Pahoti Wellness is a digital platform that educates users on mental wellness techniques like cognitive therapy to help develop an awareness of mental patterns and wholesome self-reflective practice. We employ creativity and interactivity in the learning modules to keep the engagement high as well as use powerful data visualizations to drive user insight. The objective is to help all achieve a degree of self-reliance in mental well-being.

Target audience

Our target audience is young to middle-aged adult (22-50yrs) who is either curious about mental wellness or looking for a solution to his or her mental wellness challenges. Since this is a learning platform we don’t make recommendations or prescriptions on what to do based on the condition of the user. But only educate on the foundations. We are looking at “prevention is better than cure”.

The problem we are trying to solve

There are several challenges in India that plague the mental wellness sector including accessibility, affordability as well as the stigma around mental illness. There is also a lack of knowledge on how to recognise dysfunctional mental patterns and what we should do to prevent or cope with such issues. Additionally those with mental health issues can face concentration, memory issues that affect understanding which makes recovery even more difficult. Last but not the least whether or not they are able to get social or professional help or support, everyone is still striving to achieve self reliance while hoping for complete anonymity.

An online educational platform seems like a plausible solution in this scenario addressing multiple problems like accessibility and anonymity at once, while also providing an all-in-one in-your-pocket knowledge resource to access from the comfort of your home. You can not only build on self awareness or a meditation practice but also get access to professional psychologists who can provide the necessary human support.

Story

Although registered as a company only in Jan 2021 the story of Pahoti Wellness goes a few years back when the founder Archana Bahuguna was serving as a volunteer in mental health nonprofits back in US.. Having been a Vipassana meditation and yoga practitioner, she was already convinced that self awareness is key to a healthier mind. But a deeper shift happened when she worked directly with people and saw every single person suffering from something or the other- whether it was stress, anxiety or more deeply manifested symptoms. Her own experience of sticky anxiety opened the door to therapy for her and she saw great value in another human focusedly helping you out in your journey to wellness. That’s when she decided to shift her career from technology to working for social impact- especially in mental health which is so fundamental to our happiness.

Vision

Since 2021 Pahoti has grown in its vision and mission. We started by creating educative content on our website for people to benefit from and are now taking it a step further- building educational apps while making the learning more foundational, easy and even fun. We strongly believe that self-awareness is key to happiness. And if people can learn even the basics of mindfulness practice or say,just simple recognition of what thoughts, feelings, behaviors, beliefs are, they may be able to fight mental illness at least to some extent. There are no magic bullets though and it really depends on how hard each person practices.