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A gym for the mind

You would not train your body without measuring it first.

Most apps count the minutes you sat still. This one measures what changed. You take a real assessment, then — once the rest is built — pick one thing to work on, train it daily for twelve weeks, and take the assessment again, so the numbers move, or they do not, and either way you see it.

Start the Mind TestRead the evidence first

Free while in development. No card, and nothing to cancel.

What works today · 1 October 2026

You can create an account, answer the 240 trait questions, read every answer back, take the test again, write your Creed, and do the daily practice built on it — pick one line, say what you will do about it, and answer for it in the evening. What you do is counted: the weeks you showed up on five days of seven, points for the reps, and points for the evening answer — once a day, however many times you answer it. Every one of those points is listed back to you, with what it was for and the day it was earned. You can export or delete everything in one action.

Your days start and end where you are. The time zone comes from your browser when you sign up and is yours to change afterwards, and it sets both the dates you see and the moment the day resets — so an evening answer counts on the evening you gave it. You can also install this to a home screen, and if the network goes it says so plainly instead of showing a browser error.

The pace you set now does something: a silent sit keeps time to it, two, five or ten minutes, with nothing to listen to and nothing earned for it. Your longest one is kept as a record, measured against nobody else. You can also say which routine your practice comes after, and where, so the routine does the remembering — there are no reminders in this app yet.

There are still no scores. The mood and anxiety questions are not open, so nothing here is watching how you are doing. The twelve weeks are mapped — lighter weeks at four and eight, retests on days 30, 60 and 90 — but the guided sessions that would fill a training day have not been recorded yet, and that is the largest thing missing. The reading beside them does exist: you pick a book from the shelf, most of them carry chapter prompts to answer, and what you read is marked off and read back to you that evening.

How it works

  1. Take the Mind Test

    240 questions about how you generally are, drawn from a public-domain set used in published research. They come ten to a page and each page is saved when you finish it, so you can stop after any of them. The mood and anxiety questions are written but switched off until a clinician signs them off, and nothing measures thinking style yet.

  2. Pick one thing to build

    You choose one of eight things to build, and it maps to the facets behind it. That page waits on the same clinical sign-off as the reading it is chosen from. The guided meditations it would hand you are not recorded yet; the books and the real-life reps are, for seven of the eight.

  3. Train for twelve weeks

    A daily session: read your Creed, say what you will do about one line of it, do one rep out in the world, read ten pages of a book from the shelf, and answer for it in the evening. All of that works today, along with a silent sit paced to your own breathing. Weeks where you show up on five of seven days are counted, and there is no streak to break. The twelve-week map is there; the guided sessions that would fill its days are not written yet.

  4. Retest, and see what moved

    You can take the measurement again whenever you like, and both sittings are kept side by side. The retests fall on days 30, 60 and 90 of your twelve weeks, which start the day you choose what to build. The numbers can go up. They can also go down, and you will be shown that.

Eight stats, and both halves count

Five of them are about what you can do. Three are about how you treat other people. Every programme trains both, because getting more effective while getting less kind is not success — and a programme that only trained the first half would produce exactly that.

Performance

  • ComposureStays calm under pressure
  • ResilienceBounces back
  • DisciplineDoes what they said they would do
  • DrivePushes toward goals
  • CuriosityOpen to new ideas

Character

  • KindnessCares about and helps other people
  • ConnectionMakes people feel welcome
  • IntegrityHonest, fair, humble

High is not automatically good on any of these. Low Connection can mean independent. Low Curiosity can mean steady and practical. Each stat will show what a high score and a low score are each good for.

No one is being shown a score yet — see below for why.

What the evidence actually supports

Stated at the strength the research supports, including where that strength is modest.

Personality can change on purpose
A three-month smartphone coaching programme moved the traits people chose to change — 1,523 people, randomised against a waiting list — and the change still held three months after it ended. Friends and family noticed it too when someone was building a trait up. When someone was trying to dial a trait down, the people around them did not reliably see it. That study is the backbone of this programme’s shape: you choose the goal, you do small daily things, you reflect, you check in weekly.
Stieger et al., PNAS 2021. doi:10.1073/pnas.2017548118
Meditation apps work — by a small amount
Pooled across randomised trials, app-delivered mindfulness shifts depression and anxiety symptoms by a small amount — around a fifth to a quarter of a standard deviation. Measured against another active treatment rather than a waiting list, the advantage largely disappears. Real, and small. We will tell you “measurably calmer”, and we will not tell you transformed.
Pooled across meta-analyses of app-delivered mindfulness trials — Hedges’ g of roughly 0.24 for depression and 0.28 for anxiety. There is no single study to point at, and naming one would misstate where the figure comes from.
Habits take about 66 days — but the range is enormous
The median is roughly 66 days and the observed range runs from 18 to 254. Twelve weeks fits the median, which is why the programme adapts to your pace instead of marching a fixed calendar.
Lally et al. 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology. The range is from the 39 participants whose curves fitted, not all 96.
Where we are honest about being unsure
Evidence on “I am” affirmations is mixed — one well-known study found they made people with low self-esteem feel worse, and a later attempt to replicate that did not find the same harm. So you choose your own wording, and anything built on weaker evidence is shown separately from your measured results, clearly labelled, with no numbers attached.
The harm finding is Wood, Perunovic & Lee 2009, Psychological Science. The failure to reproduce it is “On the failure to replicate past findings regarding positive affirmations and self-esteem”, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science.

What this is not

Mind Gym is a wellness product. It does not diagnose anything and it does not treat anything. It is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for a clinician.

The Mind Test does not yet ask about mood or anxiety, and nothing here is watching for either. Those questions, the thresholds that decide what happens after a worrying answer, and the words on the screen when it happens, all have to be signed off by a licensed clinician before anyone is asked them. Until that is done, this app cannot tell whether you would be better served by a person, and it will not imply otherwise.

If you need help now, it is not here. Contact your doctor or a local crisis line.

You must be 18 or over.