What is the Well-Being Index, and how does it work?

A percentage doesn't mean much on its own, until it's about your own mind. We built the Well-Being Index (WBI) because most ways of tracking mental well-being ask you to rate yourself, and self-ratings are exactly where people are least reliable: we talk ourselves up on a bad day, or brush off strain we've simply gotten used to. The WBI takes a different route. It reads your body directly, and turns what it finds into a profile you can actually read & track.

What the Well-Being Index measures

The WBI is our smart measurement and tracking system, designed to surface what's actually happening inside you, shown in percentages. It's organized around seven Life Topics, from Love & relationships to Embracing & enjoying life, each scored so you can see at a glance where you stand, and where the room for improvement actually is.

Every score comes from the same brainwave scan: no questionnaire, no self-report, no talking yourself into (or out of) how you're doing.

From scan to seven numbers

Under the hood, we work in three steps. First, the scan: the app shows specific images while the headset plays a structured sound sequence, and measures how your brain-body system responds. Second, the engine: that response is compared against a large reference model to find relevant patterns. Third, the report: the findings become your Deep Report and Well-Being Index.

Think of it like a music-recognition app such as Shazam. It doesn't understand a song by analyzing one note, it captures a pattern, compares it against a huge database, and returns the closest match. We work at a far more complex level, but the logic is the same: capture your response pattern, compare it to a large reference model, translate the closest matches into meaningful language or in case of the WBI; percentages.

Its these percentages that allow you to track and understand your mental well-being over time. Compare it to a smartwatch that monitors your sleep. One reading does not say so much, but when you track it over time you become aware of small fluctuations in your patterns and will be able to connect it to certain events that happened during that day. It allows you to take more active control of your well-being. 

The same counts for your mental well-being, monitoring the WBI over time, seeing the fluctuations and observing life events will allow you to understand the details in the 7 Life Topics and their corresponding values. Allowing you to become more conscious about the connection between your mental state and how you react to what life throws at you. 

The five fields of science it rests on

We don't rest on one new idea. The WBI stands on five separate, decades-old fields of research that converge on the same conclusion: the body carries real, structured information about mental and emotional state, and it can be measured.

•       Interoception, the brain's sense of your own internal state, tied directly to how vividly people experience and regulate emotion (Garfinkel et al., 2015).

•       The predictive brain, which learns more from being gently probed than from being passively observed (Barrett and Simmons, 2015).

•       Bodily emotion signatures, consistent across cultures as different as Finland and Taiwan (Nummenmaa et al., 2014).

•       The brain and body's measurable response to structured sound (Koelsch, 2014).

•       Validated reference models, the same comparison logic used in clinical neurometrics since the 1980s (John et al., 1988).

Each of these is explored in full, with the complete list of peer-reviewed references, in our Tech & Science document.

Why comparison is what turns a number into meaning

A single reading says almost nothing on its own. A body temperature of 37.5°C means nothing until you compare it to a normal range, a scan works the same way. Our reference model holds more than 40,000 scans, and every new result is expressed as how far it sits from that norm, a method given rigorous statistical footing decades ago and still used to standards regulators accept today (Thatcher, 2010).

Want the full picture, including all seven Life Topics? Explore the Well-Being Index.

What the Well-Being Index is not

The WBI is a decision-support tool, built to inform your own judgement, not to diagnose. It doesn't replace a conversation with a professional if there's a serious concern, it gives you a fast, structured starting point for your own reflection.

Source:

Tech & Science document — full whitepaper with all cited studies.

Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., and Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65–74.

Barrett, L. F., and Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419–429.

Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., and Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(2), 646–651.

Koelsch, S. (2014). Brain correlates of music-evoked emotions. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(3), 170–180.

John, E. R., Prichep, L. S., Fridman, J., and Easton, P. (1988). Neurometrics: computer-assisted differential diagnosis of brain dysfunctions. Science, 239(4836), 162–169.

Thatcher, R. W. (2010). Validity and reliability of quantitative electroencephalography. Journal of Neurotherapy, 14(2), 122–152.

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