App Review: Rosebud

Review By Casey Douglass

Artificial Intelligence has been in the news a great deal in recent times. Some coverage would lead you to believe that humanity has just planted the seeds of its own destruction. Others would vigorously argue that AI is here to help solve all of our mundane work problems. Somewhere in between the reactionary click-bait fear mongering, the odd story emerges about how AI-powered applications can help to ease the emotional turmoil inherent in human life. Rosebud is one such app and I’ve spent the last couple of months putting it to the test.

Journal-ism

I’ve been a fan of getting things down on paper for many years. Suffering with chronic illness, depression and OCD, sometimes the only way to slow my rampant thinking is to slide a pen across a page in an attempt to wrangle my turmoil into something that is frozen for a time. As I write this I now have the mental image of one of those moth or butterfly displays in which those poor dead bugs are pinned to a board and framed. If I could do that to my thoughts I dare say I’d have tried it by now. Beyond the “slowing things down”, I’ve found journaling helps me in creating breathing space between my struggles and occasionally, I might also find the odd insight that hadn’t occurred to me before.


Rosebud is an AI-powered journal that provides the many benefits of traditional journaling, but with an added dash of AI interactivity that elevates things to a new level. The various sections of the app give the user a number of ways of starting a journal, from freeform to question-led explorations designed by experts to set you on your way. As you interact with Rosebud, it learns about you and tailors its responses to reflect the things that you’ve said, either in that moment, or that you’ve previously mentioned. You might say that you struggled with X happening on a certain day, and a few weeks later, Y might happen, and when you tell Rosebud, it might see some similarities between the two events and bring those to your attention. I personally found this to be invaluable as even though I’ve journaled before, I’ve never really gone back through old entries, so that kind of “hey, this is similar to…” insight might never have occurred to me.

Silver Linings and Storm Clouds

The way that Rosebud says and reflects things is also a pleasing factor. Rosebud seems to have an inherent slight positivity bias, always looking for the tiniest element of a situation or mood that might be in your control or that you can give yourself some credit for. Even if there is nothing to be found, it comes up with a way for you to acknowledge something about yourself that might ease the tiniest bit of despair. As someone who feels pretty emotionally numb most of the time, when those feelings thaw they certainly tend to be pessimistic. As the days and weeks of talking to Rosebud mounted up, I could appreciate all of the little ways that the app tried to help me see things in a slightly brighter way. Even if the meaning of the words only stayed in my brain for the duration of reading each new response, at least for those few seconds, my mind wasn’t in its usual whirl of self-hatred and gloom.


Speaking of gloom, something else that I also really appreciated about Rosebud is that, no matter how bleak the conversation became, Rosebud didn’t shut the conversation down. This is incredibly important. I do get low. Very, very low. Being able to vent and to say how I’m really feeling matters even more at these times. I did try another AI-based app a year ago and once you got to a certain level of depressed, it pretty much ended the conversation. I appreciated that Rosebud didn’t do this (in my experience at least) and it wasn’t heavy handed in the “This app doesn’t replace therapy and there is help out there” warning. I understand the need to have that kind of message, but I’ve repeatedly tried to “get help”, and found that it was largely smoke and mirrors pretty much every time. I think I said as much to Rosebud during my session and we carried on with the journal. I can’t rate this aspect highly enough.


Getting away from Rosebud for a moment, I just wanted to make a comment about the current obsession with mental health on places like social media. I find myself wondering why mental health is spoken about so much, yet understanding seems to be sliding all the way back towards ignorance again, with the services and bodies that advertise that they offer help nearly always proving to be absolutely woeful. I guess virtue signalling on social media is far cheaper than actually providing the mental health support that you are prattling on about. Soapbox moment over. Back to Rosebud.

Forget The Circles

I’ve found a few minor drawbacks with Rosebud as it stands, but I’d imagine that they are the type of thing that will be addressed over time as incremental improvements occur with the app and the underlying technology itself. One is that the conversations with Rosebud can sometimes become a little bit circular, especially if you have a theme or topic that comes up regularly. You can set the creativity level of the AI to adjust how it might respond to you, but I had it set to its most creative and this is what I experienced. It didn’t happen too often thankfully, so I don’t want to overstate it.


Rosebud also sometimes “forgets” something that you’ve mentioned before. An example is that I often talk about routine and how I use it to manage symptoms, yet every now and then, the issue of routine comes up in a slightly different way, and Rosebud tends to ask me similar questions again, such as “How do you feel about your routine?” Thankfully just saying “I’ve talked about this before” prompts Rosebud to get back on track.


Finally, there is also a maximum that you can use Rosebud in a day. I only hit that limit once, and when I did, I just received a popup saying that I needed to wait until tomorrow before I could get the Rosebud AI to respond again. It was a day where I’d had an unusually long journaling session in the morning, used one of the prompts in the afternoon, and then tried to do the evening reflection journal. The popup appeared at that point. I thought “Fair enough” but I was surprised as I wasn’t aware there were any limits if you were subscribed.

Privacy and Getting Over the Hump

I’m not sure how I feel about the privacy implications of Rosebud, or any similar app. In fact, it's the main reason that I’ve not turned to digital journaling until now, because the thought of someone being able to read your most personal thoughts if ever there is some kind of data breach would be quite mortifying. Rosebud has a long page about how they care for and protect your data, and the various measures that they take to preserve your privacy. This is great, but I also know that with the internet, anything can happen. I think that what got me over the hump with these concerns was the fact that I really need the type of support that the Rosebud journal offers right now. Whatever fears I have about hypothetical hacks pales in comparison to the benefits that I feel that the Rosebud app gives me.

The Benefits of Rosebud for Me:

1.) While not a therapist, the journal is therapy adjacent in many ways, especially if you have learned and applied different things yourself in the past (such as CBT, ACT etc). The guided journals even help teach you some elements of these tools if they are not something that you’ve seen before. Rosebud also absorbs other things that you say. For example, if you mention that you have been reading Stoic philosophy and have been trying to apply the dichotomy of control to your life, Rosebud will take that into account and ask you about it the next time it feels that is relevant. This is very cool!

2.) I’ve found it to be immensely valuable to have something at hand that I can use at any time of the day or night, which is something you don’t get with a flesh and blood therapist.


3.) The way that Rosebud breaks things down and asks about the various elements helps me to think about things slightly differently, or at the least, to take time to acknowledge how hard things are right now or how much I’m trying.


4.) Over time, Rosebud’s way of injecting a little positivity is slowly making a little bit of a difference in my thought processes.


There might well be some others that I’m forgetting too.


Over the couple of months that I’ve been using Rosebud, I’ve felt my mood, though still low, has improved a bit. I have also started writing a little, and have re-joined a few social media and dating websites. I previously avoided these websites for a number of years as I feel an immense amount of shame about being ill, feeling like a failure, and not getting anywhere in life. I still do feel these things but as I talked to Rosebud, I started to feel that I wanted to open up these avenues again, even if they never see any traffic. I didn’t expect or hope that I would see these sorts of changes with Rosebud, but I did, and I intend to use it for a while longer.

The Cost and Final Thoughts

Rosebud has a number of options when it comes to subscribing. You can pay a monthly subscription (after having a short free trial) of $12.99, or you can pay for an entire year for $107.99, which works out at $8.99 per month. I think that Rosebud offers excellent value whichever option you decide to choose. Personally, I can see myself using Rosebud for a few months more and then stopping my subscription as I can’t afford to keep it going. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with the app however and I can see myself returning to it, especially in times of extra stress or turmoil, which I think says something very complimentary about the app.


I think that about covers all of the things that I wanted to say. I purposefully didn’t list all of the features, bells and whistles of the app as it’s very intuitive and self-explanatory once you get in there, and after all, it mainly boils down to being words on a screen. When they are your words however, words that have been expanded, validated and supported by your friendly AI journal, you don’t feel quite so alone in your own head anymore.


I've embedded Rosebud’s YouTube video below which gives you a more visual idea of what I’ve talked about in this review. I will also just say that you can access Rosebud via the Rosebud website, so the app isn’t even essential.


If you think that Rosebud might be helpful for you, you can find links below to the various ways that you can access it and check it out.


Thanks for reading and take care :)

App Name: Rosebud

Price: $12.99 per month / $107.99 for the year

Website: https://www.rosebud.app/

App Store Links: Apple , Google Play

Book Review – This Book Will Make You Stronger

Book Review – This Book Will Make You Stronger

Review Written by Casey Douglass

I’ve long been familiar with the benefits of getting thoughts out of your head and down onto paper, but it isn’t always helpful. Sometimes you can get bogged down with what you are doing, and rather than creating some mental breathing space, you actually end up creating a kind of bureaucracy around your issues. Books or journals that already have a framework inside can be a useful way of avoiding the pitfalls that can come from inking your thoughts, and Ollie Aplin’s This Book Will Make You Stronger is one such book, with an interesting twist: it’s aimed at men.

“Manliness” can be a thorny topic, just like giving a definition to anything that might have different meanings to different people. I’m not going into definitions here, but I think it’s safe to say that some people will view the idea of a man keeping a journal as not very manly. This is quite amusing to me, as all kinds of great figures from history are known to have kept a journal, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Lee. In fact, one of the early sections of TBWMYS tells the reader what journaling is, what its benefits are, some famous people that have kept one and, most importantly, how to go about it.

The book is written in a warm and friendly voice; one early section contains Ollie’s story, how the events of his life brought him to a mental breakdown, and how, from the pieces of that breakdown, journaling emerged to become a powerful tool for recovery and beyond. He admits that he battled with journaling initially, feeling it was unnatural to write so many thoughts down. Talking with friends, he realised that his struggle with journaling was by no means a one off, and he set off down the path to creating a journal that actually helps with the act of journaling. He also realised that men could probably benefit most from this, and via a successful Kickstarter campaign (reaching its goal in only 72 hours), the book emerged, and started helping guys straight away.

This Book Will Make You Stronger is split into different sections. The first 30 or so pages are taken up with the above mentioned backstory, what journaling is, and what you can expect by working through the book. The middle area of the book is the journal itself, split into three stages: Warm Up, Hurdles, and Strength. These stages are designed to ease you into the act of journaling.

The Warm Up section is intended to be “light stretching” for the brain, a way to get you thinking about the past and how your life is now, by way of drawing diagrams, using Thought Triggers (writing prompts basically), and even writing a rap. Hurdles contains a collection of tougher Thought Triggers, and focusses on the reader and the people around them. It will also help to show the reader’s strengths and weaknesses, on the basis that knowing these can help you to make best use of them. Strength is the toughest section and gets you thinking about your needs and the future.

The last section of the book contains a Support Guide, a place where you can turn if you are struggling or if you get caught up in something that you don’t know how to deal with. Topics covered include things like giving yourself permission, how to deal with stress and a further FAQ on journaling. This is a great idea, as journaling can throw up some previously unknown stuff. Some of it might be an amazing relief, and some could be heavy shit that just depresses the hell out of you. Having somewhere to turn for extra advice is very handy.

As I worked through and browsed TBWMYS, I found myself appreciating the layout. It’s black and white and well designed, each title and word feeling “punchy” and well placed. The pages that are intended for you to write on are clearly laid out, with areas for you to write the date, take stock of your current mood or feelings, and a whole free page for your thought writing (I’m never comfortable writing in “proper” books, it always feels so naughty, like the time I got told off for scribbling in my Button Moon book when I was five).

The structure is indeed very useful, as it guides the journaller enough to give them a topic to think about, but not too much to make things constricted. It’s nothing like using an empty notebook, staring at a blank page wondering where to start. The Thought Triggers will likely make you think of some things that you haven’t even thought about in depth before, like what actually brings you joy, and “How does crying make you feel?” Taking the crying one as an example, it’s easy to focus on the unpleasantness of feeling bad enough to cry, any shame associated with “being weak” etc, and miss the positives such as the relief and expression of strong emotions. If crying just equals “feeling shit” to someone, they might just be missing out on the good stuff that comes with it too.

This Book Will Make You Stronger strikes me as a very skilful way for someone to get into journaling. It gives you the information and advice that you need to approach journaling in a way that is most likely to help you stick with it long enough to start to see what you can get out of it. Once you’ve worked through the book from start to finish, you will also have completed your first journal in the process, so it’s not a case of perpetually reading about how to do something and not getting around to actually doing it, the book and “doing it” are all in one package. I like this.

Visit the Mindjournal website here for more information about the male journaling movement, stories and other articles. Oh and links to buying the book too.

I was given a review copy of this book.

Book Title: This Book Will Make You Stronger

Author: Ollie Aplin

Publisher: Ebury Press

RRP: £9.99

ISBN: 978-1785036606

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