How to get the most out of Maybe.

The first week, in order.

1. Before anything

   Take the free check

   Seven questions, about two minutes, and nothing you answer leaves your browser. It is what the first conversation starts from, so the app opens knowing the shape of your loop rather than asking you to explain it twice.

2. Day one

   Read the three lessons

   They are short on purpose. Why thoughts stick, why answering keeps them alive, and what facing something on purpose actually does. Everything after this assumes them, and skipping them is the most common way to end up using the chat as a search engine.

3. Day two

   Build the first ladder

   Name the things the loop has been shrinking, and order them from the one you could do this week to the one you cannot picture yet. The first rung should be almost boring. If it frightens you, it is the third rung, not the first.

4. Day three onwards

   One rep, then go and do something else

   A rep is a rung you go and do, and the other half is not doing the compulsion afterwards. Closing the app is part of the rep.

Pick the right room.

There are two, and using the wrong one is the most common way a session goes badly.

Set your ceilings on purpose.

You decide how often you can open it and how long a session runs, and the setting exists because an app for this can become the compulsion if nothing stops it. Set the ceiling while you are calm. The 2am version of you asking for more room is sometimes the loop asking, which is why raising it checks once whether you are sure, and why a real crisis lets you pause the ceilings for a day.

Every session winds down on one small commitment. Take it seriously. It is the part that turns a conversation into something that happened in your day.

Log the urges you did not plan for.

Reps are the ones you choose. The rest arrive on their own, in the supermarket or halfway through a meeting, and those are the ones worth writing down: what set it off, what you wanted to do, and what you did. A fortnight of that shows you where the loop actually lives, which is usually not where you assumed.

It also gives the setback plan something to work from, so the week it comes back you are reading your own notes rather than starting again.

When to hand it to a person.

If you can get to a specialist who treats this, go. Nothing here replaces one. Two things in the app are built to make that appointment easier: a summary you can take to it, and a card for the person you keep asking, which explains why answering costs them both something and what to say instead.

None of this is therapy, a diagnosis or a crisis service. If you are in immediate danger, the safety page lists people who can help, and that link is one tap away inside the app.

Put it on your home screen.

There is nothing to download and no store listing. It opens in whatever browser is in front of you, and your browser can install it to your home screen or dock so it opens in its own window. That works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and Windows alike.

A purchase history is a list other people can see: a shared account, a family plan, a phone somebody borrows. Nothing about this lands in one, and the card statement shows a neutral name.

It does need a connection. There is no offline mode, and that is a decision rather than a gap: an offline copy means a readable copy of your conversations sitting on the disk, which is the one thing this whole design refuses.

What good looks like after a month.

Not a quiet mind. The thoughts still turn up; what changes is how much of the day they get. Fewer sessions than last month, rungs that used to be the top of the ladder sitting near the bottom, and a stretch of an evening you would have spent checking spent on something you would rather have been doing.

If you want the practice as something you could run on paper with no app at all, the guide to practising ERP on your own walks each part in order.