Marea: OCD & ERP Practice

Marea is a place to practise ERP — the approach with the strongest evidence for OCD — on your own, or between sessions with a therapist.

It won't make the thoughts stop. It will help you stop letting them run your life. That's not a lowered bar; it's how OCD actually gets better.

What it does

Build an exposure ladder. Marea turns what you're avoiding into a set of concrete steps, from mildly uncomfortable to genuinely hard, graded so you always know which rung to try next.

Get the other half right. Every rung carries a response-prevention rule alongside the task — what you won't do afterwards. It's composed from the compulsions you tell it about, including the ones that happen in your head: replaying, checking how you feel, asking someone if it's okay. Most apps capture the exposure and skip this half. It's the half that makes ERP work.

Run a session. A timer that counts up, your rule kept in view, and a few points where you log how you're doing. Then you watch the number come down on its own.

Watch the curve flatten. Session by session, the same rung's peak drops. That chart is the whole point, and it's drawn from your own entries — nothing invented, nothing estimated.

Hand a clinician the record. Export a one-page summary of a ladder — tasks, rules, dates, start / peak / end — as a PDF. Nothing else is in it.

What it deliberately doesn't do

No reassurance. Marea never tells you a fear is unlikely, never says you're safe, never answers "could I have done it?" — because that's the compulsion.

No streaks, no badges, no confetti. Five weeks off leaves no mark. Ending a session early isn't failure; it's information.

No journal, no mood tracker, no daily check-in asking how anxious you are. Each of those has an OCD-specific way of becoming a ritual.

No AI, no chatbot, no community. Nothing that could be asked for reassurance.

Privacy, specifically

No account. No ads. No analytics, no crash reports. Marea makes no network requests except to check a purchase with Apple or Google. Everything you enter stays in encrypted storage on this device, and you can delete all of it in one action.

Backups are a single file you keep yourself, locked with a passphrase only you know. Nothing is stored anywhere else — which also means nobody can recover it for you.

Who it's for

Anyone with OCD who wants to practise ERP and can't get to a specialist, is on a waiting list, or is already in treatment and needs something to work with between sessions. Themes include contamination, checking, symmetry, harm, intrusive and taboo thoughts, moral and religious scrupulosity, relationships and health — named plainly, because the themes people are most ashamed of are among the most ordinary symptoms of this condition.

Marea was built by someone who had OCD badly for five years. The design decisions above aren't marketing; they're the things that would have helped.

What it isn't

Marea is a self-guided practice companion. It is not a medical device, does not diagnose OCD, and is not a substitute for a clinician. If OCD is severely interfering with your life, or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact a professional or a crisis line — Marea lists them in Settings and works offline.

Free and Pro

Everything that makes the practice work is free: ladders, sessions, response prevention, progress, the library. Pro adds unlimited ladders, full history, the clinician export and app lock. It pays for the app to exist without ads or an account.