My best friend was struggling through a painful breakup and I wanted to help. There are excellent and free interactive self-help tools for everything from depression to meditation, but I couldn’t find any science-based self-help tools for going through a breakup, even thought it is one of the most common negative life experiences we all share.
I dived into the CBT and evidence based research on healing after break ups, and used that to design a tool to aid healing during the painful act of breaking up.
I used clinical psychology techniques such as reframing, de-catastrophization, positive activity planning, and gratitude brainstorming. While questions focused on a variety of aspects of the breakup, the focus was on positive aspects and growth opportunities that come from that experience.
I build it in GuidedTrack, a framework which would allow me to rapidly code and test my self-help tool, as well as collecting data on user patterns, clicks, completion, time spent on each question, and anonymized answers. Before and after the tool, users rated how they felt about their breakup on a variety of different dimensions. Based on that data I was able to perform randomized A/B test, as well as change the flow of questions based on user’s answers to preceding questions.
