A new phase for Therapy Notebooks
Today, we’re sharing our rebrand with our community of customers, supporters, and friends. Over the past almost three years, you’ve played such an impactful role in shaping who we are. Thank you for being part of our journey.
As you take a look around, you’ll see that many things have changed. Our website & brand elements are updated, our notebooks are redesigned, even our emails look different. That said, this rebrand is not a course correction: what we fundamentally do is not changing. We are instead deepening our commitment to making effective mental health tools more accessible. With these changes, we are hoping to more clearly articulate who we are and where we’re headed.
This moment is also a reflective experience for us because it gives us an opportunity to connect the dots looking backwards.
Bridging the gap between research and real life
Before launching Therapy Notebooks, we explored many other ideas related to mental health care. We started by trying to create physical community spaces that were part coffee shop and part therapist offices. We believed these spaces would help more people embrace mental health as an everyday need instead of as a stigmatized clinical concept.
As we met more therapists, we shifted toward building software and content for therapists. Therapists would share clinical worksheets with us and talk to us about different treatment modalities and tools. As we learned more, we saw that the world of evidence-based mental health tools extended far beyond just mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy.
At the same time, we were having hundreds of conversations with people in our lives, including friendly strangers who expressed interest in our ideas, about how they approached their mental health. We were trying to understand the real life challenges that people were facing and how we might be able to help. We would ask if they knew about the tools and treatments that therapists were sharing with us. Even though useful tools have been integrated into most parts of our lives — we’re surrounded by new devices and software — most people were approaching their mental and emotional challenges with little support, relying instead on motivation and willpower to find a path forward.
And so, we shifted our energy toward bridging this access gap by developing products that could help more people learn and use evidence-based mental health tools. A few months later, we launched Therapy Notebooks.
Creating mental health tools for everyday needs
In launching our first few guided notebooks, we have run into challenges that have helped us understand why this gap between what we know and what we do exists in mental health.
In our everyday lives, we’re accustomed to products that are incredibly approachable and easy-to-use. This is why most wellness and self-help products offer “quick fix” answers to our mental health challenges without asking us to address the fundamental issues we’re grappling with. Evidence-based mental health tools are not developed for that level of ease. In fact, in order to work, they require us to meaningfully engage our minds and our emotions. There is this tension between effectiveness and ease.
With Therapy Notebooks, we wanted to maintain the integrity and effectiveness of these tools while also making them more accessible. That is why, as an example, the covers of our notebooks do not shy away from referencing clinical terms and treatments. And as it turns out, as long as the tools are presented in a way that is clear and compassionate, people are in fact incredibly excited to use our products. People want to learn and grow and heal and change.
This rebrand is a reflection of our long-term commitment to caring about both research and real life. We are creating effective mental health tools that you can access for your everyday needs — and now, how we show up in the world has been carefully redesigned to fully embrace that purpose.
We hope you like who we’ve become and where we’re headed.
With gratitude,
The Therapy Notebooks Team