Why we built an app that reads your body instead of asking how you feel

Every therapy session starts the same way.

"How was your week?"

For years, my answer was some version of "I think it was okay?" Said with a question mark at the end, because I genuinely wasn't sure. Not because I was hiding anything. Not because the week wasn't worth discussing. Because I could not retrieve the information.

I have ADHD and alexithymia. The ADHD means my memory for recent events is unreliable — things that happened three days ago feel as remote as things that happened three months ago. The alexithymia means that even when I can access what happened, I often can't tell you how I felt about it. There's a gap between "something occurred" and "I know what that something meant to me" that I've never been able to reliably close.

For a long time I thought this was a personal failure. Like there was a therapy homework assignment everyone else knew how to do and I just kept forgetting it.

It took a while to understand that this is an extremely common experience, especially for people whose conditions sent them to therapy in the first place.

The problem with self-report

Mental health treatment runs on self-report. Your therapist asks how your week was. Your psychiatrist asks if the medication is helping. DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy — a structured skills-based approach to emotional regulation) asks you to fill out diary cards rating your emotional states 0–5. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — the most widely used talk therapy) asks you to identify the thought, then the feeling, then the behavior that followed.

Every one of these methods assumes you have reliable introspective access to your own internal states.

For a significant portion of the people who most need mental health support, that assumption fails.

Alexithymia — difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions — affects roughly 10% of adults. It's not a separate diagnosis; it co-occurs across depression, anxiety, PTSD, autism, ADHD, eating disorders, and most conditions that bring people to therapy. Executive dysfunction makes things worse: you can't remember your week, you can't organize what you do remember into a coherent narrative, and you can't consistently show up for the tracking and journaling that would compensate.

The self-report system was designed for neurotypical people having a temporary hard time. For everyone else — the people who most need treatment to work — it's a foundation built on sand.

Why existing tools don't fix this

I tried everything.

Mood tracking apps. Daily journaling prompts. Weekly reflection templates. Habit trackers with streaks and badges. Apps that asked me to rate my mood 1–10, or pick an emoji, or write three things I was grateful for.

Every single one required the same thing: accurate, consistent introspection, delivered on a schedule.

This is exactly what ADHD and alexithymia impair.

I couldn't remember to open the app. When I did open it, I didn't know what to put in. The data I managed to collect was inconsistent enough to be meaningless. And after two weeks of trying and failing, the app joined the graveyard of abandoned tools that felt like more evidence that I was doing this wrong.

The apps weren't built for me. They were built for people who already have the thing I was trying to develop.

What my phone already knew

Here's what I realized eventually: my phone had been tracking data about my life for years.

Sleep. Steps. Heart rate. Exercise. How often I moved. How long I sat still. Whether I took my medication. Whether I logged a meal.

None of this required me to introspect. None of it required me to remember. My watch measured my sleep whether I thought about my sleep or not. My phone counted my steps whether I noticed I was tired or not.

My body had been keeping score while my mind was elsewhere.

The data was there. I just needed something to interpret it in a format that made sense to me.

Building the app I needed

I'm a data engineer by background. I know how to build pipelines that take raw data and turn it into signals. And I know something about clinical psychology — enough to know that the polyvagal theory framework maps well onto what self-report is actually trying to measure.

Polyvagal theory describes the nervous system in three broad states: shutdown and withdrawn; regulated and connected — the window of tolerance where growth and healing happen; and activated fight-or-flight. These aren't abstract concepts. They have physical correlates. Sleep quality and quantity. Activity levels. Heart rate variability. Whether you moved enough, or moved too much. Whether you rested or burned.

I built a model that maps HealthKit data to a 7-tier energy scale based on this framework. Frozen (shutdown) through Cooking (regulated, the sweet spot) through Charred Husk (burned out). No introspection required. The data tells you where you are.

I wrapped it in RPG mechanics because — and this is important — the people who most need a health-tracking tool are often the same people for whom health-tracking tools feel the most like work. ADHD brains, autistic brains, depressed brains: they need more reward signal than a checklist provides. Quest logs. HP bars. A companion that tells you what your stats are. Something your brain actually wants to open.

The gamification is an accessibility feature, not a gimmick.

What it actually changed

The first time I walked into a therapy session with the app's data on my phone, my therapist stopped me.

"You've never brought data to a session before."

I hadn't. I'd always been working from memory, which meant I was always working from nothing.

I had 28 days of energy tier history. I could see that I'd had four blue days in a row the week before a hard conversation, and that they tracked exactly with a week of disrupted sleep. I could show my therapist that my Cooking-day percentage had gone from 30% to 50% over two months — not because I felt better (I wasn't sure if I felt better), but because the data said so.

We could have a real conversation about cause and effect instead of a best-guess conversation about feelings I couldn't reliably access.

"How was your week?" became a question I could actually answer.

Who this is for

Energy RPG is for the people who've tried self-report and failed — not because they didn't try hard enough, but because the tool doesn't work for their brain.

If you have ADHD, autism, depression, PTSD, an eating disorder, anxiety, BPD, or any of the conditions that send people to therapy — and especially if you have any of these and also struggle to identify your emotions or remember your week — this app was built for you.

It doesn't require you to be consistent. It doesn't require you to remember. It doesn't require you to know how you feel.

It just requires that your phone has been turned on.

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Energy RPG launches June 23, 2026. Join the waitlist to be notified.