2025-07-25 22:50:18
Welcome to our Tools for Thought interview series, where we meet with founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Arun Bahl is the cofounder of Aloe, a tool designed to support human cognition in our information-dense world – an AI computer that acts as a “superhuman attention.”
In this interview, we discussed how information overload hinders deep work and creativity, the power of metacognition, why we should aim to augment human thinking and not automate it away, the importance of mapping a problem space rather than just getting answers, and his plans to continue to develop tools that promote clarity of thought and align with shared human interests. Enjoy the read!
Hi Arun, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You’ve written extensively about the distraction economy and its impact on human cognition. Why do you think we need better tools to handle information overload?
Glad to be here! Absolutely. In short: the distraction economy is a Bad Thing for humanity. We already know that it’s bad for individual mental health, especially social media and its effects on young people. We know that it’s bad for us geopolitically, too – when we monetize the delivery of information independently of whether that information is true or not, we create poor outcomes for any society. Governance needs fact-based discourse.
But there’s a third crucial reason that has slipped under the radar to-date: information overload breaks human thinking. I’ll share an anecdote from our own cognitive science research: we spent a lot of time with Millennial and Gen Z knowledge workers getting to know their experiences and pain points, and across our studies there was a surprisingly unanimous baseline. These individuals all expressed the same emotional state: feeling brittle. Feeling stretched too thin, reacting to the next Slack message or rushing to a Zoom call, squeezing in an errand, never getting into deep work. Feeling like their “real” creativity was always a little out of reach.
The problem is much bigger than productivity, however. Let’s imagine modern human thinking as one app among several, running on our brains. When we overtax that modern thinking piece – overtax our attention – we have other apps that will increase their activity to fill in the gaps. Those other systems are prejudice. They are cognitive bias. They are the poor heuristics that make us more susceptible to mis- and dis-information, for example.
From the data, we find that human cognition didn’t evolve to handle this amount of information saturation. It’s just not the environment human thinking evolved for. This isn’t a personal productivity problem – it’s a civilizational one.
Humans must now adapt to a fundamental shift to our ecology of information. That’s why we started Aloe – to build the tools for human thinking to succeed, even in an information environment we are not evolved to handle. We think it’s the most important problem there is to solve today.
That’s why you decided to build an AI computer to address this fundamental mismatch between human cognition and our information environment.
Exactly. Today’s information world is too large for unassisted human cognition. Our species puts out two and a half quintillion bytes of data per day onto the Internet that we consume again each day. And human working memory is fixed at birth, at seven slots. The collision between these two numbers symbolizes the problem we’re trying to solve: the gap between the volume of information we have to contend with, and the biological limits of our attention. We need a superhuman attention that we can trust to help boost our own.
As an analogy: humans can only see colors from red to violet. That’s a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, but we’ve long had tools that could see other wavelengths. Those tools take information from outside our visual range and change its representation, presenting it to us in the colors that we can see. Similarly, an AI computer must have attention that’s far greater than ours, but that knows how to present information to us when it’s important, and at the level of detail that’s appropriate to what we’re currently trying to achieve.
We call this ‘pinch-to-zoom’ for information. Just like with a map on my phone, Aloe lets us zoom in and out of any website, document, conversation, and know that at this level of zoom, you may not need to see every surface street, but the capital cities and freeways are still there.
Aloe pairs the most capable generalist AI agent with an intuitive graphical experience – an AI desktop, not just a chatbot. It knows how to present information in-context, like how to visualize and animate concepts within a large dataset, present the top-level items from a document, or engage you in a verbal conversation. You choose the right way to interact for your situation, headspace, and learning style.
Aloe also executes tasks on your behalf as you work together, and it understands collaboration and shared information. It uses tools, and even creates its own tools, as it works.
I’ve been an AI researcher for many years, but my background was in cognitive science. My cofounder and I are longtime Vipassana meditators. Aloe was born out of lifelong reflection on what humans need to think well. Not to automate us away, but to augment the thing that makes us human in the first place: our capacity for clear thought and creativity.
Let’s talk about how the Aloe agent actually works. You mentioned that Aloe can create tools when it encounters problems that existing tools can’t solve. How does this capability work in practice?
That’s right. As you work together, Aloe determines what its objective is, and makes a plan to achieve that objective. Just like other generalist agents out there, Aloe uses tools to help along the way. But importantly, when Aloe determines it needs a tool that doesn’t exist in order to accomplish something for you, it stops and creates that tool first. If it works, it keeps that new tool in its toolbox – remixing and growing its capabilities over time. An individual’s data is always kept private and secure – we take privacy very seriously. But as Aloe builds its toolbox, all users benefit simultaneously.
This is a new species of AI – internally, we nicknamed this version Aloe habilis. It’s what has allowed Aloe to already outperform every other generalist agent you’ve heard of on industry measures of intelligence like the GAIA benchmark. And we’re just getting started.
You’ve emphasized that Aloe has metacognition – the ability to think about its own thinking. Can you explain why this is crucial?
Metacognition is strategic skepticism. As smart humans, we all know to apply skepticism to the information we encounter in the world. We also know that the smartest humans don’t just question external sources – they apply that same skepticism internally, too. Why do I think what I’m thinking? Why do I feel this way? Can I bring that initial intuition into my conscious experience to learn something and make a better decision?
Similarly, Aloe is trained to question itself and recognize that it too is susceptible to a kind of cognitive bias. Language models inherit society’s biases from the internet data they’re trained on. Aloe is a neurosymbolic system that engages in symbolic reasoning beyond what LLMs can do. This reflective reasoning is essential because we don’t want an AI that just gives us answers – it must explain how it got there, and understand when it’s unsure.
How does it integrate with someone’s existing information ecosystem?
Aloe sees and understands the same information you do. It can connect to sources like websites, your email, Notion, Linear, Slack, Google Docs – and it can reference, and understand things before you’ve even seen them. We liken it to one smart trusted individual that has access, and you can interact naturally with them without having to manage individual conversations, apps, or agents and context windows.
A lot of the heavy lifting we’ve done is to learn how to make information self-organizing. Imagine that as you work, you’re moving through a map of your own knowledge of the resources, people, and processes that are important to what you’re trying to do. An AI computer like Aloe understands how to illuminate the knowledge neighborhood around where you are so that you can see and understand with clarity the most important questions and get verifiable answers. You become more effective, with less effort.
How did you approach building what you call a “synthetic mind” that can actually help humans think better?
Humans evolved to collaborate with other minds. Dunbar’s work on the evolution of human intelligence suggests that our brain size expanded to manage larger social communities – interacting with other minds is our native interface. It’s why humans anthropomorphize everything – cars, dogs, chatbots. Rather than fighting that, Aloe embraces it. It acts like a single smart individual that you get to bring with you everywhere, both on your desktop and mobile.
But for this to work, you need exceptional privacy and trust. Forget AI for a moment – how does human-to-human delegation work? You wouldn’t trust me with anything important unless you believe three things are true: that I can reason, that I have good information, and that we have aligned interests (I have no ulterior agenda). If any one of those isn’t true, you shouldn’t trust me.
The threshold for trusting an AI is no different. This is why, for example, our business model can never be based on advertising. If my goal is to always be selling you something, our interests aren’t fully aligned and I can’t be trusted. If my goal is to sell your data, absolutely do not trust me. We’ve built this foundation of trust directly into Aloe, but crucially, not in order to automate your thinking. Its job is to show you the concepts behind the information – not just give you answers – so you create understanding. Like showing your work in math class, Aloe reveals its reasoning so your mental map improves through the interaction.
What kind of people are drawn to Aloe, and how do they use it?
There’s a surprising variety. Professionally, they’re executives, consultants, designers, researchers, creators, and students – but they use Aloe in their personal lives just as much. They work in multidisciplinary teams, and sometimes solo. Work happens at a desk or on a smartphone. They don’t have separation between their work and personal lives anymore. They tend to be curious and intentional, and many already practice some form of digital hygiene or social media detox once in a while.
The common thread is that they context switch heavily – and want less time pressure and more spaciousness for the things that matter to them. They want tools that don’t get in the way. They’re aware they’d be better off with less noise. More presence. More creative time. They know they’re the best version of themselves when they have taken back control over their time and attention.
In everyday interactions, Aloe gives them time back by proactively helping them assemble their workspace – an information mise en place – so they don’t have to waste time trying to find relevant bits of data to dive into a project. Aloe shows them the provenance of their information. It helps them stay on top of things despite their back-to-back meeting schedules. It collects relevant information, briefs them on background from both public and private sources, and helps them discern what questions are important to ask. And Aloe helps them get into deep work mode more frequently, for longer – as they have delegated busywork away and freed up time to be goal-focused rather than task-focused.
What about you, how do you use Aloe?
I’m in it all the time – at my desk or out in the world – when I need to think or do. Where I really feel the biggest difference is when I’m working on something but I don’t have clarity yet – and the question I need to answer depends on combining a bunch of different kinds of information – my private notes, my team’s internal docs, prior conversations I’ve had, and public sources on the internet. I use Aloe fundamentally as a tool for visualizing, understanding, and talking through – not just getting an answer, but seeing the landscape of concepts behind the information so I can think clearly and decide where to go next.
And finally… Looking ahead, what’s next for Aloe?
We’re excited to open up Aloe for more people to use. Our earliest users are already shaping its development in big ways and telling us how they want to use Aloe next. We’re also partnering with some amazing teams in astrophysics and health tech, where privacy and advanced reasoning are critical and current solutions simply don’t cut it. And we’re hiring!
We’re just scratching the surface on Aloe. But more broadly, we want to make a case for the kinds of tools humanity deserves. Can we learn from the previous generation of tech and the ill-effects of dopamine mining? Can we steer ourselves away from cognitive offloading and the atrophy of our collective intelligence?
Can we understand the most important challenges we face, and build tools that help nudge us in the right direction?
In a world where anything can be automated, we believe clarity of thought will be a human’s defining trait. Seeing the larger picture, knowing what questions to ask, reclaiming personal agency. And making sure that our tools are deployed in concert with our shared human interests.
Thank you so much for your time, Arun! Where can people learn more about Aloe?
We’d love to have Ness Labs’ community join our priority waitlist to get earlier access. Use the following link. More info on us at our website, and our blog is a place to dig more into these ideas we’ve covered today.
You can also find us occasionally on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn. And if you’d like to see Aloe in action, check out this short video.
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2025-07-23 16:45:00
Have you ever made a decision that looked right on paper but felt wrong in your gut? Or found yourself following rules simply because that’s what you were taught, not because they align with who you are today?
If so, you’ve experienced the tension between external expectations and your own internal compass.
Self-authorship is the ability to navigate that tension by not only making decisions based on your current values rather than external expectations, but also by actively developing those values through conscious reflection.
In more academic terms, educational researcher Baxter Magnolia defines self-authorship as “the capacity to internally define a coherent belief system and identity that coordinates mutual relations with others.”
Research shows that strong self-authorship leads to better performance, stronger critical reasoning, clearer cognitive thinking, and improved motivation. Instead of pursuing goals based on societal expectations, self-authorship allows you to explore ambitions that genuinely matter to you. It’s a powerful skill for living, but it’s challenging to master.
You might be operating from external rather than internal authority if you:
Developing self-authorship allows you to more consistently express your own internal sense of authority. Researchers have identified three main phases to achieve full self-authorship:
1. Trust your internal voice. Instead of reacting automatically to situations based on past conditioning, start by actively listening to your internal voice to shape your response. What this looks like is pausing to ask: “What do I actually think about this?”
2. Build an internal foundation. Consciously combine your identity, relationships, beliefs, and values into a coherent set of internal commitments. This phase involves examining what you truly believe versus what you’ve absorbed from others.
3. Secure internal commitment. When external pressures arise, consistently use your commitments to guide decisions rather than defaulting to others’ expectations. This is the phase where self-authorship becomes a lived practice rather than just an idea.
Be patient. Developing self-authorship can take years to reliably use your internal commitments to guide decisions without automatically reacting to external events.
In addition, several obstacles can make it harder to develop your self-authorship: cultural pressures such as living in environments where conformity is heavily valued over individual expression, fear of judgment such as worrying that others will disapprove if you make choices that don’t align with their expectations, or…
… just plain habits, such as continuing patterns established in childhood without examining whether they still serve you. So, how can you make it a little bit easier to develop your self-authorship?
Studies point to a few different activities that have been shown to help people develop their self-authorship. A good approach is to experiment and see which ones help you best develop and secure your own set of internal commitments.
Developing your self-authorship requires some effort, but the journey itself will help you understand yourself more deeply. The idea isn’t to become completely independent of others’ input, but to develop a strong enough internal foundation that you can genuinely choose which external influences to incorporate into your decision-making.
As you strengthen your self-authorship, you’ll find that your choices now feel more aligned with who you are, your relationships become more authentic, and you develop a greater sense of agency when facing life’s inevitable challenges. That seems worth investing in.
The post Self-Authorship: The Art of Trusting Your Own Authority appeared first on Ness Labs.
2025-07-17 15:53:54
When I write knowing someone will read it, something changes. Having readers forces me to think harder about what I’m trying to say. My arguments become sharper and my examples clearer.
Yet I notice the temptation to gravitate toward topics I know will get engagement. Should I explore the philosophy of boredom or write about productivity hacks? I know what kind of content tends to perform better on the internet.
That’s the audience effect at play. The mere presence of others fundamentally changes what we choose to do and who we choose to be, and we become different people when we know we’re being watched.
Our brains evolved to care deeply about social status. When we sense we’re being observed, our neural networks shift into “performance mode,” prioritizing social approval over personal preferences. The regions associated with intrinsic motivation quiet down while areas processing social feedback light up.
This neurological shift explains why an audience changes our decision-making. We start choosing safer options, more impressive goals, more socially acceptable paths.
The question shifts from “What interests me?” to “What will make me look good?” and our external signals start overriding our internal preferences. Once you know about the audience effect, you’ll notice how it plays out everywhere:
What makes the audience effect particularly tricky is the associated feedback loop. As we get positive reinforcement for audience-oriented choices, our preferences gradually shift to match what gets rewarded.
We lose track of what we originally cared about, replacing it with whatever generates the strongest reaction. Over time, we forget what we wanted before we started performing for others.
You can’t eliminate the influence of having an audience, and you actually wouldn’t want to. After all, an audience can provide focus, energy, and clarity that can make our work better. What you want is to make the audience effect conscious and intentional.
1. Conscious audience selection. Not all audiences are worth performing for. Instead of optimizing for the broadest possible appeal, choose whose opinions actually matter. Stay aware of your own thoughts and write for the five people whose judgment you respect rather than the five thousand who might click “like.”
2. The sandboxed approach. Keep both audience-aware and audience-free creative spaces. Share your progress, but also work on projects no one will see. You can also consider a periodic “audience detox” where you deliberately create without any external validation in mind.
3. Strategic audience leverage. Use the audience effect as a tool. Want to learn something new? Run a tiny experiment in public. Curious about a topic? Start a study group. The key is to choose challenges that stretch you toward your own ambitions rather than toward what you think will impress others.
Next time you’re making a decision – whether that’s what to write, what to share, what career move to make – pause and ask: “Am I doing this because I want to, or because I think others want me to?”
When you recognize the audience effect, you get your agency back. That’s why there’s nothing wrong with choosing the audience-pleasing option sometimes as long as you’re making that choice consciously. You can then leverage the increased focus, energy, and clarity without falling prey to the drawbacks of the audience effect.
The post The Audience Effect: Why We Change When Others Are Watching appeared first on Ness Labs.
2025-07-09 16:42:00
Here’s one of my favorite quotes: “I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.” This comes from the diary of John Steinbeck, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.
This kind of intellectual self-doubt is common among high achievers. The smarter they are, the more acutely they seem to question their own competence.
Why is it that those with the most evidence of their abilities are often the ones who doubt themselves most? How come intellectual achievement doesn’t translate into intellectual confidence?
When I was working at Google, I constantly felt like someone would discover I didn’t belong there. Everyone around me seemed so much smarter. Then one day, I found an internal group called “The Impostors” filled with anonymous posts from colleagues sharing the exact same fears. It was somehow a relief to find out that I wasn’t the only one.
This experience captures the essence of intellectual self-doubt, a psychological pattern where capable people question their competence. It’s often associated with impostor syndrome, the well-documented fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite clear evidence of one’s abilities and which was first identified in 1978 by psychologists Dr Pauline Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes.
They observed this pattern in high-achieving women and described a feeling of “intellectual phoniness.” But recent research suggests it affects people across all demographics and up to 82% of people experience it at some point in their careers.
When we question our competence, the brain’s default mode network becomes hyperactive, putting us into an anxious self-referential thinking loop. Meanwhile, our prefrontal cortex, which is among other things responsible for self-monitoring, can become overwhelmed, making it harder to accurately assess our actual abilities.
Understanding the different ways intellectual self-doubt shows up can help you recognize your own patterns. Dr Valerie Young, a leading expert on the topic, has identified five distinct behavioral patterns:
These patterns of intellectual self-doubt often compound over time, creating cycles where the more someone achieves, the more fraudulent they feel.
The secrecy surrounding these feelings only intensifies the experience and prevents people from seeking support, which can lead to burnout. Fortunately, there’s a way out.
There’s no magic bullet to beat impostor syndrome, but there are a few strategies you can apply to better manage the anxiety and start accepting that nobody made a mistake, and you belong to the group of smart and talented people you get to work with.
Reframe your internal narrative. Replace “I don’t know what I’m doing” with “I’m learning as I go.” Yes, it can feel cheesy to talk to yourself, but research shows that these kinds of self-affirmations activate the brain systems associated with reward, so you’ll feel good about the process.
Practice just-in-time learning. Instead of trying to be an expert on everything and hoarding knowledge, acquire relevant skills when needed for specific tasks. And to make your progress more visible, keep a learning log documenting one new skill or insight you’ve gained as part of your weekly review.
Realize that there’s no shame in asking for help. Asking generative questions is a helpful skill that takes practice. If you don’t know how to do something or struggle to solve a problem, try asking a coworker first instead of struggling to solve it on your own.
Celebrate your achievements. Everytime you reach a milestone, take the time to celebrate your hard work – even if it’s just a micro-win. Then, extract useful knowledge by asking: “What worked well?” and “What would I do differently?” This metacognitive practice creates growth loops rather than a linear pass/fail mentality.
Embrace experimental thinking. Turn big challenges into tiny experiments. Scientists run countless trials and most of their hypotheses prove wrong, but each experiment generates valuable data. Apply this mindset to reduce your fear of failure and cultivate curiosity about what you might discover in the process of trying.
Importantly, remember that the most successful people aren’t those who never doubt themselves, but those who’ve learned to move forward despite the doubt. Intellectual self-doubt and the associated impostor syndrome are often a sign that you’re challenging yourself and growing.
The post Intellectual Self-Doubt: The Psychology Behind Questioning Your Competence appeared first on Ness Labs.
2025-07-03 16:17:24
Generative AI has become part of everyday life for millions of people. We use it to polish emails, brainstorm ideas, write essays, and even as a coach or therapist. But as we hand over more of our thinking to AI, some have begun to wonder whether we’re paying a hidden price.
A recent study from MIT has fueled this debate, with headlines wondering whether ChatGPT may rot your brain. People are worried this technology is eroding critical thinking. Others say these claims are just scaremongering.
What does the science actually say? As a neuroscientist, I might be able to help break it down. Let’s take a closer look at what this study found (and what it didn’t).
Over the course of several months, researchers at MIT asked 54 students to write a series of essays. Participants were divided into three groups:
Each participant completed three essays in their assigned condition. In a fourth session, some people switched methods (for example, ChatGPT users then wrote without AI, and vice versa).
As they wrote, the researchers monitored brain activity using EEG headsets. They also tested participants’ memory of their essays, scored the essays for quality (using human teachers and an AI model), and asked participants how much the essays felt like their own work.
Here’s what they found:
Based on these findings, the researchers argued that over-reliance on AI tools could lead to “cognitive debt”—a kind of mental shortfall where people don’t engage deeply enough to learn or remember.
It’s an interesting study, but there are important caveats to keep in mind.
The authors themselves highlight several limitations. The study had a small sample size of just 54 participants, nearly all from elite universities, making it hard to generalize to broader populations.
Participants wrote short essays under tight time limits (20 minutes each), which doesn’t reflect how people use AI in everyday life. The research also looked only at short-term effects, not whether long-term AI use would change brain function. And in the final “switching” session, only 18 participants took part, making those results especially tentative.
There are also additional limitations worth noting.
In reality, people tend to use AI more flexibly than the rigid instructions given to the LLM group who were told to rely exclusively on AI.
The task itself (writing SAT-style essays) may not represent other types of thinking or learning where AI might be used differently, such as coding or creative brainstorming.
This doesn’t mean the findings aren’t valuable! But they reflect a very specific setup and can’t really be taken as proof that AI is inherently harmful to our brains.
So what can we actually take from this study? While the findings don’t prove that ChatGPT will harm your brain, they’re a useful reminder to use AI tools thoughtfully. Here are five practical tips:
The MIT study offers a fascinating glimpse into how our brains respond to AI assistance. But it also had narrow, artificial parameters. Writing essays in 20 minutes with an EEG headset on in a lab is not the same as using AI in your day-to-day life.
The real question isn’t whether you should use AI, but how you use it. Like any tool, it can either sharpen or dull your skills depending on your approach. Keep your brain in the loop, and AI can be a powerful partner instead of a crutch.
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2025-07-01 16:34:57
Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Dave Radparvar is the co-founder of Reflection, private AI-enhanced guided journaling app.
In this interview, we talked about the transformative potential of journaling, how AI can make the experience more meaningful and delightful, how journaling prompts can provide structure and inspiration to deepen your practice, why they focused on creating a writing oasis as their design philosophy, and much more. Enjoy the read!
Hi Dave, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Why do you think we need better journaling tools?
Thanks for having me! It’s a topic I’m really passionate about. There’s been a good amount of research around the benefits of journaling for mental wellness and personal growth—we know it helps reduce stress, gain clarity, foster gratitude, and shift our mindset. But there’s always been this gap between knowing it’s good for you and actually doing it.
The biggest hurdle is often the blank page—not knowing where to begin. Many early digital journals were essentially just text editors, so they didn’t solve this core friction.
But even for people who got past that initial hurdle and built a daily writing habit, most journaling would end there. There was never a practice of reflecting back on what you wrote, no push to go deeper, or help synthesizing what happened over weeks, months, or years. It was really a one-way activity.
While I love the instant clarity and catharsis of journaling, for me, the real magic happens when I go back, see patterns, and use that perspective to inform the decisions I make today. Reflecting consistently helps me live in the moment with more intention—ultimately helping me set the path for the life I truly want to live-—and because of that, I truly believe journaling can have a transformative effect on the trajectory of someone’s life.
So you decided to design an intelligent AI journaling companion.
My journey to Reflection actually started with my previous company, Holstee. We were already focused on creating tools to help people live more fully and mindfully through our community and products. One of our early products was a guided annual review—a physical journal for reflecting on the past year.
I loved the concept, but I found myself spending most of the time on the logistical chore of filling in what happened, leaving less time for the deeper reflection—how the year actually unfolded, how I felt about it, and how I wanted to use those insights to shape the year ahead.
We decided to build a small digital MVP with built-in reflection guides, but we quickly saw it had potential to be something much bigger. A couple years ago, we spun it out as its own company.
Our first step was addressing the “blank page problem” with a library of guided journaling prompts from experts. That was a great start, but the real breakthrough came with AI and the possibility to truly personalize the questions for each person. It became immediately clear—the AI companion wasn’t just a feature, it could become a core part of the experience. As the AI space evolved, we pushed the integration further throughout the entire user experience.
The challenge was—and remains—making the experience feel natural and helpful, not invasive or burdensome. It may sound counterintuitive, but the real goal is to leverage tech to make more sense of the human experience, ideally connecting us more meaningfully with ourselves and the world around us.
Like so much of design, it’s always a balance of how, what, and when to show something to make the experience both delightful and meaningful.
How did you incorporate AI in the user experience?
Our philosophy is that AI should be a thoughtful companion that helps you go one layer deeper. We’ve woven it into the entire journaling process in three main ways.
1) Reflecting Coach. As you’re writing, you can call on our AI companion for real-time coaching. You can get questions to go deeper, gain another perspective, or synthesize your thoughts. You can even ask it to search through your past writing—like “When was the last time I felt this way, and what helped me get through it?”
2) Rich Insights. As soon as you finish an entry, our “Entry Insights” feature gives you an immediate summary, identifies key themes, and suggests tags. It reflects back what you wrote but with a bit of perspective—which also serves as a reminder of how valuable the practice is.
3) Ask Your Journal Anything. This is probably my favorite part. You’re not limited to basic search—you can ask questions and get accurate responses pulling from your entire journal. You can ask practical questions like “Where did I travel in 2024?” or more revealing ones like “What are my biggest self-limiting beliefs?” or “What moments bring me the most joy?” It connects the dots across months or years of your life, revealing insights that would be impossible to find on your own or with a paper journal.
You also decided to partner with wellness experts.
Yes, this was fundamental for us. While AI is an incredible tool for personalization and discovery, we believe it’s most powerful when combined with human-centered wisdom. We’re not therapists or life coaches, but we can partner with the best.
Our guided journaling library is our way of providing structure and evidence-based frameworks for our users. We’ve collaborated with leading experts, authors, and institutions like UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and Grateful.org to create over 100 guided journaling series on topics ranging from gratitude and grief to shadow work and navigating career transitions.
These journal prompts solve the “what do I write about?” problem for people newer to the practice, while also providing a powerful framework for those ready to do the deeper work of self-understanding. It actually works beautifully in tandem with our AI tools, which can then help people explore their answers on a deeper, more personal level. It’s this combination of expert guidance and personalized AI that we think makes for a truly unique and meaningful journaling practice.
So, how does Reflection work, exactly?
We designed it to be simple and intuitive, but incredibly powerful. When you open the app, you’re greeted with a calm “Today” page that offers a personalized prompt based on things you’ve written about in the past.
From there, you can start with a prompt or new entry. You can type, or use our enhanced voice journaling feature—which allows you to simply dump your thoughts and let our AI give you back a clear, concise, and organized journal entry. It’s perfect for capturing thoughts on the go.
While you write, our AI companion is available with a single tap. I like to think of it as your journaling coach—you can get coaching feedback, gain perspective, summarize your thoughts, or simply ask your own question. Once you save, you get Entry Insights—an instant summary and analysis that helps you understand patterns in your thinking.
For those looking to go deeper, our guide library has hundreds of journaling guides created by wellness and personal growth experts, covering everything from gratitude practices to career transitions. These provide structure and inspiration to help you deepen your practice.
To help build the habit, we have gentle reminders and a streak tracker. And over time, the real magic happens with our AI-enhanced search—it can scan through tens of thousands of entries in seconds, letting you find patterns across years of writing simply by asking a question. From practical queries like “Where did I travel last year?” to deeper explorations like “What are my self-limiting beliefs?”
And importantly—it all syncs seamlessly across our native apps on iOS, Android, macOS, and the Web, so your journal is always with you. So you can start an entry on your phone and finish it on your computer when you get home.
Beyond these core features, we’ve built in things like custom quick templates for journaling frameworks you want to use often, private links for sharing entries trusted friends or therapists, and advanced privacy settings including entry blurring to keep sensitive content private even on your own device.
You were recognized as a “Great New App” in the App Store. Can you please tell us more about the design choices you made.
That was a big honor for our team! From day one, our design philosophy has been to create a
“writing oasis.” In a world of noisy, distracting apps, we wanted Reflection to be a calm, quiet, and safe space for your thoughts.
Every design choice stems from that. We chose a minimalist UI with beautiful typography that gets out of your way so you can focus on writing. We added Dark Mode for late-night reflection that’s easy on the eyes. Our notifications are intentionally sparse—they’re opt-in only and designed to be a gentle nudge, not a nuisance.
Most importantly, we built Reflection with privacy as a foundational principle, not an afterthought. All entries are encrypted in storage and in transit. We believe you can only be truly honest with yourself if you know your thoughts are safe and secure. We also support features like entry blurring, pin lock, and biometric lock, so you can feel comfortable journaling even in a public space or with a shared device. It’s about creating a sanctuary for your mind.
What kind of people use Reflection?
Our community is wonderfully diverse, but the common thread is a mindset of curiosity and a desire for growth. We see a lot of founders, creatives, managers, and students—people who are often navigating high-stress environments or significant life transitions.
They aren’t always looking for a “journaling app”; sometimes they’re looking for a tool to help them manage their thoughts, make better decisions, and understand themselves more deeply. They use Reflection for everything from preparing for a big meeting to processing a difficult conversation, clarifying their career goals, or simply building a daily practice of gratitude and mindfulness.
Ultimately, they are people who believe that a little bit of self-awareness can lead to a more effective and fulfilling life.
What about you, how do you use Reflection?
That’s a great question! I use it in a few different ways depending on the season of life I’m in. But here are a few practices that often stick with me in my daily life.
Most days, I do a bit of free writing in the style of morning pages—writing about 750 words of whatever’s on my mind without thinking or filtering too much. It helps shake out thoughts from my subconscious that I haven’t fully recognized yet. Getting them on paper calms and clears my mind before the day begins. What I love is how the Entry Insights immediately surface patterns I might not have noticed—it often highlights things that were in the background that I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of.
I often take photos of things I experience—moments with my kids, something I ate, travels—and add a quick blurb. At the end of the month when I’m scrolling through my past entries, I see at a glance how many things I have to be grateful for.
When I’m going through something difficult, I find myself journaling a lot more as a way of finding my way through it. I often use voice for this—just talking about how I’m feeling and what’s on my mind. I use the in-app AI coaching heavily here to help me see things from a different perspective and work through whatever I’m dealing with.
I end most days with a simple practice that I’ve since shared as a guide within the app—my Evening Wind Down. I ask myself three questions: What am I grateful for? What am I proud of? And how are my physical and mental health today? It’s simple but powerful for fostering gratitude and checking in with myself as I wind down for the evening.
My journaling practice has been something I’ve been doing for 20+ years. It’s changed and evolved over time, and there have been periods that were more active or less active. Despite all that, it’s always been something I can come back to, especially during particularly challenging times. It’s definitely been there to help me stay grounded when things are really wonderful, but also find solace when things are really challenging.
And finally… What’s next for Reflection?
We’re doubling down on two things: voice and AI. We want to expand Reflection from journaling into the most intelligent and supportive companion for personal growth. Our next big leap is proactive, conversational coaching.
Imagine your journal calling you at a pre-scheduled time, picking up where you left off and asking about things you recently reflected on. Or if you ask it to call you back later, it can update a calendar invite and reach out when you’re ready. When you do choose to chat, you can talk for as long as you like—Reflection will listen and ask guiding questions when appropriate.
We also plan to build in an MCP client so the journal can get more context around your fitness, sleep, and calendar. This helps it connect the dots and ask more specific questions about your day. At the end of each conversation, everything is synthesized and saved as a journal entry, providing richer context for future reflection and conversations.
Our long-term vision is to help millions of people build a better relationship with themselves. In a world that’s getting louder and more demanding, we believe the practice of turning inward is more important than ever. We want to build the tool that makes that practice not just easy, but delightful.
Thank you so much for your time, Dave! Where can people learn more about Reflection?
Thank you for the wonderful conversation! You can learn more on our website or directly download on iOS and Android in the respective app stores. I occasionally share thoughts on building and wellness on my LinkedIn and we’ve begun to share more about our app and behind the scenes of how we build on our YouTube channel. Looking forward to connecting with folks from the Ness Labs community!
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