When I stopped counting,
it stuck.

Your own target

What you quit is up to you

We don't pick the target for you. Write down a name, and that becomes the target.

You can register as many as you like, but we recommend starting with just one. Quit several things at once and when one of them cracks, the others tend to crack with it. The reason is in the next section.

The counter

A number that resets to zero
is what keeps you from coming back

You slip once, and the next day falls apart too, and the day after that. That isn't just weak willpower — the way the number is built is part of the problem.

Most apps of this kind display your streak. You make it to day 27, slip once, and the next morning it reads 0. Nothing about those 27 days of behavior has disappeared — but on screen, they're gone.

Research on addictive behaviors has a name for this reaction — reading a single lapse as the failure of everything. It's called the abstinence violation effect, described by Marlatt and Gordon in 1985 within their relapse prevention framework, and observed repeatedly in studies of quitting smoking and drinking. What determines how things unravel is not the lapse itself but the interpretation that follows: it's all ruined anyway.

A counter that resets to zero delivers that interpretation every morning, in the shape of a number. It becomes a device for translating one slip into total loss.

Same behavior. Same 90 days. One line says “you failed over and over”; the other says “look at everything you did.” Neither is a lie. Which one you see each morning, then, is a design choice.

What it records

It records three things, and only three

We narrowed what gets recorded so the app never turns numbers into a contest.

When the urge comes

When the wave comes,
ride it

Before you decide whether to slip, there's one more move available. You can't switch the urge off, but there are a few dozen seconds between feeling it and acting on it — and something can happen in that gap.

Research on addictive behavior points to something counterintuitive: trying to force an urge down tends to work worse than simply watching it and waiting for it to pass. This is the idea behind "urge surfing," proposed by Marlatt as part of the relapse prevention framework and later built into a manualized program, Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP). You don't resist it and you don't judge it — you watch the sensation rise, peak, and eventually fall, the way you'd watch a wave.

The evidence is still mixed. A systematic review pooling 17 randomized controlled trials on substance use and behavioral addictions found that mindfulness-based interventions produced a moderate-to-large reduction in craving, but with high variability between studies and low overall certainty. A randomized trial of a smartphone mindfulness app for smoking didn't raise quit rates over the control group, but it did weaken the link between how strong a craving felt and whether the person actually smoked. The honest way to describe this, for now, is not a tool that erases the urge — it's a tool for getting through the seconds after it shows up.

This isn't treatment — it's a way to redirect attention for a few dozen seconds. If a strong urge is repeatedly putting your life at risk, look at the counseling resources below first.

The one friend

You answer to exactly one person

No rankings, no boards, no anonymous crowd. Each addition makes it work less.

The more people are watching, the closer your records drift toward fiction.

Why this app limits the audience to one

Behavior-change research has one thing that works more reliably than willpower: having someone to report to. A private diary alone rarely lasts; add a single person and people keep going. This has been confirmed again and again.

Past a certain headcount, it breaks. The bigger the audience, the more you want to look good — and once you want to look good, the record starts to lie. A lying record is worthless. For the same reason we dropped counting, we won't add more people to show it to.

So there is one. On a day you slip, one notification goes to that one person. All they can do is send a single reply — there's no scoring, and no stock phrases of encouragement.

The stock phrases are absent on purpose. Prepared words tell you they weren't actually read. If the alternative is an automatic “you can do it” flying in on its own, nothing at all is better.

Honest limits

What this app will not tell you

Saying it up front: if reading this disappoints you, it's probably not for you.

• Won't say
  “You can quit in X days” How long a habit takes to take hold varies enormously by target and by person. Numbers like “21 days” have no basis. We promise no timeline.
• Won't say
  “Your willpower will get stronger” This isn't a tool for training willpower. If anything, it's a tool for finding the places where you can manage without it.
• Won't say
  “Your life will change” For some people it does. We just won't book that under the app's achievements.
• Won't say
  “Urge surfing makes the craving go away” The current evidence isn't high quality, and effect sizes vary widely between studies. We won't promise it disappears.
• Can say
  The link between craving and acting on it can weaken In a smoking-cessation app trial, how strong the craving felt became less predictive of whether the person actually smoked. Feeling an urge and following it turn out to be two different things you can feel the difference between.
• Can say
  Time comes back This part is arithmetic. The time the habit was eating is simply open again. What the app counts is exactly this.
• Can say
  Triggers become visible Write it three times and you can see for yourself under what conditions you slip. Once you can see it, you can start changing the environment instead.
• Can say
  The sense of “I made the call myself” builds up It's called self-efficacy, and it sits at the center of behavior-change research. A zero-reset counter is exactly what breaks it.

Status

Where things stand

The design is settled, but it hasn't shipped yet. It's being built in Flutter and will launch on Android first. Your records stay inside the device; nothing leaves it except the notification to your one person.

If there's a feature you'd want — or a number you never want to see — write to info@toriumis.com or leave a note in the Studio Toriumi feedback section. Above all, we'd like to hear from people who have actually tried to keep a habit going — and from people it didn't stick for.