The 5-Minute Mental Reset That Actually Works

An evidence-based routine you can try right now

10 min readDec 11, 2025

UPDATE: The iOS app is live! Get it here.

UPDATE 2: The Android app is live! Get it here.

A few years ago, I inherited a mental health feature that was, frankly, broken.

I was the Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health, a digital therapeutics company that built apps for people with chronic illnesses. The app had a gratitude feature called “10 Fingers of Gratitude” where users were supposed to list ten things they were grateful for each day.

Almost nobody used it.

When I dug into the user research, the reasons became obvious. Ten things is a lot. What if you can only think of seven? Does that mean you failed? The interface was tedious: just a blank text field staring at you, waiting. Users told us they found the whole experience confusing and, worse, guilt-inducing. The exact opposite of what a mental health feature should do.

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Beautifully put Sam!

I've been teaching this in my psychology practice for years.

I started learning to meditate about 45 years ago and ran into the same problems most people do when they start:

- an hour (or 20 minutes, or hell, 10 minutes) is too…

Oh, I love this so much. It's exactly how I feel we should approach creativity and the creative process. Stop focussing on outcomes and external validation and all the rest of it, start focusing on one tiny step at a time, no matter the direction…

I just completed the 5-minute reset after reading this, and I'm genuinely impressed. As someone who has abandoned countless meditation apps, the 'three things, not ten' rule was a revelation. The progress animations and the little celebration at the…

Age of Awareness

The 5-Minute Mental Reset That Actually Works

An evidence-based routine you can try right now

Create an account to read the full story.

Published in Age of Awareness

Written by Sam Liberty

Responses (242)

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Create an account to read the full story.

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