Adulting - #27 It's Good To Be Moody with Amy Thomson

Episode Date: February 24, 2019

This week I speak to Amy Thomson, founder of ‘Moody Month’, an app that aims to help you get to know your cycle better, and in turn, yourself. We discuss contraception, period tracking, and creating your own business. Hope you enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Hi guys and welcome to Adulting. This week I'm joined by Amy Thompson. Hi. And we are going to be talking about her app Moody Month. Yes, should I give you an overview about what it is? Yes, please do. So Moody is a mood and hormone tracking app and it basically gives you the weather forecast for your moods

and hormones on a kind of daily and nightly basis so it gives you information not just about when you're on or off your period but what are the daily fluctuations that you might be going through based on your menstrual cycle but it actually also allows you to also log your own symptoms, moods, memo so you can actually diarize and capture kind of voice notes and then at the end of each month it will give you reflections of the different patterns of those moods and symptoms so starting to essentially unpack for women the different kind of patterns that happen for them within their months so that you know rather than get caught out by these things every month we can actually start to get ahead of our emotional intelligence and our moods and and actually claim back a little

bit of this understanding that moody isn't always a bad thing um being moody is what makes us human which is our kind of strapline this idea of actually it's a good thing as long as you understand it 100 yeah well knowledge is power as they say and it's completely true because i think we're getting to a place now where we're able to talk more about female health, whether that's periods or contraception or even like sexual liberation or whatever it is. Conversations are happening that previously hadn't. Even I personally on my Instagram talk quite a lot about periods just to try and destigmatize it. But what came out of that was I remember once actually doing a post about all the things that I that happened to me in the lead up to my period so full body bloating water retention getting sweatier

moodier wanting to cry all the time absolutely ravenous starving and everyone just comes going oh really oh I get that and had never spoken to anyone about it yeah and that and that's the thing right we're kind of in an era now we're suddenly so much more attuned we have so much more access to information and yet I think again we have so much information and yet the thing that's most powerful to us is actually a better understanding of ourselves um and I think that's a really brilliant opportunity to be able to kind of share experience and actually again where Moody came from, you know, my personal experience was that I was running a business, which I started in 2011. This was kind of 2016. And that year, I actually, my periods totally stopped. So they stopped and my mind was

working. I was really kind of capable in work, but I actually wasn't able to physically understand why my weight gain, you know, bloating, these crazy symptoms, but I actually wasn't able to physically understand why my weight gain, you know, bloating, these crazy symptoms, which I actually would normally connect to a period, and then my periods had stopped. And it wasn't until I started to uncover that there was hormonal imbalances and things going on in my body that were causing from stress that were causing my body to essentially just respond with a, you're not listening to us mentally, so we're going to tell you physically. And the research and the access that I had, because the business that I was running was doing really well. And I couldn't believe that I had to spend all this money on nutritionists and, you know, everything to understand basically on the

baseline, what was my body doing? How does my body body work what are the systems and the chemicals within my body that if I don't look after them essentially can respond with stressors so that was kind of where the very early stage of saying well why doesn't this exist um and the journey that kind of ensued over the the next kind of three years was very much a well it's because actually this information has been held back from a lot of women so I think I mentioned this to you before you know the contraceptive is a very profitable industry and there's all this information and science behind how our hormones work but it's been used to kind of create a pill for a really long time so we wanted to kind of democratize some of that and start to allow women to make a more informed decision so the more you understand about how your hormones work

it's not about saying any decision that you make is is a wrong one like you know plenty of friends myself included have had good experiences on on certain contraceptive but it's about saying well what is your baseline and what is your experience of your body and then when you're putting or adapting your hormonal balance in any way what does that then mean and how can we report that better for ourselves so that rather than think we're going crazy or think that we're you know bad people we're actually coming from a place of informed reflections and the patterns of actually our behaviors and experiences yeah well I think it's hugely timely because there's been such a big shift in, as you say, I think people have become more aware of perhaps some of the negative parts of contraception

because I went on contraception when I was like 14, 15 because I had really heavy periods. I think all my girlfriends went on the pill and then we tried about six, seven different pills and one girl would find one she loved and that would give one of them acne and then someone got fat on one of them my boobs got gigantic on one of them so we all went on that one we were like unbelievable I've got massive boobs and then I came off it after pretty much like near enough like eight nine years and was like oh my god I feel incredible and I felt this whole thing I was like I've just realized funny enough I came off for a year and I was like I've just realized funny enough I came

off for a year and I was like that must have been the pill was that unique what was it like it was just it was a very low-lying low mood that almost having a cloud over me had existed and I wasn't almost sure I was like is it really the con was it really the pill I was like it must have been I didn't have a definitive answer and it wasn't until I tried the marina coil so I was trying to I tried natural cycles tracking which didn't work for me and then I got the copper coil and it wasn't until I tried the marina coil so I was trying to I tried natural cycles tracking which didn't work for me and then I got the copper coil and it fell out and then I was like I'll try the marina coil but it's the same as the progesterone only pill that I've been on before and the exact same thing I felt almost depressed almost immediately and I was like I want to take

it out I was on holiday with my boyfriend one point I was crying I was like please can you pull it out he was like no I'm not gonna pull it. We'll have to wait and do it when you get home. Romantic. I was so desperate because I just realized these hormones just don't work well for me. So then I am looking into now, like, registering how my natural hormones affect me. And I said to you before, like, one of my other girlfriends came up at the same time. She messaged me like, oh, we're such natural goddesses. I know when I'm ovulating. It was really fun, like, knowing your body.

It felt very empowering. Yeah. And this is the thing, right? No other example where we treat ourselves in like such guinea pigs. And again, I actually think that there are examples where women have had great experiences with contraceptive. But I think that ultimately, like we said before, it's about rather than us continually have to test and learn on our bodies, how can we give ourselves a better understanding of what and how our hormonal cycles work and then when we go to either our doctor or we go to whoever it is that we're kind of talking to or discussing our options we're coming from a place where we've explored

what our kind of baseline is and therefore you're saying well actually when I then went on this pill it wasn't that that weight gain was or it wasn't just uni or you're actually coming from a place where you can say well there was a markable difference from point x to point x and my moods were markably lower because I was feeling genuinely more cloudy or more foggy and you can correlate that to when you started taking the pill to when you stopped taking it or you can relate that to when you were going out and drinking all the wine at uni. It's difficult to be able to place what the kind of cause and effect of these things are unless you're actually thinking about them in context. And I was saying before about logging in the moment, it's great when you retrospectively think back

and it's powerful to look back at past experiences, but it's also very powerful to capture things in the moment because it means that you're informed in the moment, but it also means then when you do look back at past experiences but it's also very powerful to capture things in the moment because it means that you're informed in the moment but it also means then when you do look back you're looking at it in context so it's one of the reasons that we built in the diarization so looking at how you memo so text voice memos you know we we recover very quickly from when we feel sad um and actually when we're kind of okay we're going to pick ourselves up and and move on um and if then you do start to notice kind of perpetual low moods you do start to see that as a sustained problem you could maybe address that but if you are kind of experiencing

low mood within your month that's normal like everybody has low moods at some point that's not and that's the whole point of why we called it moody because it's about connecting with your humanity connecting with your and your highs and your lows not always just thinking about trying to win at being happy but yeah my point being that actually it's about doing it in the moment it's about understanding yourself in context and then feeling informed by that information and there's something very powerful of looking back and saying okay I do feel in a different state of mind how can I communicate that to myself yeah rather than you know competing or thinking about being happy all the time and trying to visually look the way that

you want to look it's just how do I feel in this moment and then six three months two weeks later how do I feel now and then what's the relationship between those two things I think I the other thing that's so incredible about about this idea and i'm so excited i'm going to download the app the minute we leave um is that historically societally our periods and our hormones have been used against us all the time whether it's at school boys going oh you're on your period or and it's about your hormones and it really it weakens you because especially if you are feeling fragile and you are i I my emotions go all over the shop that would be enough to make me cry and it's really disempowering when you feel like you don't have the ability to vocalize or understand what you're going going through so being able to as you say write it down because I'm one of those people that every single

month it takes me by surprise um I'll go to my boyfriend I'll be like I'm sorry I'm being a bit irritable I think um my periods he's like yeah it's two and three days I'm the only one that doesn't know like everyone I think it's easier to watch it in other people but it's as you say when you go through those emotions I won't necessarily immediately attribute it to my period so I'll just be crying over something and he's looking on like well obviously because she's gonna get up here but I don't know that to me I'm like this is the most devastation I've ever felt about whatever it is because it's also you know I think we are very dismissive of our emotions because we feel this sense that we should be feeling better all the time we should be

feeling the most well but actually sometimes you're just having a bad day and you've got to kind of sit with it a little bit and that doesn't mean you have to wallow in it you just but having a vehicle or a space where you can share it with yourself so you can reflect on it in hindsight is a very powerful tool and you know we talk a lot about this idea that yeah women have been called moody for centuries and you know your hormonal you know as a cusp basically is something that's been a put down but actually you know we're living in an era of emotional intelligence you know iq is you can be very very smart but if you don't have the ability to emotionally collect connect with people and be emotionally smart and be attuned to both yourself and the people around you you're going to struggle because you know the the time for connecting with yourself connecting with other people is now because there

is a lot of change happening in you know we could go off on a tangent about careers and the kind of future of where that sits but coming back to kind of why moody is important now for people as well is you know if we want to start understanding our emotions and the patterns of our emotions what better way to start than thinking about the cycles that happen to us biologically yeah as a way of unpacking that first and then as you start to get into using it I mean obviously I've been using it since we first developed the product so really early days when it was literally like essentially the most basic I looked some of the wireframes of the designs and things that we had really early when I was

first using it and even then looking back at some of the diary entries and some of the kind of moods and the things that I was logging the patterns you you start to be like, wow, there is just so much that we can be positive for because they do pass. So all these things pass. You know, if you can see that there's light at the end of the tunnel, if you can see that that moment is just a moment and there's a kind of the next day you're going to be feeling better. But even better than that, what's the science behind that? So the fact that, yeah, you're bleeding for five days, but then as your estrogen begins, and we talked about ovulation and suddenly your goddess days, you're like, you know, you're working towards your ovulation. And rather than that being a kind of great, it's my like, I'm fertile and our bodies being a utility and a vehicle for fertility, actually thinking about, well, what does that mean for me?

Like, I'm going to be way better in meetings. Like, you feel great. Your skin's better. You kind of, generally, it's a great time to kind of start thinking about setting goals and setting intentions because you're at a positive point. And, yeah, and like harnessing some of that is great when you know. It is so much power because actually you're right. I need to think about that more on the ovulation side. But on the times when I am feeling really drudgy and low,

I have actually started to try and not book meetings and stuff then because I know I just feel like crap. And that's been a really empowering thing for me because it would always happen by surprise before. But you're so right. Even if I'm not regular, the pattern still is. So even if that period's a little bit later or something's happening because I feel like my cycle isn't

always exactly the same it'll still happen in the same order so the minute one thing starts to go I'm like oh I can kind of figure out yeah where I'm at which is again where it's you know less about how regular is your bleed it's more about what are the patterns and the regularity of bloating so mine is we were talking about swelling and water retention you know mine is I really I really don't actually have incredible cramps or any of the other kind of kind of more common PMS symptoms but I do get really bad water retention and then I instantly know that my period is x amount of days away so it's listening to those symptoms and those kind of cycles and patterns rather than the kind of

oh okay well this is the exact calculation of your bleed what are some of the most common um things that have been thrown up like swelling and cramps and then what are the more uncommon because i feel like every every time i talk about some of the things i deal with it's people just feel so relieved because they're like oh i've never heard anyone say it but i bet you've probably heard so many stories now. Well, yeah, it's interesting because the thing that's also really important is the doctors that we've got working with us. So what we're seeing from, and we wanted to build something that was really safe in terms of data as well. So we're not kind of selling data. It's all about actually you being able to see the patterns for yourself,

but also for us to be able to say, well, this is a safe space for you to share. And what we're going to start to be able to see for like, you know, for example, if you want to donate your data to research, and you want to do a piece around memory and menstruation. And coming back to kind of the commonalities, a lot of the doctors that we're working with have no in their clinical practice that there are patterns so that there are like a direct relationship between, for example, your memory and when within your cycle your estrogen is higher or your progesterone is higher but there's been no real research to prove that that's the case in the same way as actually for me with the reason that you know my stress levels and my period stopping there's actually not hard kind of factual science to say there is a direct correlation and proof that

stress and periods so as a clinician as some of the doctors we're working with they're not actually allowed to say to you this is a scientific diagnosis they're saying i think it might be this can you try changing some of your lifestyle to be able to see whether that helps yeah so then there's no there's no prescription drug there's nothing that solves stress and periods it's actually about lifestyle changes so I think again the point being that what we want to try and look at is because women's health has been kind of ignored there's no every woman is slightly different and there are some really interesting kind of relationships between our lifestyle choices and the things that are actually impacting on our cycles.

But also being able to do that from the perspective of the collective and say, this is now fact. And, you know, the gynecologist we're working with, the kind of psychologist can then go and say to their patients, based on the data that we've seen from users working within the Moody Circle, we know that there is definitely a relationship and we can definitely tell you that this is something maybe to do. So it becomes a kind of sharing of experience to then inform for other women, not having to go through this kind of self-discovery of, is that relating to my body or is that something else?

And I think I told you this story before as well in terms of the psychologist that we're working with in New York. She specializes in women's health and mood disorders. And one of the things that was a big part of her clinical practice was the misdiagnosis of bipolar in women. Because these women that were coming in or being diagnosed with bipolar were not being asked when their symptoms were appearing within their cycle. So they weren't being asked at what point is it at the end of your cycle when your estrogen is lowest is that when your moods are lowest and therefore

that and we only recently discovered pmdd which is a clinical depression essentially brought on by hormone imbalance within your menstrual cycle and you know clinicians being able to then see the patterns to say that this is how you track it. This is how you see. So not only go away and just write down in a paper diary like when you're feeling lowest, you can now do that in technology, which means you can then come back to me and I can give you a better information and better diagnosis. With PMDD, is that an ongoing depression or is it just depression for the time when you have the low estrogen? It varies in person to person, but it is a specific condition which is brought on about a point in the cycle. That is so fascinating, especially the bit about bipolar because that's quite a big...

I mean, it's huge, right? And again, women's health, there's an incredible book by an amazing doctor called Angela Saini. And it's called Inferior. And I would advise anybody to read it. It's absolutely beautifully written. But she talks about the homogenization of science and the fact that women have been ignored for such a long time. And therefore, that's caused problems, not just in drug trials. So, you know, the way that our bodies process and there's a really bad habit, which pharmaceutical companies have in the past had, which is essentially that they choose more kind of male kind of trialists in trials because women's hormone cycles can jar their findings because we metabolize at different levels you know we have cycles so dependent where you are in your cycle could have a different impact based on kind of what drug they're trialing so that's obviously terrible and the book goes into great detail of some brilliant

case studies but it also talks about the fact that you know hormones were only really discovered in the 1920s and they were discovered um really about testosterone and at that point when they were first discovered it was actually about proving maleness as authority oh so testosterone makes and is proven to make you kind of very virile it's kind of and it was actually in uh and this is actually quoting from the book so i was actually rereading it recently um it was male chickens and they were showing how they would regrow testicles on male chickens or cocks sorry i should say not chickens because that's a different sex um cockerels um and this kind of proof that testosterone was the kind of masculinity and then

essentially estrogen was understood but it was you know it was inducing emotion, it was the kind of woman hormone. And the idea that emotion was a negative is really interesting, and probably testament to the era that that was being researched. Because, as I mentioned before, you know, emotional intelligence now is a currency, you know, you actually, as women, we're in an incredibly advantaged position, because however much we've been told to stop being so moody now it's about saying well actually we have emotional literacy we know and have you know arguably been forced to connect on emotions in a much more kind of granular level and describe them in much more detail um so again it's this kind of pivotal point within time and history and science and it's also

why it hasn't been built in the way that it's been built before um because actually it's crazy to think we're in 2019 and we're having this discussion it seems mad it does as we're talking i suddenly thought god this is so exciting like we can do so much i always think women are so powerful and cool anyway but i was just thinking if we can understand because literally everyone's walking around with no freaking idea what's going on, like internally, emotionally. So how we've even got so far, I don't know, because we should really know. But one thing I want to ask is, obviously this conversation, this question is quite hard, scientifically is there the question that the presence of certain hormones means that you're more adept at presenting feminine or masculine traits or is it that's so many different variables i mean so i'm not i also should qualify myself as i'm not an endocrinologist yeah we have endocrinologists

and psychologists that we work with within the business. But in terms of, I guess, the problem that I have a lot with the way that we describe feminine and masculine is that they're social terms. So they're also very subjective. And my understanding of even emotion and, you know, so that's about, I mean, I can come on to something i think is really interesting around hormones and kind of gender in in a minute because i think that actually we underestimate from some of the most powerful conversations in the qualitative space and the conversations we had when we were researching what we were building was with the trans community because you know they are very in tune they They're incredible men and women who are incredibly in tune with their hormones

because they had to be. Because when you're going through anything where you're taking either kind of, you know, induced hormones, either transitioning from male to female or female to male, like, or woman to man, you're kind of, you're going through something which is

about tuning into what you feel but again it's relative it's very subjective to the individual and i think that we try and categorize everything in these very broad brushstroke ways of saying well that's like the pink and the blue and the kind of this is a boy trait and a girl trait and actually you know happiness is really difficult to even describe my understanding of happiness as an experience of a mood or a hormone not hormone sorry an emotion is different and i don't think we have the language to describe emotions because the emotion is it's that is yeah it's you're right it makes you word so so what we need is we need to have more ways of being able to communicate about what we're feeling, kind of the granular, the textures, the like.

There's an amazing, I'm going to just say Dutch because I want to say Dutch. I want to make sure it's, no, it's Danish. It's Danish called hygge, which is a kind of word which doesn't exist in the English language. You might have heard of it, which is essentially a kind of, it's more of an experience um and i heard someone describe it as a coat like a coziness but we should have more words like that right more more granular ways of describing how something makes us feel and can be able to communicate that with someone else rather than putting everything into these categories of well that's male or female or that's because it just doesn't actually as a language thing it

doesn't really make sense so I think what we'll start to see in the next kind of few years are people starting to experiment a bit more with what that makes them feel and you know it might not be a single word it might be a descriptor but actually having the ability to have those conversations about why something doesn't just make you feel sad but let's drill down into that like you know again the variability the kind of subjectiveness of those things. And again, when you're kind of thinking about yourself in the context of trying to understand more about your patterns and your moods, it gives you license to be like, well, actually, yeah, that is different. That is more variable. But and that's an area that we really want to go into.

You know, we we are very much about being inclusive. We don't just want to be a kind of talking to a kind of very specific female voice. We want to be talking to every woman and from multiple different kind of backgrounds and experiences so that we can be more inclusive of lots of different types of voices in this space. And especially for trans women and women in the trans community, this is such a big part of what we as women probably assimilate to being a massive part of our nature, is that conversation around our hormones and our moodiness and all of those. Exclusive Live Dealer Studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning, which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting Live Dealer Studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated.

19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca Please play responsibly. So if it has an increase, it's really interesting what you're saying actually about obviously taking hormones, things I'd never really thought about that. So obviously if you're

speaking to people in the trans community, they're probably so much more aware than we even are of how their hormones are affecting them. But more why I posed that question was because I find it really interesting especially in my own I've got very heteronormative cisgendered relationship um and we do play out well not not in the way that we act we're very like there's no gender roles there but in the way that we think about things sometimes I'm very classically emotional and he's very classically stoic.

And I always wonder if that's conditioning or. Well, that's the big question of life, isn't it? Nature nurture. It's not really. I know. But it's true. But it's. And this is.

I don't think that. I mean, this is this is literally just my personal perspective. I just don't think it's that black and white. No. this is literally just my personal perspective. I just don't think it's that black and white. So I don't think that there's any way that we can say for certainty in one person, this is 100% the case than it is in somebody else. And it's a really interesting and important area. But I also think coming back to the point of,

you know, other voices and talking about kind of hormones, rather than also assume what someone's voice is or what someone's experience is I think the thing that's also really important is to ask you know what do you feel rather than assume that what you understand of their feeling is the same being able to have these conversations from the idea that you can never understand someone's experience like they experience it. And we can never assume too much. And it's also why we're trying to be quite mindful about how we talk about this as well.

Because, you know, we within everything come from different perspectives of bias. And it's one of the areas that as a female team, I think we want to bring into every aspect is you know bringing in emotional intelligence but also trying to open up conversations with all different types of women everyone's experiences and trying not to be too linear in the way that we approach even the build which has meant that we've maybe not been as dynamic in in certain areas of the app just yet which is what we want to build out so you know we launched in the UK in October and we have been just completely overwhelmed with the response in terms of how people have engaged how positive people have been and just coming on this journey with us right you know we are a startup essentially and we want to do these kind of really big important things for women but we also are in a position where we have to you know build at certain stages I've been

raising capital which is something I've also been logging in my I've also got some hilarious stories of coming on my period in a meeting while talking about an app which helps you get ahead of your period cycle wearing beige corduroy um not the best in class example of me using the app or taking my own advice either um but it's you know it's a good example of where using the app or taking my own advice either yeah um but it's you know it's a good example of where you know we are we are in a position where we want to do so much for so many different kind of people and conversations but we also are starting out now so we're also super grateful to everyone that's kind of been on this early journey because we there have been some learnings and there have been some things where we were like oh okay well we

could do that better um and having the ability to talk directly with the community and you know that's something we've really invested heavily in is having people that every dm and like on instagram you know any feedback that we get we respond directly to i am actually one of the other big things that i want to talk about today is being a woman in business creating your own app and getting to where you are now because you were literally telling me about how yesterday you're filming a video for Apple's most, what was it? Oh, yeah, they're doing a big thing for International Women's Day about visionary women. Yeah. And it was a really difficult question. They asked me, what's a visionary woman? And I, I kind of, normally, I'm like, well, obviously, I know what visionary is. And I know what visionary

means. But I thought, well, really, for me, and my experience of it being, you know, visionary is not just thinking about what your vision is. It's about thinking about the future. Yeah. And, yeah, and I think that I was in a, so I, my background was that I actually started a business when I was 23. So it was 2011. It was before kind of Instagram was a big platform and I think I probably told this story a few times so apologies if it sounds like an old record to people but um it basically was it just took off you know communications in a digital space in 2011 wasn't that known by brands so we were able to work with some incredible brands like Nike and Microsoft we were helping them understand and navigate their social channels.

And then I sold that business in 2017. The reason for selling it was not just because I was doing it for seven years or six years. I was also in a position where my body, as I said before, had kind of shut down. And I was starting to realize that there was a huge missing piece in the world and the missing piece was that you know it's very stressful starting a business and it is very stressful running a business and especially when you don't feel like you have purpose with it and I was fortunate that I was young and I had this opportunity and then we were able to scale so I'd learn a lot about how to scale a business you know what were the infrastructure I'd you know it was a lot of learnings you know I got a lot of stuff wrong and I think one of the

biggest learnings with the agency was a lot of just how I was operationally running things as as a leader when you're a young person running a business when a lot of people are actually older than you but junior to you that's a whole different dynamic but how did you what was your background what had you studied or what how did you get to so I mean the story of the agency is almost like bizarre so I was working in a PR agency so I I did I did sociology I've always been slightly fascinated by people but kind of really was like right I'm in London I'm kind of really excited about going into communications it was like the coolest thing to do so I I got a job at a PR agency in London and then basically was working in a really kind of it was a really positive environment but it was very fast paced it was

very aggressive it was very much like get everything done it was it would it was an era when there was a lot of money for brand activations and live experience was a big part of that and but no one really understood social and it was a it was basically one day the girl that I was working with we kind of just turned around I was like this is nuts why are they spending all this money on parties for journalists when actually we should be thinking about investing in like social and like actually looking at how we create experiences for the audiences how do we create experiences which are for the kind of consumers you would call in the brand world.

So we kind of started Scene, which was, you know, again, very early stage but came from this space. Her sister was working at this marketing agency and the founder of that wanted to invest in like new startup agencies. We literally had one dinner with him and he was like, cool, when can you start? And we were like, whoa, it was crazy. It was like, this guy is just taking this huge punt. But I guess for him, he saw two people that understood something he didn't understand. And he gave us

a huge amount of privilege and opportunity. We didn't, you know, neither of us came from business backgrounds or any kind of experience and he literally threw us in the deep end the thing that I learned from that was he threw us in the deep end but there was also a it was a you know the way that the business was set up it was very much like they had a big kind of investment stake it was you know I learned a lot about what your value as a founder is you found a business and then if you find that five six years later you don't really have enough control or you don't have the ability to kind of pivot because you don't have enough of a stakeholding or you've kind of diluted yourself it's a difficult position to be in and I think

that that was my learning as well was you know what do I want my purpose and what do I want to learn from this I could be angry that you know I feel like I don't have control of the business that I've started but actually in the end it comes down to well you're not the right person to lead it at that point I'd kind of timed out I was I'd done my bit it was now up to someone else to pick it up and do amazing things with it that narrative is kind of like my favorite thing ever because this is how I've um I think life always happens so when you went through that really awful part where you felt like you'd suddenly you'd lost control a bit and like you'd lost your periods and everything wasn't feeling right

and you're so stressed and overwhelmed and out of that real difficult time was born like this amazing thing and I really think in life that's how things work. I don't know if that's because I'm just really positive but every time something really bad happens something amazing happens so now I've got quite a good attitude towards

shit happening. Absolutely. Which is funny. got quite a good attitude towards shit happening. Absolutely. It's just funny. There is always a balance, right? It's exactly what, it's the same with your moods. It's like everything has a balance. And if you are experiencing something that is sustained and doesn't feel like you ever get out of it,

then you know that there's something wrong. And it's the same if you're extremely happy, then it becomes mania and it would become incredibly, obviously, low, then you can be slipping into depression depression and it's about understanding where you're appreciating the highs and the lows at the same time and being able to read them and take learnings from both sides and i think it's very easy and there's um a kind of another brilliant book actually called grit which is by a positive psychologist it's very good and it's all about resilience and it's about this idea that actually the biggest skill and the asset you can have in life is

perseverance and resilience because if you can stick with something and stay true to the fact that you believe in what you're doing and get past the inevitable barriers and roadblocks then you're going to eventually find a conclusion which is going to be more positive so it's all about how you read and the story you want to tell about something and there's always a negative story you can tell and always a positive story you can tell yeah for sure and when you were so when you then decided you're going to set up moody and you've got your background in sociology but you're thinking about because how much of the app is the input from the user like putting in your mood and how much of it is um algorithm and science that's actually giving you

direct information back so I mean yeah so I mean I think my my experience that I was bringing to the table as part of the the kind of the business was obviously the experience of business and knowing that what we didn't want to do was sell data we didn't want to build a business which took advantage of any user because that was the other thing that I was finding quite frustrating when I was looking at the landscape of tracking technologies was it's a huge data business there. And I think that's a very dangerous thing. But that's its own podcast. That's really creepy.

I can't remember how I was listening to you talk about that. But actually, that is really scary. And I think, again, as you know, when I was looking at it, I was saying, well, we want to be an all-female team. We want to build in engineers. So I'm not a coder. So the first thing I did was think about, well, what are the people we need to be able to make this happen and I had been working with an incredible team of doctors and incredible nutritionists to be able to fix myself so I had access to some people that I said well look guys like actually

this is very much a problem and I've had to I don't mind you know spending some of my hard-earned cash on this but you know there are women in the world who are experiencing to I don't mind you know spending some of my hard-earned cash on this but you know there are women in the world who are experiencing this and don't have the privilege that I have access to like this should be more democratic it should be more accessible and they were totally on board with coming in in terms of saying well this is how we would serve it and then building in a CTO so I literally found a CTO by stalking her and I again I tell the story a lot but you but everyone said to me, you can't find,

it's really hard to find female engineers. And I was like, yeah, but most female engineers are working in big businesses and a lot of them are sitting in teams of very male, heavy environment, right? And most of them want to meet other female engineers. So they go to meetups. And this was just as meetup was kind of taking off in 2017.

So I just found where all the women that code events were and just went oh amazing um and then I just kind of hunted for like I sound like a really creepy stalker but it was like that but I was obviously really transparent with everyone I said look I want to build this this company and I want to do it properly and I want to do it with the right talent and I want to do it with women and Ingrid who's our CTO she was working at Industrial Magic and Light which is a big special effects kind of company and she was working with her husband and she had realized after having her daughter that she wanted to not work in a very kind of not just not male dominated space but actually was something a bit more purpose but the risk for her

was that she just had a daughter you know she can't give up all of the opportunities to go and join some crazy woman that sits at the back of meetups trying to hunt for ctos so i had to go and raise capital so to make sure that we could build the business with a female team we had to have money to be able to facilitate it and that is its own again probably its own narrative and that's its own stresses like raising money in an environment where you're basically going and meeting with lots of strange bankers but that whole story of what's so lovely about that is how cohesive everything is as you're talking about it everything ties in it's women helping women it's seeing those women who are coders and people listening to you talking about this that in of itself building an all-female

team is an incredible feat giving women positions like really good job roles in a thing that's again profiting women so even just through that it's it's an incredible tool because as we know like one of the best things we can do for the environment is educate women around sexual health and contraception all those things because they feed back in more and they won't be having as many children etc etc so even like just the real makeup of the app before you even get to what it does is really cool and actually like oh i mean it's just crazy to think that we don't think about things as cycles in every aspect right so you know the cycles of the systems in which we exist right now the kind of

problems the challenges that we're facing it's why you know you read books like sapiens and homo deus and these incredible like and it's just it's terrifying because you think we just make the same mistakes over and over again why are we making the same mistakes is because human beings operate on life cycles so you have a life cycle of a person and then the next generation pick up the bad habits and then the life cycle continues i actually said this on the last episode with scotty i was like i literally it's so funny i was like i feel like we do a circle and we get inch forward and then we go back and so we move forwards but at like a glacial pace because we go it's like fashion trends and our opinions on gender and sexuality like we've done this in ancient greek no one's everyone was shagging everyone no one gave a shit today and now we're being but the difference is

technology yeah so the big difference is technology now and the the risk we have with technology is building the same kind of bias and the thing when because when you build technology and this is the other reason for founding a female team is that when you and i always use the metaphor of writing a female protagonist so when you write a female protagonist as a male author or as a female author you write her different because you have a different kind of bias and perspective because we are as i mentioned before kind of socialized in the way in which we understand kind of moods and emotions and gender and so actually when you're coding it's exactly the same thing if you're coding as a man you're coding something in a

different experience and especially if you're coding something about a menstrual cycle or hormones you should be coding it as a woman. And that's the nuance. And then you get this kind of really unique output. And ultimately, that's how we can build a new kind of bias. So rather than end up with all of the technologists building these incredible platforms from the perspective of a very specific male guys, let's try and do it from a female guise let's build a new kind of bias because then this elevation that technology gives us this kind of opportunity for technology to fast track and hopefully get past some of these boring cycles that we repeat over and over again but rather than slip into the negative side of it where it can be very controlling or it could be dangerous or monopolizing let's try

and build something that's more emotionally intelligent that has more community aspect to it which takes into consideration the risk before it does something yeah because that's what we also did you know we've been building this for two years and we've evaluated the potential risk you know we didn't we're never selling data we needed to build a business model that worked so the way that the business model is not switched on properly yet but the way that it will work and i'm always really transparent about this is that what we want to do is we want people to be able to understand their moods and their symptoms and the things that are going on and then we want to be able to serve diet and exercise and vitamins

and things which are part of a routine and a ritual that you're in that are based on the specific moods and symptoms that you might be experiencing and that's not even just us saying this is going to solve all your problems but it's saying this is a better routine and ritual that might help you so it's connecting the dots from a wellness perspective as well and being able to give you know a lot more access for women to this information well it's so fast like the more you're talking about i'm just honestly really overwhelmed i think it's incredible i went to talk last night that was called like has me too failed um and and the baseline at the end of the conversation just got to that we need to change the laws because all the laws are written by men so even when you deal with these big big problems the underlying issues of everything is we are in

a patriarchy where all the voices and every single thing is written from a male perspective and actually the impact of you creating technology which as you say is one of the biggest currencies that we have now that is female driven that not only aims to like it will give jobs to women but this empowerment of women understanding their bodies being more emotionally intelligent able to harness the power of femininity or whatever it is is actually huge i'm really i'm so down i'm so excited I know it's amazing but it's also why you know people like well you know you need to be doing more PR and doing all these things and it's hard because you know we're there's a lot going on there's a lot of and and that's also where we it's not really about me even it's about all the different women that are involved in the business

and we're at a really interesting inflection point now because we've got enough information to be able to go live in the states and we've got enough information now to kind of start to really elevate what we've built and we feel confident that we're not slipping into kind of risk with you know addictive behaviors we've creating a product which is much more about building routines and rituals not being addictive and that is a position where we feel excited about elevating it and now we can start talking about it. But yeah, we've basically been sat around in dark rooms, studiously working away and trying to change the like system. And we're really hopeful and excited about sharing with everyone like what we feel now.

I think, yeah, it's incredible. So quickly, just to run through like some of the things that I'd love if you could just give like an overview of things that people should feel normalized about because I think that's like the biggest sigh of relief when someone goes to you oh this is totally normal well I think everyone is normal this idea that normal is just a very odd concept because what is normal for me is very different to you and I think that's why being able to self-report is important so being able to see okay example when for me the thing that was abnormal was that I was experiencing I wasn't having a period but I was also experiencing incredibly high low kind of issues around my sleep

and my temperature and they weren't connected to my period cycle they were connected to a specific travel so it was actually also to do with the fact I was traveling a lot and I was jet lagged and so my body and my rhythms were just totally off and what I was able to identify was a direct correlation and this was in a paper diary when I was pre having Moody even built and I was able to correlate that there was a direct relationship between certain meetings certain interactions with certain people and travel plans with things like water retention, bloating and sleep deprivation. And so what that I identified was that's not normal for me. And therefore, for me, I needed to address the problem. So the root cause. So not just logging. And this is why we have a world section. So

what you can log is you can log your moods, things that are going on in your body and also the things in the world that are affecting you. So what I'm tracking at the moment, for example, is fundraising. So raising capital to build technology is, I mean, that's a book. And a whole, yeah, it is hard. But it's not unachievable. It's just it is difficult so what i'm logging at the moment is when do i feel overwhelmed and when am i fundraising and then when am i finding within the month is the best time for me to pitch so when am i feeling most like x like externally like okay about kind of putting us out there because basically the thing with fundraising is you get told no and even emily vice talks about this a lot when she talks about fundraising for glossier and a lot of women women that have fundraised for female products specifically where it's like you just you have to be rejected and you have to be ready to be rejected every day. And so when am I most capable to be rejected in extreme levels or in a softer level? And then you tailor how you how you work and operate around that so coming back to your point about well what's what's normal is that there's no there's nothing about you that is potentially abnormal as long as you're tracking and understanding what is your environment and what are the things that you feel abnormal and

the intuition you have as well like listen to your gut you know the thing that we have is this sixth sense of you know when something feels, the likelihood is that it is. And listen to it. Don't put it off. Don't ignore it, but track it. Yeah. I think as well, I think with this inner sage where there is so much social media and stuff, I think we do become slightly disconnected sometimes. So giving yourself that time, it's just like another bit of mindfulness.

It's just another way to reconnect with yourself, but in a way that we understand now, which is through tech. Yeah. So it's just like another bit of mindfulness it's just another way to reconnect with yourself but in a way that we understand now which is through tech yeah so it's amazing and the other thing that we're kind of launching which is happening in the next six months is moody meets because the other thing that is really important is that as we do build the community and as people start to kind of engage we want to be able to take it into the real world because actually it's great that you can kind of track those things but also you want to be able to meet people that are also experiencing similar things and you know I have a very brilliant incredible friendship group and we share a lot and it sounds like you're the same right but we're all quite different whereas it's something very powerful about I met an amazing

woman who'd been through a very similar story to me she was living in the states she'd experienced um adrenal fatigue but not the clinical word um and she'd had very similar like very similar patterns and just us sitting down and like drinking a bottle of wine and talking about it changed my life i know but there is something about um i always say this because i find it so hilarious but i run a book club um my next one's actually on international women's day and every single time so i'll pick a book everyone reads it before and then i'll come up with like set questions with feminism whatever it is and then halfway through and everyone's drinking wine halfway through have food and then for the

next half just no one I can't get anyone's attention everyone just starts talking about sex periods and all these like taboo subjects where it's almost like it's a root it sounds because it shouldn't be like this in this day and age but it's almost like being in a massive girls bathroom in a nightclub and no one's judging you and the stories that people are telling because there isn't space for women to talk about these issues so you do very often only speak about them with a very small group of women who you really really trust and it's when you get a stranger in front of you suddenly there's a real safeness and I don't know what it is but when no one there knows you you're suddenly that story it's amazing it's the best thing ever what happens at book club stays at book club but it's so it's really funny it's so liberating and it's so

important you know like it's so important because i talk a lot about technology and i'm a big believer in the positive attributes and the way in which you can build ethical technology but i'm an even bigger believer in connecting in the real world and the power and the positive power that women have intuitively to share and be sympathetic and intelligent around how you share stories and I think that's the other exciting part of this era of emotional intelligence for everyone you know men as well because it's about retraining everybody to be more connected and if we can feel more confident and empowered then we can help educate the kind of next generation of women and men yeah so incredible oh amazing i've literally loved this conversation

i'm so excited about this whole thing i'm like this is going to change everything it's been so nice chatting about it i've been loving it if everyone wants to find you online or if they want to fundraise is that something that people can contribute to is that so we will be uh so we will actually be doing um some crowdfunding in uh i think i'm not going to put a date on that because i'm actually not 100% sure where it's going to be because we're putting a plan together at the moment but everything is moody month so everything social web um and yeah and just i guess it's everyone that's involved at the moment is really our kind of early stage and and we are going to be there's some really exciting things happening this year and and yeah and it's really going to

start to build that momentum so we just want to share it with everyone now amazing well i think it's going to be amazing things for you and this is such a great thing to have done so thanks so much for coming on i look forward to seeing how you get on thank you amazing bye Fandu Casino Daily Jackpots Guaranteed to hit by 11pm with your chance at the number one feeling Winning Which beats even the 27th best feeling Saying I do Who wants this last parachute?

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