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Cathy Brown has fifteen years of experience in the health and wellness field. She has taught yoga, breath work and meditation and is a certified Trauma Support Specialist. She has hosted numerous wellness retreats and is currently the director of Foxlily Farm, where she is creating a residential healing center for previously trafficked women.

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After trying online therapy off and on for the past year, I have started to feel like it might not be the most effective way to support my mental health. I’m a very impatient person who knows what specific issues I want help with. I’ve found it usually takes me at least three sessions before I feel like my therapist has become familiar enough with me and my concerns to offer helpful insights. But that meant spending a couple of weeks and hundreds of dollars to get to that point. I realized I was looking more for on-the-spot tools that would not set me back so much financially.

Therapy Wasn’t Providing Strategies to Manage My Mental Health, So I Tried the Real App

I’d recently heard about this new mental health app called Real that offered therapist-created tools and what the app calls therapist-led “events,” which are essentially virtual group therapy sessions you can participate in with your camera on or off (and your name revealed or kept private). The Real team is led by licensed mental health providers, including Nina Vasan, MD, a psychiatrist and founder/executive director of Stanford University’s Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, and Rachel Hoffman, PhD, author of Dating and Mating in a Techno-Driven World.

The app is basically a vast library of audio talks given by seksikäs Puerto Rican tytöt licensed therapists, all of whom have detailed bios on the website. Each talk offers evidence-based guidance and practical techniques you can use to navigate various issues in your day-to-day life. Topics include things like burnout, body image, setting boundaries, or navigating relationships.

Though I was initially skeptical about how much an app could truly affect my mental health, I was excited to try it out, especially considering the expertise of the app’s creators. And given that a year of Real costs less than one online therapy appointment, I felt I didn’t have much to lose.

How I Started Using the App

Downloading the Real app on my iPhone was straightforward-the app is also available for Android. However, the app was so new that I had to wait before I could use it. Even though I was able to download it to my phone, every time I tried to sign up in the app it told me it wasn’t quite ready to accept memberships yet. Finally, in it allowed me to sign up for a membership and start accessing content.

To access app content, I had to sign up for membership, which cost $165 per year or $24 per month (it could be canceled anytime). I would have preferred some sort of free trial to get a better feel for what I was paying for, but considering I had been shelling out hundreds of dollars a month for online therapy, $24 did not seem like much. The reviews I had read online were all positive, so that helped my decision.

After signing up for membership, I was then prompted to fill out a questionnaire, which I was told would take less than five minutes. The first question was about what topics I would like to explore. I chose body image, family dynamics, and dating and breakups, but other options included who I am, parenting, LGBTQ+ identity, substances, friendships, purpose, work-life balance, etc. It then asked me to share which feelings I wanted to explore: joy, sadness, anxiety, fatigue, grief, or anger. I chose anxiety.