Gets you through the moment
One big button, a clock that counts up, and an explanation that this moves like a wave: it rises, it peaks, and it drops on its own. You are not being asked to resist it — only to stay with it a while.
You do not have to fight yourself
Safi is a small app that helps you get through the hard moment, see what keeps repeating, and find a decent sentence on a bad day.
Arabic and English · free · no account, no phone number
The part nobody talks about
The hardest thing about this is not the urge. It is the feeling that you are the only one, and that there is nobody to tell. That secrecy feeds the shame, and the shame feeds the behaviour — and breaking that loop is what everything in Safi is built around.
We are not going to tell you that you are disgusting, and not that you are ill either. We will say that something is taking your time and your peace, and that there is a way to work on it without holding yourself to account every day.
What Safi does
Shows you what repeats
After a few entries you will see the time, the place and the feeling that tend to come before it for you specifically. From there you can change one right thing instead of trying to change all of yourself.
The counter never falls
Most apps reset the number to zero when it happens, and that zero is what turns one night into a week. In Safi the headline number is cumulative: a bad day stops it rising for a day and can never send it back.
A decent sentence on a bad day
Every time you log something, a line comes back written for that exact moment. What it says after a hard night is the most carefully written thing in the app.
Something we will say plainly
Most of what circulates about "rebooting the brain" and dopamine is extrapolated from studies of addictive substances, and it is not established the way it is usually stated. The World Health Organization placed compulsive sexual behaviour in ICD-11 under impulse-control disorders — deliberately not under addiction — because the evidence was not there.
So Safi does not tell you what is happening inside your head. It tells you what a lot of people report, and it shows you what you wrote yourself. The difference between those two is the whole difference.
Nobody finds out
This is not marketing copy. It is how the app is actually built:
- No account: no email, no phone number, no password.
- No notifications by default. If you turn them on yourself, they carry no text at all — just the app name.
- The name on screen is "Safi" and the icon is a wave. Nothing says what the app is for.
- A quick-exit button on every page, and a button that erases everything, permanently, whenever you want.
- No community and no messaging between users. Nobody can find you.
Things to read
The scienceWhen the distress is about the conflict, not the amount
One of the most robust findings in this field: how addicted somebody feels is predicted better by the clash with their own values than by how much they actually use.
The scienceStages of change, 12 steps, and which is which
These two get confused constantly. One is a description of how people change; the other is a fellowship programme. Neither is a timetable of withdrawal.
The scienceNaming what you feel, and why it lowers the volume
Putting a precise word to a feeling measurably reduces its intensity — without you trying to calm down. It is one of the few things here with clean evidence behind it.
The scienceThe model researchers actually use
Not "your brain on porn". The framework most of this field works in describes an interaction between who you are, what triggered you, how you read it, and what control you had left.
The scienceThe flatline: a real experience with no research behind it
Thousands of people describe the same thing in almost the same words. That is worth taking seriously. It is also not the same as evidence, and the difference matters.
The scienceIs there really such a thing as withdrawal?
Every recovery site has a day-by-day withdrawal timeline. The only randomised trial to test the question found no difference between people abstaining and people who were not.
Start from wherever you actually are
You do not have to have decided anything, and you do not have to be ready. You can open it and just read.
No subscription, no ads, no paid tier. You open it and you use it.