For the moment the text doesn't come back. For the meeting that ends with a comment that feels off. For the silence after a vulnerable share. For Sunday at 11pm when your brain is rerunning a conversation from 2019.

That is what Outspiral 2.0 is built for.

This is the biggest update we have shipped. It is not a coat of paint on existing features. It is a re-shape of the app around the specific moments that Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria takes over a day, with six new tools that work together. None of them require AI. All of them are designed to externalize the work that an RSD-shaped brain cannot reliably do on its own.

Here is what is new.

1. The Drawer

You have just drafted a message your future self would not have sent. Your thumb is hovering over the send button. You can see they read your last message. You are sure. The full SOS flow is too heavy for this moment. You need one thing that puts the phone down for 20 minutes.

The Drawer is that one thing.

You paste the draft, you optionally write what you are afraid happens if you do not send it, you pick a 10, 20, or 45 minute cool-down, and you put it in the drawer. When the timer ends, we send you one notification. You read your draft again with calmer eyes. You pick one of three buttons: Send it, Edit it, or I do not need to send this.

Most drafts, in our testing, end up in the third bucket. That is the entire point.

Two things make the Drawer different from iMessage's scheduled-send feature. First, it captures the felt fear underneath the message ("what I am afraid happens if I do not send this") so the act of parking it externalizes the spiral instead of just deferring it. Second, every draft you discard becomes a draft Evidence entry (more on that below), so today's win compounds into long-term proof that your RSD lies.

The 20 minute default exists for a reason. The acute peak of an RSD response typically clears within 20 to 30 minutes as stress hormones leave your system (see the 20-minute rule). The Drawer is built around that biology.

The Drawer's home tab shows a running count of "messages you didn't need to send" at the top. That is the stat your friend will screenshot.

2. The Evidence File

If you have ADHD, you likely have weak emotional permanence. That is the inability to feel the continuity of your relationships and your competence when no one is actively reminding you. Your friend who has not texted in three days still feels like your friend to a neurotypical brain. To an ADHD brain, the felt sense evaporates. (We wrote about this in detail in our emotional permanence post.)

The Evidence File is the long memory your brain is not built for.

You park a fear. "She is mad at me because she did not reply." You leave it. Days, or sometimes hours, later, you know what actually happened. She had food poisoning. You come back to the entry and write the outcome, then tag it with one of four options: fear didn't materialize, it happened but I handled it, it happened and was hard, or still don't know.

Each tagged entry is a data point. After 30 days, you have your own personal corpus of "things my RSD was sure about, and what was actually true." After 60 days, opening the Evidence tab feels like opening a letter from your saner self.

And every weekday evening, your Today screen surfaces a random past entry where your fear did not come true. That is the daily anchor. Not a notification, not a nag, just a quiet reminder, in your own words, that your nervous system was wrong before and will be wrong again.

For longtime users, the Evidence File is the feature that compounds the most. We expect this to be the surface people stop being willing to switch apps for.

3. A Today Screen That Knows What Time It Is

The home screen of every habit and mental health app looks the same at 7am and 11pm. Outspiral 2.0's Today screen does not.

  • Morning Forecast (5am to 11am): A three-state read-out (gentle / steady / strong day) based on the sleep, medication, and stress check-in you fill in. Premium users get specific factor explanations and pattern correlations.
  • Mid-day Pulse (11am to 5pm): A one-tap mood grade. Mid-day is when ADHD medication wears off and rumination starts seeping in. The card asks a single question and saves the answer locally.
  • This Evening (5pm to 10pm): The "Got an urge to send something?" Drawer chip becomes prominent. Active Permission Slips that expire tonight surface inline. A random "fear didn't materialize" Evidence entry appears as the daily anchor card.
  • Wind Down (10pm to 5am): A 4-minute body scan one tap away. The Drawer becomes the dominant surface. Soft "tomorrow's-you will want this" Evidence prompts replace check-in pressure.

The pattern: the app is shaped like the day. No surface is decorative. Every surface is built around a felt moment.

4. Custom Triggers

The pre-built trigger picker has eight categories. They cover the general shapes. They do not cover what your brain actually says.

Custom Triggers let you name your own. Examples from our beta testers:

  • "Being the one without big news"
  • "Mom's tone shifted"
  • "Stand-up went quiet"
  • "Compliment that felt backhanded"
  • "Slack went quiet for too long"

You pick an icon from a curated set of around two dozen, you write the trigger name in your own words, and it appears alongside the built-ins in every picker in the app. Free users can add up to five. Premium unlocks unlimited.

This is the feature that turns the journal from "good app" to "my app." After two weeks of building up custom triggers, you have named your own brain in this tool. That is the single strongest retention force in any tracker app.

5. Permission Slips

Therapists ask clients to do this. Clients rarely do, because there is no surface for it.

A Permission Slip is a small note you sign for yourself. "I give myself permission to leave the party at 9 without explaining." "I give myself permission to not reply tonight." "I give myself permission to feel jealous without acting on it." You pick how long it should be active (this evening, today, or this week), and it expires on its own. The temporariness is the point.

Active slips that expire tonight surface in the Evening Today card, so you are reminded of the thing you already gave yourself permission for, right at the moment you need it most.

Free for everyone, no caps. This is one of those features that is small in code and large in emotional resonance.

6. Receipts

You have a hard conversation coming up at 2pm. Your brain has already pre-grieved it. You are sure they are going to be disappointed in you, and you are not sure exactly what they will say, but you know what they will really mean underneath.

Receipts capture both layers, then come back 24 hours later to help you tag what was real and what your RSD added.

Before the conversation: you label who it is with, you write what you predict they will say, and you write what you are afraid they really mean. After the conversation: you capture five quick bullets of what they actually said. The next day, we send you a single push notification. You go through each bullet and tag it as they literally said this, my RSD added this, or I'm not sure.

The first time you tag a bullet as "my RSD added this" on something your brain was certain was real, the app earns its place. After three or four receipts with the same person, you build a per-person pattern. "Last time you talked to M., your RSD added 4 of 5 things." That insight is, for many people, the moment Outspiral becomes indispensable.

Free users get three demo receipts. Premium unlocks unlimited plus per-person pattern surfacing.

The free tier got bigger

One of the most common pieces of feedback we got in 2025 was that the free tier felt thin. We agreed. In 2.0:

  • The Drawer, the Evidence File, Permission Slips, time-of-day Today modes, and your first 5 Custom Triggers are all free
  • Three Learn articles open without paying ("The Neuroscience of RSD," "Why Rejection Feels Physical," and "Why 20 Minutes Matters")
  • The daily 60-second practice is free for everyone
  • The full SOS flow stays free, forever
  • You can log up to 10 episodes free before the journal cap

Premium is now structured around depth on top of free: pattern intelligence over the data you have built, unlimited Receipts, unlimited Custom Triggers, weekly reflections, the trigger fingerprint, monthly reports, and the rest of the Learn library. The principle we landed on: give away the verb, charge for the reflection.

What is not in this update (yet)

We considered, and then explicitly did not ship, a few things:

  • Anything AI-powered. Not before we have the product right. RSD users specifically need to be able to trust that the words on the screen are from you, your therapist, or your own past entries, not a model. We will revisit when the case is real.
  • A "send help" button that texts a friend. Sending an SMS to someone at peak RSD is exactly what the Drawer is designed to prevent. Building this would be building the gun the Drawer is the safety on.
  • A Tamagotchi-style pet you nurture. Beautiful for some apps. Not the right shape for this audience right now. The Evidence File is doing the long-term emotional-permanence work that gamification would otherwise try to do.

Getting the update

Open the App Store on your iPhone, search Outspiral, tap Update. Or if you have automatic updates turned on, it is on its way already. All your existing data carries forward, including any episodes, check-ins, streaks, and journal entries.

If you have not downloaded Outspiral yet, this is a good moment. Built for the RSD spike, with you ever after.

And if you find a feature you love, tell someone. The Drawer in particular is the kind of feature that does not exist in any other app right now, and we would not mind being the recommendation that lands at the right moment for the right person.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is new in Outspiral 2.0?

Outspiral 2.0 introduces six new tools built specifically for the RSD spike: the Drawer holds impulsive messages on a cool-down timer; the Evidence File logs what you feared and what actually happened so you can see your own counterevidence over time; the Today screen reshapes itself across morning, midday, evening, and late-night modes; Custom Triggers let you name what your brain actually says; Permission Slips let you sign timed self-given permissions; and Receipts capture conversations before and after to help you tag what was literally said versus what your RSD added on top. The free tier also got bigger, with three Learn articles open to everyone, a daily practice for free users, and the SOS flow staying free forever.

Do I have to pay for the new features?

Most of the new tools are fully free. The Drawer, the Evidence File, Permission Slips, the time-of-day Today modes, and your first five Custom Triggers are all available without a subscription. Receipts give you three demo conversations free, then unlock unlimited with Premium. The conversion model is depth-as-paid: free users get a fully usable indispensability tool, premium users get pattern-level insights layered on top of the data you have already built.

Why build a Drawer instead of a send-later feature?

iMessage and most chat apps have a scheduled-send feature, and they do not solve the RSD problem. The Drawer is different in three ways. First, it captures the felt fear underneath the message ("what I am afraid happens if I do not send this"), so the act of parking the message externalizes the spiral. Second, every draft you discard becomes a draft Evidence entry that can later prove your fear was wrong. Third, the running count of "messages you did not need to send" gives you visible proof, over time, that your nervous system was wrong about urgency. Schedule-send is a productivity tool; the Drawer is an emotional regulation tool.

How do I update to Outspiral 2.0?

Open the App Store on your iPhone, search for Outspiral, and tap Update. If you have automatic updates on, the new version will arrive on its own. Your existing data carries forward, including any episodes, daily check-ins, streaks, and journal entries you have already logged. The new features simply appear in their respective tabs once the update is installed.