At a glance
You have done everything the app asked for 4 months, and nothing in you has moved. The tracking is accurate and the feeling is unchanged, and that combination is more discouraging than doing nothing at all. This article is about why, and what the difference is.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- People arrive with excellent data and no relief. Clients can show me 6 months of logged moods and sleep, and still have never said the thing underneath out loud to anyone.
- Measuring can become a way of managing. Clients describe rating a feeling as a way of putting it at arm’s length, which is useful in a crisis and expensive as a habit.
- The hard part is never the technique. Clients usually know the breathing exercise. What they have not had is somebody staying with them while the feeling is actually happening.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does tracking how I feel not change how I feel?
Because noticing a feeling and being met in it are different events, and only the second one shifts anything. You can name the emotion accurately, score it out of 10, see the pattern across a month, and still be entirely alone inside it.
There is something else the daily rating does. It turns your inner life into a task you are either passing or failing, so a bad week starts to look like poor compliance. People then arrive at the point of saying that they are doing everything right and getting nowhere, which is a miserable place to be and has nothing to do with effort.
What is usually missing is not insight. Most people can describe their pattern better than they can bear it. The thing that moves is having somebody there while the feeling happens, rather than a record of it afterwards.
Do the apps do anything at all?
Something, modestly, and not what the marketing implies. A review of 14 meta-analyses, covering 145 randomised trials and nearly 48,000 people, found small effects for smartphone interventions on anxiety, depression and stress when they were compared with no treatment, and no reliable advantage when they were compared with a real therapeutic alternative.1 The authors are blunt that the evidence thins as the comparison gets more serious.
So an app is better than nothing, measurably. It is not a replacement for the thing it is often sold as replacing, and nothing in that research supports the claim that it is.
What is an app genuinely good at?
It is good at the parts of the work that happen between sessions, and at being available at 3 in the morning.
- Practice. A breathing or grounding exercise needs repetition, and repetition is exactly what a phone is for.
- Noticing patterns. 6 weeks of logging can show you that the bad days cluster after certain evenings, which is real information.
- Language. People who grew up without words for feelings often find the lists genuinely useful as a starting vocabulary.
- Availability. At 3 in the morning there is no session, and something structured in your hand is better than scrolling.
Used that way, as a tool rather than as the treatment, an app can carry a surprising amount of the week.
What can only happen with another person?
Being known while you are in it, rather than afterwards. You say the shameful thing out loud, and the other person does not flinch, and something in your body registers that it was survivable. No notification does that.
Most of what I do is that, repeatedly. I notice the half-second where your voice changes and ask about it. I remember what you said in April and put it beside what you are saying now. I stay with you in the feeling instead of helping you measure it. An app can hold your history. It cannot be surprised by you, and it cannot be moved by you, and those turn out to matter.
How do I decide, and when is an app enough?
Ask what you are actually stuck on, rather than which option is better.
- An app may be enough when the problem is a habit, a skill or a routine, and when you feel basically met in your life.
- A person is the better fit when the same thing keeps happening in your relationships, when something old is involved, or when you cannot say the central thing out loud yet.
- Use both when the sessions need practice between them. Bring what you noticed; it makes the hour more precise.
- Stop tracking for a fortnight if the logging has become the relationship you have with your own feelings. Notice what is there without the scoring.
Where neither is enough on its own: if you have cycled through several apps, each one promising and then abandoned, that pattern is itself worth looking at rather than evidence that you lack discipline. It usually means the thing you need is not a technique. If you want to think about which of those you are dealing with, a session or a free 30-minute call will sort it out faster than another trial subscription.
Questions people ask
Can I use an app alongside therapy?
Yes, and it often works well when the app carries the practice between sessions. Bring what you noticed rather than the charts, and we will use it.
I have abandoned 3 apps. Will I abandon therapy too?
Not necessarily, because the thing that keeps people in therapy is the relationship, not the willpower. Stopping an app is usually boredom or a lack of being met, which is a different mechanism entirely.
What happens in a first session that an app cannot do?
You say the difficult thing to another person and find out what happens next. That experience, rather than the information you give me, is what starts to shift things.
Is therapy worth it if I am functioning fine?
Functioning well and feeling nothing is one of the most common reasons people come to me. You do not need to be in crisis to use an hour a week properly.
How many sessions will I need?
I cannot give you a number, and I would be wary of anyone who does. What I can say is that most people know within 3 or 4 sessions whether this is reaching the thing they came with.
If an app is not giving you enough, my psychotherapy in person offers a real relationship with someone who remembers you.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
