Mental fitness is not one-size-fits-all. Some days you need to calm your nervous system. Other days you need to challenge an unhelpful thought pattern, take stock of your resilience, or extract a lesson from a difficult experience.
Starting today, Companion includes four guided mental fitness exercises, each built on established psychological frameworks and designed to fit into five minutes of your day.
The four exercises
1. Mindfulness: Breathe and ground
This exercise combines two clinically validated techniques: 4-7-8 breathing (4 seconds inhale, 7 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale) and 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding (name 5 things you see, 4 you hear, 3 you feel, 2 you smell, 1 you taste).
4-7-8 breathing activates the vagus nerve, triggering the parasympathetic nervous system and reducing the physiological stress response. The grounding sequence that follows anchors your attention in the present moment, a core technique used in anxiety and trauma therapy.
2. Cognitive Reframe: Challenge your thinking
Based on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) thought records, this exercise walks you through a structured process:
- Identify the triggering situation
- Capture the automatic thought
- Weigh evidence for and against that thought
- Write a balanced, more accurate thought
CBT thought records are one of the most widely studied interventions in clinical psychology. The act of examining evidence, rather than accepting the first interpretation your mind produces, is the mechanism that reduces cognitive distortions over time.
3. Resilience Check: Know where you stand
This exercise measures your resilience across four research-backed dimensions: active coping, emotional regulation, social support, and positive reappraisal. The framework draws on established resilience science, including the work of Steinhardt & Dolbier and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale.
After rating yourself on each dimension, you see a radar chart showing your resilience profile, making it easy to identify which areas are strong and which could use attention.
4. Growth Reflection: Learn from experience
This reflective exercise asks you to examine a recent experience from three perspectives: the objective facts, your feelings, and how others might have perceived it. From there, you extract a guiding principle and commit to specific continue/stop/start actions.
Multi-perspective reflection is a deliberate learning technique. It turns lived experience into actionable insight rather than letting it pass unexamined.
Mood tracking built in
Every exercise begins and ends with a mood check-in. You select from eight emotions (Joy, Calm, Hopeful, Energized, Neutral, Anxious, Sad, Frustrated) and Companion captures the shift. Over time, this gives you a quantified picture of how each exercise type affects your emotional state.
AI-powered reflection
After completing an exercise, Companion's AI generates a personalised reflection on your session. This is not a generic summary. It draws on the specific inputs you provided during the exercise to offer a warm, thoughtful observation about your process.
Save to diary
Every completed exercise can be saved as a structured diary entry. Entries include mood scores, exercise-specific highlights (your balanced thought from a Cognitive Reframe, your resilience radar from a Resilience Check), and the AI reflection. These entries integrate with your existing Companion diary, so your mental fitness work lives alongside your daily reflections.
Designed for real life
Each exercise has 4 to 7 guided phases, progressing step-by-step so you are never overwhelmed. If you leave mid-exercise, session persistence lets you resume within 30 minutes. The exercises are fully WCAG 2.1 AA accessible, respecting reduced-motion preferences, supporting keyboard navigation, and offering optional sound and haptic cues.
The user flow
- Open Mental Fitness Exercises from the chat sidebar
- Pick one of four exercise cards, each shows a prompt count and accent colour
- Progress through the guided phases: mood check-in → exercise core → mood check-out
- See your result card with duration, mood delta, and an exercise-specific highlight
- Read the AI-generated reflection
- Save to diary or skip
Why we built this
Companion has always been a space for conversation and reflection. But conversation alone does not cover every dimension of mental fitness. Sometimes you need structured practice, the psychological equivalent of a guided workout.
These four exercises bring that structure. They are brief, evidence-based, and integrated into the same space where you already reflect and journal. No separate app, no context switching.
We are starting with four exercises and will expand the toolkit based on what users find most valuable. If you have suggestions, we are always listening at [email protected].
Mental Fitness Exercises are available now on all plans. Open Companion, tap the exercises icon in the sidebar, and start your first session.