Programs · Body-driven volatility · Groundwork
Groundwork
Reducing emotional vulnerability with the DBT body-care skills
The size of a reaction is not set only by the trigger — it is set by the body the trigger lands in. Short on sleep, running on skipped meals, paying for last night's drinks: that body fires bigger waves from smaller sparks. This program teaches the DBT body-care skills as what they are — emotion regulation through the body. Sixty seconds of logging a night, your own correlations each week, and one experiment instead of an overhaul.
The pattern has a shape, too
- Hard days that arrive without a trigger big enough to explain them.
- Small sparks producing outsized reactions when you're running on empty.
- Sleep, meals, or drinks that you suspect are involved — without proof.
- Advice that arrives as a whole-lifestyle overhaul you'll never sustain.
- A floor that drops out in the weeks you can least afford it.
Your own correlations drive the program
Not a course you watch — a loop you run. Groundwork logs five body factors against how reactive your day actually was, then shows you which levers move you — not which ones move people in general.
Measure
A sixty-second evening log — sleep, meals, movement, substances, illness, and how reactive the day actually was.
daily · 60 secLearn
Short sessions with Maya teach the method — wave height, the sleep anchor, regular eating, the substances audit, the minimum dose.
10 min · most daysAdjust
The weekly review ranks your factors by how strongly each one moves your reactivity, and sets one experiment.
weekly review↻ the loop runs weekly — six times
Each factor is scored by the gap between your reactivity on drained days and on resourced days — sleep and substances measured against the next day, since that's when the bill actually arrives. The strongest lever becomes a single week-long experiment. One factor at a time, never a lifestyle overhaul.
Six weeks, one method
Fourteen sessions and five weekly reviews. The first week is free — including your baseline body-budget report.
Week 1The Body BudgetWhy the body sets the wave height3 sessions
Week 2SleepThe biggest lever, one habit3 sessions
Week 3FuelRhythm, and honest prices3 sessions
Week 4Movement & IllnessThe minimum dose, and the days the body is the problem3 sessions
Week 5The ExperimentOne factor, one week, one verdict4 sessions
Week 6The Floor That HoldsYour data, your floor, your watch system3 sessions
Maya
DBT: emotion regulation core · guides 4 programs
The steady emotion-regulation coach — warm, unhurried, and precise about what a feeling is actually doing before asking you to change anything. Maya treats big emotions as information, not malfunctions.
“Hi, I'm Maya. Over the next six weeks we're not going to fix your lifestyle — we're going to find the one or two body levers that actually move you, and build a floor you can return to.”
The PLEASE skills, faithfully built
Groundwork implements the DBT PLEASE skills from the emotion-regulation module — treating physical illness, balanced eating, avoiding mood-altering substances, balanced sleep, and movement — as vulnerability reduction rather than self-improvement. The correlation engine is inherited from Lift, and the prediction-testing ethic from What If.
- PLEASE skillsLinehan, DBT emotion regulation
- Per-factor mood correlation
- Single-factor behavioral experiments
- Cope ahead
Routing modes, never lockouts
Eating-disorder history runs every eating session in regularity-only mode — never calories, never restriction, never weight — with routing to Nourish or Mindful Plate. Substance-dependence signals run the substances session in audit-only mode with Clear Path routing and a medical-referral note, because reducing a substance the body depends on needs a doctor, not an app. Suspected insomnia disorder gets a Sleep Again routing note: this program anchors sleep, it does not treat insomnia.
Medical conditions, chronic pain, or pregnancy get a doctor-first note before any movement change. This is not medical advice, and it is not a wellness program.
Groundwork, next to the field
| GroundworkResiliens | Bearablebearable.app | Exist.ioexist.io | Moodfitgetmoodfit.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $149 one-time (draft) — the program is yours | Free tier, or Premium $34.99/year | $6.99/month or $62.90/year | Free tier with premium in-app purchases |
| Structure | 6 weeks · 14 sessions + weekly reviews | Open-ended tracker with 30+ reports — no lessons, no curriculum, no fixed duration | Open-ended analytics — no lessons, no teaching content, no fixed duration | Open-ended toolkit — tools, daily goals, insights and articles, with user-set goals; no fixed duration or sequenced arc |
| Personalization | Body-care log → your correlations → one experiment | Genuinely computed: an Impacts tab and correlations grid show each factor's effect on a chosen metric, once there are 6 days of data plus 3 days with and 3 without the factor. A 'Health Experiments' feature lets you test one factor — user-designed and user-initiated, not sequenced by a curriculum | Yes, and mood is the anchor: users rate each day 1–9 and that rating is what the correlation analysis explains, across 20+ integrations | Partial: scatter plots show how mood relates to sleep, exercise, nutrition and social contact. The methodology is undocumented — whether this is computed correlation or visualization could not be verified |
| Human support | Self-guided · clinician-referral gates built in | None — self-guided | None — self-guided | None — self-guided |
| Access | Self-serve, start today | Direct-to-consumer freemium subscription | Direct-to-consumer subscription | Direct-to-consumer freemium |
| Breadth | 24+ program catalog · bundle 2-3 related programs and save | Very broad and chronic-illness-first — migraine, pain, fatigue, IBS, PoTS, PCOS, EDS and more; mood is one tracked domain among many rather than the organizing principle | Very broad, quantified-self framed — fitness, productivity, music, location, calendar and weather data alongside mood | General mental-health toolkit; body factors are one feature among journaling, breathing, mindfulness and thought records |
| Platforms | Web · iOS · Android | iOS · Android | iOS · Android · Web | iOS · Android |
Sources: competitor pricing and program pages — every production value carries a source URL and access date, and unpublished facts are labeled "not published," never guessed.
Why we built it differently
- A curriculum, not a dashboard. Bearable and Exist will show you correlations and leave you to interpret them. Groundwork teaches the PLEASE skills week by week, then hands you one experiment at a time — the reading and the next move, not just the chart.
- Body factors as emotion regulation. The outcome being explained here is how reactive your day was, not recovery score or symptom load — which is why the levers it surfaces are the ones that change how big your waves get.
- Safe by design, not by omission. No calories, no weight, no scale, no streaks — and eating content runs in regularity-only mode for anyone with an eating-disorder history. That's a deliberate stance the tracker category doesn't take.
Start free. Continue if it's working.
First week
- Onboarding + two full sessions
- Nightly body-care log
- Your baseline body-budget report
Full program
- All six weeks of Groundwork, yours to keep
- Every session, review, and exercise
- Web + Untangle app access
Working on more than one thing? Related programs bundle together — two or three at a discount. Bundles are announced at launch.
Before you start
Is this a wellness or lifestyle program?
No. There are no calories, no weight, no streaks, and no optimization. The only question this program asks is which body factors change how reactive your days are — and it answers it from your data, not a general prescription.
Do I have to overhaul my whole routine?
The opposite — that's the thing this program refuses to do. You run one factor, for one week, and get one verdict. The rest waits.
What if I have a history of disordered eating?
The screen catches it and runs every eating session in regularity-only mode — never calories, never restriction, never weight — with a pointer to Nourish or Mindful Plate. Nothing locks; the content changes shape.
How much time does it take?
Sixty seconds each evening for the log, and about ten minutes most days for the session. The experiment itself is one small change, held for a week.
Be first to lay the groundwork
Groundwork is launching soon on the web and in the Untangle app. Join the early-access list and we'll let you know the moment it opens.
One email when your program opens. No drip campaign.