Outside of a therapy session, there are 167 hours in a week. What are you going to do?

Have you ever googled something to do with mental health?

If you have, you’re not alone, and if you haven’t your friends probably have. Last year, over 32 million people accessed the UK mental health pages of the National Health Service (NHS) choices website.

That’s over 50% of the UK adult population looking for good quality information on mental health… Around 15% of us have a diagnosable mental health problem at any time, but clearly so many more of us are concerned about our mental health in any one year.

This is why we have created resilio; providing good quality information with an understanding of what to then do next with tailored skill development matched to individuals.

Resilio is Latin for bounce and the root of resilience, and developed by expert clinicians, with psychotherapist and medic co-founders, we offer therapy, but without the therapist.

We help people to be the best they can for themselves, with the addition of a bit more knowledge and a few helpful skills.

Diagnosed or not, skills for our thinking and behaviours can help us all manage ourselves better.

Awareness campaigns have done a great job making strides to lower stigma, and in the UK we have been encouraged to access services with around 15% with a condition accessing therapy and 100,000 people a month currently entering treatment for common mental health problems in the huge initiative of the Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT).

However, UK NHS mental health services can struggle to meet the demand as they receive only 11% of the funding for what is 26% of the work of the NHS. Even with well organised services such as IAPT, the current hope is to only offer therapy to 25% of those people with a diagnosed condition, let alone help the larger numbers concerned about their mental health.

This larger group may go on to develop further problems, and may well access private treatment at £80 — £100 a session, or more from a therapist, often sought out randomly. For business, the cost is massive with ‘presenteeism’ at work being ten times the cost of workers being absent, the best part of two months a year of an individual worker’s time being wasted.

Where we are not functioning well the cost to us and those around us is huge.

In 2014 the US the mental health spend is $186bn a year, but what money could we save services, what could we save employers or what pain could we reduce individuals having to carry, if we could help people to manage themselves, their minds and their behaviours in a more effective way for them?

The public campaigns of awareness raising and lowering stigma has encouraged us to beat a path to the most effective treatment. We are encouraged to talk about mental health, but do we have to always access expensive and inconsistent treatment? We know that we should talk about mental health, but what should we say or do?

What’s missing between awareness-raising and accessing treatment are two important steps; good quality knowledge about symptoms and types of disorders, which the NHS choices site is providing, but we also need effective high quality self-management skills for what life throws at us.

We are starting to see significant problems when we do not have these lifeskills, strategies and capacity to manage ourselves. If we cannot effectively self-manage, face challenges and know how to deal with them, as Professor Stan Kutcher lucidly argues, we may retreat to incorrectly use the language of diagnosis, which ruins our internal ability to deal with the external demands of life, and this can happen on a massive scale.

In what has been observed as a global mental health crisis in young people, we have reportedly done them disservice by leaving a generation unprepared for adulthood by not having these skills.

Seeing a therapist as a young person or an adult may help with developing skills management, but good ones can be hard to find, sessions are expensive, varied in quality, and therapists are usually not matched with an approach that is best for the individual, plus sessions can take a long time too.

I have chronic difficulties myself, and although I understand them, having received over 600 sessions of therapy, and provided well over 25000 hours to others, but despite this detailed knowledge, often my personal management comes down to well fitting, personalised but most importantly, really quite simple skills.

Complex concepts, in plain language, and that is what we offer at resilio.

We have taken the more effective approaches to therapy, ones that have the best evidence, and turned them into skills that can be accessed, when and where you want them, learned, practiced and tailored to you. And given how busy we all are, we offer convenient bite-size pieces, in audio, and with interactive and personalised parts — all about the length of a song.

I come from a traditional background as a counsellor, psychotherapist and counselling psychologist, having trained with the best professors in the world including the originators of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). I have a loyalty to the best forms and approaches to therapy, where it is needed.

However, there is a great opportunity now for therapy to move away from the consulting room couch, to become more accessible, from being a meeting that takes place for only 1 of the 168 hours in a week, but to fit into our digital age. We need to know what to do for the other 167 hours.

Not to focus on the digital or the technology here, because the smart thing that resilio does is to make the complex understandable, to have therapy in chunked skills that are able to be understood, mastered, practiced and repeated.

Life Happens — Learn to Bounce

To start with, the resilio programmes help with areas that can be linked to more serious mental health problems, such as stress, sleep, happiness, social anxiety, mood and self-esteem.

We are focussing on areas that we could all improve — and even small improvements in them can add up to big differences in how we feel and how we live our lives. Because we have a medical Doctor as resilio co-founder, we are moving on to other areas that are a bit more health-related, such as pain, diabetes and IBS, translating an understanding and enhancing the self-management of common longer-term conditions.

And because it can sometimes take a while to get the hang of new ideas, the resilio sessions are reusable for continued learning or repeating later.

We help you discover what works best for you, we help you keep that going. We help you optimise your own wellbeing (with some other nudges too).

The resilio approaches are based on techniques that the best clinicians over the world use. The resilio programmes are made by experts — all at a fraction of the cost, from good knowledge, made understandable, and tailored to you.

With resilio, we see problems not just as mental illness, it is about helping us all learn effective skills for managing life; diagnosed or not.

See our site, sign up to try our courses, let us help you develop your skills.

Because sometimes…we all need a bit of help with our bounce.

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@resiliohealth is a company built in the Zinc VC incubator, a start-up incubator which aims to solve the world’s most pressing social issues by building tech-for-good companies from scratch. All companies strive to impact the lives of millions of people. Learn more about them here: Gilda, Leika, Amble, Bold Health, Zentor, Dialoguers, KitchenTable, Zone, Uniq, Lucina, Resilio, Squad, Onigo, Bolster, and Trapeze.

If you want to learn more about Zinc, have a look at www.zinc.vc and follow them on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.