There are days when the app itself feels like too much. The setup cards, the check-ins, the extras — they’re all useful on a clear day. On the worst days, they’re noise. I’d open the app and immediately feel more overwhelmed than before. I needed a version of the app that understood the difference.
So I stopped making it a mode you switch on. I rebuilt the whole home around the worst day — stripped to essentials is just what you see now.
Fewer choices. Less noise. Just what matters.
There’s no setting to find. The home you open on a bad day is already pared back to essentials: your plan as a short list of steps, a quiet check-in, and a few calm tools. No setup cards, no dashboards, nothing to configure.
It’s built for the moments when cognitive load is already at its limit. Every element on a screen is a micro-decision — so the everyday clutter simply isn’t there. What’s left is what helps: one tap to start your plan, or one tap to say how you’re doing.
The thinking happens earlier, on a clear day, when you set your plan up. The bad-day version asks nothing of you except to tap.
Why this matters
Cognitive load research shows that visual complexity directly increases decision fatigue. For neurodivergent people in an episode, every additional UI element has a real cognitive cost. So the app you need during a shutdown is treated as the default — not a stripped-down version of the real thing, but the real thing.
That’s why it isn’t a mode you have to remember to switch on. The thing that makes the app usable during a shutdown shouldn’t itself require a decision — so it’s simply how the app works, every time you open it.
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