Whatever your treatment is — a medication, a programme, a therapist, a counter on your phone, some combination nobody but you has the full list of — most of it happens somewhere you are not being seen. The appointment is thirty minutes. The month is not.
The gap is not a gap in care so much as a gap in memory. Not memory of facts: you know the reasons. Memory under load. At the hour it goes badly, the reasons are the first thing that stops being available, and what is left is a decision being made by the version of you least equipped to make it.
A record is a message to the person who will be well
That is the whole idea, and it is not ours. Anyone who has done this with a good counsellor has been asked to keep some version of it. What has been missing is a decent place to keep it — not a folder, not a note buried under twelve grocery lists, not a laminated card in a drawer.
One habit: when a craving lands, log it — a tag, a time-stamp, a few words if you have them. Ten seconds in the hard moment. Then, in daylight, the entries add up to the thing no single night can show you: the pattern, and whether it is loosening.
Three things we decided at the start
One: it stays yours. Entries live on your phone and sync only to your own private iCloud — we hold no copy, and there is nothing at our end to read, sell, or hand over. If a clinician should see it, you export the CSV and send it yourself.
Two: it never speaks for you. North Star does not message, alert, or escalate to anyone on your behalf. A tool that contacts your sponsor without you is a tool you stop being honest with, and a log you are not honest with is worth nothing at all.
Three: no engagement machinery. No feed, no ads, and no notification engineered to bring you back for our sake — one optional daily reminder, off until you switch it on. Where a day count belongs in your recovery, that is Day One's job — No. 01 in the same register.
What it is not
It is not treatment and it is not medical advice. It does not interpret a symptom, adjust a dose, or have an opinion about your night. It holds what you logged.
North Star is a monthly or annual subscription through the App Store — $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year — with 7 free days before the first charge. If the idea of writing it down while it is happening makes sense to you, the register is open, or how it works is the shorter version of this piece.