A Painful Symptom of Perimenopause: Targeted Ads.

Over Christmas, when my sleeping patterns were thrown out by a winning combination of not working and consuming excess quantities of food and alcohol, I found that I went through a bout of insomnia, where I would wake at 3am and be unable to get back to sleep until 6 or 7 am, or I would wake very early at 5 or 6 am and not be able to get back to sleep at all.

Living in the digital age, I inevitably eventually gave up tossing and turning and ended up reaching for my phone. Before listening to my audiobook in an attempt to get back to sleep, I would invariably browse Facebook or read some news articles, just to pass the time.

Over the next few days, I found my Facebook feed filled with long public posts, ostensibly from individuals and not signposted as advertisements, but also not penned by any of my Facebook "friends", complaining of the difficulty of wearing earbuds when sleeping on their side, or the sound of their partner's snoring, or waking up in the middle of the night with night sweats caused by (peri)menopause and not being able to sleep, or having relationship difficulties. I initially read these posts out of some morbid sense of curiosity, until I eventually realised that they all ended with a link to one of a few websites: snoozeband.co.uk, lyrasleep.com, quiz.theliven.com, drinksoulbrew.com and similar sites. Facebook had evidently taken my age, gender and irregular sleeping patterns and decided that I was the perfect target for these products.

During one of my sleepless nights, I'm ashamed to say that I ended up filling out the Liven Quiz and it perhaps unsurprisingly decided that I was indeed in need of some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Given that I had tried CBT before and found it quite helpful, I made the perhaps ill-advised decision to subscribe to the service for a 3-month plan, at a cost of £29.99.

To save others from falling for the same tactics, I decided to share my experiences with Liven and Lyra sleep, so readers can make a more informed decision about their risks & benefits.

Liven

After I completed the quiz and paid for the 3-month plan, I was directed to their app and given a "Personalised Plan" of lessons, essentially telling me that self-talk and self-recrimination are bad and that I am worthy of others' love and affection.

This might be good if you suffer from low self-esteem, or have never tried CBT before, but I found the content quite basic and a bit patronising. Frustratingly, I found that you have to go through every lesson to move onto the next, which has meant I haven't yet been able to access any material that I've found particularly useful, but I will continue to persevere for the remainder of my subscription period, which ends at the end of March.

Liven's "Personalized Plan"

The Livie AI Chatbot, on the other hand, was surprisingly helpful. I had thought it would be a bit of a gimmick, like talking to a "virtual assistant" on a retail website but, if you just want an "independent" sounding board, not related to your situation. it can be quite nice. The responses are scarily immediate and seem very personal, even suggesting practical advice, such as how best to approach someone about a sensitive subject. For this reason, though, I would worry about vulnerable people that genuinely need help relying on it too heavily, or even becoming "hooked" on it, because it is quite engaging and encourages you to continue the "conversation", to the point at which I am now afraid to start a new chat because I feel compelled to reply to all "her" questions!

I personally found that the other features are a bit lacking, technically, for a paid app. Not being able to edit your mood or journal entries, if you want to add something later, or copy & paste to other apps is very annoying. I already use free apps for mood tracking and journaling, so Liven feels like duplication and inferior to what I've already got for free. It also immediately creates an association between the activities that you tell it you're doing and your current mood, even if they are completely unrelated. For example, I could be spending time with my pets and be feeling down, but that doesn't mean that being with them puts me in a bad mood! To accurately use it for mood tracking, I'm now guessing that you need to log any extreme emotions at the exact point that you're feeling them, which obviously isn't always practical!

Liven automatically associates your mood with what you're doing at the time of recording, even if it's completely unrelated!

It's also annoying that you can't even track your mood or post a journal entry without an Internet connection, which rules out using it anywhere (e.g.. on the train) that doesn't have a good signal.

Regarding payment, I just gave feedback, similar to what I've written above, using the feedback feature within the app and said I probably wouldn't continue my subscription beyond the 3 month period and customer service immediately cancelled it for me and said no further payments would be taken from my card, which was refreshing given my experience with other subscription services. They also offered me a "cheaper" deal if I do decide to reactivate my subscription, but I have since realised that the 80% discount in fact only reduces the £49.95 payment to £9.99 per month, making it the same as I paid for the initial 3-month subscription!

In summary, I think that, if you're having mild to moderate mental health issues or personal problems, it could help and it isn't bad value for CBT if you want to try it for the first time. It can be done in your own time and at your own pace, so it's convenient if you need to fit "therapy" around work and don't have time / money for in-person appointments. I wouldn't however recommend it if you're having serious mental health issues or are in crisis. It's absolutely no substitute for a properly qualified therapist and it feels unethical that they proactively target people that might need one.

Lyra Sleep

The product appears legitimate and the website carries "as seen on" logos for trusted brands, such as Good Housekeeping, WebMD and Healthline, but I did a bit of research and although Good Housekeeping did run an article comparing Sleep Aid Supplements on 30 July 2025, there is absolutely no mention of Lyra Sleep, only some of the ingredients they claim the product contains. In fact, it looks like they've taken the ingredients mentioned in the article and created the product based on their reported attributes!

Worse, there is a very misleading Trustpilot 5* logo on the checkout page, stating they have "173,000 happy customers", but there is no link to their page on Trustpilot and I subsequently discovered that it didn't in fact exist.

Misleading 5* Trustpilot Logo on LyraSleep checkout page, claiming they have 173,000 happy customers

When I queried this with Customer Service, I was told that it was because UK customers are sometimes unable to view their Trustpilot page, as it is US-based. This is untrue because I can see pages for companies on the US version of Trustpilot and they're not there. There are pages for similarly named companies, one of which sells sleep devices, but not supplements.

Customer Service instead directed me to the positive reviews and photos featured on their own website, but I am not inclined to trust their authenticity, given the misleading use of logos.

In short, I'm not certain this is a scam and the product may live up to their claims, but I'm not going to risk spending money on, let alone ingesting, something that hasn't been independently tested.

I so far haven't been tempted to try any of the other products advertised on Facebook, but will let you know if I do! In the meantime, I've learned to hurriedly scroll past any strange, long posts not posted by those I'm friends with or have chosen to follow!