Mizzou Founder Features: Sarah Hill

This week’s Mizzou founder feature is someone who is changing the game of mental health. Sarah Hill is the founder, CEO, and Chief Storyteller at Healium, the world’s first drugless solution for stress, anxiety, and insomnia using VR and mobile video. After nearly 30 years in the media industry, Sarah needed to find an escape from the daily anxiety and trauma that came with negative news reporting. So, in 2016 she created Healium, a powerful mental fitness tool that immerses users in virtual or augmented reality environments to help them navigate through a meditative state. It harnesses the user’s brain waves and heart rate via consumer wearables (like fitness trackers) and provides real-time feedback that allows users to understand their levels of stress or anxiety and how they improve over time with Healium. The best way to describe it is to imagine meditating in a beautiful park without physically being in a park. With over 7 million viewers and publications in 8 different peer-reviewed journals, Sarah marks the start of a revolutionary change in mental health, and this is only the beginning.

Sarah Hill, a Mizzou journalism graduate of 1993, began her remarkable career even before earning her Bachelor's. She reported for KSMU Radio-NPR, was a producer at KSPR-TV, and later became an anchor/reporter at KFRU 1400 AM radio station, showcasing her storytelling gifts from the start. After graduating, Sarah began working for KRCG-TV in Jefferson City. There, she not only anchored and produced news but also created her own segment called “People You Should Know,” which highlighted community leaders. Upon returning to Columbia in 2001, Sarah joined KOMU-TV as an anchor and reporter. She launched “Sarah’s Stories” and concurrently served as an adjunct faculty member at the Missouri School of Journalism. Google featured her for pioneering an innovative, interactive form of news broadcasting using Google Hangouts to engage the audience. Following her 11-year tenure at KOMU-TV, Sarah transitioned to Veterans United as Chief Storyteller and Human Media Strategist from 2012 to 2015.

30 years in the storytelling business and 8 Mid-America Emmy Awards later, having traveled everywhere from mid-Missouri to Indonesia; from Guatemala to Vietnam, she found a new way to tell stories. In 2012, a few years before Healium’s debut, Sarah founded StoryUp, a VR-focused company transforming storytelling into immersive experiences, pushing the transition of text-based storytelling to a three-dimensional world. An article from The Washington Post highlighted her VR storytelling in Zambia, showing how a self-powered device allowed people to take control of their mobility again. Among StoryUp's remarkable initiatives, 'Honor Everywhere 360' stands out—a VR experience enabling veterans to virtually stand before their memorials, delivering an incredibly lifelike encounter. In an interview with the Columbia Business Times, Sarah expressed her excitement about the trajectory of her startup, eagerly anticipating the future path it will forge.

A pivotal moment came when Sarah shifted gears from VR storytelling to VR meditation. When reporting so much negativity led to panic attacks and sleepless nights that became unbearable, she reached out to a longtime family friend, Jeff Tarrant – a fellow Mizzou alum and doctor at the NeuroMeditation Institute in Eugene, Oregon. The two came up with a system that, although wasn’t the same type of VR Healium uses today, still reduced Sarah’s stress and anxiety. With electrodes glued to her head, she had to engage in a PC program that helped her control her breathing and heart rate. After finding success with this system, she thought of how the same principles of virtual meditation could be built out into a company. Finding her answer in 2016, she founded Healium to help millions of other people around the world who struggled with stress, anxiety, and insomnia. Healium debuted as a powerful virtual vacation experience and has had incredible success since.

When you engage with Healium's VR meditation experiences using devices like the Meta Quest 2 or Pico goggles, and a BrainLink Lite EEG headband, the software measures your brainwaves in real-time. A glowing aura, changing colors based on your brainwave patterns, serves as immediate feedback. Green indicates successful adherence to the "focused calm" protocol, developed by Healium's Chief Scientist, Dr. Jeff Tarrant. However, if your aura turns gold, it's a signal that your focused-calm state has passed the threshold, prompting you to make adjustments like deep breathing, relaxing the shoulders, or focusing on elements within the VR experience.

The VR sessions vary across five meditation categories: focus, calm, mindfulness, positivity, and Sleepium. For instance, if your goal is to quiet your mind, the VR experience adapts, guiding you through scenarios where your success is reflected by the aura glowing more prominently in green. At the session's conclusion, Healium provides a score and grade based on the percentage of time spent above your baseline, giving you tangible feedback on your progress.

Moreover, Healium's mobile augmented reality (AR) app, compatible with iOS and Android devices, offers a portable training solution. Paired with biometric wearables like the Apple Watch or BrainLink Lite EEG headband, the AR environment responds to changes in your heart rate or brainwaves. This allows you to engage with various interactive experiences—like changing the colors of objects or hatching butterflies—as you train your brain, even without a VR headset.

Sarah is redefining wellness. Empowering users with tangible data and immersive experiences, Healium’s unique blend of technology and biometric feedback demonstrates clinical stress relief within minutes, completely changing the game of stress management and mental health. With accolades like the CES® 2022 Innovation Awards, Columbia Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Year Award of 2021, NFL Players Association Innovation Prize, and global recognition including the Mass Challenge Award, NASA iTech Semifinalist, and more, Sarah Hill is making her mark and it doesn’t stop here. Healium's trajectory promises continuous growth, setting new standards in the realm of mental health and well-being.

Sarah shares with us some of her best pieces of advice, life lessons, and insights on turning entrepreneurial dreams into reality.

Share one of your favorite quotes.

Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goals. - Henry Ford

Reflecting on your upbringing in Missouri and attendance at Mizzou, how do you believe these experiences shaped your philosophies in business and life?

I grew up in a small Missouri town that had a K-12 school. I had only about 40 people in my graduating class. It taught me the importance of being a part of a close community of people...no matter how small... who trust each other. Trust and respect are super important tenets of any relationship whether it's your family or your work family. I learned that from spending a large amount of time with the same group of people for decades. In that long length of time together, we had to develop skills in conflict resolution, forgiveness, and respect which are core skills in business relationships as well.

How did you find your own mentor or advisor, and how did they impact your career journey?

I had a lot of incredible mentors over the years at the Missouri School of Journalism, different TV stations, and at the MO Innovation Center. These mentors were my first informal board of directors before my company even had a board. They taught me about unit economics, product market fit, and raising venture capital. When I found someone I wanted to mentor me or teach me a new skill, I would ask them....'would you adopt me'? They would laugh. I would say no really....would you teach me your superpowers about _____. Be specific on what you want out of the relationship right down to the skill set that you want to learn and how many meetings you want to have with them. May I shadow you?...is also a great ask. In my early days of TV reporting, I did a lot of shadow shifts on news assignments or I'd sit next to them as they video-edited a story to learn about video production or storytelling. In business, you can't always shadow a CEO but you can ask for them to carve out a few minutes to impart wisdom to you. I learned a lot about business from other entrepreneurs who walked the same path I wanted to walk on. I find myself using phrases and lessons I learned from them. One of my favorite mentors who has since passed away used to always ask his newsrooms or classes....'are you happy and healthy?'. I still ask my employees that today as those are the two most important things I want to know about them.

Reflecting on your humongous growth, what aspects of your leadership style have evolved over time, and what catalyzed these changes?

I used to think that my job was to keep all of the balls in the air and not let any of them drop. I quickly realized after dropping some important balls that I needed to discern which balls would break if I dropped them...and which balls would bounce. Forgetting to order printer paper is a ball that will bounce. Forgetting to pick up your child from school...that's a ball that will break. I think in business, we have to have some grace for ourselves that we're going to drop some balls.

If you could sit down with freshman year Sarah, what would you tell her?

Focus on your self care. You are about to cover some sad stories as a reporter and you need to have some coping mechanisms in place so that when you see your first dead body, interview a mom who's lost a child, or cover a natural disaster you're mentally prepared for seeing awful things. When you cover trauma, you have to step inside their stories to be able to understand them and over time, those moments take chunks out of your soul. I wish I would have paid more attention to getting good sleep and developing coping mechanisms to derail the constant worry that I had while I was in college.

Share your best piece(s) of advice for current and aspiring entrepreneurs at Mizzou.

Focus on what you can control. If you can't control it or change the outcome of a situation, then why are you spending time worrying about it?

Do what you say you're going to do... when you say you're going to do it. If you can't execute the action by the deadline, communicate why ahead of time so others can adjust. Hypercommunication breeds trust. Don't just meet the expectation, look for ways to exceed it.

Before you bring up a problem to your supervisor, brainstorm some potential solutions first.

I was on the "B" basketball team in my very small high school.  No one wanted to pass me the ball because they didn't trust me to make a basket. In business, people need to trust whether you've got the ball. If you're not going to execute and take the ball to the basket, you lose trust with your team members and they don't want to pass to you.

Share the title of a book or two that you would recommend to any entrepreneur.

Are You My Mother? by PD Easterman and edited by Dr. Seuss

Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins

Thank you - check back next Monday for a fresh Founder Feature!