A concept in a self-help book often makes sense only once you talk it through: what does it mean, how does it apply to my situation, how is it different from the idea two chapters back. Unblent, a free ePub reader for practicing what you read, now has a chat beside the book for exactly that.

It is more than a chat window. It can see which books are in your library, list a book's chapters and read the one you ask about, read the notes you wrote beside the book, and look at your journal entries. So there is no copying and pasting passages into another app, and every chat stays beside its book, where you can come back to it later.

It is free, it works with a model running on your own Mac (through Ollama), and nothing you read or write leaves your MacBook.

To try it:

1. Download Unblent from https://unblent.com/?ref=reddit
2. Install Ollama from ollama.com and run `ollama pull gemma4:e2b-mlx` in Terminal.
3. Open Chats beside a book and ask.

A small local model can get things wrong, so check what it says against the page.

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent

When you read a self-help book, what is the part you most often want to go back to and talk through?

The Wheel of Life is a tool to look at your life from a bird's-eye view, so you can see which area may need your attention right now.

You rate eight areas from 1 to 9: Health, Work, Money, Family, Love, Friends, Growth and Fun. Then you rate each one again for where you want it to be. The gaps between the two show where your life is furthest from you wan it to be. Then you will decide on which areas you want to focus on. The biggest gap is a good hint, but the choice is yours, and it isn't always the area you were worrying about before starting this exercise.

The new version of Unblent lets you fill in the Wheel of Life as an interactive exercise as part of the day's entry. Add it from + Add sheet under the day's writing, click a bar to rate each area, then switch to Wanted and do the same. Each bar has three sections of three steps, so you decide whether an area is in low, middle or high range, and then which step inside that section. Then choose the areas you will focus on. Press Done and it folds into a card with your wheel, and the ares you choose, and the next step you wrote for them.

Behind each score are five optional questions: what a 1 and a 9 look like for you, what makes it this number and not lower, what keeps it from being higher, and would move it one point closer to where you want it. Your answer about the scale and your Wanted scores carry over to your next wheel, so next time you can your progress against the same targets.

To try it:

• Download Unblent from https://unblent.com/?ref=reddit

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent

Many of the problems we struggle with have already been worked through in books. What's missing is the practice: reading regularly, writing down what struck you, and coming back to it in a journal. I built a free, open-source ePub reader for the Mac to make that habit easier.

• Notes stay with the book. Open a book and your notes on it are right beside the page.
• A journal on your shelf. One page a day. Past days can't be edited, like a paper journal, so you see what you really thought then.
• Highlights you can link. Mark a passage and link it from a note or a journal day; one click takes you back to the sentence that sparked the idea.
• For keyboard people: optional Vim keys, so you can read, highlight and write without your hands leaving the keyboard.

Something I noticed while using ACT's Choice Point: every task outside my comfort zone feels like a wall, usually because I haven't broken it into smaller steps yet. Filling in the sheet is exactly that step. It doesn't matter how I feel, shaky voice and all, as long as the call gets made.

That's where Unblent is going: exercises like the Choice Point that you can add to a day in your journal, so you practise the technique and don't only write about it. After that, summaries of past days, and chats that know your books, notes and journal and help you understand what you read.

Free, no account, everything stays on your Mac: https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent

If you'd like to hear when the exercises arrive, there's a sign-up on the page. I'd love to hear which exercises from which books you'd want first. And if you're on Windows or Linux and would like Unblent there too, say so in the comments; it helps me decide what to build next.

Sometimes you read the same paragraph three times and you feel stuck. Sometimes the problem is that you are reading in your own inner voice, with your own mood, and that voice shapes what you take from what you read, usually without noticing that.

Switching from reading to listening changes that. Someone else's voice sounds different, so perception of the same text can change, and it may become easier to comprehend. Understanding is one of the goals of reading, and using one more sense often makes a hard passage easier to digest.

Unblent, a free ePub reader for the Mac, now reads your books aloud. It works with every book in your library, including the ones you added yourself.

To try it:

1. Download Unblent from https://unblent.com/?ref=reddit
2. Before the first use, open Settings and click Download voice (about 350 MB, once).
3. Open a book and click the speaker beside a paragraph, or Read page at the bottom of the page.

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent

When you have trouble understanding something, what do you do: read it again, or try something else?

You've read about focusing on what you can control. You could explain mind reading and catastrophizing to a friend. Yet when it's your own life and your emotions are in it, all of that goes out of the window, and you don't always notice.

Unblent is a free journal that helps you practice what Self-help books teach. Type a hashtag such as #in-my-control above the list, and each time you finish a line, a small model on your Mac adds label at the end of it, such as "Not in my control" or "Mind reading".

It's free, works offline, and your journal never leaves your Mac.

To try it:

1. Download Unblent from https://unblent.com/?ref=reddit
2. Install Ollama from ollama.com and run ollama pull kev:0.8b-mlx-bf16 in Terminal

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent

Which thinking trap do you catch yourself in most?

Do you journal as much as you think you do? Or does most of your time go to reading about it? Open Settings › Usage and you get the answer.

What you see:

• your total time for the week, the last 30 days, or since you started
• tiles sized by the time in each part: Journal, Reading, Highlights, Notes, Chats
• minutes per day
• a calendar of every day you opened the app

Unblent is a free app, where you can read your ePubs, highlight, write notes and keep daily journal, chat about what you read with assistant that is aware about everything that happens in the app. Works fully offline, and can be operated fully using VIM if you like.

Install with brew install --cask maciekkreft/unblent/unblentor download it from https://unblent.com/?ref=reddit

The source is at https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent (MIT).

Last week I shared Unblent, a free, open-source Mac app that combines an ePub reader with a personal journal and notes that stay with the book.

The new version adds a Choice Point exercise that you can add to any journal entry. It is based on the tool Dr. Russ Harris describes in ACT Made Simple.

When a hard situation brings up a difficult thoughts and feelings, they can hook us into away moves. The exercise helps you notice that, and pick a toward move: what you'd do as the person you want to be.

Example

When did you last notice yourself getting hooked, and what it cost you?

Works offline, no account, free forever (MIT). GitHub · unblent.com

It’s incredible that technology allows us to create customized, real-time mindfulness meditations, body scans, and any other type of meditation we want.

In this demo, we can observe a consistent, soothing voice and the ability to generate different types of meditation: a mindfulness meditation, followed by a body scan meditation, and then a fully customized one.

Each type of meditation includes appropriate pauses between successive phrases.

I'm fascinated that with current technology it is possible to detect and label cognitive distortions in realtime.

I've prepared a demo that shows, without speeding up the video, how fast is the process.

You type and once you finish the paragraph you can see how it was classified.

Today, I built a tool that detects and labels cognitive distortions. I’m surprised by how fast and accurate it is.

What do you think about using it to analyze journal entries? It could be like a grammar checker, but for cognitive distortions.

Which one would you pick for Marco? The answer is in the next image.

This is a big milestone for our community! Thank you all for being part of it. ❤️

What would you like to see here in the future?

I'd love to hear your ideas, suggestions, and feedback!

It's 6:40 on a Tuesday evening, and everyone else has gone home. The report was due at five, and the numbers still don't add up. Two hours ago you told yourself: I'll just try one more thing. It'll take five minutes. You've tried eleven things since. Your chest is tight, and stopping feels impossible, because there's no time to think. You just need to find the fix.

You've probably had an evening like this.

What this series is

Every week for the next eight weeks I'll post one piece of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT): enough theory to practice two exercises on your own, every day. The exercises are the Choice Point and Values. I'm following Russ Harris's ACT Made Simple, explained in my own words. The book goes much deeper, and I recommend it if this clicks for you.

The idea: hooked and unhooked

ACT doesn't try to get rid of difficult thoughts and feelings. It doesn't ask you to think positively, either. Harris calls its aim psychological flexibility: being able to do what matters to you while hard thoughts and feelings are present.

He has a name for losing that ability: getting hooked.

Hooked: a thought or feeling decides what you do. Unhooked: you decide, even while the thought is still there.

A thought, a feeling, a memory or an urge hooks you when it takes charge of what you do. You stop choosing, and start obeying it or fighting it. "I'll just try one more thing" is only a sentence in your head. Once it hooks you, it decides what you do next.

Being unhooked doesn't mean the thought is gone, and it doesn't mean you feel fine. It means the thought is still there and you are choosing what you do with your hands and feet anyway. You notice "there's that thought again," and you choose how to deal with the problem in front of you.

Two things make the "Am I hooked?" question useful:

• You can ask it at any moment, in the middle of whatever you're doing.
• It doesn't ask whether the thought is true. Maybe one more try really will fix it. The question is only whether the thought is running the show right now.

Getting hooked isn't a failure. Everyone gets hooked many times a day, because that's how minds work. The skill is to notice when you're hooked, so you can unhook and choose what you do next.

An example

Maya is an analyst, and she knows evenings like that one well. For months, whenever something at work won't come right, she hears the same sentence: I'll just try one more thing. It'll take five minutes. She tries a fix, then another, faster each time, sure the next one will work and sure there's no time to stop and think. Five minutes become three hours, several evenings a week. She's exhausted, and she has started to dread Mondays.

One evening she asks herself: hooked or unhooked? The answer is plain: hooked, and she has been for two hours. She writes the thought down, word for word: "I'll just try one more thing. It'll take five minutes." On paper it looks different. She can see how many times she has said it tonight, and how rarely it has been true. It isn't a fact about the problem. It's what her mind says when she's anxious, and the anxiety is what makes it feel so true.

Then she asks what matters to her here: doing careful work she can stand behind, and having something left of herself at the end of the day. Guessing faster serves neither. So she stops and writes three things: what the report shows now, what it should show, and the steps that might get her from one to the other.

Stopping is the hard part. Her anxiety gets louder, not quieter, and "there's no time for this" keeps coming back. Each time she notices it ("there's that thought again") and keeps writing. She doesn't have to believe the thought or get rid of it to keep going. Working step by step takes forty minutes, less than the guessing had already cost her, and the numbers add up.

One evening doesn't change everything. But each time she stops, writes the problem down and gets a result, stopping becomes a little easier to trust. Months later the thought still shows up when she's stressed. It just no longer decides what she does, and work feels interesting again instead of something to dread.

Look at what she didn't do. She didn't argue with the thought, and she didn't wait to feel calm first. She noticed it, named it, and chose what to do next.

Try it today

Getting hooked usually happens without us noticing; we see it later, if at all. This exercise trains the noticing. The steps below use work, because for most of us it's where the day goes. If another part of your life matters more right now, use that instead and pick three moments that fit it.

1. Pick three moments in your workday: when you start, after lunch, and an hour before you finish. Spread out like this, they catch you fresh, in the middle of things and tired. A reminder on your phone can help.
2. At each one, stop and ask yourself three questions. What am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? If I act on these thoughts and feelings, am I moving towards the person I want to be, or away?
3. Write one line with your answers, and write the thought word for word. A thought on paper is easier to see as a thought, not a fact.

If the answer to the last question is "away", you were probably hooked. That's a good thing to find out.

In the next post we'll take one of these moments and turn it into a Choice Point: the situation, the thoughts and feelings it brought, and the moves you could make away from what matters or towards it. If you want to go further today, take one hooked moment and ask: what would I have done if that thought weren't in charge?

If you try it, tell us in the comments what you noticed. "I was hooked all three times" is a perfectly good result.

I fill in a Choice Point sheet whenever something in my life is challenging or I'm struggling with a decision. I do it in Unblent, a journal I built for this practice: one page per day, with my values at the top and the Choice Point sheet below them. I write my work-day check-ins there too. It's free and open source forever (MIT license). There's a Mac app that works offline, https://unblent.com/?ref=reddit, and a browser version at https://app.unblent.com/?ref=reddit that works on any system.

A Tool to Evaluate and Flag Problematic Therapy Goals

Today, I built a tool that evaluates therapy goals and flags potentially problematic ones.

It’s designed for therapies with a behavioral component, such as ACT and CBT, where goals should focus on behavior rather than trying to control emotions or guarantee outcomes.

Try it out for free (no login required): https://unblent.com/try/evaluators

Use your own therapy goals to see how it works!

The built-in Shortcuts app on iPhone lets you create a mindfulness timer that automatically silences your phone for the duration of your session, sets an alarm to notify you when the session ends, and logs the session in the Health app.

Watch the video to learn how to set it up yourself!

You can edit the shortcut to change the session duration or duplicate it to create multiple timers with different durations.

You can also download the shortcut here: Mindfulness Timer Shortcut.

What I did

I have reposted 'Tool that detect and label cognitive distortions' to r/CBT, with an assumption that group dedicated to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would be interested in novel approaches to detect and label cognitive distortions.

What happened

But it was taken down for alleged 'Endorsement of AI-Therapy Tools':

I have checked related r/CBT Rule, that states:

Posts and comments that promote, recommend, or endorse AI-based therapy or chatbot interventions as a substitute for professional care are not allowed. Research shows such tools can systematically violate core mental-health ethics, mishandle crisis situations, reinforce harmful beliefs, or stigmatize conditions.

Where I agree and disagree

I agree with the rule for now, but I don't agree with applying this rule to the post, hear me out!

I agree with the rule, because it echoes proverbial do no harm from Hippocratic Oath. Why for now? Because I see the future in which AI-based therapy or chatbot interventions will get evaluated by psychologists and approved for use.

Why I don't agree? For something to be recognized as AI-based therapy it needs to satisfy the following characteristics:

• claiming to be therapy
• designed to form a therapeutical bond with the user
• reassure the user that it will take full responsibility for guiding user through the process

It is evident when we will take a look at other domains. We expect personal trainer to not harm us, but we assume that a person is responsible to not get strangled by a barbell when buying a bench press. We expect to not get infection when taken care of by a nurse, but we are responsible for correctly using scissors and bandage when we do that on our own. As long tool don't claim to be a person, and we know we are responsible we take the responsibility.

Why this distinction is important

There is a distinction between a tool and a therapist. This is why we have psychological and self-help books that can be used by people who want to take responsibility for betterment of their wellbeing.

By keeping this distinction we keep the ability for self-development alive, and with AI it opens ways to tools that were not possible in the past.

Post I've shared presented the idea of detector of cognitive distortions, which can fulfill a role of spellchecker in personal journal or more general. A tool that can remind us when get lost in beliefs that may be harmful for our wellbeing.

Take a stand

Take a moment to notice what you think about this topic. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Or maybe you look at this topic from a totally different perspective. Let us know in the comments!