Our Journey: Why We Created Happier Humans
Hi! If you're here, we're guessing you're burnt out. If that's the case, you're in the right place, and we're here to help.
We're Natalie LaDuke and Carly Tindall Biggins, co-workers, co-founders, and friends, dedicated to helping others live a joyful, fulfilling life. So what makes talking about burnout our business? Stick with us for a minute.
We met in graduate school studying school psychology, Natalie starting in 2013 and Carly two years later. We clicked right away and spent years on research teams together, learning how to ask good questions and use data to solve problems. Over time, our work led us toward some of the most vulnerable people, from kids caught in the school-to-prison pipeline to families experiencing homelessness. Along the way, we studied evidence-based strategies for resilience and coping.
After graduation, we both became dually-licensed as nationally certified school and clinical psychologists, working directly with children and families for years. Then the pandemic hit. We watched burnout spread through our colleagues and friends, and watched good people leave a field that needed them more than ever. If we're honest, we were struggling too. Add a couple of kids and the demands of adult life, and burnout became our own reality.
So we made a change. We stepped away from practicing and moved toward what we were truly passionate about: research and teaching. As professors, we finally had the space to chase the questions we'd been asking about ourselves. What causes burnout? Who does it hit hardest? And how do we prevent it?
We won research grants, dug into the literature, and took the work on the road, presenting at conferences across the country to people living the same struggle. What we saw was a lot of head nodding, a few tears, and people lining up afterward to tell us how exhausted, and sometimes hopeless, they felt.
Along the way, we kept running into bad advice about burnout on social media, posts that boil it all down to self care or just saying no. If you've spent five minutes functioning as an adult, you know it's not that simple. So we decided to build something better.
That's how Happier Humans was born. Our mission is simple: create burnout recovery tools that are grounded in science, accessible to all, and easy to use. We're licensed psychologists, researchers, and educators who know burnout from both a personal and academic perspective, and we built this for anyone running on empty who's ready for something that actually works.
With warmth and gratitude,
