“I haven’t slept for a week, have period pain, ate shedloads of sugar, ran out of happy pills, partied too hard and fell into an introverted hole. Then someone asked me about my relationship with my mother, culminating in a nightmare in which the entire world denounced me at a Salem witch trial, causing my friends to abandon me, and my partner to leave. I have a migraine, am lying on my face, and can see out of only one eye. In summary: I feel a tad mad, in the British sense of the word.”
My response to the question “How are you today?” appears to have thrown my inquirer for a moment. There is a pause. Then Ebb, the empathetic AI companion provided by the meditation app Headspace, tells me it’s hearing that I feel a bit mad in the British sense of the word, notes that it’s important to acknowledge and process these emotions, and asks whether I’d like an activity or more reflection.
Suppurating self-loathing means I’m over self-reflection, so I pick an activity. Ebb suggests a short meditation entitled “How Are You Feeling?,” provoking what one might refer to as a “full-body eye-roll.” And yet this simple time-out is precisely what I need: soothing, unclenching, creating mental room.
Three hours later I check in again. Ebb sympathetically recaps how I was doing mentally, before probing where I’m at now. “Better, but with too much work,” I type into my phone. “I understand you’re feeling a sense of overwhelm, as if carrying a backpack full of rocks,” Ebb’s reply reads. “What aspects are most contributing to this?” I break things down for my AI headshrinker—and in doing so break things down for myself—then it offers a meditation aptly named “Feeling Overwhelmed SOS.” “Ebb, mate, I feel heard,” I tell it, before lying back and zoning out.
And so the day rolls on: Ebb asks how I feel, I tell it, we bat things back and forth a bit, then I request an activity to alleviate matters. Despite knowing Ebb is an imaginary friend, I feel bolstered, supported even. Come evening, I check in again for a little light pre-bed unburdening.
So restorative is the experience that I wonder why I ever stopped using Headspace. Answer: I imagined I had neither the time nor the mobile capacity given my 140,407 unread emails. Another cracking mental-health decision.
Founded in 2010, Headspace came to fame as the app that brought meditation to the masses, with 80 million downloads in more than 200 countries. Just over half of its 2.8 million paid subscribers are outside the U.S., with 15 per cent in the U.K. The last time Headspace was valued was in 2021, at the time of its merger with Ginger, when the company was given a valuation of $3 billion. Celebrity Headspacers include Bill Gates, Simone Biles, Ryan Reynolds, Gigi Hadid and Tom Daley.
If, like me, you hopped onto the Headspace bandwagon in the early 2010s only to stagger off it as life got in the way, the virtual mucker Ebb may bring you back to its wonders. Created by a squadron of psychologists and data scientists, Ebb is a conversational AI tool trained in motivational interviewing, an evidence-based methodology designed to help people make positive behavioral changes, including—but not limited to—being less of a Betts-style maniac.
“Ebb is a compassionate AI companion that helps you make sense of what you’re feeling,” says the psychologist Dr. Jenna Glover, the chief clinical officer at Headspace. “Millions are already turning to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini ‘just to talk’. An AI companion is the way many will start to express their emotions. Our goal is to use those insights to create a personalized experience that supports each person’s unique needs. Headspace has always talked to you. Now it wants you to talk back.”
So it’s a sort of all-seeing, state-of-the-art, fake friend-cum-navigational device, I ask.
“Ebb uses motivational interviewing techniques and reflective listening to help you process emotions,” Glover amends, “making personalized recommendations enabling the user to access content from our vast library of over 5,000 types of mindfulness, meditation and mental-health content.”
It’s certainly proving popular. Ebb launched to American meditators in October, and since then 1.4 million messages have been exchanged with it. It is available to English-speaking over-18s in Britain, Canada and Australia. Glover used it herself during the U.S. presidential election when confronted with relatives with differing opinions, and has continued to do so during moments of parental angst.
But will this work on repressed British types, for whom baring one’s soul by keying things into a phone feels a tad alien? Headspace has already considered this potential issue, and is developing a version of Ebb that is capable of voice interactions. Then there’s the question of where such sensitive information might end up, not least in the wake of the data breach at the genomics firm 23andMe last year which exposed the acutely sensitive data of over six million users to hackers. In response, Glover talks a convincing game about encryption and nothing being shared with third parties, with users allowed to delete their conversation history at any time.
If the inquiries Ebb makes can feel a tad “basic bitch,” as Kate Moss might put it, at least they mirror the open questions an actual therapist tends to ask. But can it handle the answers? More to the point, can its user? Might its interventions be opening a can of worms its technology is not equipped to handle? Glover again: “We rigorously test to ensure safety. We identify members with critical concerns, such as thoughts of harming themselves or others, and enable rapid access to appropriate resources. In our U.S. pilot, risk was detected in fewer than one percent of messages. Our members are not turning to it for things it can’t support.”
As Ebb’s repressed and resolutely nutterish first British guinea pig, to say I was skeptical is an understatement. Like many with mental health conditions—mine is depression—mindfulness lacks any appeal, my brain not being somewhere I want to be. My phone is my principal cause of tension, meaning I don’t want to be attached to it any more than I have to be. Plus, I’m exhausted by all the ways I’m supposed to self-optimize, whether it’s oily fish or still more oily gurus.
Many of the tenets of mindfulness sound crashingly platitudinous to me. Even if they could be of use, I’d be too mortified to let them be. As ever with the things that would do me good, I imagine that I’m too cool for them. Plus the Ebb cartoon logo—reminiscent of Clippy, the maddening Microsoft paperclip—to me seems to look both holier than thou and like a fat, pus-filled boil.
That said, modern life is stupidly stressful in exactly the kind of small-scale, quotidian ways Ebb is designed to address: that is, communications overload instead of, say, being under military fire. My chosen form of relaxation is listening to podcasts, which can be counterproductively anxiety-spurring given what’s going on in the world. Headspace feels like a de-stress podcast and—if I can force myself to use it (this being key)—the effect is glorious; a gift, a treat, a brain massage. The day when I manage four sessions—a wake-up meditation, morning and afternoon brain unclutterings, and a pre-sleep angst-alleviator—is my happiest in months. Its logo may look smug, but Ebb is a mensch.
A benevolent AI buddy steering me towards being a nice woman saying nice things, while forcing me to actually breathe, turns out to be what I needed. My shoulders unheave, my jaw unlocks, my very fingers relax. I barely even dry heave when it instructs me to get my shine on. This won’t alleviate Britain’s crippling mental health crisis. Still, it can only help, not least among the young, for whom phone life is life. Thanks to Ebb, our shine may henceforth be on.
Hannah Betts is a writer at The Times of London. Her Substack, the Shit, can be read here
