About Brimmy

Brimmy is a feelings journal for iPhone. Here’s who makes it, why, and the rules it follows.

Stanislav Mashkin

Founder, product designer

@mrstanmash

Who I am

Hi, I’m Stanislav Mashkin, the founder of Brimmy. If you use the app or are just looking around, thank you.

I’m a product designer. I’ve launched startups and worked at big companies. Brimmy is my own project.

Why Brimmy

Therapists often suggest keeping a feelings journal. In practice it’s hard: the right word won’t come, there’s no time to write, and by the session much of it is gone.

Brimmy helps with three things:

• noticing and naming a feeling — with a word, not a score from bad to good;
• keeping the moment: what happened, what you felt in your body, your thoughts and actions;
• coming to your session with the days written down and a PDF.

What Brimmy is based on

• An entry follows the emotion diary used in CBT, one of the most studied forms of therapy: the event, thoughts, feelings, body sensations and actions. In Brimmy you fill it in on your phone and show it to your therapist as a PDF.
• The feelings vocabulary is grouped into families, like a feelings wheel: from a broad word to the exact shade.
• Research suggests an exact word for a feeling can help: naming it may take the edge off (Lieberman et al., 2007), and telling feelings apart is linked to more flexible behavior (Seah & Coifman, 2022).
• A practicing therapist reviewed the entry and the vocabulary. On her advice, an entry has five parts, and states like “stress” left the word list.

Brimmy doesn’t replace therapy — it helps you prepare for it.

Principles

• Your entries stay on your iPhone — the app has no server.
• No account needed.
• No ads or analytics in the app.
• Not a medical device: Brimmy doesn’t diagnose or treat anything and doesn’t replace professional help.

Company

Brimmy is published by Stanmash Ltd. Send questions and feedback to the email below, and follow the project on X.