Why I Love Finch

Happy Mental Health Awareness Month! I know it’s almost over, but I’ve been busy with other writing. Anyways… mental health awareness month! Trust me, I’m well aware of my mental health. I’ve done lots of things over the years to try to manage it with various results. I could talk about those for ages but I’m just going to focus on one thing for this post. One thing I’ve found that helps a lot is a self care app called Finch. 

Finch is an app where you have a bird that you can dress and take on adventures. You make a list of tasks and as you do tasks you earn energy to go on adventures. You also earn gems that you can spend on clothes and furniture for your bird. 

My bird’s name is Otis and they are non-binary. I dress them in a different outfit every day and put them in pajamas at night. I love dressing them in themed outfits for what I’m doing. I care way more about what my bird wears than what I wear. 

I was diagnosed with ADHD late last year and even though I’m on meds for it I’ve really been struggling with executive dysfunction and emotional flooding lately. I find having all my tasks in Finch helps with the executive dysfunction. I know what tasks I have and I get gems to buy things for my bird from doing them. I’m able to organize them into categories and I also have categories for tasks related to my monthly goals. 

I also love that buying cute things for my bird with fake money I earned by doing tasks helps me not want to spend real money. Angela and I also gift things to each other every day on the app and it just makes me feel so happy. Once she got into Finch too she ended up drawing me the beautiful pic with this post of our Finches holding the rats we used to own. 

I’ve been trying to not follow to-do lists as strictly and to not stress myself out with all the things I think I need to do, so being able to skip tasks on Finch is really important to me. I like the reminder that they are tasks I can do without the pressure that I have to do them. For example, I put a lot of therapy skills on there. I don’t use them that often, but if I’m upset I can look at Finch and be reminded that they’re options I can use when my brain is too overwhelmed to remember anything else. 

The world is on fire, but at least I have a cute self-care bird.