There is Hope
There is hope
If you are trying to make really hard changes like overcoming life long habits or addictions or significant character defects, we are part of the solution. We have built daily, accountability tools that help you to do active, personal processing of your stuff several times a day. That processing is where change happens.
You may be fighting your challenges alone or you may have a personal or group therapist. Assuming that you are working with a professional, you may be checking in with that person weekly or monthly. You might do daily workbook activities or you may have a daily devotional or other processes to stay connected with others. Those things matter and are helpful and we encourage them, but our experience suggests two things: 1. It is hard to stay consistent with these daily, weekly check-ins, 2. Most of us don't actually process our stuff on a daily basis like we should. Without a regular cadence to assess our wins and losses, many of us will fail to achieve the long term change we are hoping for.
You could describe Take24 as an advanced therapy processing journaling system using the power of software to prompt you to stay engaged, listens with exactness and ingests your data to then do smart things. Those things include sending alerts and notifications to a network of people—spouses, friends, peers, church leaders—you invite to intervene when you need help. You control the data. It is yours and you choose what to share with whom.
Start today on the path to making the changes that will improve your life.
Still uncertain if this is for you? Read a user's story
Want to see a demonstration of the check-in reporting? Explore sample data
Start someone today on the path to making the changes that will improve their life.
It Works
A Recovery System That Really Works
Based on the science of behavior change and developed in partnership with professional therapists, Take24 has proven to increase sobriety week over week and users report meaningful changes in their thinking. If you are like them, you will be able to move past what users describe as ‘white knuckling’ where brute force, physical separation or circumstances keeps them from doing their thing to a mental state of choice, control, freedom and power. The former state is not typically sustainable leading to frustrating reversion back to negative behaviors after time.
Research suggests that our behaviors are part of a pattern starting with triggers (things that happen to us), compulsions (strong desires to act fast without thinking), routines (patterns of thinking or physical activity) and rewards (the highs that give us pleasure). Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habits cites research that addictions are habits that cannot be eliminated wholesale. Instead, it is the ‘routine’ that can be replaced. In other words, we can learn to redirect addictive triggers away from negative routines toward healthy routines as long as those routines deliver the same type of reward that is the real goal we are after.
Take24 allows you to work through the components of these patterns of thinking and acting. Results take time and we have found that users who give attention to change every few hours will increase the speed toward lasting positive results.
Start today on the path to making the changes that will improve your life.
Still uncertain if this is for you? Read a user's story
Want to see a demonstration of the check-in reporting? Explore sample data
Start someone today on the path to making the changes that will improve their life.
About Check-ins
How do check-ins work?
While customizable to your needs, we send you three check-in requests every day by default. We ask one simple question, “How are you doing on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being unhealthy and 10 being healthy living?” It takes only a few moments to respond in a single text message with the following two things:
- A SCORE – A single number assessing your living since the last check-in. Consider your triggers, compulsions, routines and rewards against your check-definitions. See the table below of the default check-in definitions, customize your own (after you subscribe to a Take24 service).
- DESCRIPTION – The best descriptions are different one from another just like the differences in every day. Be specific and name people and thoughts both healthy and unhealthy.This isn’t easy and it may make you feel vulnerable. That is normal, but, you have total control over what and how your data is shared with others. And there is therapeutic healing power in describing your real thoughts both good and bad. Therapists talk about this as a process of surrendering that dilutes the power of those things over you. There is more to the psychology behind this thinking-writing process, but for now we will show you an example.
A Typical Check-in
What does a typical check-in look like?
7 – I ran into Chris(ty) again in the lobby. Immediately I felt a huge rush of excitement and [insert all your feelings] that made me want to [insert your negative behavior]. Whenever I see Chris(ty) I think about [insert negative compulsion]. For about 60 seconds I thought about [insert the unhealthy thinking] which I know is insane thinking. Luckily I put into practice [insert a redirection or intervention technique] and within a few minutes I am feeling [insert your healthy thinking in detail]. I have to be careful and next time I should [insert a better pattern].
If you are anything like most of us, you didn’t expect to be in this current situation with this negative behavior. You may have been exposed to your thing at a vulnerable moment or early in life and it may have taken hold fast or slow. Regardless of the severity of your behavior most of us share these things in common:
- Shame, guilt or embarrassment about our behavior.
- People around us who have been impacted negatively, but if given healthy boundaries will help.
- Uncertain commitment or confidence about making real changes.
Default Check-in Definitions
See the table below of the default check-in definitions, customize your own (after you subscribe to a Take24 service).
Start today on the path to making the changes that will improve your life.
Still uncertain if this is for you? Read a user's story
Want to see a demonstration of the check-in reporting? Explore sample data
Start someone today on the path to making the changes that will improve their life.
One User's Story
Let us tell you the story of one person. It may sound all too familiar or very different from your story as it deals with a deep seated addiction, but this story illustrates the depth of addiction as well as the gap that Take24 fills for one of our users.
One Person’s Story of Overcoming Addiction
I’ve lived with this thing for 33 years. It took root as a boy, when I was exposed to stuff at a neighbors. I remember the first exposure well. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire, and something intense exploded inside of me. The thing I was enamored with might have as well strapped me in handcuffs because I wanted more of it from then on.
Addiction’s Cost
I’ve done the analysis and in these 33 years I spent some 7,800 hours on this thing. Considering my average earnings over that time, that time was worth $156,000 and that is time I could have spent learning, growing, playing and building stuff. Those were precious growing up years that I will never get back again. That makes me sad for sure, but then again, now that I am well on my way to recovery with another 40 years ahead of me with a higher value to my time, I just gained more than $500,000 of my life back. That is material and reason enough for me to be so very grateful. Oh and that doesn’t calculate the value of my time to my wife, my kids, my employer and my society. Addiction really did rip away from me the best years of life but, healing is restoring the future.
My Beginning
Early in life, I didn’t see the truth for what it was – the selfish searching for friends who had access to the stuff, the hustling, the hiding and the sneaking to isolate myself are all too clear now as signs of a deep seated addiction, but to my young self, I wasn’t brave enough to face the behavior head on. It gave me a rush that I didn’t want to give up. Plus, when I did divulge my thing to a church leader, he told me to stop doing it and to be a good boy. In most every other way I was good, so with bigger problems to fix, he left me alone and I kept doing my thing. Why didn’t I get more help? If I’m honest, I didn’t want to give up the addiction highs. They were strong and compulsive and then I would forget about my bad behavior. It was like I lived in two worlds. I was a good boy 95% of the time and every once in a while this other part of me would take over and the time passed like sand through my fingers. Plus, I was embarrassed and ashamed and couldn’t stand the idea of people thinking poorly of me. The result was that I hid this thing from others who could help for years all the while lying to myself that I’d overcome it . . . later.
Active Recovery 30 Years In
Now, fast forward three decades to the point when I entered active recovery in a formal therapy program. I wish I could say I had done it on my own, but I didn’t. I was forced to by my patient wife who had reached a tipping point. Was I grateful for her help? No not at the time. I resented her. Plus, I wasn’t like these other people whose problems were much worse than mine. I didn’t need this attention. Therapy was expensive and at the time, I didn’t think it was worth my time or my money. I had never spent a dollar on my thing in all those years and now I was forking out lots of money to get better. I wasn’t happy.
At that time, my marriage was on the rocks. Things were not good. I was the cause. My wife and I were not connected. She was often angry, depressed or overwhelmed and we had lots of arguments. I was living between two lives and most of the time, I was in control but just like the 33 years previously, the addicted side of me would come out in private, isolated moments and I would do things I told myself I would not do again. I never realized just how strongly correlated all the bad things in my marriage were to my addiction. While I kept asking her to fix her negative frame of mind, not until later did I realize I was the problem. She was the victim and I was so blind to it all.
We had been married for years and for much of that time, she had lived under the dark shadow of my junk. Our faith and our kids kept me in the marriage. She, thankfully, was the anchor that kept things whole in our home. I had become overly controlling and hyper focused on productivity and value in time and money. I had lost track of the intangible values of patiently loving others in spite of their faults. I was judgmental and overly critical and those feelings were driving a wedge between me and everyone else. Few people were good enough for me. In my house, it was my way or hit the highway. All of this led to my wife and kids resenting me. Weekend time together was the hardest part of the week.
Now, three years into recovery, I realize that all of this crappy behavior of mine points is connected to my addiction. It seems crazy to say, but the more I’d process my wife’s anger or headaches or anxiety, the more I realized these were manifestations of the trauma I had caused in her.
A Gap in Therapy
After thirty-three months, $5,000 of therapy, and three periods of 6, 8 and 21 months of sobriety, I relapsed again. How could that be? Why wasn’t I better? It turns out that I was still half heartedly committing to rewiring my addictive brain. While I did attend my meetings and did my work books, I was doing that primarily out of obligation to others and often I’d procrastinate the work until the night before my therapy sessions. In group meetings, I’d review the past week of patterns but with such short sessions I didn’t get to review much of my week.
That is when I discovered the gap in my therapy – I wasn’t addressing the small stuff on a consistent basis and I learned that those small moments of negative thinking that seemed inconsequential in isolation were actually compounding to lead to irrational explosions of addictive behavior every once in a while that left me wondering how I messed up again. Addressing the small things every single day has proven critical to my current 3 months of sobriety and different from my past periods of success, this time I am focused on living between healthy living scores of 8 and 10. Also different than the past, my wife gets a daily notification with my last three check-ins. If I don’t check-in, she knows. She only gets my number, so she isn’t traumatized by the details. I’ve done pretty good with this new system and I’ve learned there is power in consistent positive patterns.
I still have a long way to go to restore permanent, healthy living to those around me, but I am a long way away from the crappy life I used to be living. Life is so much better and I owe it to finally putting personal effort each and every day into processing my junk, and that is making a difference in big ways in other areas of my life too. I think more clearly. I have a lot more ideas. I have more will power and I have more time to do positive things. It feels like my brain is finally returning.
Whether you use Take24 or another approach we want you to be successful. Give us a try and see the difference for yourself.
Start today on the path to making the changes that will improve your life.
Want to see a demonstration of the check-in reporting? Explore sample data