The morning I finally agreed to track my mood, I was sitting in Dr. Kowalski's office in Gdańsk, watching rain streak the window and feeling the particular irritation of a man being asked to do something he considers pointless. I'm a construction project manager, forty-two years old—I work with blueprints and deadlines, not feelings. Fifteen years of problematic drinking hadn't made me someone who paused twice daily to rate my emotional state on a scale of one to ten. "I'm not a data person," I told him, which was absurd given my profession, but felt true in the moment. He nodded in that patient way therapists have and suggested I try it for three months. Thirty seconds, twice a day. Just see what I notice.
That was eighteen months ago. I've been sober for all of them, which still surprises me when I say it aloud. I want to be clear about something from the start: the app didn't get me sober. Dr. Kowalski helped. My wife helped. The AA meetings I resented but kept attending helped. But those thirty-second check-ins, and the session summaries that arrived in my inbox after each therapy appointment, showed me something my own memory kept obscuring—the actual shape of my weeks as they happened, not as I reconstructed them afterward through whatever fog I was feeling at the time.
The Honest Mirror
One patient's account of what 18 months of daily check-ins revealed—and what his anxious memory kept hiding
The morning I finally agreed to track my mood, I was sitting in Dr. Kowalski's office in Gdańsk, watching rain streak the window and feeling the particular irritation of a man being asked to do something he considers pointless. I'm a construction project manager, forty-two years old—I work with blueprints and deadlines, not feelings. Fifteen years of problematic drinking hadn't made me someone who paused twice daily to rate my emotional state on a scale of one to ten. "I'm not a data person," I told him, which was absurd given my profession, but felt true in the moment. He nodded in that patient way therapists have and suggested I try it for three months. Thirty seconds, twice a day. Just see what I notice.
That was eighteen months ago. I've been sober for all of them, which still surprises me when I say it aloud. I want to be clear about something from the start: the app didn't get me sober. Dr. Kowalski helped. My wife helped. The AA meetings I resented but kept attending helped. But those thirty-second check-ins, and the session summaries that arrived in my inbox after each therapy appointment, showed me something my own memory kept obscuring—the actual shape of my weeks as they happened, not as I reconstructed them afterward through whatever fog I was feeling at the time.
The problem with memory, I've learned, is that it lies in the service of the present moment. Before I started tracking anything, Dr. Kowalski would begin each session with the same question: "How was your week?" I'd answer honestly, or so I thought. "Pretty good" or "stressful" or occasionally "rough." But I couldn't remember Tuesday. By Friday, whatever happened Monday had been overwritten by Thursday's argument with my foreman or Wednesday's decent night's sleep. My recollection wasn't a recording—it was a reconstruction, assembled from fragments and shaped by whatever I was feeling as I sat in that leather chair. After a rough morning, everything seemed rough. After a calm one, I'd forget the struggles entirely.
Dr. Kowalski told me I wasn't unusual in this. He mentioned that studies of therapy where patients fill out brief questionnaires regularly show modest improvements—not because the forms are magic, but because they help catch worsening moods earlier than memory alone tends to. Most of us, he said, are poorer witnesses to our own lives than we'd like to think.
The check-ins were simple: morning and evening, rate your mood, stress level, craving intensity, sleep quality. At first I resented them—another obligation in a life already full of obligations. I'd forget, then remember at midnight and feel guilty, then forget again. Around week three, something shifted. It became routine, like brushing teeth. I'd tap through the questions while waiting for my morning coffee, again before bed. Thirty seconds, rarely more.
After two months, patterns emerged that genuinely startled me. I'd been telling myself I was "doing fine overall"—until I saw a week where I'd rated my mood four out of ten three days running. In my head, that week was "fine." On the screen it looked like a slow slide. Seeing that number—my own number—staring back at me was uncomfortably honest. It was harder to dismiss a bad Thursday as "nothing" when I'd already written down that it was a four. The charts showed something else I hadn't noticed: Monday through Wednesday, my mood consistently scored seven or eight. Thursday through Sunday, it dropped to four or five, sometimes lower. Weekends were my danger zone, and I hadn't known it. I'd been treating my stress as random, scattered across the calendar like thrown dice. Instead, it followed a rhythm I'd been too close to see.
There's a particular quality to therapy sessions when you're anxious—a blurriness, as if someone has smeared Vaseline over your memory. I'd sit with Dr. Kowalski, my thoughts racing, half-listening while trying to manage the static in my head. He'd say something important, I'd nod, and three days later the insight would be gone. I left those sessions feeling lighter, genuinely helped, but unable to articulate what had helped or what I'd agreed to work on. My anxious brain was an unreliable stenographer.
This is where the session summaries became unexpectedly valuable. After each appointment, ContextCare generated a brief document—key themes we'd discussed, patterns identified from both the check-in data and our conversation, agreed next steps, Dr. Kowalski's observations. They weren't perfect. Sometimes a nuance of what I'd said didn't make it into the summary, or a point we'd only touched on briefly got more space than I expected. A few times I brought a line back to Dr. Kowalski and said, "This doesn't quite capture what I meant," and we clarified it together. But even with those imperfections, it was far more than my anxious brain could hold on its own.
I started reading the summaries the following morning with my coffee. Five minutes, maybe less. The effect was like reading someone else's notes about a movie you'd watched half-asleep—suddenly you remember the scenes you missed. Session twenty-three, I was spiraling about a work deadline, so agitated I could barely sit still. I left therapy feeling somewhat calmer but with only scattered fragments of what we'd talked about. The summary reminded me: we'd identified my tendency to catastrophize under deadline pressure, and Dr. Kowalski had suggested a specific breathing technique plus breaking the project into smaller tasks. I'd forgotten the breathing part entirely. Without that summary, the technique would have been lost to my static-filled memory, and I would have faced the next deadline exactly as badly equipped as before.
Over time, something else emerged. Reading through months of summaries was like watching time-lapse footage of my own recovery. Month six mentioned my cravings had dropped to one or two per week. Month twelve, one or two per month. I hadn't consciously tracked this—I was too busy living it—but seeing the decline documented meant something my subjective experience couldn't provide. The summaries also caught patterns I kept denying. "Adam tends to minimize stress until crisis" appeared in my records four times before I truly absorbed it. Now I watch for that tendency like a driver watching for ice.
I should be honest about what didn't work, because nothing works smoothly and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The first month, I actively resented the check-ins. Week eight, during a particularly stressful period—the exact time tracking would have been most useful—I abandoned it for five days, creating a gap precisely where data would have mattered most. Month four, I discovered my Apple Watch could track heart rate variability and became briefly obsessive, checking it ten times daily, trying to decode my nervous system like some biological stock ticker. Dr. Kowalski had to tell me to stop. "This is not a replacement for living," he said, which sounds obvious but apparently needed saying.
On my own, the graphs mostly made me worry or guess. It was only when Dr. Kowalski and I looked at them together that they started to make sense. The check-ins showed the data—mood declining Wednesday through Friday. The summaries provided context—work stress, poor sleep, skipped AA meetings. Dr. Kowalski connected the threads: "Adam, your Friday check-ins show elevated stress and cravings. Last session we discussed your pattern of isolating when overwhelmed. How many meetings did you make this week?" And suddenly I'd see it clearly: I'd skipped two meetings because I was "too busy," and now I was stressed and thinking about drinking. Pattern caught, perhaps in time. Data without that conversation was just numbers I couldn't interpret.
There's also the matter of Polish history, which non-Poles may not immediately understand. Surveillance in this country carries weight—my parents remember what it meant to be monitored, to have your words recorded and filed somewhere beyond your control. When Dr. Kowalski first suggested ContextCare, my immediate question was about data. Where does it go? Who sees it? He walked me through the specifics: encryption, EU servers, data that never leaves Poland, my ability to delete everything at any time. This mattered. I wasn't going to hand my addiction history to some American tech company that might sell it to advertisers or insurance algorithms. The assurance of European data sovereignty wasn't a feature—it was a prerequisite.
This isn't for everyone. If tracking feels like surveillance, if it triggers something dark about control and monitoring, trust that instinct. If you have health anxiety, obsessing over biometric data might make things worse—I learned this personally with the heart rate variability rabbit hole. You need a smartphone, a bit of digital comfort, and the bandwidth—mental and literal—to open an app twice a day. Some people will find check-ins another burden in an already burdened life. Fair enough.
But if you struggle to remember what happened between therapy sessions, if you've experienced the slow deterioration that only becomes visible in retrospect, if your anxious mind goes blank during appointments and loses what your therapist said—then perhaps this deserves consideration. Start small. Morning and evening, thirty seconds. Read the summaries with coffee. Give it three months. If it doesn't help, stop without guilt.
Eighteen months ago, I couldn't imagine staying sober this long. The app didn't accomplish that—I did, with considerable help from people who cared whether I lived or continued destroying myself slowly. But those thirty-second check-ins and those session summaries helped me see what I couldn't see on my own: the actual contours of my weeks, the patterns my memory kept smoothing away, the slow progress that felt invisible until I saw it documented. And sometimes, that's the difference between catching a slide early and realizing too late that you're already falling.