Research, investment, national media, tech innovation...our story so far
As we near the end of 2024 and head into the full launch of the Habit Reset on 1st January 2025, it seems a good time to look at how far our company has come in the past 5 years.
Hi, I’m Dr Julia Jones, a neuroscientist, former Olympic psychologist and founder of Holidity. Here’s a potted history of our journey.
2018
While assisting on an NHS dementia care strategy, I began to wonder why fifty years of huge diet and fitness trends had failed to produce any healthy nations.
In the 1990s and 2000s, I was deeply professionally involved in the diet and fitness sector, and I truly believed the recommendations we were giving people would produce healthy nations.
But, in 2018, when I plotted the growth of decades of diet and fitness revenues alongside the growth of average waistline size, and the scale of the ballooning physical and mental health crisis, there was no doubt that this model had utterly failed.
I began to think a lot about my Dad who had died of a fatal heart attack while on holiday celebrating his 65th birthday and retirement in a hotel with my Mum. He was obese and suffering high blood pressure and cholesterol after having continuously failed to follow the diet and fitness advice given by his GP. He would be 90 this year.
Why are these recommendations so hard to adopt, and why are they still being given by health professionals when we know they are unsustainable for most people?
I decided to investigate the reasons for this failure and to try and identify and develop a new approach that would more effectively tackle the real drivers of the health problem.
2019
I set up a company called Neuron Wellness Limited as a vehicle for this research work.
I began examining our ancient evolutionary biology and revisited a biohacking technique I had first been introduced to during a visit to a US Navy SEALs base in California in the early 1990s. They had shown me how to use music to reach the underlying nervous system to reduce stress, increase physical endurance, improve confidence, motivation and sleep. This simple ‘hack’ helped our underlying physiology function properly when in unusual situations (e.g. stressful encounters).
In 2019, I self-published a book called ‘The Music Diet: The Rock & Roll Guide To Staying Alive’ documenting this ‘biohacking’ approach using music as the example. The book attracted a lot of national media attention.
I began running music-based wellness sessions at major corporate employer offices to gather behavioural data.
2020 & 2021
On 1st January 2020, I cancelled my fitness subscriptions and diet plans, and began experimenting with lots of different types of science-backed ‘hacks’ to help my brain and body function healthily in the modern world.
These hacks proved to be extremely effective. They were very low effort and required no financial outlay. I began to recognize that this approach could provide very powerful benefits due to its simplicity and affordability. I lost weight and all my health scores improved across all wellness pillars such as sleep and stress.
I published this 12-month personal experiment in a second book called ‘Neuron: Smart Wellness Made Easy’.
The book attracted national TV, radio and press coverage and hit the Amazon Bestseller list.
I continued to deliver wellness sessions for employers and NHS groups to gather more data around the effectiveness of different delivery styles and various science-based ‘hacks’.
2022 & 2023
With the help of some fantastic supporters and advisors we raised almost £200,000 of EIS-approved pre-seed investment. This enabled more testing of various health approaches including gut health and biological age testing.
I published the final book documenting this research journey. It was called ‘F-Bomb’ and also attracted significant national media coverage and hit the Amazon Bestseller list.
We developed a new prebiotic coffee drink called ‘Hack’ on a UK Government Funded Food Innovation Accelerator.
We developed a superb new collection of music tracks for breathing practices with Universal Production Music (you can find these ‘MusicHacks’ tracks on Spotify).
We thought we’d found the answers but as we progressed we could see that these approaches weren’t actually tackling the real problem.
Because the real problem was the fact that most people cannot stick with their habit changes long enough to make them a lifelong new routine.
These gut health and biological age approaches were just new versions of ‘fads’ just like previous diet and fitness fads that had failed to produce lifelong habit change through the decades.
When I looked at the data we’d gathered over the previous years the real solution became clear:
- Human-led accountability support boosts success
- When I had been personally delivering the habit change programme and regularly checking-in with people they were more likely to continue the habit hack they had chosen
- When people try and make high effort changes they usually fail
- The evolutionary-science-based habit ‘hacks’ are easier
But the final challenge was to figure out how to scale up this daily human support so it can be delivered affordably to mass users.
We began looking at ‘apps’ but the average retention rate for health and fitness apps in 2023 was just 2.8%.
Apps are simply not working. The world has become tired of apps. Our home screens are littered with them. App fatigue is a real thing and something that I heard talked about a lot at LA Tech Week in October 2024.
Most of us download apps and use them for a little while and then never open them again. Their annoying tech-based nudge messages become invisible to us. We ignore them.
Online content also isn’t working. Most people are living in a state of overwhelm. So providing them with huge amounts of videos, PDFs, webinars, podcasts and endless health advice is simply adding to the noise.
The tsunami of wellness content is not leading to lifelong habit change.
We knew that to create a real solution we had to adopt a ‘less is more’ approach.
We had to build an ultra simple and peaceful journey that was human-led, but tech-enabled, so it could be delivered affordably at scale to anyone who wanted it.
2024
After examining various statistics it became clear that WhatsApp was now the preferred communication portal for most people. It dominates everything else.
So, in January 2024, I began delivering an MVP (minimum viable product) version of a ‘Habit Reset’ behaviour change programme using daily check-ins with me on WhatsApp.
I kept it simple. Participants just chose ONE habit hack from my recommended list and then checked-in with me on WhatsApp by responding to my daily message with a Thumbs Up if they'd managed to do the habit hack that day.
We delivered it for employers and also for consumers via www.holidity.com
It achieved an incredible 70% retention rate. Obliterating the 2.8% rate of health apps.
We rebranded the company as Holidity, representing a holistic approach to health through the solidity of lifelong habits.
In September, we won a place on another superb UK government funded, Mayor of London / Grow London, tech innovation accelerator and this greatly improved the way we explain and communicate the Habit Reset. We also built a new website on Shopify to simplify the customer experience even further.
In December we completed the build of the v1 tech-enabled Habit Reset meaning I could now have an unlimited number of users checking-in with me every day on WhatsApp. This will launch on January 1st with a new subscription membership to make it simple and affordable for people to work with us on lifelong habit adjustments.
2025
When I began this research journey I had no idea of the enormity of the project that it would become.
Like all startups we’ve faced a steady flow of problems that had to be overcome.
But here we are on the cusp of our January 1st launch and very proud and excited about the ultimate outcome of all this work.
We’ve developed an innovative new approach to habit change that my colleagues and I honestly believe can make a real dent in the health crisis.
It’s affordable, simple and effective.
We invite you to try the Habit Reset for yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, customers. It could make a big difference to their lives.
January 1st will mark 5-years since I began adopting this simple habit-hacking approach in my daily routine for my own health.
This year we will invite investors to support us once again as we roll out the Habit Reset as an effective and affordable new preventative health tool to help tackle the health crisis.
We’d like to send a big thank you to everyone who has supported this journey.
Here's to an exciting, healthier future.
Happy New Year!
Dr Julia Jones and the Holidity team