The Science Behind Strive
Strive is built on a simple claim: one of the most effective ways to improve our wellbeing is to develop our agency — to take charge of our own lives, together with people who care about us.
Why Agency
Life is difficult, and more and more people — especially young people — are struggling.
Research across 167 countries points to declining wellbeing, rising loneliness, and a growing sense that nothing we do makes a difference. The trend started in the early 2010s, long before the pandemic, and hasn't reversed (Blanchflower & Bryson, 2024).
Schools were not designed to produce wellbeing, but researchers and educators have stepped in to try: mindfulness sessions, social-emotional learning programs, and emotional check-ins are more and more common in schools.
Yet despite best intentions, scientific studies increasingly indicate weak and non-persisting effects at best (Cipriano et al., 2023), and in some cases harmful effects for the students who need help the most (Kuyken et al., 2022). While approaches vary, most share a core emphasis on self-awareness and emotional recognition: notice what you're feeling, name your emotions. Many programmes include elements of agency, but the emphasis in practice tends toward noticing.
Awareness is important. But without the capacity to act, it can leave people more conscious of their distress and no more able to do anything about it.
Agency — the capacity to decide, plan, act, and learn from what happens — offers a different starting point. Not what are you feeling? but what can you do about it?
In 2016, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier revised their own famous research on learned helplessness. The original finding suggested people learn to become passive when they can't control what happens to them. The revision flipped it: you don't unlearn helplessness. You learn control. How? Through concrete, repeated experiences where your actions produce a visible result. The brain learns to expect that what you do matters. In the early stages of building a habit, this is exactly what happens — you act, you see the result, and the connection between effort and outcome becomes real. That's the connection Strive is built on.
Agency has become a buzzword — especially in tech culture, where it often means something like relentless individual drive. The research says something different. Albert Bandura identified four things agency actually requires:
- intentionality (forming a real plan),
- forethought (anticipating obstacles),
- self-reactiveness (monitoring how it's going), and
- self-reflectiveness (evaluating what's working and what to change).
Strive's design maps onto all four — though self-reflectiveness is the one where I've made deliberate trade-offs, which I'll come to.
How Strive Works
Implementation intentions
Goals matter, but they're not enough. Research consistently shows a gap between setting a goal and following through. Willpower is unreliable, and the decisions that derail habits are small ones — whether to start, when to start, where to do it — made at moments when motivation is low.
Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions shows that specific if-then plans (“When I get home from school, I will read for 20 minutes in my room”) automate the decision point, so we're not relying on willpower in the moment. Strive's habit creation flow is built on this: cue, action, location, obstacle, backup plan. That structure comes directly from the research.
Community, not just tracking
Most habit apps treat change as a solo project, but agency is developed through relationships. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory identifies three needs for intrinsic motivation: autonomy (acting freely from your own values), competence (feeling capable and effective), and relatedness (belonging). Relatedness is the one most apps skip.
Strive is built around groups — educators and students (or anyone, really) tracking habits alongside each other through all the ups and downs along the way. When a teacher shares their own habit journey, it stops being an assignment and becomes a shared experience of striving to live better.
Motivation without manipulation
Most apps are designed to maximise engagement — infinite scroll, variable rewards, push notifications timed to pull you back. These are “attention-capture dark patterns”: designs that exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximise time spent and daily visits against the person's will (Monge Roffarello & De Russis, 2022).
Strive is designed to do the opposite. Cumulative completion counts only go up — they record evidence of progress without punishing lapses. Weekly dots show patterns at a human scale. Group totals provide social proof without individual ranking. There are no leaderboards, no percentage scores, no algorithmic nudges. Every core design choice was tested against a simple question: does this help the student build agency, or does it help the app retain a user?
Bandura called mastery experiences the most powerful source of self-efficacy — evidence that your own effort produces results. The tracking exists to show you and your group that evidence, not to keep you on the app.
The Trade-Offs
If I were to really go all-in on following where the research leads, Strive would put a stronger emphasis on facilitating self-reflection — what worked, what didn't, and what might work better next time. However, when designing with kids foremost in mind, certain trade-offs are needed in order to prioritise child safeguarding.
Any system that asks students to write about their inner experiences creates a disclosure risk. A student reflecting on why they missed a sleep habit might write “because my parents were fighting again.” Once that's in the system and a teacher has seen it, safeguarding obligations are triggered. I don't think an app is the right place to support these kinds of student needs — that's a job for schools, and meeting that need demands more human systems.
Instead, to support self-reflection, Strive uses contextual micro-prompts — short, data-anchored messages at meaningful moments. A student who completes a habit five days running might see: “You've been consistent this week — what made it easier?” Or after a missed stretch: “Getting back on track is the skill. Not the streak.” The prompt plants a seed — and that seed may or may not grow. For now, I need to accept that. The deeper reflective conversations belong somewhere else: between teachers and students, face to face, where someone can respond if something difficult comes up. Strive can surface patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed — but what happens next is a pastoral decision.
This approach makes sense to me. If the science evolves, or the pilot illuminates things the research cannot, I'll adapt.
For the full research synthesis, see our Agency Research Brief.
For curriculum materials, see Curriculum Resources.