This is how female founders want to help you with a crisis of meaning

Corona is also a challenge on many levels in the job: Many employees are working hard to manage the excesses of the pandemic, others are stagnating in their careers due to short-time work and still others have even lost their jobs completely. But there is also a lot going on between people. For some people, for example, working from home does not necessarily mean the freedom that is often propagated, but rather brings them one thing above all else: loneliness. The feeling of isolation is reinforced by a private life that has been reduced to the bare minimum, which they were confronted with, especially during the lockdown phases. The term crisis of meaning is circulating more strongly than ever. Many ask: do I want this? How can it go on? And what can I do to make things change?

“A crisis of meaning often arises when we are confronted with questions that overwhelm us,” explains Luca Lea Kleene in a t3n conversation. Sometimes because someone ignored them for too long, and sometimes also because they pushed their way into life not quietly and slowly, but with full force. However, the excessive demands often go hand in hand with a lack of interlocutors who can help to get to the bottom of the pressing questions. The Berliner therefore has together with two colleagues the mental health startup Whylab founded. Luca Lea Kleene, Nikola Berkmann and Sarah Reitz want to help other people to deal with themselves regularly and to support them in deriving concrete actions for their lives from these sessions.

The focus is on a virtual meet-up format in which participants are accompanied by trained coaches in regular group meetings for at least six weeks. To ensure that these groups harmonize, the three founders rely on a sophisticated matching process based on personality types and individual needs. In addition to personal coaching, an intelligent digital companion also supports users in systematically guiding them through regular training units in personal development. “We want people to understand that they are not alone with the big questions in life, but that many others also have difficulties with them,” continues Luca Lea Kleene.

The three entrepreneurs founded in December 2020, not necessarily, but somehow as a direct response to the challenges of the corona crisis. “At first we were surprised at how quickly our offer was accepted, but the pandemic has certainly accelerated our growth again,” says Luca Lea Kleene. “But we also noticed beforehand that the topics of personality development and mental well-being are becoming more and more important for society.” There are increasingly reliable facts, especially for the latter: The number of illness-related absences due to mental illness has been rising continuously for years. Sufferers sometimes wait months for therapy appointments. Often these people are left to their own devices for a long time.

In the last three months in particular, the number of users has risen rapidly again. With a current pre-seed financing amounting to a mid six-digit sum, the Whylab founders can now invest in the expansion of the team and in the technological infrastructure in order to reach even more people with their start-up. “Our vision is to become the digital fitness studio for mental health,” said Luca Lea Kleene in an interview with t3n. The three founders do not want to replace therapies for psychological ailments, but rather support people in advance so that they do not get into bad exceptional situations in the first place. “With Whylab, something can be done preventively for your own well-being without being knee-deep in a crisis of meaning.”

The offer is currently used in particular by millennials who are in a so-called “quarter life crisis”. According to a LinkedIn study, around 70 percent of 20 to 30 year olds in Germany are affected by this. The founders are also familiar with personality crises: “I had a phase like this two years ago, there was no accessible and really effective offer for me,” reports Luca Lea Kleene. This is exactly the problem they are now solving with Whylab. “We support people to get to know themselves better and to change their own behavior systematically over the long term,” she continues. The startup’s offers are not limited to millennials, however, but are accessible to all people who are stuck in similar situations and going through such personal crises.

“Often it is precisely another person’s perspective that gives us consolation and new inspiration on how we can shape our own lives,” says the Berliner. “We bring additional structure and scientific impulses to the groups so that our participants know exactly what their next step is after each session.” The founders are certain that in the future it will be normal to train mental wellbeing just as regularly as the physical. Especially in times of concentrated work and a high level of absences due to mental illness, such digital offers in connection with individual coaching can play their part in making people more resilient in personal crises. Whylab is going this way together with other startups such as Vaha or Minddoc.