The Setup: Why I Decided to Become a Lab Rat

January felt like the right time to get weird about journaling. Not in the sense of finally starting a journal (I’ve been doing that on and off since 2019), but in the sense of actually testing whether these AI-powered journaling apps I kept hearing about actually made me write more, or just made me feel like I was accomplishing something while scrolling through my phone. So I committed to 90 days, rotating through seven different apps, tracking my entries obsessively, and paying close attention to how the quality of my writing changed when a machine was suggesting what I should think about.

The timing was strange too. The journaling app market basically exploded in 2025. Notion released their templated approach in late 2024 and now they’re sitting at over 2 million active users just for the journaling feature. Day One dropped a major redesign around mid-year with AI-powered reflection prompts that actually analyze your entry patterns. Meanwhile, the entire mental health app market hit $17.5 billion, and journaling apps were growing faster than any other subcategory at 22% year-over-year. The market is genuinely crowded now. I wanted to know if that crowding meant better tools or just more noise.

The Numbers: More Entries, Fewer Words

Here’s the thing about committing to track data for 90 days: you get results that are weirdly specific and not always what you expected. With AI prompts guiding me, I averaged 4.2 entries per week. Without them, staring at a blank page, I managed 1.8 per week. That’s a significant difference. The math is seductive: more than double the entries. You can see why people get excited about this stuff.

But then you look at the depth. My entries with AI prompts were 40% shorter on average. They were snappier. More structured. Sometimes more useful for the moment, honestly. But there’s something that happens when a prompt asks you “What challenged you today?” versus you just sitting with your own thoughts until something emerges. One approach is efficient. The other is sometimes messier and occasionally more true.

I wasn’t the only one noticing this trade-off. A study out of the University of Rochester landed right in the middle of my testing period, and they found exactly what I was experiencing: AI-assisted journaling pushed consistency up by 34% compared to blank-page journaling. But emotional depth scores dropped by 18%. It’s not that AI journaling is bad. It’s that it’s different in ways that matter depending on what you actually want from your journal.

The Specific Apps: What I Actually Used

I cycled through Day One (with their new 2025 redesign), Notion’s templates, two smaller apps I’ll call “Prompt Heavy” and “Minimalist,” plus three others I’ve honestly half-forgotten already. The ones that stuck were the ones that felt like they were having a conversation with me rather than administering a questionnaire.

Day One’s updated system was the most sophisticated. The reflection prompts pull from your actual history, so it might connect something you wrote about last month to something happening now. That’s not generic AI hand-holding. That’s actually useful. You can read more about Day One’s 2025 AI journaling features on their site, and I’m not exaggerating when I say the technical execution is genuinely thoughtful. The prompts feel earned rather than interruptive.

Notion’s approach was different. With over 2 million people using their journaling templates, they’re basically betting that structure and accessibility matter more than sophisticated AI. For a lot of people, they’re probably right. The templates are good. They work. They don’t try to be clever about it. I found myself using Notion when I wanted to capture information quickly but using Day One when I actually wanted to process something.

The Thing Nobody Talks About: Consistency Versus Honesty

Here’s what genuinely surprised me: I don’t think the goal should be maximum entries. I think the goal should be useful entries. And those aren’t always the same thing.

The 34% increase in consistency that the Rochester researchers found? That’s real and it matters for people who struggle with blank-page anxiety. For those people, having a prompt saying “What did you notice today?” is genuinely liberating. It removes the paralysis. You write something. You build momentum. You keep showing up. That’s valuable.

But I also noticed that around week six, something shifted. My entries got more rote. I was hitting the prompts more than I was actually thinking. It was like I’d optimized for the metric of “entries per week” rather than the actual thing I was trying to do, which was figure out how to live better. The apps made me more consistent, but they also made it easier to fake consistency. I could tell myself I was journaling when really I was just filling in answers.

Where I Landed (And What I Actually Still Use)

The 90 days ended. The streaks broke. Life happened. That’s maybe the most honest thing I can tell you about journaling: no app changes the fact that it’s a practice that requires you to actually show up, and sometimes you don’t.

What I kept: Day One for actual reflection, Notion for quick capture, and honestly a lot of paper for the stuff that matters most. I use the AI features sometimes. They’re useful. But they’re not magic, and I think a lot of the marketing around these apps implies that they are. If you want to write more, an AI prompt will probably help. If you want to understand yourself better, that still requires work that no machine can quite do for you.

The journaling market is booming for a reason. These tools are helping people capture their lives in ways that matter. You can check out Grand View Research’s mental health app market report if you want the full picture, but the short version is: there’s genuine innovation happening here. The apps are getting better at understanding what humans need from journaling. They’re still tools, not solutions, though. The interesting part is still up to you.

If you’ve tried any of these, I’m curious what stuck. Or if you’ve resisted the whole trend and kept a paper journal or just winged it without tracking anything at all. The 90-day experiment taught me that there’s no right way to do this, just the way that works for you and the way that doesn’t. Still figuring out which is which.

The TikTok Trend That Made Me Feel Seen (And Guilty)

Around the time everyone was telling me I needed to buy less, I was buying more. Not dramatically more. Just the normal more. A sweater that felt different from the three sweaters I already owned. A water bottle with a handle because the last one was “inconvenient.” Things that seemed reasonable at checkout felt absurd by the time they arrived on my doorstep. So when I started seeing #underconsumptioncore all over my feed, it felt less like a trend and more like an intervention.

What started as a quiet countermovement to haul culture has gotten genuinely massive. We’re talking over 700 million views on TikTok between mid-2024 and early 2025. The basic premise is disarmingly simple: stop buying things you don’t need. Stop treating consumption as entertainment. Question whether you actually want something or just want the feeling of getting something. It sounds obvious until you realize how many purchases you make on autopilot.

I watched videos of people showing off their tiny wardrobes, their deliberately slow shopping habits, their genuine contentment with owning fewer things. They didn’t look like they were punishing themselves. They looked peaceful. And I thought: I could do that. Ninety days. No new clothes, no new books, no impulse purchases. How hard could it be?

The First Month: When I Realized I Had a Real Problem

Spoiler alert: harder than I expected. Not in the way I anticipated, though. I thought I’d battle constant cravings. Instead, I discovered that shopping wasn’t really about wanting things. It was about the pause button.

The first week, I had this strange phantom itch. I’d be scrolling through my phone, bored or stressed or just existing between tasks, and my fingers would automatically navigate toward shopping apps. Same muscle memory as checking email or opening social media. The habit ran deeper than I’d admitted. A 2025 NielsenIQ 2025 Consumer Outlook Report found that 52% of Gen Z consumers said they actively tried to reduce discretionary purchases in the past six months, up from 38% in 2023. I suddenly understood why. We’re not just tired of stuff. We’re tired of the decision-making.

By week three, something shifted. I stopped reaching for my phone when I was bored. I started noticing things instead. How many books I actually hadn’t read yet. How many clothes I’d forgotten I owned. How the sweaters I already had were, objectively, fine. More than fine. The default setting of my brain went from “what do I need” to “what do I already have that I’m not using.”

Here’s what nobody tells you about stopping shopping: it makes you confront what you’ve already bought. I found a dress in the back of my closet that still had the tag on. Couldn’t even remember buying it. That single dress became a tiny monument to every purchase I’d made without thinking.

The Middle Part: When I Started Seeing Money As a Concept Again

Around day 45, I did the math. Americans spent an average of $1,497 per household on impulse purchases in 2024 alone. Just impulse. Not planned, considered purchases. Just the small things we grab without thinking. That number made me sit down.

For a decade, I’d been thinking about shopping in this abstract way. You need clothes, you buy clothes. You want something, you get it. The money part felt separate from the wanting part, which I now realize is absolutely bonkers. But that’s how capitalism wants you to think about it. The transaction should feel frictionless and divorced from consequence.

Not buying things forced me to reconnect those dots. Every time I wanted something, I had to sit with the actual cost. Not just the number, but what else that money could do. It sounds like budgeting advice, but it felt more philosophical than that. Like I was remembering how to value things again.

I found myself browsing secondhand sites more than new ones. The ThredUp 2025 Annual Resale Report projects that the secondhand apparel market will reach $350 billion globally by 2028, growing three times faster than the overall retail clothing sector. That statistic started making sense to me in my gut, not just my head. There’s something about buying secondhand that forces you to slow down. You can’t just click and checkout. You have to think.

The Final Month: When My Brain Actually Changed

By day 75, I noticed something weird. Decision fatigue was gone. Not the big decisions. The constant low-level noise of wanting things had quieted. A UCLA psychology study from 2024 found that a 30-day buying pause on non-essentials reduced participants’ reported decision fatigue scores by 19% on average. My experience was less quantifiable but genuinely noticeable. There’s this weight that lifts when you stop constantly evaluating products and making micro-decisions about consumption.

I caught myself actually enjoying having fewer things. My closet was easier to navigate. I got creative with what I owned instead of assuming I needed something new. I borrowed a friend’s jacket instead of buying my own. Learned to thrift with intention instead of impulse. None of this felt like deprivation. It felt like I’d been living in a blurry state and suddenly the resolution came back.

The wildest part? I didn’t want to stop when day 90 came around. I thought I’d feel this explosion of purchasing energy, like I’d been holding my breath and finally get to exhale. Instead, I just kept going. Not as a trend or a challenge, but because something genuinely shifted in how I relate to stuff.

The Part Where I’m Honest About What Actually Changed

I’m not here to tell you that underconsumption core is the answer to everything. It’s not. I still buy things. I’m not wearing a uniform of three identical outfits or getting morally superior about other people’s shopping habits. That was never the point for me.

What changed is my relationship to the act of buying itself. I buy deliberately instead of automatically now. I question whether I’m bored or whether I actually want something. I started seeing shopping as something that required presence instead of something to do while scrolling. Once that clicked, it felt impossible to go back to the before version.

The trend helped because it gave me permission and a structure. But the actual work was just paying attention. If you’re curious about what might shift if you stopped for a while, I’d genuinely recommend trying it. Pick a timeframe that feels doable. Notice what happens. Pay attention to what you reach for when you’re bored or stressed. See if anything rearranges itself in your brain.

I’m genuinely curious whether this stuck with you if you’ve tried something similar, or whether there’s something you’ve been meaning to question about your own habits. Feel free to share in the comments.

The Thing Everyone’s Doing

You know that moment when you realize everyone has suddenly started talking about the same obscure thing? That’s been the dopamine menu for the past few months. If you’ve somehow missed it, here’s the premise: you make a list of activities organized by how much effort they require and how much dopamine reward they deliver. Low effort, low reward activities in one column. High effort, high reward in another. The idea is that when your brain is fried and can’t make decisions, you pick something from the appropriate tier instead of doom-scrolling for two hours wondering what you should be doing.

The concept exploded on TikTok last year, and I mean exploded. We’re talking eight hundred million views under the #dopaminemenu hashtag by early 2025. That’s not hyperbole—that’s just where we are now. People were creating color-coded Notion templates, filming their dopamine menus, organizing them by season. It became a whole thing. A Notion survey showed that dopamine menu templates got downloaded over a million times in the last quarter of 2024 alone, making it basically the second most popular wellness template after habit trackers. Which tells you something about where we’re collectively at with decision-making.

Why This Actually Made Sense to Try

I have ADHD. I got diagnosed as an adult, which is common enough that it barely registers as interesting anymore—there are an estimated 366 million adults with ADHD globally now according to a recent Lancet Psychiatry ADHD prevalence meta-analysis. It’s not exactly niche anymore. One of the things nobody tells you about adult ADHD diagnosis is that suddenly all these small frustrations get a name. Like decision paralysis. Like the fact that choosing between forty different activities feels harder than actually doing any of them.

What made the dopamine menu interesting wasn’t that it was trendy, but that psychiatrists were actually backing it. Dr. Ned Hallowell, who literally wrote the book on ADHD (okay, he co-authored ADHD 2.0, but you know what I mean), called it “CBT in meme form” in an interview with ADDitude Magazine on dopamine menus. The concept aligns with established behavioral activation therapy, which meant this wasn’t just wellness theater. It was actual behavioral science wrapped in a TikTok bow. A survey from CHADD found that forty-four percent of adults tried some version of structured leisure planning after seeing it on social media, and sixty-one percent of those people reported less decision fatigue. Those are decent numbers. Decent enough that I thought: why not?

What I Actually Built

I made my dopamine menu on a Sunday morning like a reasonable person and then spent way too much time color-coding it. Low effort activities included things like scrolling Reddit for exactly fifteen minutes, making tea, taking a bath, listening to music. Medium effort stuff was reading a book chapter, calling a friend, going for a walk. High effort activities were things like writing, reorganizing a room, cooking an actual meal. I was very proud of this menu. It felt organized. It felt like I had my life sorted. I printed it out and everything.

For about three weeks, I actually used it. Every time I felt stuck, I’d look at my menu and pick something instead of melting into decision paralysis. It worked, too. I wasn’t wasting two hours figuring out what to do with myself. I was just doing something. The decision fatigue was noticeably lower. I felt more productive, less anxious. This was vindication. The internet had provided a solution and it had solved something.

Where It Got Weird

Then I noticed something embarrassing. The activities I kept reaching for were all the low effort ones. Every single time. Never the medium. Basically never the high effort stuff. I would look at “high effort” and think about it the same way you think about doing your taxes, something you acknowledge exists but will definitely do later. So I paid attention. I started tracking which activities I actually picked, and it was almost comical. Bath, tea, Reddit scroll, music, repeat.

And here’s the thing that stuck with me: that wasn’t a bug in the system. That was exactly what the system was supposed to do. I was supposed to meet myself where I was at. If my brain couldn’t handle high effort that day, fine. Pick something else. That’s the whole point of the dopamine menu, judgment-free activity selection.

But I kept using it for eight weeks because something about the pattern bothered me. And slowly, something became unavoidable. The embarrassing part. I wasn’t actually struggling with decision fatigue. Not really. Not most days. What I was actually doing was giving myself permission to do only low-effort things and calling it productive self-care. The menu became my excuse. I was using a legitimate tool as a prop in a story I was telling myself about why I wasn’t doing the things I actually wanted to be doing.

What Changed After I Admitted This

The dopamine menu wasn’t wrong. It’s a genuinely useful tool and I think it’s genuinely helpful for people with actual executive dysfunction. But for me, it became a way to avoid confronting the real issue, which was that I’d gotten comfortable with doing easy things and I was scared to push myself back into harder things. That’s not a dopamine problem. That’s a motivation problem. Which feels like a different thing entirely.

So I stopped using the menu as my script and started using it more honestly. I’d check it when I was truly stuck, but mostly I tried to notice when I was reaching for the low-effort column out of habit versus genuine need. And it turned out I could actually handle more medium and high effort things than I’d convinced myself I could. They were just scary because I’d gotten used to not doing them.

I think this is why I’m writing this out now. Because the viral dopamine menu is genuinely useful, and I don’t want to trash something that’s actually helping people. But there’s also value in admitting that sometimes tools work great until they become excuses. The embarrassing truth I discovered about myself was that I’m really good at that. At taking something helpful and turning it into a comfortable avoidance pattern. If you’re using a dopamine menu and you notice yourself only ever picking the easy column, maybe check in with yourself the same way I had to. Maybe you’re genuinely fried and need easy things. Or maybe, like me, you’ve just gotten good at talking yourself into staying small.

The Conversation I Wasn’t Expecting

So there I was, sitting on that crinkly paper in the exam room, getting the usual “your blood pressure looks good” speech, when my doctor casually asked if I’d been thinking about trying a GLP-1 medication. Not in a judgmental way. Just like she was asking if I’d tried the new coffee place downtown. I laughed a little because honestly, I wasn’t sure if she was serious. But she was.

This wasn’t some random suggestion. She’d been my doctor for six years and knew my history, my actual lifestyle habits, and what I’d already tried. She explained that the medical thinking around weight loss has shifted pretty dramatically, and she thought it might be worth a real conversation. The thing is, she was right. The approach to obesity treatment has fundamentally changed in ways I didn’t fully grasp until she walked me through the specifics.

Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About This

You notice it everywhere now. Your coworker mentions Ozempic at lunch. A celebrity does an interview about it. Someone’s TikTok is about their Zepbound experience. It’s not just casual chatter—this reflects a massive shift in how these drugs are being prescribed. According to recent health data, prescriptions for GLP-1 receptor agonists increased by more than 400% between 2022 and 2025. That’s not a small uptick. That’s a complete recalibration of the market.

The American Medical Association updated its official obesity treatment guidelines in 2025 to list GLP-1 medications as a first-line option, which matters. These drugs aren’t being tucked into the “last resort” category anymore. They’re up there with lifestyle modifications as legitimate, evidence-based treatment. When major medical organizations make that kind of pivot, it usually means something real has shifted in the research.

The sales numbers tell their own story too. Novo Nordisk reported that global Ozempic and Wegovy sales exceeded $25 billion combined in 2025. You don’t get those kinds of numbers from a niche product. You get them from something that’s genuinely changing how people approach their health, for better or worse, depending on how you look at it.

What The Research Actually Shows

My doctor pulled up some recent data, and this is where things got interesting. A major trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine obesity research showed that tirzepatide, which goes by the brand name Zepbound, produced an average weight loss of 22.5% of body weight over 72 weeks in adults with obesity. That’s not trivial. That’s meaningful, measurable results over a sustained period. I asked her what that translates to in real terms, and she said for someone at, say, 250 pounds, that would be around 56 pounds. We’re not talking about incremental change here.

But here’s what my doctor emphasized: these drugs work because of how they interact with your hunger signals and your blood sugar regulation. They’re not stimulants that trick your body into burning more calories. They actually change how your brain perceives hunger and fullness. That’s why the weight loss is so consistent in the trials, she explained. You’re not white-knuckling your way through a diet. You’re actually eating less because your body is sending different signals.

The Part Nobody’s Really Talking About: Who It’s Actually For

This is where my doctor’s recommendation started to feel personalized instead of generic. She wasn’t suggesting I take this because I’m overweight and should be thinner. She was suggesting it because I have specific health markers—slightly elevated triglycerides, prediabetic glucose levels, a family history of type 2 diabetes—that would benefit from the metabolic effects of these medications. The weight loss is almost secondary to managing these underlying risks.

She also pointed out something I hadn’t considered: I’ve been trying to lose weight through diet and exercise modifications for years with limited success. That’s not a character flaw. That’s potentially a metabolic reality that these drugs actually address. Some people have a harder time with weight management not because they’re lazy or undisciplined, but because their body chemistry makes it structurally more difficult. These medications can help rebalance that.

Affordability came up too, and it’s worth being honest about because it’s a real barrier for a lot of people. According to the KFF GLP-1 medication tracking poll, about 1 in 8 American adults has taken a GLP-1 medication at some point, but 43% cited cost as the primary reason they stopped. My doctor was upfront that insurance coverage varies wildly depending on your plan, and we’d need to check my specific coverage before making any decisions.

Where I’m Landing on This

I’m not jumping into this immediately, but I’m also not dismissing it anymore. What shifted for me was understanding that this isn’t about vanity or taking a shortcut. It’s about using a medical tool that’s been thoroughly researched and officially integrated into obesity treatment guidelines because it actually works for certain people in certain situations. That’s the friend-over-coffee version of what my doctor explained: if you have metabolic markers that would benefit from it, and you’ve struggled with traditional approaches, this might be worth exploring with your doctor.

The key word there is “your doctor.” This isn’t a thing to decide based on someone’s Instagram post or what you overheard at the gym. It requires an actual conversation about your specific health history, your goals, what you’ve already tried, and what your insurance situation looks like. My doctor made that clear, and I appreciated it because it cut through all the noise.

If you’ve been wondering about this like I was, the real move is scheduling that conversation. Not because you should definitely take these drugs, but because the evidence has changed enough that it’s worth understanding what it actually says and what it might mean for you specifically.