Why I built Solastone

Earlier this year I burned out. I want to be precise about what that meant, because for a long time I wasn’t. I could not finish a sentence. I could not follow a television show. In an exercise class, I could not keep up with the instructions. I was exhausted and wired at the same time, and I did not see it coming.

I had every number. I checked my HRV each morning. I knew my sleep stages, my deep-sleep minutes, and my cumulative stress score. I was one of the most measured people I knew, and I had no idea how I actually was. The data told me what my body had done. It never told me what to do next.

And I was not naive about any of this. I had been in therapy for years. I had read enough about the vagus nerve to award myself a small, self-declared PhD in it. I had studied the brain the way other people study markets: why it breaks, what motivates it, why we sleep. I knew the theory cold. And with five deadlines and two young kids, I could not see that I was in a meltdown. Knowing how the nervous system works turned out to be no protection from my own.

Therapy was different. Once a week, my therapist gave me something practical I could do in one to five minutes. Those tools worked. The problem was where they lived: on post-its, in the Notes app on my laptop, in a journal at home. When I needed them most, I could not find them.

Before I went back to work, my anxiety came down to one question: would I hit the bottom again? So my therapist, Aubrey Landau, LMFT, gave me a framework. Four states: green, yellow, red, and purple. The first step is not to fix anything. The first step is to answer honestly which one you are in right now.

I tried to do this on my phone, and I learned something. Picking up my phone to check in with myself meant I checked my email, answered two texts, opened Instagram, and looked at my HRV. I did everything except check in.

So I built something else. Solastone is a stone you turn to say where you are, and it then offers one small practice that fits the minutes you have. The app is out first, because I need to know whether this works for people who are not me. The physical stone is next.

Here is what I believe after this year. Measuring your body is not the same as being in it. The tools that help are small, and they only help if they are within reach. And asking “where am I right now?” is a skill, not a feeling. It gets better with practice, and it is worth practicing before the bottom, not after.

If you have been through a version of this, I would like to hear what worked for you. That is how the toolkit in Solastone grew, and it is how it will keep growing.