Sept 06, 20269:24 AM

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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 the premium plan.

I came across Finch—a popular mobile app for self-care and habit tracking—the way I imagine most of its user base does: at rock bottom, doomscrolling until I was hit with one of its ads. It was early 2026, and self-care for me, like many other women in their 20s, came in infrequent spurts: a workout here and there, journaling when it occurred to me, half-enforced boundaries, and alone time that almost always consisted of “rotting.”

I do not think I am an outlier. It often feels as if the road to wellness is littered with consumerism vs. 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 a chore, so 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 sends only 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 improve your mental health. 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. She 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 that of Maya, another Finch user whose name has been changed for privacy. She found Finch after a tough semester of graduate school when she felt that 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 the premium plan, $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, you can 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 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 how I wanted to be spending my time, and it ironically made me feel as if doing just self-care wasn’t enough.

For a solid two weeks, 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 as if 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 actual pet.

There were other features in the app that I didn’t fully utilize, including journal prompts, mood trackers, and meditations. 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 was supposed to help me with.

I may have been stretching and reading more, but it sure did feel like I was performing wellness rather than 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 worse 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 I was becoming more and more disembodied from my own well-being. I had a suspicion that these habits would be maintained only so long as I was on the app.

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 in 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.