Do streaks help or hurt? What the research actually says

JotMood has no streaks. No consecutive-day counter, no badges, no red marks on a calendar. Missed days just stay blank.

We designed it that way because of a pattern we kept hearing: people who wanted to journal, tried an app that counted days, missed a day, felt like they had failed at feeling better, and quit. So when we went to write the page justifying that decision, we expected to find research showing that streaks make people quit.

We didn’t find it. What we found instead was one trial that argues against us, one meta-analysis that finds nothing either way, a large review of why people actually abandon these apps in which streaks do not appear at all, and one extremely convenient statistic that appears to have been invented.

This page reports all four, because a page that only reported the helpful ones would be marketing rather than evidence.

The trial that argues against us

Litvin and colleagues ran a randomised controlled trial comparing a gamified mental-wellbeing app against a non-gamified journalling app and a waitlist control, published in PLoS One in 2020 (1).

The gamified app held on to people substantially better. Retention was roughly 21% higher, and the odds of completing the study were about 3.94 times those of the control condition — attrition of 10% against 30.5%.

Stated plainly, without hedging: in that trial, gamification worked. It kept people using a mental-health app, which is the single hardest problem in the category. This is the strongest piece of evidence in this entire post, and it points away from the design choice we made.

It is worth being precise about what it does and does not establish. It tested a gamified app as a whole package — points, feedback, progression — against a plain journalling app. It did not isolate consecutive-day streaks as a mechanism, and it did not measure how the people who dropped out felt about breaking one. So it is strong evidence that gamification can aid retention, and it is not evidence about streak anxiety specifically. But we are not going to file that distinction under “so it doesn’t count.” It counts.

The meta-analysis that finds nothing either way

Six and colleagues pooled 38 studies covering 8,110 participants in a systematic review and meta-analysis of gamification in mental health apps, published in JMIR Mental Health in 2021 (2).

Gamification was not a significant predictor of outcomes (β = −0.03, P = .38). A separate analysis found no significant effect on adherence either (β = −1.93, P = .40).

That is a null result on both counts — not evidence that gamification hurts, but not support for the enthusiasm either. Taken with Litvin, the fair summary is that gamification helps in some implementations for some people and washes out on average.

One scope caveat that matters and is usually dropped: this review is specifically about apps for depression. JotMood is not a depression app, does not claim to treat depression, and is not a medical device. Findings from a clinical population do not transfer cleanly to a general-audience journaling app, in either direction.

What people say when they actually abandon an app

If streaks were the reason people quit these apps, the abandonment literature would say so.

Kidman and colleagues reviewed 18 studies covering 525,824 people to ask when and why adults stop using lifestyle and mental-health apps, published in JMIR in 2024 (3).

The reasons that came back:

• technical problems
• privacy concerns
• annoying notifications
• confusing design
• the burden of data entry
• hidden costs
• boredom and fading motivation

Streaks are not on that list. Neither is guilt, or day counting, or anything resembling streak anxiety.

This is the most useful paper of the three, and not because it supports us — it doesn’t. It is useful because it says the things that actually drive people away are mundane and fixable: don’t break, don’t nag, don’t confuse, don’t make data entry a chore, don’t hide the price. Every item on that list is a design decision, and none of them is glamorous enough to market on.

The statistic we are not going to use

There is a figure circulating that would be perfect for us: a claim, usually attributed to “CHI 2020,” that people tracking habits via rigid streaks are 63% more likely to quit entirely after missing a single day.

We tried to find the paper. We could not. Searching PMC, the ACM Digital Library and the open web turns up only vendor blogs and SEO pages citing one another — no authors, no paper title, no DOI, no conference session. As far as we can establish, there is no such study.

So we are not going to repeat it, even though it is the single most useful sentence anyone could hand us. If you see it on another app’s marketing page — and you will — now you know what is behind it.

So why does JotMood have no streaks?

Because “gamification works on average” and “gamification works on you” are different statements, and the evidence above makes this a fit question rather than a moral one.

If a broken streak makes you want to get back on track, that effect is real, it is measurable, and it showed up clearly in a randomised trial. Apps built around it are working with your psychology, and you should use one. Daylio is very good at this, and we say so on our own comparison page.

If a broken streak makes you want to delete the app out of shame, no averaged result changes what happens in your head on day eight. That is not a discipline problem. It is a fit problem, and the fix is a tool that does not keep score.

We built for the second person because that is who kept telling us they had quit four journaling apps. That is a positioning decision grounded in who we talked to — not a claim that the literature proves streaks are harmful. It doesn’t, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What the evidence does support is the rest of how the app is built. The abandonment review is essentially a list of instructions: keep data entry small, keep notifications rare, don’t confuse people, don’t hide the price, protect privacy. Those are the reasons people actually leave. We have tried to answer each of them, and there is one place we currently fall short — there is no in-app export yet, and you can read our own accounting of that.

The short version

• One RCT found gamification improved retention substantially. It argues against our design choice (1).
• One meta-analysis of 38 studies found no significant effect on outcomes or adherence (2).
• A review of 525,824 people found streaks are not among the reasons people abandon apps (3).
• The widely-quoted “63% quit after one missed day” figure could not be traced to any paper. Do not trust pages that use it.
• Streaks are a question of fit. For some people they work well. For others they are the reason the app got deleted. Both of those are true at once.

References

1. Litvin S, Saunders R, Maier MA, Lüttke S. Gamification as an approach to improve resilience and reduce attrition in mobile mental health interventions: a randomized controlled trial. PLoS One, 2020. — Gamified app retained ~21% more participants; odds of completion 3.94× control.
2. Six SG, Byrne KA, Tibbett TP, Pericot-Valverde I. Examining the effectiveness of gamification in mental health apps for depression: systematic review and meta-analysis. JMIR Mental Health, 2021. — 38 studies, 8,110 participants; null on outcomes (β = −0.03, P = .38) and adherence (β = −1.93, P = .40).
3. Kidman PG, Curtis RG, Watson A, Maher CA. When and why adults abandon lifestyle behavior and mental health mobile apps: scoping review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2024. — 18 studies, 525,824 participants.

If you want to read further

For the product-level version of this argument, the Daylio comparison goes line by line on what Daylio does better and when you should stay with it. If you came here because you have started and stopped journaling several times, what to write when nothing happened addresses the evening where the habit usually actually breaks — which, per the abandonment review above, is boredom rather than guilt.

If you want the same treatment of the gratitude evidence, gratitude journaling: the research, honestly reports those meta-analyses including the low-certainty rating their own authors gave them.

JotMood is self-care, not therapy, and it does not diagnose or treat anything. If writing brings up more than you want to hold on your own, please talk to a qualified professional. In the US you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.