Like you, I want to design a life that allows me to feel wonderful inside and out. We are at our best when we’ve completely recharged.

Our mission at Moodring™ is to help you recharge so you can feel on fire every day.

But in today’s fast-paced culture you’ve been fighting a battle against hyper-productivity, stress, burnout – whatever you call it. Feeling exhausted doesn’t have to be your new normal.

One day in 2019, constant stress reached a breaking point for me. It destroyed my joy.

The day stress destroyed joy:

I was building my last company, focused on creating the first social self-care app. It was a reinvention of the diary for modern teens. The process was fun and wild and it took years. We helped hundreds of thousands of young people. However, I noticed two issues bubbling up over time:

1. We were crescendoing towards optimizing results above all else which ultimately made the work arduous, rather than enjoyable.

2. Our teenage users expressed feeling stressed out more often than any other emotion. Stress was becoming a coming-of-age norm.

Then one day, as CEO, I was running a team-wide meeting and I had a panic attack.

The feeling of panic scared me. I felt hot. My heart raced. I became hyper focused. I could have sprinted from a predator.

I’d always prided myself on being calm. So, cool as a cucumber on the outside, no one noticed my symptoms. After the meeting I drove home while my brain was still on overdrive. At home, I laid down on the couch. My heart still raced. I tested breathing exercises. No change. My symptoms finally started to alleviate after I decided to eat a snack.

I told, only, my husband. Months later I briefly mentioned it to my doctor. But that night, I had one concrete thought: “I never want to feel that way again.”

I have always believed that when my cup is full I will love my life and do my best work. However, I’d let burnout culture take the reins while I was busy. I’d forgotten about my cup.

Over the next few months I started to focus – on me.

How I regained joyful energy:

I started simple. I just took breaks more often. I’d been working too many hours or days in a row over and over. Once my schedule could breathe a little, I started re-introducing activities that have always felt energizing for me. Once I gained more joy from those activities, I felt the desire to confront relationship issues more head-on. I started spending time with people who brought me joy and drastically cut down time spent with people who drained me.

One day during the pandemic, I felt that good ol’ stress building up again. But this time, having learned how to recharge, I stopped working immediately to go for a much needed walk away from my computer and phone.

Here was the trouble:

I had to be back in 30 minutes. But I don’t wear a watch. I had to take my phone just to tell the time… So I never fully unplugged.

At that moment I imagined something I would wear: a beautiful gold ring that helps me unwind. I already wear rings. I adore gold. Most importantly, I wouldn’t get overwhelmed by this simple, stunning device.

It was an ah-ha moment.

I began researching how experts reverse chronic stress to find joy again and how modern technology might help make this tedious practice more enjoyable. I read, took classes, lived on a Caribbean island for a year, got a therapist, hired a coach, and tested the most proven methods on myself. I don’t know exactly how much time and money I spent on this pursuit. It was the most pressing issue in my life.

After a year and half of this, I was shocked. The best methods all had one similar concept:

Reduce activities that cause you repeated stress and increase those that bring you joyful energy.

Making this a habit is the hard part. That’s where Moodring™ comes in.

Designed to help:

Our method is playful: elegant wearable products designed for your inner wellness. This approach is not new.

For thousands of years we’ve worn jewelry to feel great about, and within, ourselves. Ancient Egyptians designed jewelry, including crystals, believed to promote well-being. Over the centuries aesthetic styles evolved, eventually, in parallel to the development of sciences that studied how the brain functions.

By the mid twentieth century a collision of emotion, style, and science occurred when the first mood ring was designed. The original mood rings contained liquid crystals that changed with your finger’s temperature and suggested that warmer body temperatures represented happiness or romantic excitement while cooler temperatures represented anxious or tense emotions.

Even if pseudoscience, their popularity reflected a clear desire to shed more light on our feelings; those that might be concealed one layer deeper.

Today’s scientists have developed a clearer approach to estimating emotional states using a combination of technology and self-observation about how we feel. Technology can more accurately sense change in body temperature, for example. Our Moodrings™ might sense your sweat, heart rate, temperature, or hand movement to help you determine if your activities, period, sickness, pregnancy, or social interactions are impacting your mood.

While there is some evidence that technology on the finger could accurately estimate our stress levels, we are still on a scientific journey when it comes to clearly being able to separate our bodily stress reactions (such as a heart racing) vs. mental feeling of stress.

At Moodring™, we aim to find the best balance between technological progress and your emotional desires and needs.

The Plan:

The ultimate goal is to sell smart Moodrings™ to millions, making self-care easier for more people. But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

First, we need to accomplish three things:

1. Find early adopters to test our prototype Moodrings™.

2. Refine the experience for effectiveness and enjoyability.

3. Release our first collection of Moodrings™ to customers.

These will not be the throw-away mood rings from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Your emotional wellness is forever.

As we work, we’ll bring you on our journey.

No matter when (or if) you become a customer, I encourage you to spend your precious time scheduling more moments for joy; it’s the lifeblood of everything you do.

Be well,
– Founder & CEO, Lauren Tracy