about mind.exe

mind.exe is a private daily-reckoning tool for men in long recovery from compulsive behaviour. it asks the same handful of questions every night, encrypts the answers on your device, and shows you the patterns that fall out of the data. it is not a therapist, not a sponsor, and not a clinical tool. it is a structured mirror.

men in metanoia. multi-year recovery from things like sex addiction, compulsive relationship patterns, dark-triad behaviours, anger, or any other “urge that became a self.” the user this is built for already has the human-scale infrastructure: therapy, men's group, sponsor. mind.exe is what they pull up at 11pm, alone, when the structure outside isn't in the room.

• reckoning. the daily 24-step flow. scales (energy, mood, clarity), one word, primary emotion, today's looping thought, the urge, what you held vs. what you didn't, what to take into tomorrow.
• pattern interrupt. a real-time tool when an urge surfaces. seven steps that branch on the named feeling, show you your own past responses, route through your locked testimony, and end in a specific 30-minute commitment to a replacement action.
• the testimony. a three-part written artefact — what you're putting down, what you're saying goodbye to, and who you're becoming. specific, concrete, forward (‘i am the kind of man who...’). played back during a pattern interrupt. permanent: not deletable from the day-to-day surface; you can start over (which archives the prior version, not destroys it) once every 28 days. the 3-day clearing in settings is the ritual route to the same artefact — one part per day, with the workout and the fast around it.
• ledger. the calendar, timeline, and patterns view of everything you've logged. mood-by-day-of-week, urge time-to-close, focus held-rate trend, looping-thought clusters, hour-of-day distribution.
• portrait. the know-yourself page. derived statistics that fall out of 30+ days of data: who you are when stressed, when grounded, when tempted.
• mirror. eleven readings you retake periodically and watch yourself drift through. big five (IPIP-50), patterns under pressure, values ranking, relational defaults, attachment-as-it-shows-up-in-men, integrity (the gap between what your testimony says and what you actually do), the chase, the shadow, validation, control vs surrender, and how you most receive love.

• every record is encrypted at rest with AES-GCM 256, using a key derived from your recovery phrase via PBKDF2 (600,000 iterations of SHA-256).
• the key only exists in memory while the app is unlocked. it is wiped when the tab closes or the app idles past your configured lock window.
• passkeys (WebAuthn PRF) wrap the recovery phrase so you can unlock biometrically. the passkey lives in your operating system, never in our code.
• there is no server. no analytics. no telemetry. the static files are served, the connection closes, and the app runs locally from there. there is no “forgot password” flow because there is no password we hold.

full details: privacy policy.

metanoiais a greek word usually translated as “repentance,” but it more precisely means a fundamental change of mind. a turn. the white paper that seeded this app uses metanoia to describe the multi-year process of becoming someone other than who your compulsion told you to be. this is not the early-recovery phase of stopping the behaviour. it's the longer phase of stopping the identity that produced the behaviour.

two ideas matter for the design:

• the urge is information, not the enemy. the goal isn't to never feel pulled. that's suppression, and it doesn't hold. the goal is to become the kind of man who feels the pull and chooses something else with such consistency that the old self stops being a live possibility.
• the work is outside the app. real change happens in human-scale infrastructure. therapy, men's groups, sponsors, the conversations and amends and uncomfortable choices outside this screen. mind.exe is the structured mirror you pull up alone, at 11pm, when none of that is in the room with you. it holds the structure. it is not the structure.

• the nightly reckoning draws on the inventory tradition in 12-step recovery (steps 4, 10, 11) and on structured expressive writing protocols (Pennebaker, et al.). the act of writing about emotional experience reduces rumination and improves clarity over weeks. the 24-step format isn't arbitrary: it tracks state (energy / mood / clarity), feeling (named, with secondary), thought (the looping one, your assessment of it, a reframe), behaviour (aligned vs. avoided + reasons), and forward-look (lesson, focus, gratitude). same questions every night = year-over-year comparable data.
• the 3am day boundary is a practical accommodation: a reckoning written at 1am should still “belong” to the day that just ended, not the calendar day that just started. timezones are anchored to the user's zone at signup so streaks don't shatter when you travel.
• the pattern interrupt is built around the gap between impulse and action. neuroscientists call this the “urge surfing” window: most cravings rise and fall within 20–30 minutes if you can stay with them without acting. the seven-step flow is engineered to occupy that window with friction:
  • mandatory pauses force prefrontal re-engagement
  • the branched probe matches the felt emotion to the right inquiry
  • the mirror step shows you your own past. anchoring you in identity continuity
  • the testimony is parts-work in audio: your earlier-self speaking to your later-self
  • the explicit 30-minute commitment converts intention to a concrete next move
• the testimony draws on the future-self / earlier-self letter technique used in CBT and IFS-adjacent therapies. the version of you that recorded the testimony is real. the version of you in the middle of an urge is also real. the testimony is a way for the first to speak to the second when the second can't access the first directly.
• carry-forward creates a consequence chain. yesterday's “tomorrow focus” becomes today's first question (held / partial / lost / forgot). this prevents the journal from becoming theatre. the future-self that wrote the focus knows the present-self has to face it tomorrow.
• the mirror readings are periodic re-baselining. retake the same instrument every 90 days and you can see your drift. toward more avoidance under stress, toward higher integrity, toward different values. reading results are a slow signal; the nightly reckoning is a fast one. both matter.

• big five (IPIP-50) uses the international personality item pool's public-domain Goldberg markers. the most widely-used non-proprietary version of the Big Five. each trait sums 10 items (reverse-keyed where appropriate) and is plotted against published norms (mean and SD from large adult samples) on a real Gaussian curve. the percentile is computed via the normal CDF (Abramowitz & Stegun 26.2.17 approximation, accurate to ~5 decimal places).
• attachment-style assessments use the secure / anxious / dismissive-avoidant / fearful-avoidant model (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). the same four-style framework used clinically. items are original, not copied from any proprietary instrument; results are descriptive, not diagnostic.
• jaccard similarity on character 3-grams is how the “recurring looping thoughts” cluster works. two thoughts get grouped if their character-trigram sets overlap above a 0.35 threshold. it's robust to small wording changes (“i am not enough” ≈ “i'm not enough yet” ≈ “i'll never be enough”) without needing a language model.
• markov chains on emotion transitions compute the probability that a given primary emotion on one day transitions to each emotion on the next day. over time you can see the loops your inner life runs on: irritated → resentful → contemptuous → empty is a different chain from sad → tender → connected.
• pearson correlation between series (mood and sleep, energy and substance use, etc.) gives you signal on the connections you already half-suspect. rolling means smooth the noise so trend reads cleanly.
• held-rate trend is a 30-day rolling proportion of carry-forward focuses you held vs. lost. it's the closest this app gets to a single number for “how aligned am i.”
• urge half-lifetracks the median time between an interrupt opening (“still in it”) and closing. over months, this number going down is direct evidence the urge has lost grip.

none of these are clinical instruments. all of them surface patterns that would be invisible in a scrolling journal.

the architecture is a progressive web app. a single static frontend that runs entirely in your browser. the technical stack:

• next.js 16 with the app router and turbopack. server-rendered shell, client-side state.
• react 19 + tailwind v4 for the UI primitives.
• indexeddb via dexie for local persistence.
• web crypto api for AES-GCM and PBKDF2. no third-party crypto libraries.
• webauthn PRF extension for the passkey path.
• zustand for the in-memory session key.
• a service worker for offline access after the first visit.
• vitest + playwright for the test suite. currently 84 tests covering the encryption stack, statistical helpers, reading scoring, and the public routes.

the app deliberately has no AI in the runtime path. no GPT-style prompts that interpret your entries, no language model labelling your emotions, no machine making recommendations. the math used to derive your patterns is plain statistics . correlations, jaccard clustering, markov transitions, percentile bands against published norms. you see the math, the math doesn't see anything outside your device.

this is intentional. the user this is built for needs a mirror, not a counsellor. an LLM in the loop would be one more voice telling him what his own data means.

mind.exe is a self-reflection tool. it is not therapy, not a medical device, and not a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or psychiatric care. nothing in this app diagnoses, labels, or treats anything. if you're in crisis, reach a crisis line.

mind.exe · last updated 2026-05-02. the work is outside the app.

first launched 26 january 2026.