Getting started with Unloop

At sign-up you choose what you are working on, and everything Unloop gives you afterwards is built around that choice. Pick the one that is closest, even if it is not exact. You are not locked into it.

Below is where to start for each, and what to expect in the first week.

Start by speaking a journal entry on a day it happens, as soon after as you can manage. Say what was going on before you ate, not just that you ate.

Unloop reads what was underneath it, and your roadmap starts giving you challenges that put something in the gap between the urge and the eating. Some of them are short games, which sounds unserious and is not: a game competes for the same mental resources a craving needs, which measurably reduces how strong it feels.

Journal at the times you would normally reach for it. The entries that help most are the ordinary ones, on ordinary days, not just the hard ones.

Your roadmap builds toward having something ready before the urge arrives rather than resisting it once it is there. You will also meet challenges that name the thought that gives you permission, the one that sounds like just one will not hurt.

Speak an entry at the end of a night you lost to it. Say how it started, because it almost never starts with the phone.

Expect challenges that interrupt the reach rather than ask you to have more discipline, and expect some of them to be about what you are avoiding by scrolling.

This one is slower and the journal matters more. Speak an entry most days, including the days nothing notable happened.

Your roadmap will mix movement challenges with thinking ones. Movement here is deliberately small, often ten minutes, because the point is the shift in mood rather than the exercise. Motivation arrives after you move, not before.

Choose the general goal. It is the right answer more often than people think, and it is what to pick if what you actually want is to understand why you keep doing something.

Journal for a week without trying to fix anything. The patterns show up on their own, and the roadmap follows them.

Journaling in Unloop is spoken. Press the microphone and say a few honest lines about how the day went. There is no typing, no prompt to fill in, and no minimum length.

Say the ordinary version rather than the tidy one. The entries worth the most are the ones you would not have thought to write down.

The first few days are mostly listening. You speak, and Unloop reads what repeats across entries rather than reacting to any single one, so the roadmap gets more accurate the more ordinary days it has.

You will not be asked to do anything long. If a challenge feels like too much on a given day, that is worth knowing and the roadmap adjusts.

An iPhone. Unloop is live across Europe, the Americas and much of the world, but not yet everywhere; where it has not launched, the site offers a waitlist instead of a download. Connecting Apple Health is optional and makes the timing better, since your sleep and readiness shape which challenge you get.

Unloop is for adults, so you will need to be over 18.

Sign up with the work email address your company bought the subscription for. That is what matches you to their plan, so there is nothing to pay and no code to enter. If you sign up with a personal address instead, Unloop has no way to know you are covered.

Your entries stay yours either way. Your employer never sees them, and only ever receives aggregate figures for the whole group.

Clinics work differently: you will have been given an access code, and you enter that at sign-up.

Your clinician does not see your entries. Recommending Unloop does not open any view into your account.