STILL

Day 1 of 30 · Observe & reduce · 2 min

Don't quit today

This is the first page of the programme, printed here exactly as it appears in the app. It is free there too — you read the whole of it before anything is asked of you. We are putting it on the open web for the same reason: the loudest complaint in this entire category is paying to find out there was nothing behind the paywall.

You are not quitting today. You are not quitting tomorrow either, or on Thursday, or at any point in the next five days. Today you only watch. Nothing is taken away, and nothing is promised.

Every attempt you have made before started the other way round. There was a date, and a decision made in a good mood, and a last one, and then a countdown running against you from the first hour. That holds for a while. Then an ordinary Wednesday turns up with nothing special in it, a delay, a drink, somebody holding something out, and the whole arrangement goes in one move, because it was a single promise and there was no smaller piece of it left over to keep.

People who are still off it a year later almost never tell that story. What they describe is having noticed something. One man's account of what finally made it hold: "it was about shifting my mindset. When a craving hit, I would pause and ask myself what I was actually getting from it." That sounds like a piece of luck he happened to have. It can also be produced deliberately, and it takes about five days.

So you keep using. Normally, at your usual rate, at the usual hours, including the ones that happen when nobody is in the room. Nothing here is going to ask you to make a pod last or to hold off on the tin until ten. The disposable you keep drawing on after it has started tasting of nothing goes on being drawn on. The pouch that has been in so long you could not say when it went in stays exactly where it is.

The only thing you do is log it. One tap, every time, starting with the next one. That is the whole of today's task and it will be the whole of tomorrow's.

You have just answered fourteen questions about yourself, and every answer in there came out of memory. Memory keeps the deliberate ones. It holds on to the first of the day and the one after dinner, and it loses the rest without telling you, and the rest is most of it. Five days of taps puts a written record where the estimate was.

The advice that comes up most often from people who got off these and stayed off is also the least dramatic available: "Don't wait for the ideal moment. Avoid going cold turkey immediately." Take it literally. These five days are load-bearing, and everything on day 6 rests on what gets recorded in them.

By Friday you will have something no previous attempt ever handed you. Your own hours, on a screen. Which parts of the day this actually owns, and which parts you had badly wrong. Somewhere in there will be one window you barely care about, one you could drop without much happening, and that window is where day 6 begins. The pages after day 6 are about stopping. The ones after those are about the particular ways people come back to it in month three, on a good day, when they have stopped thinking about any of this.

Nothing about today is difficult, and that is deliberate rather than a way of easing you in. You were going to use today whatever this page said. The only new thing is that it leaves a record.

Try this today

Use exactly as much as you would have anyway. Every single time, open Still and tap once. That is all of it.

What comes after this page

Four more days of the same watching, then day 6, which is the one where you stop. The full table of contents lists all thirty by name.

One payment at the price shown by the App Store. No subscription, nothing renews. The day counter, the log, the craving tool, your timeline and this page stay free whatever you decide.

Still is behavioural support and general information. It does not diagnose or treat, and it is not a substitute for advice from a doctor.