Health start-up , is named after the Swedish concept of taking relaxed time to talk with friends or colleagues over a coffee. Based in Bethnal Green the company wants to move the dial on mental health through conversation, encouraging people to build up their emotional fitness.聽
鈥淲hat we鈥檝e done with our language over the years is we use the phrase mental health and what we are referring to is mental illness. We鈥檝e created this huge problem with stigma,鈥� explains Fika鈥檚 CEO Nick Bennett.聽
鈥淔or the last two years we鈥檝e been developing something focused on prevention in this space.鈥澛�
Motivated by the suicide of a close friend, Bennett set about creating an app focused on building up emotional fitness. Like a 5 minute a day workout app, Fika encourages users to exercise their emotional health, building up day by day.
Improving emotional fitness has many benefits include improved focus, confidence and resilience. Fika was developed with the help of seven psychologists, borrowing theories from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and solutions-based therapy. The app houses exercises for developing goal power, positivity, adaptability, confidence and relationships and can be used alone or face-to-face with a friend.
Unfortunately, you can鈥檛 download Fika on the App Store, as Fika is currently exclusively working with UK universities, including Lincoln, Exeter, Manchester Metropolitan and Coventry. Today, the app is only available for students of these universities.
Focusing on students means that Fika can thoroughly test their product, before rolling the product out to the rest of the world. Furthermore, over 15,000 first-year students reported they had a mental health problem in 2015-2016, up from 3,000 10 years earlier, that鈥檚 according to the . So, the student population is certainly a worthy place to start.
鈥淲e need to be brave as a culture. It鈥檚 time for us as a nation to stand up, and say let鈥檚 normalise emotional fitness, make it habitual, and address the terrible imbalance between the importance placed on physical fitness and the missing importance on emotional fitness,鈥� says Bennett.聽
