It started with one person, not a market gap

Our story

A struggle, then a stubborn question.

1. 01

   The crisis

   After a series of significant mental health challenges in his own life, our founder Raj went looking for help. He found the same off-the-shelf answer everybody else was being handed, and could not shake the feeling that something about the way we approach anxiety, depression and everything around them was systematically broken.

2. 02

   The question he was already trained to ask

   Raj is an economist and behavioural scientist, and a former central banker and regulator. At LSE his focus was what drives rational and irrational behaviour: heuristics, shortcuts, and the economic systems built on top of them. Turned on his own situation, that training produced an uncomfortable question. If people know what would help, and the information is freely available, why does nothing change?

3. 03

   The answer, which was not more information

   His later research at UCL extended the same interest into mental health, information overload and how people process experience, including a Master’s dissertation on the role of information in mental wellbeing. It kept arriving at the same place. The mind is not short of information. It is overwhelmed by it, so it builds shortcuts, and those shortcuts, not the knowledge gap, decide behaviour. That insight became the basis of MindHug’s approach. CUE reads what is blocking a behaviour, and SURE shapes the training and experiential learning used to change it.

4. 04

   Which is why we do both

   If behaviour is the bottleneck, the same understanding applies to a team that keeps clicking the link, a founder who plays it safe, and somebody who cannot sleep. Programmes work on it actively. MindHug Zero works on it passively: zero not as in no hope, but as in ground state, the calm baseline you return to so you can act rather than freeze. One organisation, because it is one problem.

What that looks like in the room, where a psychologist, a mindfulness practitioner, a game designer and a hackathon meet, is its own thing. See how our programmes work.