Jumpstart January: An Interview with Breanna Moret, Senior Manager of Content at Headspace

Maintaining health and wellness are about more than just physical activity—managing the stress of modern life and making time for yourself to relax and decompress can be just as essential. But while many of us make resolutions to step up our physical fitness and improve our health habits in the new year, managing mental wellness often goes overlooked. That’s where apps like Headspace XR come in.

For Breanna Moret, Senior Manager of Content at Headspace, mindfulness works a lot like physical fitness. In order to really see the benefits, it’s important to develop consistent habits. Headspace XR looks to make those activities a little easier to try so that anyone can start to add mindfulness to their routines.

Headspace XR uses Meta Quest to immerse its users in a virtual playground, offering a number of different mindfulness activities you can approach alone or with friends—without outside distractions. It includes guided meditation experiences, uplifting games that can enhance your mood while also giving you mindfulness skills to take back to the physical world and exercises that can help release tension and make it easier to drop stress and relax. Headspace XR is set in a beautiful, relaxing landscape where you can meet other players to build community as you build mindfulness habits, and it includes mindfulness teachers who can guide you through the experience.

For this entry in our Jumpstart January series, we sat down with Moret to discuss what VR and MR can offer for exploring and building good mindfulness habits, how Headspace combines the Headspace XR experience with its existing mobile app to offer different approaches to those experiences, and how Headspace XR is changing in the new year.

Breanna Moret: My name is Bre. I’m the Senior Manager of Content over here at Headspace, so I work across all of what we call “off-platform” projects—everything from TV, film, digital, and now VR/XR—and have worked on this project really since the start. It’s been about three years now from development to putting it out into the world.

BM: We actually are launching a fairly large product update soon. It’s like a two-parter. One hit in December. The second will hit in February, and it’s really kind of restructuring our whole onboarding experience, trying to make it more effortless for new users to understand. I think with our app, it’s such a big world. It can be a little bit overwhelming at times. So it’s a smoother experience, I would say.

Some of the other changes we’ve made are emphasizing how important it is to have a consistent routine and treating your mindfulness practice kind of like going to the gym—like training your mind. If you can do it three times a week, you’re going to see a lot more benefit than once a month. It’s a little bit of a shifting of how we talk to users, and we really hope that they can start to see some of those benefits, like less stress, less anxiety, more relaxation, etc.

BM: Honestly, it’s been fun to see how people have reacted. I think mostly people are sort of amazed that this could be considered mindfulness—that this could be considered meditation. I think there’s that kind of stereotype out there that you have to sit with your eyes closed and cross your legs, and at Headspace, with our mobile app and with this newer XR app, we really wanted to get across that it’s for everyone. You can do it anywhere. You can do it sitting, laying down, walking. You can really tailor it to what works best for you.

We always talk over here about how not everyone’s the same, so not everyone’s going to enjoy sitting and closing their eyes. This is just another way to experience that. So I think with the community we already had, people were really like, “Wow.” It’s just a different experience and can lead to some richer, more powerful responses because it’s so different and so immersive. That’s been exciting to see.

We’re also tapping into a newer community, this community that you’ve built on Quest, where they’re used to being in-headset, they’re used to being immersed. They’re starting to understand, “Oh, I can make meditation a part of that routine for myself, whether it’s before a game, after a game, or doing it alone. I can get some benefit for myself even while I’m doing the things that I like to do in the headset."

BM: We think they go together really well. Our mobile app is great, it’s so portable, you can take it anywhere you go. We have walking meditations in our mobile app, so people take their phone, they’ll go do their walking meditation in the morning, start their day off that way, and then they can come home at the end of the night, they can get in-headset and do some of our wind downs in our XR app, and it’s a totally different kind of immersive experience. Having the two really pairs well together, depending on where you are, what you need that day, how much time you have. Giving people the option of having multiple ways to access that mindfulness and meditation practice is really important.

BM: Myself and the company as a whole, we’re very new to VR, MR, and XR, but it was an opportunity to do something different. I think technology is changing so much, there are so many advancements happening, so how do we access mindfulness in different ways? I think we did that with our mobile app in the beginning. Our founder, before our app came out, was a monk in Asia, and that’s how he found his mindfulness. He decided to kind of change it a little bit, adapt it for the modern age, and that’s how the mobile app was born.

We looked at it in very much the same way when it came to XR and saw it as an opportunity to reach new people. We always say, “Meet people where they are.” So it was an opportunity to find this different community that may not be super familiar with wellness, meditation, or mindfulness, tap into that group and open their eyes to how it can be beneficial for them—to show people there’s so many ways to incorporate it into your life. This is another avenue for you to find how it can work for you.

So we’ve seen both new audiences and audiences we’ve already had respond well to it, and I think as a company, we try to be really innovative with where and how we show up. And then personally, with wellness for myself, like many others, I had a very stressful job before this and started getting into it in my personal life and found something that really works for me. It’s always nice when you can translate that into your working life, and I was able to make the jump over here. It’s just been awesome. We put out this content, and whether it’s a digital series we do or the XR app, we’re always trying to find ways to help people at the end of the day.

BM: Something we talk a lot about with VR specifically that’s so great, that our mobile app honestly can’t do, is it can really knock out all of the distractions. You can’t be on your phone. You’re not looking at your TV. When you’re in-headset, you are fully there, and I think a lot of people can struggle with visualization and turning off their mind. This is a powerful tool we’ve seen people respond really well to for just blocking out the rest of the world and finding space to access a different mindset.

BM: The timing is great because we’re about to do this big product update. So that’s exciting for us and especially for new users. I think they’re going to see some big benefits right away and really feel like they’re going on a journey with us—and hopefully, it’s a journey that they enjoy and will want to keep coming back for more.

And as we’re getting into the new year, people are obviously very big on goals and resolutions, and there’s always that fresh-start feeling to January. We love to be a part of those journeys for people. I think meditation, mindfulness, wellness, taking care of yourself can really help you with those goals, whether it’s work-related or personal-related, fitness-related, what have you. Having this consistent routine can help with a lot of your other goals as well.

BM: I think sometimes, when it comes to meditation, when it comes to mindfulness, people try it once, and they’re like, “Oh, it didn’t really do anything for me.” It really is so much like your physical fitness. It’s like going to the gym. You’re going to see results if you have a consistent practice, and it can be five minutes a day, it can be 10 minutes, it can be one minute. It can be very short, but it’s just so much about that routine and letting your mind have that space to really have a moment, take a break, that kind of thing.

We hope that our app can help guide people to figuring out how to do that because it’s really hard to turn your brain off. We’re surrounded by social media and TV and billboards and ads and everything. We try to help people take a little break—however short.

It’s like when you go to the gym: If you’re strength training, you can’t do it once and then expect huge muscles. It takes consistent practice to really see those results. So that’s what we like to always encourage people with.

Kick off your mindfulness journey and jumpstart your January with Headspace XR. You can find it on the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.