How does tracking work?

In Drinker’s Helper, you can track your drinking, your sober days, and your urges to drink.

We’ll help you set low-risk weekly and daily drinking limits, and track your drinking against those goals. You can also make a short-term pledge to stay sober for a certain number of days, and we will help you track completion of that pledge.

We can also help you realize why you drink, by tracking the triggers that lead you to drink and the strategies that help you get through urges to drink. You can also convince yourself to change, by logging the benefits of sobriety or moderation and the downsides of drinking, as you see them.

Finally, you can get an idea of your longer-term progress by looking at the Insights tab. There, you can see historical data on your drinking and your urges to drink as both (hopefully!) decrease over time.

What is a trigger?

A trigger is any circumstance that makes you want to drink. Triggers could be: places (e.g., being near favorite bars), people (e.g., drinking buddies, people you don’t get along with), feelings (e.g., work stress), events (e.g., a happy hour, a brunch) or even things (e.g., being around your favorite type of alcohol). By tracking their triggers, we hope members can prepare to handle them.

What is a strategy?

A strategy is any action you take that helps you avoid unwanted drinking. Strategies can be mental (e.g., meditation or a mental trick to fight urges) or physical (e.g., taking a walk when you have an urge). They can be ways of handling problems that might otherwise lead you to drink (e.g., taking a bath instead of drinking to de-stress). They can be things you do in the moment, or they can be things you prepare in advance (e.g., having a favorite non-alcoholic drink on hand). By tracking their strategies, we hope members can discover what works best for them.

What are benefits and downsides?

We hope to help members of our community track the benefits of sobriety or moderation and the downsides of drinking or excessive drinking so that they solidify their own motivation to change. When you track your drinking, you can write down how good it feels to stick with your goals, or how badly you wish you hadn’t exceeded your limits. Over time, we hope looking at your own words may help persuade you to change.

how do sober days work?

If you are maintaining complete sobriety, we understand it might feel strange or even triggering to keep logging zero drinks. That’s why we’ve added sober days as an option for tracking in the new Drinker’s Helper app. When you add sober days, we increment your streak to include all days since your last entry, and provide an inspirational quote to encourage you on your path. 

How is my streak calculated?

Your streak includes all the days for which you have been below BOTH your weekly and daily drinking limits. That means that if you exceed your weekly limit, your streak will reset, even if you’re below your daily limit.

Does Community Insights cost more?

It does not. Community Insights is included with your DH Plus membership. It is opt-in, so that anyone who does NOT wish to share their strategies and benefits anonymously with the community may choose not to.

How can I contribute to Community Insights?

If you turn on Community Insights, we will review the strategies and benefits that you add, along with those of thousands of others, and select the best ones to add to the Community Insights list. We may not add all of them, and we will deliberately reject any that encourage drinking, contain profanity, or mention any person’s name. The goal is to have an anonymous list of strategies and benefits that help everyone in the community.

How do groups work?

Your Group is a place to get empathy and understanding from others in the same situation, share tips and advice based on what has worked for you in the past, and encourage one another to make progress. Group chats are unmoderated, made up only of comments from other users.

Our goal with the Group is to help you find the right people to support you. We match you with people in your Group based on having similar answers to the introductory questions about your drinking history. We also introduce you to people in your Group who share your challenges and motivations - your “Matches” - so you can make deeper connections more quickly.

when am I talking to a bot?

When you answer the introductory questions to get matched to your Group, and when you do exercises on the Library and Toolbox tabs, you are talking to the Drinker’s Helper chat bot. It is not an intelligent bot, as you’ll see if you attempt to engage it that way; it cannot understand unstructured conversation, but instead gives a programmed set of responses. It’s like reading a book, only in a chat format.

When you join your Group, you are talking to other people who’ve also signed up for Drinker’s Helper. We do not insert bots into Groups.

As a further clarification: there is no bot, anywhere in the world, that is known to pass the Turing test of convincingly sounding like a human being. We certainly do not have that capability, as you’ll see when you do exercises. It is a chat bot, but not an intelligent one :).

Who is it good for?

Drinker's Helper is intended as support for anyone who is working on drinking less or quitting drinking, who has mild or moderate problems with alcohol. It is not intended in any case to be a substitute for medical care or alcohol addiction treatment. 

Should I do this instead of going to a rehab facility or a therapist?

In short, no. If your problems caused by drinking are serious enough that you are considering residential rehab or going to an addiction therapist, you could  consider using Drinker's Helper as an aid after your formal treatment ends, or using it in addition to your core treatment program. If you are looking for an addiction therapist, we recommend searching in Psychology Today here, or look for doctors or inpatient programs here.

What does it cost?

We offer a one week free trial, and if at that point you are seeing value in Drinker's Helper, we hope you will subscribe to DH Plus to help keep us in business. If you decide you don’t want it anymore, you can cancel by following Apple’s standard process here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202039.

How can I cancel my subscription?

You can easily cancel your subscription anytime by following Apple’s standard process here. If you cancel, you will still have access to DH Plus premium features (your Group, your Insights, and your Program) until the end of your subscription period.

If you are only cancelling because you are experiencing financial distress, please contact us regarding available discounts.