What we talked about
Suze Yalof Schwartz is the Founder and CEO of Unplug, a secular meditation studio in Los Angeles and a global meditation app built for busy people who feel stressed, anxious, distracted, overwhelmed, or unable to sleep. In this conversation, Suze shares how a simple three minute breathing exercise taught by her mother in law changed her life and sparked her 2012 quest to make meditation easy and practical for modern skeptics. She reflects on her previous career in fashion media, including years at Glamour and work with Vogue, Elle, and Marie Claire, and how that fast paced lifestyle kept her stuck in constant busyness instead of the present moment.
Show notes
Suze Yalof Schwartz spent 14 and a half years at Glamour Magazine, covering the Oscars and Golden Globes, anchoring the magazine’s do’s and don’ts section, and flying back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, before her mother-in-law taught her a three-minute breathing exercise that she says changed her life. By 2012 she was looking for a drop-in meditation studio and couldn’t find one. So she built it.
What we covered
- Unplug is the world’s first drop-in meditation studio, located in Los Angeles, and has expanded into a global app with over 1,500 meditations led by 300 world-renowned experts. It also runs teacher training in 20 countries and a corporate wellness program. Suze describes the target user as anyone who is stressed, anxious, unable to sleep, overwhelmed, or distracted, which, she notes, covers most people working in corporate America.
- Her advice to skeptics is to lose the word “meditation” entirely and call it tactical breathing, mindfulness, or a present practice instead. The actual mechanics are three steps: breathe, let go, and when the mind wanders, begin again. She says the number one mistake beginners make is believing they’re doing it wrong because they can’t clear their mind, clearing the mind is not possible and was never the goal.
- She recommends starting with 60 seconds rather than a 20-minute session, because people who attempt long sessions once and hate it rarely return. Her own practice is 10 minutes every morning before getting out of bed using the Unplug app’s meditation of the day, immediately followed by the gym. She calls this habit stacking, not giving herself a vote on whether to do it, simply doing what’s in front of her.
- When Suze first opened the studio she gave classes away for free to attract people, and found that paid members attended more consistently than people who came for free. She concluded that paying for something causes people to assign value to it and to show up to extract that value, the free version produced the opposite behavior.
- The Unplug app was designed so that her 87-year-old mother could open it and know exactly what to do. The home screen contains the entire app: a positive quote, a daily check-in with a self-discovery question and three gratitude prompts, the meditation of the day, and then all categories, sleep, meditate, movement, visible without navigating away. Suze spent nine days at Apple’s Cupertino campus through the Apple Entrepreneur Camp and credits that experience with shaping the product’s emphasis on beauty and ease.
- The most unusual meditations on the platform include a dog meditation for meditating with your pet, a breastfeeding meditation, and a hypnosis session that Suze says can get someone who never exercises to want to work out the next morning. The most-searched topics are sleep, stress, and anxiety.
About Suze
Suze Yalof Schwartz is the Founder and CEO of Unplug, the world’s first drop-in meditation studio, based in Los Angeles, and the author of “Unplug: A Simple Guide to Meditation for Busy Skeptics and Modern Soul Seekers.” She previously spent 14 and a half years at Glamour Magazine as a television expert and editor.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzeyalofschwartz
- Website: https://www.unplug.com/corporate
Episode 118 of the PreVetted Podcast.