How Pink Bunny Bubblegum works

It is a free self improvement game you play in a web browser. You write down the things you are actually carrying, do one real thing about one of them, and the room on screen changes. No account, nothing to install, and everything you write stays on your own device.

Who it is for

People who have already tried a habit app and quietly stopped opening it.

That is a specific person, and it is worth being specific about. You downloaded something with a streak counter. It went well for nine days. Then you got sick, or had a bad week, or simply forgot, and the number went back to zero. And the thing that made you stop was not losing the number. It was that opening the app now meant looking at evidence that you had failed. So you did not open it, and a week later you deleted it.

It is also for people who do not want to hand their private thoughts to a company, and for people who find that the task they cannot do is never actually the task on the list.

The problem it is built against

Most self improvement tools ask you to do something you already know how to do. Drink water. Go to bed earlier. Read ten pages. Nobody is stuck because they do not know that going to bed earlier is good.

What people are actually stuck on is heavier and less tidy: the message you have not answered, the apology you owe someone, the appointment you keep not booking, the thing you promised yourself in January. Those do not fit in a checkbox, so the tools quietly replace them with things that do. Then you complete a week of tidy little boxes and feel exactly as stuck as before, because you spent the week on the substitutes.

The idea underneath the whole thing

The room on the screen is the inside of your head. The objects on the floor are not chores. They are the things you named, in your own words, and each one weighs what you said it weighs. A slip you have already forgiven yourself for is a dirty mug. Something you have carried for weeks is a hole in the floor.

Cups and laundry are only the visible ends of invisible things.

How it works

  1. You name something. Not from a menu of suggested habits. You type what is actually on you, in the words you would use to a friend.
  2. You do one real thing about it. Away from the screen. Send the message, book the appointment, sit down for ten minutes. The app cannot do this part and does not pretend to.
  3. You mark it, and the room changes. The piece moves. You earn gold. The character in the room straightens up a little.
  4. You come back when you come back. Nothing is counting the days between visits, and nothing is taken away for the gap.

What is actually in it

Mindfulness
A temptation you felt on the left, what you did instead on the right. Naming the temptation is half of it, because the thing you did instead only means something once you have admitted what you were pulled towards.
Little wins
Small things you did, and how many times you did them. No target, no quota.
Body and space
Anything about your physical self or your surroundings that you can put a number on. Either a percentage, or a count like seven of ten books. Every point is worth a gold point, so looking after yourself is not a separate category from progress. It is the same category.
General life
The things you have and are proud of, each one dated. Every new day gets the next colour of the rainbow, so time and progress are visible as colour rather than as a list of dates.
A journal that is genuinely private
It saves as you type and never leaves the device. The page says so plainly: nobody sees this, but you.
Gold, levels, and a button that costs you one
You earn gold by doing real things. There is also a button that says I slipped up, and pressing it costs you a point.

What makes it different

The thing on the list is the thing in your head

You do not pick from a library of suggested habits. You type the actual thing, in your own words, and it becomes an object in the room with the weight you gave it. That is the whole mechanic, and it is why the tool cannot quietly decide that your real problem is your water intake. Nothing else here works if this part does not.

It has somewhere to put the reason

Most trackers offer two states: done, or not done. So a day you could not get out of bed and a day you simply could not be bothered look identical, and the record of your own life becomes a row of failures with no explanation attached. Here the temptation you felt sits beside what you did instead, which means the interesting part of the day has a place to live.

The slip up button exists on purpose

Most apps have no way to record that you did the thing you were trying not to do. So the only options are to log nothing or to log a lie. Here it is one press, it costs a single point out of a hundred, and then the page carries on exactly as before. Nothing is wiped and nothing resets. It is a small cost by design: enough to be real, not enough to make the day feel ruined.

Honesty earns and never costs

Writing down something difficult adds to your score. It never subtracts. A tool that punished honest disclosure would teach you to lie to it, and a self improvement tool you lie to is worth less than nothing, because now you are practising the lying.

The points are attached to something

Fair objection to any app with points in it: if the points do not mean anything, collecting them is just a nicer way of wasting an evening. So here a point is never awarded for opening the page, for a login streak or for tapping through a screen. Every point is attached to a real thing you did about a thing you wrote down yourself. If you can earn points here without your actual life changing, that is a bug, not a feature.

There is no streak to lose

Nothing counts consecutive days, so there is nothing to break. The moment a tool can punish you for a bad week, a bad week becomes a reason to avoid the tool, and avoiding the tool is how people end up back where they started.

Nothing leaves your device

No account, no server, no analytics on what you wrote. Worth stating plainly, and it has a real cost, which is in the limits below.

What it is designed to help you do

It is a self improvement game, not a treatment. It cannot diagnose anything, it is not therapy, and it makes no claim to help with any medical or psychiatric condition. If you are struggling with your mental health, please talk to a real professional. That is not a disclaimer bolted on the end, it is the honest limit of what a web page can do.

Why it is built this way

Three findings shaped the parts above. Each is linked, and each is given with its limits, because a self improvement page quoting confident science at you is exactly the thing to be suspicious of.

Missing one day does not undo your progress

In the study most often cited on how long habits take to form, missing a single day had no measurable effect on the habit forming (Lally and colleagues, 2010). That is the finding behind having no streak. The same study is where the "66 days" number comes from, and it deserves its caveat: the range ran from 18 days to well over two hundred, and the figure comes from about half the participants whose data fit the model. There is no correct number of days. The popular "21 days" claim is not evidence based at all (Singh and colleagues, 2024, reviewing twenty studies), and it traces back to a 1960 book by a plastic surgeon writing about something else entirely.

The slip is not the problem, what you conclude from it is

There is a long-studied pattern where breaking a rule you set yourself triggers a collapse much larger than the slip itself: one drink becomes the whole evening, one missed day becomes quitting. It was named the abstinence violation effect by Marlatt and Gordon in Relapse Prevention (1985) and is closely related to what researchers have called the what-the-hell effect (Polivy and Herman, 1985). Honest limit: the pattern is well described, and how reliably it predicts a full relapse is still argued about. That is why the slip up button costs one point rather than resetting anything. The design is trying to keep a slip the size it actually is.

Deciding what you will do instead is the part that works

Deciding in advance what you will do in a specific situation has been studied for decades under the name implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999). That is what the temptation and what-you-did-instead pair is for. The honest version of the effect size: early reviews reported it as large, and a 2025 review of 642 tests puts it between small and moderate depending on the area of life. Real, useful, not magic.

None of this makes the app itself evidence based. These are findings that informed some design choices, and that is a much smaller claim.

What it does not do

Worth knowing before you start rather than after:

How to start

Open pinkbunnybubblegum.com and press ready. That is the whole of it. There is nothing to download, no email to give and no setup. Write one true thing in the first box you see. Most people's first entry is something they have been carrying for a while, and that is the right size to start on.

Why choose this over a habit tracker

Honestly: for a lot of people, do not. If streaks work on you, a streak app is a fine tool and it will do more for you than this will. Some people genuinely run on that pressure and there is nothing wrong with that.

This is for the other group. The people for whom the streak became the point, and then breaking it became the end. If you have downloaded three habit apps and abandoned all three within a fortnight, the pattern is probably not that you lack discipline. It is more likely that a tool built to reward perfect attendance is the wrong shape for a life that has bad weeks in it.

The comparison that matters is not feature by feature. It is what happens on the day you fail. In most tools, that day sets you back to zero and quietly makes opening the app feel bad. Here you press a button that says you slipped, it costs one point out of a hundred, and the room is still your room tomorrow.

Questions

What is Pink Bunny Bubblegum?
A free self improvement game that runs in a web browser. You write down the things you are actually carrying, do one real thing about one of them, and the room on screen changes. No account, nothing to install, and everything you write stays on your own device.
Is this a habit tracker?
Not in the usual sense. There is no streak to protect and nothing is taken from you for missing a day. It tracks what you did rather than how many days in a row you did it, and it has a button for admitting you slipped, because a tool you cannot be honest with is a tool you will start lying to.
Do I need to make an account?
No. There is no sign up, no email and no password. Open the page and start. The trade off is real and worth knowing before you begin: because nothing is stored on a server, your progress lives in the one browser you used and does not follow you to another device.
Where is my writing stored, and can anyone read it?
In your own browser, on your own device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, which also means nobody, including the people who made this, can read it. Clearing your browser data will erase it, and there is currently no backup.
How much does it cost?
Nothing. There is no paid tier, no trial that expires and no advertising. It is free because it is early and small, not as a hook into something paid later.
Is this therapy, or a treatment for anxiety or depression?
No, and it is not designed or tested as one. It is a self improvement game for ordinary stuck feeling and things you keep putting off. It cannot diagnose anything, it is not a substitute for a doctor or a therapist, and if you are struggling with your mental health please talk to a real professional.
Is there an iPhone or Android app?
There is no app store version. It is a website, so it works on any phone or computer with a browser, and you can add it to your home screen where it opens like an app.