Nineteen-year-old Gianni Jennes was one of Ensu’s earliest adopters. He’s also a frequent feedback provider, as we develop a new app designed to turn your music listening into a tool for managing your mental health. Gianni is from Belgium, so we have absolutely no idea how he found us. We recently sat down with him to learn more about how he uses Ensu to preserve through suicidal thoughts and what music he uses to improve his mental health.

I’m Amol, the co-founder of Ensu. The question I get asked most often when friends and family learn I left my stable finance job to found a startup is, “Why build another product for mental health?” The reason is because to me, it’s personal.

Our emotional experience - the way we perceive ourselves, the things that happen around us, and our relationship with the world at large - sits at the centerpiece of everything that happens in our lives.At our core, most of us have a strong desire to avoid pain and feel happiness. Unfortunately by and large, we were never given the right tools and frameworks with which to go about doing this, and as a result we often inadvertently end up feeling pain, and avoiding happiness. We’ve all struggled with our emotional health at various points, oftentimes more than most of us like to publicly admit.

The learning problemWe know how to brush our teeth because we were taught how. We know how to use syntax and punctuation because we were taught how. We know how to ride a bicycle because we were taught how. It’s kind of bizarre that we’re taught so many things growing up, but we’re never really taught about our emotions. Somehow, everything around how to process, understand, and deal with the constant chatter of thoughts in our head never made the cut.

In many aspects of our health and well-being, measurement is at the center of understanding where you’re currently at in relation to where you want to get to, as well as tracking the journey of improvement you need to go on to get there. You see this in contexts such as weight management, where objective measures over time such as weighing yourself, or using Body Mass Index (BMI) tests, give you a clear picture of understanding whether the stuff you’re doing is actually working or not. This is the same with other fitness goals - seeing how long a specific run takes, how many laps you can do in the pool - as well as in areas such as diabetes (blood-sugar), asthma (spirometry) and even just taking your temperature. With emotional health and the mind however, there’s no equivalent solution that we can easily do on our own that gives us a clear picture of our emotional state over time.