LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist

A scientific guide to your self, career, and relationships

5 followers

LIFE Intelligence is a comprehensive course & cognitive training to help you manage stress & anxiety, improve work productivity, & build lasting relationships. Practical, science-backed, efficient: a "DIY" therapist, coach, & relationship counselor in one.
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
LIFE Intelligence: DIY Coach & Therapist gallery image
Launch tags:
iOSHealth & FitnessTech
Launch Team

What do you think? …

Alexander Fournier
Hello Jasmine, first of all congrats to your launch, this seems like a great idea to organize the daily struggle. I do not really understand the whole complexity of this project. But i am very curious, which possibilities this app can bring to my personal life. To bad its only for IOS, any plans for launching on Android?
Jasmine Chen
@fresh_food Thanks for checking it out Alexander! The possibilities are so many. I can share some examples from specific lessons; there are hundreds in all. In just the first Mission (I think 1.2) you start off learning cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a way to retrain your thoughts. CBT says that thoughts create emotions which create behaviors. So, one example is someone is rude to you one day. An automatic thought might be, "this person doesn't like me." The emotion might be sadness. The behavior might be avoiding this person. Our CBT exercise would teach you how to retrain that thought to be a bit more balanced: i.e. maybe they had a bad day, etc so that the feeling and behavior is less automatic/severe. Then we go on to talk about learned helplessness in 1.4. One user example of this is an engineering student who was struggling with Calculus. But the lesson taught them growth mindset and they ended the course with honors. Others have really liked the communication/relationship missions, which are #7 and 8. A user said he had been married for 7 years, and he started sending screen shots of the app to his wife to help them communicate. There are also mood exercises that help with that communication. If you are angry with someone, you can try a "hard conversations" exercise - it guides through 5-8 steps to plan out what you'd like to say first. I use it almost every day. It'll ask me every night if I have a mood I want to fix, and usually I do. I choose "frustration" exercises a lot when I have management issues, i.e. people not replying or projects not going the way I hoped. We also have an exercise with being comfortable giving up control (very relevant in an uncertain COVID world). I hope this gives a glimpse. Because it really is so comprehensive, it could be many problems. 🙂
Jasmine Chen
@fresh_food and re: android yes it's in the works! Look out for product hunt round two 🙂
Carlos Liverani
Congrats on the launch! I'm a big fan of using CBT and other research-based psychological tools to improve my life. I find it interesting that you're taking a Headspace like course approach to having people learn about CBT instead of the get a chatbot to administer the CBT approach that other startups are taking. Pumped to check Life out.
Jasmine Chen
@loslivs Hi Carlos, thank you and appreciate your checking us out! Agree, I'm a huge fan of CBT also. The biggest difference is that CBT is less than 1% of our content. So CBT chat bots probably cover only our Mission 1.2 and 1.3, on CBT and cognitive distortions, out of hundred-plus. It'd be like if you just did Missions 1.2-1.3, over and over and over. That's pretty limited! Because of that breadth, we teach things that I don't think a bot can, at least yet. For example, I've tried to ask a bot what to do with my life. It didn't go anywhere 🙂. But in LIFE's Mission 2, we teach something called narrative therapy and walk through your personal hero journey to start shaping that life story. Then in Mission 3 we talk about the Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values, and help you find a "north star." We also show how values conflict naturally: like, I want financial security, but that's pretty divergent from building a startup. I have to choose which value matters more and Mission 3 helps me develop that hierarchy. Or, a CBT bot might not be able to help me solve a problem like "I don't know whether to break up with my significant other." However in LIFE Mission 4, you can learn about what we regret and why. In Mission 7, you can learn about attachment styles and how our upbringing affects our adult love life. You can figure out if what you're looking for in a person are traits for lasting love, you can learn about the emotional bank account and see if you're in deficit. And then in Mission 8, we talk about all the ways to fight... and you can diagnose if your relationship is something you want to save, whether it's beyond repair, and if not, how to repair it.
Carlos Liverani
@jasmine_chen2 I appreciate the inside scoop into your mental model for rationalizing the decision to sway from the chatbot! Wholeheartedly, agree that there is important life design value left on the table with the chatbot. I wish you the best of luck!
Jasmine Chen
@jasmine_chen2 @loslivs awesome Carlos, would love to hear more when you try it out.
Jasmine Chen
Last year, I left my dream job at a hedge fund to create the product I wish I’d had. As an investor, I had all this research and analysis to back up my stock picks. 📈 But why hadn’t I put the same sort of rigorous study into my most important investment: me? The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on many of us. However, the problem I see is bigger than mental fitness. It’s threefold: 1) Self, career, and relationships are intertwined. Missing any one piece of the puzzle misses the full picture and cure. Yet, most apps focus on just one vertical. 2) Content that lacks depth and nuance is going to bore a Type-A like me. I wanted something science-backed with real “ah-ha” moments. 3) “Tell me and I forget... involve me and I learn.” A lot of us jump to seeking advice from others. Yet, coming to conclusions on our own makes lessons stick much longer. I couldn’t find this type of holistic education anywhere, so I decided to research and write it myself. My requirements for differentiation were: 1) A comprehensive course/training/tool that 2) Was backed in science with no fluff and 3) Could make me my own coach or therapist: actionable, efficient, with lasting change Having written a thesis at Princeton, I knew there were decades of psychology research that rarely reach those who could benefit from it most: users like you and me. So, I took my skill set studying stocks and applied it to the biggest life questions I had. Today, the result of that effort is a comprehensive course and cognitive training. It’s taken months of research and writing to create not only complete content that gets at the “how,” but also a thoughtful, curated flow. Inside, you’ll see we offer three main features. 📘 (1) First is a 9-Mission course, comprised of hundreds of 5-min bite-sized daily lessons of snippet reading and reflection. To: 1 Build mental resilience and emotional management skills 2 Develop self-awareness and emotional intelligence 3 Discover values, set goals, track habits, stay motivated 4 Minimize regret and manage time 5 Make difficult decisions, avoid mental biases, determine direction 6 Harness stress, anxiety, and social influence 7 Understand attraction, attachment styles, dating and relationships 8 Practice communication and conflict resolution 9 Become an effective leader, mentor, manager (Add our iOS 14 widget to your home screen, so you can get a beautiful next-lesson preview)! 😧 (2) Second is an immediate mood-management tool. I spent a great deal of time researching the basis of emotions. How is envy different from jealousy? How do we categorize them? Do they belong in anger, disgust, or sadness? I drew from multiple academic sources to build a mood wheel. It might actually be the part of the app I’m most proud of  Why is this so important? Sometimes I would feel “bad” but be unable to pinpoint how I was feeling or what was bothering me. After looking into it, I discovered that “emotional granularity,” or the ability to name exact emotions, is the first step to gaining control over moods. LIFE’s user-friendly mood wheel gets super specific, and is sorted by color as well as intensity, so you can see how moods, like colors, combine or change in intensity. After choosing your mood, you’ll find exact coping, communication, and problem-solving exercises that can get you out of your bad mood in minutes. For example, if I’m frustrated, I can use the 5-Whys exercise to figure out the root cause. If I’m insecure, I can use a self-affirmation exercise. And so on. 💌 (3) Third, relationship prompts. Why don’t we learn marriage counseling topics until it’s too late? Consider this question I saw on a forum: “We seem to agree what toxic and dysfunctional families look like. My question is: what is a functional and healthy family supposed to look like? Is there a guide somewhere?” A lot of replies said things like, “great communication,” “support,” “stability,” or “compromise.” The problem is, these say what to do, but not how to do it. I tried to get specific in LIFE: for example, I now know what the multiple types of support are, and when to use each. Or, what the 4 relationship ruining ways to fight are (stonewalling, contempt, defensiveness, criticism), when they might come up, and what we can do about them. It doesn’t mean I don’t mess up, but it does mean I’m far more aware of actionable ways I can improve. -- I cited all research, something very important to me. The real experts are those researchers in the psychology lab, who over decades have dedicated their lives to studying why we act the way we do. Don’t believe me: believe them. I am simply a mere curator whom I hope does a decent job of scouring, drawing conclusions from, and relating to you their findings in a relatable and insightful way. Ultimately, my goal is to serve every person, of every culture, who could use more insight into some aspect of their lives. LIFE can be used solo, or among families, teams, companies and schools. It takes two to communicate and our moods often easily affect others. Today, LIFE helps me stay sane, happy, and healthy as a solo founder. My hope is that if it speaks to you, you can also gain a more fulfilling, purposeful, positive life. Please, email me at jc@lifeintelligence.io with any and all feedback, questions or comments. Huge thanks as well to @flarup for hunting us. As a newcomer here, it really means a lot.