Twelve days ago, I stopped drinking.
What’s been fascinating, as someone who’s spent fifteen years thinking about how we learn, is how much this experience feels like being enrolled on two very different online courses at once.
The first is NHS Drink Free Days, a simple, free public-health app that tracks days without alcohol and gives a little dopamine hit of encouragement.
The second is Reframe, a paid app that treats sobriety not as abstinence but as education: a self-directed, psychologically informed curriculum in how our brains and habits work.
Both aim to change behaviour. But only one truly teaches.
The Lightweight Tracker: NHS Drink Free Days
The NHS app does exactly what it says. You set a target number of “drink free” days, log your progress, and see graphs of units saved. It’s quick, clean, and easy to use.
As a behavioural intervention, it works at the surface level of habit: awareness, accountability, repetition. But it doesn’t teach why change feels difficult, or how to build new patterns of thought. It’s data without reflection.
It’s like being given a scale without a fitness plan. You see the numbers, but not the story.
The Learning Model: Reframe
Reframe is something else entirely.
It’s a masterclass in what good online learning can be: a mixture of psychology, neuroscience, reflection, and gentle humour. It uses short, animated micro-lessons on topics like dopamine, habit loops, and emotional regulation. It asks you to journal, to question automatic thoughts, to build self-awareness.
It’s active learning. Every interaction prompts reflection and, crucially, personalisation.
The tone is warm, human, and intelligent — it feels like having a compassionate coach who also knows their neuroscience.
In short, it teaches you how to learn yourself.
What Makes Learning Work Online
Comparing the two has reminded me of the principles that matter most in any digital learning design — from health to history, coaching to creativity:
1. Purpose and Structure
People engage best when the design matches the goal.
Tracking habits can be linear and simple; changing beliefs or behaviours requires structured reflection and depth.
2. Personalisation and Agency
Reframe adapts to me. It remembers my goals, my streak, my weak points. That sense of agency — I’m in charge of my learning — fuels motivation far more effectively than a one-size-fits-all dashboard.
3. Feedback and Reflection
Numbers are fine, but insight is better.
Reframe’s feedback loops (journals, check-ins, stories) transform data into meaning — echoing Kolb’s learning cycle of experience → reflection → conceptualisation → experimentation.
4. Community and Connection
Even brief contact with others on the same journey builds momentum.
Learning is social: we grow by witnessing each other’s progress and setbacks.
5. Cognitive Insight
Understanding what’s happening in the brain — the craving circuits, the prefrontal cortex’s role in impulse control — gives me both curiosity and compassion. Knowledge, it turns out, is a form of relief.
6. Progressive Mastery
Reframe uses gamification well. Each micro-lesson, streak, and milestone gives a sense of progress — small wins that accumulate. The NHS app’s identical daily task can start to feel static.
7. Tone and Empathy
The tone of voice matters. The NHS app speaks like a public service announcement.
Reframe speaks like a friend. Tone is pedagogy.
Learning How to Learn — About Myself
Both tools have their place. The NHS app gets you started — a nudge toward accountability.
But Reframe keeps you learning — a journey into why we behave as we do and how to shift that behaviour sustainably.
For someone who has spent years immersed in online learning — from the Open University’s MAODE to Coursera and beyond — it’s striking to experience the theory from the inside. This isn’t just behaviour change; it’s applied learning design, lived daily.
Each sober day is, in essence, a micro-lesson: small, repeatable, occasionally challenging, often revealing.
And like any good course, I’m learning that the subject isn’t alcohol — it’s attention, awareness, and agency
