'I thought meditation was mindfulness woo woo – until it solved my imposter syndrome'

A lot of people are reflexively sceptical when meditation is brought up. “I was one of those people,” admits Russell Glass, the American chief executive of Headspace Health on a trip to London. “I’d heard the term mindfulness before and – do you have the term ‘woo woo’ over here? – It all felt kind of woo woo to me.” Today, Glass, a serial entrepreneur from New Jersey, meditates daily and has been the boss of one of the world’s biggest mental health apps since October 2021.  Headspace, which has offices in California and London, experienced an influx of users during the pandemic as rates of depression and loneliness soared. Glass’s Damascene conversion was years earlier. In 2014, he had just sold his marketing start-up Bizo to LinkedIn for $175m (£144m), becoming one of the social networking giant’s top executives and netting a fortune. He should have been on top of the world, but says he found it difficult to feel at home. “I was really struggling when I joined LinkedIn from a mental health standpoint. I had had my third daughter about a week before I sold the company and I wasn’t sleeping very well. I got to LinkedIn…
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