Jill

I am a therapist by profession, and this is not an open topic for me. For many years I really hid it. It’s a kind of white elephant because it’s visible. It was very hard for me to expose it. What I tried until today - I’m treated with psychiatric medications that I thought would help. They didn’t help. I tried opening it up in different psychological therapies. I didn’t receive specific tools for the habit itself. They didn’t manage to create change there, certainly not over time.

What did help me in the past was the effect of shame. There was one time when my sister, whom I have a close and open relationship with, said: “Wow, you really have to deal with this…” and then the shame caused me to stop for a certain period. But it didn’t last long. What I feel the app does help me with is that it really raises this to awareness. And then I’m in awareness all the time.

And the thing that helps me the most in the app is the training. Every time the urge comes, I open a training. And usually in less than 10 seconds it passes. So what I do is either scratch the area for a moment, or press my fingers finger to finger, and then I close the training and see my points go up. And we may be adults, but this feedback of points does something. Another thing - the app effect that helped me - is the desire to count consecutive days without the habit.

For example, if I’m driving and the urge comes, I tell myself that if I give in, I’ll have to reset it. So I have this desire to see as many days as possible without the habit. I dream of seeing a year, two years, three -  as many as possible. And now there is documentation. I had periods when I succeeded for a month and even two months, and the hair grew back too. But I didn’t have documentation. I didn’t know how long it was. With the documentation in the app, it really holds me. And it makes it concrete for me. It’s measurable. It’s meaningful to me.