theWave

Getting started

Open ocdwave.com in any browser. There is nothing to download and no account to create.

The first time, you get a welcome page explaining what the app is for, two promises about privacy and cost, and one thing worth reading before anything else.

From there you either choose a coping skill or tap Just let me look around. You can reopen the welcome any time from Read the welcome again at the bottom of the home screen.

Choosing your go-to skill

Seven skills. Pick the one you actually reach for when it counts, and the app leads with it from then on.

Each opens to a five-step walkthrough, and every skill screen has a Try a different one row at the bottom. Nothing is locked in — on a given night one will fit better than another. To change it, tap Change my go-to skill under the card on the home screen.

TIPP in detail

• Temperature — cool water on your face, or a cold damp cloth over your cheeks and eyes for about thirty seconds. Skip it if you have a heart condition, an eating disorder, or take beta blockers.
• Intense exercise — a two-minute timer with prompts.
• Paced breathing — opens the breathing circle set to four in, seven out.
• Paired muscle relaxation — a guided sequence through seven muscle groups, five seconds tensing and eight releasing, timed for you.

Games in detail

• Sequence — a memory game with tones that grows by one step each round. Losing carries no penalty; going again is the point.
• Word chain — take the last letter and start a new word. Four categories.
• Five senses — links to the grounding walkthrough.

The home screen

• Something is flaring up — the main button, for right now.
• Ride it out, Breathe, Get grounded, You're not alone — the four immediate tools.
• Your go-to — jumps straight into your chosen skill.
• The long game, Ban book, For the people who love you.
• More tools — the Plus features.

Day and night. The small circle at the top right switches between the daylight theme and a dark one, and remembers your choice. Worth knowing it is there, because a white screen at 2am is genuinely painful.

Crisis numbers are at the bottom of the home screen. In the US, call or text 988, or text HOME to 741741.

When something is flaring up

Tap the main button and pick the closest fit from twelve squares: contamination, checking, unwanted harm thoughts, taboo thoughts, scrupulosity, "just right" and symmetry, relationship doubt, health and body sensations, rumination, discarding and keeping, panic and general anxiety, and "I don't know — it's everything." It doesn't have to be exact.

The response screen

Four tabs. Right now has three cards in order:

The other tabs: Settle down links to breathing, grounding and the wave timer. Long game holds exposure ideas for that specific theme. Not alone gives three affirmations chosen for the moment.

Riding it out

Two modes, chosen at the top.

Set a length

Pick 5, 10, 20 or 45 minutes. A curve shows the urge climbing, cresting and falling, with a marker travelling along it in real time and prompts appearing at each stage. Watching the shape is the point: urges peak and drop whether or not you obey them.

Stopwatch

No fixed length. Set the 0–10 slider to where the anxiety is now, tap Start, and mark it again whenever the number changes — beginning, middle, end, or a dozen times. Each mark appears as a labelled bar.

When you stop, it reads back what happened:

If it held steady, that counts too. If it climbed, it tells you that is usually the part just before the fall. One button writes the whole thing into the ban book with the peak, the ending number and the duration already filled in.

Wave sounds

A toggle and volume slider. Ocean sound generated live, so it never loops and needs no connection. It fades in over a few seconds and out when the timer ends.

Breathing

A circle that expands and contracts, with a count.

• Box — four in, hold four, four out, hold four.
• Paced — four in, seven out. About five and a half breaths a minute, which is where the calming effect is strongest.

Breath sounds can be switched on: a soft rush that gathers on the inhale and falls away on the exhale, timed to land just before each turn. Holds stay silent. Tapping the toggle plays one sample breath so you can set the volume.

If breath-holding feels bad, use Paced and simply breathe out longer than you breathe in.

Five senses

Name five things you see, four you feel, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste.

Each step has an optional If you are stuck panel with something the device can provide — for when you are too flooded to start scanning, or when one sense isn't available to you:

• See — an illustrated scene (a dolphin, a lighthouse, a quiet shore, a boat), with Show me another to cycle them. A Light button turns on the torch where the browser allows it, or fills the screen with a steady warm glow. It never flashes.
• Feel — A pulse, or Like a wave, which builds and fades. On devices that cannot vibrate from a web page, it offers physical prompts instead.
• Hear — A chime that decays over four seconds, or One wave.
• Smell and Taste — no device can help, so these offer suggestions.

These are a way in, not a replacement. The exercise is naming real things in the room you are actually in.

You're not alone

Thirty rotating lines written for the middle of a spike. None of them reassure you about whether your fear is true — they are about what you can withstand.

My own notes lets you write your own, or hand the phone to someone who loves you and let them write one. Your own words carry further than anyone else's.

One caution: a note that answers the fear ("the door is definitely locked") becomes a reassurance ritual. Notes about who you are hold up better.

The long game

Reference material on what actually shrinks OCD.

• What works — exposure and response prevention, and why response prevention is the half that does the work.
• The compulsions nobody sees — mental review, replaying conversations, checking whether you still feel anxious, googling, rereading this app. These are the ones that keep people stuck after years of treatment.
• Where medication sits — a short, honest note pointing you to a prescriber who treats OCD specifically.
• Build a ladder — list things you avoid, rate the dread 0–10, and the app sorts them lowest first. Tick them off as you go. Start near the bottom.
• Finding someone who knows OCD — the IOCDF directory, plus the questions worth asking a prospective therapist.

Exposures

An exposure is a planned, deliberate exercise where you face what triggers the fear and then do not perform the ritual. This section is for planning them, running them, and repeating them until they stop working on you.

Build the hierarchy

Add anything you avoid, or that pulls a ritual out of you, and rate the distress from 1 to 10. The list sorts itself into Easier, Moderate and Hard. Start in the middle: the bottom teaches little, and the top usually ends in the ritual, which teaches the wrong thing.

Choose the type

• Real life — face the actual thing. Touch the door handle, leave the lock checked once. Your therapist may call this in vivo.
• Imagined — write out the worst-case story in the present tense, feared ending left in, for fears that cannot be safely recreated. The app will read your script aloud on a loop. Sometimes called imaginal.
• Body sensations — bring on the physical feelings of anxiety deliberately, so they stop being alarming in themselves. Check with a clinician first; it is not safe for everyone. Sometimes called interoceptive.

Block the ritual

You name the compulsion when you create the item, and it is shown before you begin: you are not going to do this. During the exposure, a stopwatch runs and you mark your distress as it moves. Afterwards the app asks whether you blocked the ritual completely, partly, or not at all.

Plan them in advance

Every item can be scheduled — once, daily, weekdays, or weekly. Anything due appears on the home screen, and in the phone app you get a notification when the time comes. This is the point: you decide when you are steady, and the plan holds when you are not.

Record

Everything you write down lives here, in four tabs.

Entries

A full record of one episode: what set it off, what OCD demanded, how high it got (0–10), what you did, how long you held out, what helped, where it landed, and how long until it eased.

The four responses are Didn't do it, Delayed it, Did it differently, and Did the compulsion.

Banned

Rituals you have taken off the table, each with the rule you keep instead — "wash once, thirty seconds, no re-do". Each shows days since it last got you and how many times you held the line, with buttons for both outcomes. Add them from here, or with one tap from the Name it box during a spike. Add them when you are steady, not mid-spike.

Progress

Once you have three entries where you sat with it, this fills in with your own numbers:

Beside it, how long it took when you did perform it — usually faster, and that speed is exactly what keeps the ritual funded. Below that, a chart of peak anxiety entry by entry, coloured by outcome.

Export produces a plain text file you can print or email to your therapist, or a CSV if someone wants to chart it.

Journal

Every wave and exposure you rode out, what you predicted beforehand, and what you took away. Its second view adds them up: how likely your predictions felt against how often they actually came true. That comparison is the most useful thing this app can show you.

For the people who love youFree

A page for partners and family, covering the part nobody warns families about: accommodation. Answering "are you sure it's clean?", doing the checking, rearranging the household around what is safe to touch. These come from love, and they are the strongest predictor of a poor outcome in OCD.

It includes wording that declines without abandoning, guidance on withdrawing accommodation gradually and in advance rather than mid-spike, and a note that the supporter's own therapist is not a luxury.

The Wave Plus

Seven days free, then $8 a month or $60 a year. Nothing is charged during the trial, and cancelling in the first week costs nothing. Manage or cancel any time from the plans screen.

Everything above stays free forever. Plus adds:

Restoring on another device: plans screen → I already subscribed → enter the email you paid with.

Speaking instead of typing

A microphone appears in the corner of every text box. Tap it and speak; the words appear as you go. It adds to whatever is already typed rather than wiping it, and runs continuously, so pausing to think doesn't end it.

Two boxes have no microphone on purpose: the restore-access email, and the word chain game. Available in Chrome, Edge and Safari. Firefox does not support it and simply shows no buttons.

Installing it on your phone

It works in a browser, but installing gives it an icon and makes it work with no signal at all.

• iPhone / iPad — open in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. Chrome and Firefox on iOS cannot do this.
• Android — Chrome offers an install prompt, or use the Install button in the app.
• Desktop — Chrome and Edge show an install icon in the address bar.

Once installed it opens without browser chrome and works offline. Long-pressing the icon gives shortcuts straight to the wave timer, breathing, or the ban book. When a new version is available you'll see a small A newer version is ready bar — tap Reload.

Privacy and troubleshooting

Where your data lives

In your browser's storage on that device. It is never uploaded. Voice recordings are stored separately, also locally. Nobody — including the people who built this — can read any of it.

Payment is handled entirely by Stripe. They receive an email address and a card. Nothing you write in the app ever reaches them.

Dictation is the one exception worth knowing: your phone sends the audio to Apple or Google to convert it to text, the same as the microphone key on your keyboard does. The resulting text stays on your device.

If the app seems stuck on an old version

Your browser is serving the saved offline copy. Open the site in a private window, or run resetWave() in the browser console.

If something says it can't reach the server

Only the payment features need a connection; everything else works offline. On the plans screen a Run a connection check button appears after any failure and reports exactly what is wrong.

A note on using this well

If you find yourself opening this app compulsively — rereading the same steps, logging the same episode repeatedly, agonising over whether a rating is exactly right — that is the disorder finding a new home. The fix is a rule of one entry per episode, written quickly and imperfectly.