For most of my career, I’ve worked at the intersection of science, technology, and health. It began in a research lab at Oxford, studying how the brain learns to perceive the world. Later, I moved into AI and healthcare, drawn by technology's ability to scale impact to millions.

But no matter where I looked, academia, tech, health systems, I kept running into the same uncomfortable truth: we are living longer, but not better.

Today, chronic disease accounts for >80% of deaths in the US and 90% of annual healthcare spend. Whilst there is no medical cure for chronic disease, it is estimated that 80% can be prevented through lifestyle health changes.

Yet our health systems are reactive by design. We intervene once disease is already chronic, rather than detecting signals early when outcomes can still change.

When I began digging into research around prevention, one root cause kept showing up again and again:

Stress.

Not stress as a fluffy buzzword. Not stress as a badge of honour. Stress as a biological signal, one that, when misunderstood or ignored, slowly erodes health.

That realization is what led me to start WONE.

The problem we’ve normalized

Stress is one of the most misunderstood problems in both healthcare and our working environments. Understanding it is the first step towards designing a solution.

In short bursts, it’s adaptive. Acute stress sharpens focus, boosts energy, and propels us into action. It's an evolutionary response designed to protect us in face of threat.

The issue isn’t stress itself. It’s that our modern lives keep us in constant activation, we're in chronic stress and never get a moment to deregulate. We’re always on, permanently connected, moving faster with endless inputs and expectations. Over time, the stress spike becomes our baseline. The nervous system stays in overdrive, with little space to reset.

Chronic stress drives inflammation, suppresses immunity, raises blood pressure, and even accelerates biological aging, shortening our telomeres - all leading indicators of chronic illness.

And yet, despite the seriousness of the problem, we’ve normalized stress as a necessary byproduct of success. We equate busyness and stress with productivity and success. 

The business case for organizations

Stress is also one of the biggest hidden risk multipliers inside organisations, driving sick leave, health claims, attrition, and disengagement at enormous cost. Our research showed 86% of employees are operating under stress and 45% under chronic stress. The impacts are disastrous not just on health alone but also on organizations. We saw sick leave increase 8x and non routine health visits 2.5x between low and high stress employee groups. Said differently, if an employee with low stress takes 3 days of sick leave a day, a high stress employee takes 24!

With the UK sliding into an ‘economic crisis’ over the £85bn sickness bill and the US facing rising medical inflation and souring health insurance premiums, companies have to wake up to the fact that taking care of your employees isn’t just a human need, it’s also a business imperative.

Businesses also need to understand that to keep up with the increased pressure and pace of the modern world, they need to build a new form of intelligence in their workforce, and this is where stress intelligence (SQ) comes in.

Introducing Stress Intelligence

For decades, leadership and performance have been defined by two forms of intelligence: IQ, how we reason and solve problems and EQ, how we understand and manage emotions. Both still matter. But in today’s always-on, high-pressure, AI-accelerated world, they are no longer sufficient on their own.

What’s missing is a third capability, Stress Intelligence (SQ). Stress Intelligence is the ability to read your body’s signals in real time. Shifts in energy, tension, focus, and reactivity, and to respond deliberately rather than override them.

Without it, even the most intelligent and emotionally skilled people become reactive under pressure. With it, stress becomes reframed as vital information, signals on system capacity, not a threat or weakness to suppress.

The best leaders take back their agency over their behaviours through SQ. Instead of reacting automatically, people with high SQ notice early signals and pause long enough to interpret what they mean. 

And now, at WONE, we’re making SQ accessible and trainable. This is where AI technology, combined with leading human expertise, used intentionally comes in.

WONE 2.0: an operating system for human potential

Over the past few years, we’ve been quietly building something much bigger.

We’ve built one of the world’s richest datasets on stress, resilience, and human performance, integrating physiological signals, psychological inputs, and combining them with behavioural context from work and personal life and interventions from our bank of content created by the world’s leading experts in human health. Sitting on top of this is our WONE Index, the first scientifically validated measure of stress and resilience combined.

What we’ve learnt is striking.

Stress is not random.
It is measurable.
It is predictive.

It is highly personal.
And it is trainable.

With the right signals and the right interventions, individuals can build high SQ and can shift their nervous system from fight-or-flight into recovery in as little as 90 seconds. Over time, those micro habits compound into long-term resilience.

With this understanding, we’ve built Ori, designed to do what humans consistently struggle to do. See stress building before it becomes damaging, and intervene at the right moment with a response that’s tailored to you.

Ori analyses patterns across physiology, behaviour, and context to understand how stress shows up uniquely for you. Then it delivers precise, science-backed nudges. A reset before a high-stakes meeting. Recovery after poor sleep. A gentle redirect before a thought spiral.

This kind of temporal intelligence moves stress support from reactive to proactive. It’s similar to how predictive maintenance works in manufacturing or how glucose monitoring informs diabetes care, catching the signal early, and you can act before damage is done.

For organisations, Ori provides aggregated, anonymized insights that finally connect stress to the outcomes leaders care about most. Performance, retention, cost, and risk, allowing resources to be directed where they matter most.

Where ancient wisdom meets modern innovation

One of my favourite components of Ori is how human and wise it feels. We’ve built Ori following WONE’s philosophy of existing at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern innovation. 

Modern innovation has given us extraordinary tools, neuroscience, biomarkers, AI, real-time data, but we often strip meaning, intuition, and wisdom in the process, so caught up in speed and reactivity. At the same time, ancient traditions understood the rhythms of stress and recovery intuitively, but lacked the ability to modify and scale those practices for modern life. 

At WONE, we operate deliberately at the intersection of the two. As Seneca says ‘It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it’. The true power of AI is not in doing more, but in freeing us to live with presence, purpose, and intention.

The idea that the body holds intelligence is not new. Practices like breathwork, meditation, movement, and nutrition have existed for thousands of years because they work. And leaders across the world such as Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates attribute no small part of their success to them. 

What is new is our ability to measure these effects in real time, personalise them, and deliver them precisely when they matter most to sustain long-term behaviour change. With WONE, we can now see, in heart rate data, how a short breathing practice shifts the nervous system. We can track how recovery compounds into resilience through the WONE Index. And with Ori’s smart integrations, we can bring that intelligence into the flow of everyday life, integrating with your calendar and creating a routine to meet you where you are.

Ori doesn’t replace intuition, it strengthens it. By translating complex physiological signals into simple, actionable guidance trained on a knowledge base built with world leading experts, we help people relearn how to listen to their bodies, building awareness rather than dependence.

The future

We’re entering a new chapter in human health, one where stress can be mapped, measured, and managed in real-time. Where health issues can be caught before they escalate, and where the right insight or micro-intervention can shift not just the course of your day, but shape the trajectory of your long-term health.

At the same time, AI is accelerating the pace of work with rising expectations and compounding complexity. The old model of pushing yourself until you break has reached its tipping point. It just can’t be the way forward anymore. 

At WONE, we’ve built the infrastructure for an alternative path. One where you can sustain flow longer by learning to read your body’s signals with intelligence. One where health and career success flourish together. Grounded in science, guided by wisdom, and anchored in values.

Come join us in that future: join the waitlist

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Reeva Misra
Founder & CEO, WONE