me and my children sleep. Let's compare access to this kind of experience through YouTube and reset (a new platform I've been building):

First Steps Towards Free and Accessible Wellness and Mental Health

I'm building a growing collection of wellness experience tools (at 17 as of this writing) including:

• breathe: Simple box-breathing visual guide
• stream: Judgment-free space for thoughts and reflection
• fill: Endless coloring pages for mental health
• flow: Minimalist habit tracking without the pressure
• rain: Ambient natural sounds for relaxation
• future: Future-self journal prompts for mental health

Each mini app is designed to be immediately useful without tutorials or learning curves. They work on any device with a web browser, requiring no downloads or installations, have no ads, and require no signups or sharing of personal data.

Continuing to Build More Wellness Experiences

I'm in a fortunate situation where I can spend some of my time building without a need for profit and I want to try do good. I'm going to continue to do my best to build tools that respect users' time, attention, and privacy. Mental wellbeing shouldn't be a premium feature but a fundamental right. As I continue to develop and release new micro apps and experiences, I remain committed to this vision of accessible wellness. If attention-draining content is freely available everywhere, I believe the tools to protect and nurture our wellbeing should be equally accessible.