Imagine you carry a bucket inside you. All day long things flow into it: work, money, worries about the people close to you, lack of sleep, the traffic jam on the way home. At the same time things drain out of it: exercise, sleep, time with people, moments outdoors. As long as roughly as much flows out as flows in, you're fine.
If not, the level slowly rises, and then a bit of spilled milk is enough to make it overflow.
Set up your usual week and see where you stand.
IllustrationThe bucket is a picture, not a psychological test. It shows how strain and recovery add up, but it doesn't measure anything about you. What you enter isn't stored or sent anywhere unless you save your result yourself.
Do you have enough room for the next two weeks?
My week
Your result
After 14 days
90 %
Days over the rim
0 of 14
Biggest inflow
Daily hassles
Strongest tap
Good sleep
Daily hassles are among your three biggest inflows.
Over 14 days the fake taps added 9 units in total, even though each time they brought relief.
The last drop isn't to blame
Snapping over a small thing doesn't mean overreacting. The bucket was full already.
Small things add up
Traffic, noise, notifications. Nothing on their own, but they flow in every day.
Some taps are fake
Alcohol, scrolling, food. Relief now, paid back with interest.
What to do
Don't try to hold more. Open the taps and watch the small inflows.
The model shows a principle; its numbers are illustrative.
How it works
The bucket is a metaphor, not a measurement. It builds on the stress-vulnerability model (Zubin & Spring, 1977), still used in psychology today. Kanner, Coyne, Schaefer and Lazarus (1981, Journal of Behavioral Medicine) reported that daily hassles were more strongly related to psychological symptoms than major life events. The numbers in the app are chosen for illustration. The fake taps are a picture: for alcohol, worse sleep in the second half of the night and lower mood the next day are documented (Ebrahim et al., 2013; Gawn et al., 2025); for comfort eating the evidence is weak and for scrolling it is mixed.
Another view: Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716–733.
