A bit of context

Over the years I've started to value mental health practices a lot more. That's why I've integrated the following mental health and positive psychology habits in my day to day:

• Journaling: writing down what's going well, and reviewing all the beautiful things that happened before

• Daily mindfulness meditation: using the app Headspace

These are all inexpensive things I can do myself.

As I'm not in a state of depression, therapy is something that is not really possible for me in Switzerland. In fact in Switzerland what I would call "prevention" therapy is something that you would have to pay yourself and I don't have that kind of money.

So from time to time I do some "deep journaling" sessions where I explore by myself what's going on in my life and try to find solutions through writing.

The tool I'm trying

I've seen friends using ChatGPT for their own mental health exercices, and there has been lately a rise in mental health companions built around this idea.

So I started playing with one called Sonia.

Bascially what Sonia is, is a bot that has been trained to use some of the scripts from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is one type of therapy that has a sort of library of classical questions and templates. Which makes it pretty easily to be copied by something like ChatGPT or a more focused service that builds on it.

What I like about AI therapy so far

• It mimics what I already do: Basically it's like the deep journaling sessions I already do, but this time, instead of having to think about the questions myself, there is a robot that suggest questions, and if I don't like them, I can ask it to find a better question.

• It takes less energy to get started: When you're doing that type of introspective work alone it takes some effort to get started. Here as there is some guiding done, it's at least easier to get started.

• It's cheap: 20$ bucks per month is super cheap compared to proper therapy here in Switzerland.

• I can do it multiple times: compared to classical therapy where you would go maybe one a month, here I can do multiple sessions within a month or even week.

• Calendar integration: Sonia suggest from time to time to add calendar events to my calendar to help me stay on track on the decisions I've taken. It's super smart to make it easy to transfer the therapy decision to other tools. For now it's just possible with calendars, but this could be even stronger with other tools like email, tasks, etc.

What I'm clear about

I have a kind of rule when it comes to these tools:

Never put in these tools information that you wouldn't feel comfortable that a friend would share with another friend you don't know.

So no, I'm not sharing super intimate stuff in there. If shit happens and it gets all published in the dark web, people might find my conversations with a bot weird, but no harm could happen out of it to me or other people.

Let's see how it goes in a few weeks

As I'm testing this over a longer time period we will see if the early geeky excitement transforms into something that has truely mental health benefits for me. For the moment at least, it's a welcome "refresh" of my introspection writing process.