Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
A little bird told me there’s a way to meet my self-care goals. Then it asked me if I wanted to continue with the free version of the app or upgrade to their premium plan.
I came across Finch—a popular mobile app for self-care and habit tracking—the way I imagine most of their user base does: at rock bottom, doomscrolling until I was hit with one of their ads. It was early 2026, and like many other women in their 20s, self-care for me came in infrequent spurts: a workout here and there, journaling when it occurred to me, boundaries half-enforced, and alone time that almost always consisted of “rotting.”
I do not think I am an outlier. It often feels like the road to wellness is littered with consumerism versus actual care, making it feel unattainable if you don’t have the time and money to purchase, say, a yoga class, or a personal trainer, or an app subscription. If I—a single woman who lives alone and works from home—don’t have the luxury of me time, I cannot fathom what families, gig workers, and recent college graduates must endure.
Finch’s approach to wellness is to gamify self-care. On paper, it makes sense: Self-care feels like such a chore, why not make it fun? When you join, you hatch a pet bird, and as you complete real-life tasks, your Finch is rewarded with rainbow coins that can be spent on outfits and furniture. It’s Tamagotchi for the burned out and overwhelmed.
Finch essentially operates on a reward loop. The more you complete your self-care tasks, the happier your bird becomes. If you’re consistent with your goals, the more Dora the Explorer–style adventures your bird can go on. For example, there was a Wizard of Oz storyline that was released in real time with the premiere of Wicked: For Good.
The beauty of Finch is that it actively deters you from an all-or-nothing mindset; you can customize your goals realistically to your lifestyle and needs. It adopts a helpful no-punishment philosophy: If you don’t meet your goals or you step away from the app for an extended amount of time, it only sends encouragement. Where Duolingo found success in its cheeky, sometimes abrasive, reminders, Finch opts for gentle parenting.
I had serious reservations about joining Finch. The overtly cute approach to self-care was a massive turnoff for me, though that might just be a personality mismatch. I was apprehensive about any mental care–adjacent product that encourages more screen time. In its defense, Finch does not advertise itself as fixing the root of what is causing us to be so unwell. It doesn’t even really claim to make your mental health better. What it aims for is to make self-care fun.
“A month in, I generally felt more relaxed overall,” Georgia, a Finch user whose name has been changed for privacy, told me. “Six months in, I realized that my general doomscrolling time had decreased pretty drastically. Instead of reaching for my phone to scroll at night, I reached for my book; I’m actually very ahead of my reading goal for the year.”
She’s been using Finch for more than a year now, and added, “I still have a long way to go, but love having my bird and self-care exercises in my back pocket.”
Georgia’s experience was similar to Maya’s, another Finch user whose name has been changed for privacy. She found Finch after a tough semester of graduate school where she felt like she was “falling apart as a person.”
“Before Finch, I would forget to eat a lot, not take naps or breaks during the day, and I was not as mindful of my body’s cues—needing to pee, water break, hungry, overwhelmed—and I almost never exercised,” she said. “With Finch, I improved most with eating, napping, and taking breaks. I was excited to check things off—and felt guilty when I didn’t.”
Emboldened by the positive reviews, I jumped into Finch. I made my virtual bird—named Max, like Verstappen—and added my friends. Almost immediately, I was exhausted by the customization of it all. I fed it my self-care goals: read more, go for a walk, track my nutritional intake, and take a daily stretch break. For their premium plan, $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, you could set goals with your friends on Finch (allowing them to see your progress and send encouragement via the app), access their breathing exercises, and unlock more customization options.
That was a big selling point for Finch Plus. In addition to checking off my goals, I was also heavily encouraged to shop for my bird’s closet, furnish his apartment, and complete the in-app quests. None of this is bad on its own, as millions of Sims fans can attest. But it was not what I wanted to be doing, and it ironically made me feel like just doing self-care wasn’t enough.
There was a solid two weeks when I complied with its whims. I petted my bird by tapping my screen while my real life cat glared at me from a corner. I came back every day to collect my rewards and spent them on more decor and clothing. I visited my friends’ homes and hatched micropets and answered the daily quiz questions (typically either/or prompts such as “Are you a morning or night person?”).
Unlike a simple checklist, it felt like the app was doing everything in its power to lull you into spending more time there. Every time I checked off a goal, I’d be flooded with notifications: a new adventure, offerings in the store, what my friends are up to, how I’m doing for the day, my bird’s personality reveal, and a new challenge to opt into. Somehow my bird needed more attention than my real-life pet.
There were other features in the app that I didn’t fully utilize, like journal prompts, mood trackers, meditations, and more. I’m sure self-care needs were being hit during this time, but I was also cognizant of another factor: my increased screen time. In those two weeks, the amount of time I was spending on the app far exceeded the time I was spending on the habits it’s supposed to help me with.
Ruth Graham
Can You Download Your Way to a Better Life?
Read More
I may have been stretching and reading more, but it sure did feel like I was performing wellness versus actually feeling well. I returned to the app a few more times, at different points in my life (when I was super busy with work, when I was in a good mood, etc.) to see if there would be a difference in my experience. There wasn’t. No matter what was going on in my world, the only consistent factor about Finch was how much I wanted to strangle that little bird.
I got Finch burnout faster than burnout from my actual day-to-day life. I finally snapped one day, a month and a half into having the app on my phone, when I got yet another notification from the bird telling me it missed me. I didn’t feel bad about abandoning my bird (I feel more bad when I think about my childhood Nintendogs); the more it wanted me to come back, the less I wanted to.
When I deleted the app, I felt a wave of relief. I wasn’t so much self-caring for myself as I was feeding the app. My relationship with self-care is already so discombobulated. Even now, I struggle to do things for myself that aren’t for the sake of optimization. By outsourcing my habits to an app, I felt like I was more and more disembodied from my own well-being. I had a suspicion that these habits would only be maintained so long as I was on the app.
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
It’s Been Downloaded by Millions. It’s Supposed to Make You Happier. Does It Really Work?
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
We Took Something Crucial Away From Teenagers. That Was a Huge Mistake.
I went back to Maya to see how she was doing. She had a similar experience and fell off around the four-month mark: “I’m trying to be a bit more intuitive about what my needs are, and while I do like acknowledging my accomplishments in a trackable way, it feels like more of a chore to update all my little daily goals, especially when they aren’t consistent for each day.”
There’s no doubt that Finch is enticing. But forming a dependency on an app didn’t feel sustainable or good for me in the long run. The cost of phone fatigue was not worth the short-term dopamine hit of my bird congratulating me on taking three deep breaths today. I was the first of my friends to abandon the app, but ironically, there was an unexpected positive effect of having trial-run Finch: I became actually committed to self-care.
If I had 10 to 20 minutes to log my tasks into the app, then I had 10 to 20 minutes to journal, take a walk, or clean my apartment. I’m not as consistent with these habits as I would like to be, but my commitment to them isn’t reliant on screen time. I want to want to do these things for myself—hence the term self-care.
