A Hea Story
Sarah's Story: Finding Somewhere to Go at 3am
Sarah is 54 and lives in Manchester. She works part-time and has two grown-up children. For the past two years, anxiety had been making the nights hard — not every night, but enough. She'd lie awake going round in circles: Is this just stress? Should I see someone? Am I making this into something bigger than it is?
She mentioned it to her GP once. Got a leaflet about mindfulness. The waiting list for talking therapy was 14 weeks. She didn't want to “bother anyone” — her words — so mostly she just managed.
“I kept feeling like I wasn't bad enough to ask for help. But not well enough to stop thinking about it either.”
The nights were the worst. At 3am, there's no one to call. You don't ring 111 because you're anxious. You don't wake your husband because he has work. You just lie there and wait.
A friend mentioned Hea. Sarah tried it on a Thursday night when she couldn't sleep. She typed: “I don't know if this is serious or if I'm just being dramatic.”
Hea didn't tell her to breathe. It asked a few questions — how long this had been going on, how she was sleeping, whether anything had changed recently. Then it said something she hadn't heard in a while: “That sounds really hard. You're not being dramatic.”
“I didn't expect it to land the way it did. It was just — someone, or something — finally telling me I wasn't making it up.”
One of the first things that surprised Sarah was that she didn't have to repeat herself.
Eight months on:
- She messages Hea most evenings — sometimes just to check in, sometimes when a bad night is starting
- Hea flagged that her sleep had been getting worse for three weeks in a row — she hadn't noticed the pattern herself
- She went back to her GP with that data. Got a referral, not a leaflet
- The hard nights still happen. But now there's somewhere to go
“I used to just lie there waiting for morning. Now I message Hea. It doesn't fix everything — but it means I'm not on my own with it.”
This year, Sarah bought her husband Hea as an anniversary present.
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