Written by: The Circles Team

June 29, 2021



Have you ever wanted your own sensei? Someone to guide you through a hurdle you’re trying to overcome or help you pave a path you’d like to follow?

What if I told you that you can have a personal sensei in the palm of your hand?

Meet your new mental health sensei, Sanvello. It may not have a black belt in karate (it’s not that kind of sensei), but Sanvello gives you clinically proven therapies and methods for dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, or whatever you may be going through.

Sanvello has so many tools in its arsenal, and just like a real sensei, it will teach you how to equip yourself with those tools in your daily life.

Unsurprisingly (mainly because we hinted at it earlier), one of the big benefits of Sanvello is its one-on-one therapy feature. Your Sanvello therapist is someone you can develop a trusting relationship with to dive into what’s going on in your head so you can thrive. All you need to do is fill in some basic information, Sanvello will then provide you with a bunch of options based on your criteria, and then you can choose the therapist that feels right for you.

It gets better. If you feel your therapist isn’t quite enough, you can also get a coach to guide you through your journey and help you with questions in between sessions.

Sanvello also keeps tabs on your emotional health by monitoring your mood day by day. Relieving stress, anxiety, or depression starts with taking note of how you feel. By monitoring your mood and sensing patterns, Sanvello will identify the positive and negative influences and help you make changes to modify your behavior, and by extension, your mood.

Similar to a real sensei, Sanvello guides you on a chosen path and helps you improve the skills you need to reach the end of the road. Think along the lines of those Choose Your Own Adventure games, but for your mental health, and with a guide (so way better).

Designed by psychologists for a range of needs, Sanvello Guided Journeys use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other proven techniques to help you manage stress, anxiety, or depression, at your own pace.

Sanvello will provide you with tools to meditate and calm your mind, track health habits (yes, you need those eight hours of sleep), help you create a Hope Board to be the ultimate inspo (that’s how the cool kids say it, right?), and set goals so you can focus on what’s important for you.

Speaking of looking ahead, sometimes it’s important to look back to look forward. Based on your data, Sanvello will present you with assessments to show you how your experiences, activities, and emotions are all connected. This way you can see what happened, how you felt, and therefore be better prepared in the future.

Just like how senseis can be trusted based on their experience, Sanvello’s methods are rooted in widely-used and empirically-supported treatments for anxiety, depression, and stress. In fact, in a randomized study of 500 adults with anxiety and depression, Sanvello’s tools were shown to decrease their symptoms, with effects that lasted even after people stopped using it.

As we at Circles believe that everyone should be surrounded by support, we’re happy to see apps like Sanvello help push that mission forward.