“I open Headspace and it congratulates me for my streak and asks me to rate my mood and honestly I'd rather just stare at the ceiling.”
Mood trackers. Streak counters. Daily check-ins. Badges for breathing. At some point, your mental health app started feeling less like support and more like another thing you're failing at. ILTY has no streaks, no scores, no gamification. You show up when you need to, and that's it.
Wellness apps are designed to create habits. And habits require consistency. Which means they turn your mental health into a performance metric. Miss a day? There goes your streak. Skip the mood check? You're falling behind. When you're already struggling, the last thing you need is something else making you feel guilty.
The gamification that makes these apps 'engaging' is often the same thing that makes them exhausting. Earning badges for meditating doesn't make meditation meaningful. It makes it transactional. And when the transaction stops feeling worth it, you stop opening the app and feel bad about that too.
•Gamified wellness apps borrow engagement tactics from social media, creating obligation rather than genuine motivation
•Structured daily routines require executive function energy that's already depleted when you're struggling mentally
•The repetitive nature of guided exercises, mood logs, and check-ins stops feeling helpful once the novelty wears off
•When an app tracks your 'progress,' bad days feel like failure instead of just bad days
No daily check-ins, no mood logs, no streaks, no badges. You open ILTY when you want to talk. You close it when you're done. That's the entire system.
You don't have to follow a program or complete a module. Every conversation starts wherever you are right now. No prerequisites.
ILTY will never send you a notification saying 'You haven't checked in today!' Your mental health isn't a Duolingo streak.
One real conversation when you actually need it is worth more than 30 days of logging your mood as 'meh' out of obligation.
We want to be honest about our limitations:
No. ILTY is purely conversation-based. There are no modules, exercises, guided sessions, or activities to complete. You talk when you want to talk. That's it.
No. ILTY doesn't send push notifications, streak reminders, or guilt-trip messages. It's there when you need it and quiet when you don't.
For many people, yes. Research on therapeutic conversations shows that what matters most is feeling heard and working through specific concerns in the moment, not completing a prescribed curriculum. Structure helps some people. Flexibility helps others.
A detailed comparison of conversation-based vs meditation-based approaches.
How ILTY's no-structure approach compares to Calm's guided programs.
Why most wellness apps make you feel worse about feeling bad.
When your phone is a graveyard of mental health apps you used for three days.
ILTY is free during beta. It's not therapy. It's not a cure. It's a place to talk through what you're going through—honestly, without judgment, whenever you need it.