How the program was built, and from what
Silex's 90 days were written from published clinical material and research, not from a marketing brief. This page lists what they were built from so you can check the work, and so you can go to the primary sources directly if you'd rather not pay for an app.
The shape of the program
90 authored days, one lesson at a time, in three phases:
| Phase | Idea | What it draws on |
|---|---|---|
| See the Machine | It was engineered. Drop the shame. | Research on how gambling products are designed: variable-ratio reinforcement, losses disguised as wins, near-miss effects, machine-zone immersion |
| Rewire | Your brain is resetting. Trust the timeline. | CBT for gambling disorder: trigger mapping, cognitive restructuring of gambling beliefs, urge exposure and urge surfing, behavioural substitution |
| Fortify | Build the life that competes. | Relapse-prevention planning, values work, financial repair, rebuilding the activities gambling crowded out |
A lapse doesn't reset anything. It routes you to a Reset day built around relapse-prevention material on the abstinence violation effect, the finding that how a person interprets a slip predicts whether it becomes a full return to gambling more reliably than the slip itself does.
The sources
Clinical treatment material
- Nancy M. Petry's cognitive-behavioural work on pathological gambling, the standard CBT framework for gambling disorder: functional analysis of gambling episodes, trigger identification, coping-skills training and planned alternative activities. Petry's treatment manual and trials are the backbone of Phase 2.
- The UCLA Gambling Studies Program patient workbook: a free, publicly available self-help workbook. Several of the day-level exercise formats (trigger inventories, urge logs, decision worksheets) follow its structure.
- Motivational Interviewing (William R. Miller & Stephen Rollnick): why the program asks rather than lectures, and why your own stated reasons for quitting are resurfaced back to you instead of the app supplying motivation.
- Relapse Prevention (G. Alan Marlatt & Judith R. Gordon, 1985): high-risk-situation planning, the abstinence violation effect, and the design rule that a slip must never zero your history.
- SMART Recovery and Gamblers Anonymous: two different traditions, both pointed to inside the app, because the evidence does not support telling someone there is only one route.
How gambling products are engineered
- Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012): the ethnography behind Phase 1. The "machine zone", the design of continuous play, and the industry's own language about time-on-device.
- Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation (2021): the pleasure–pain balance framing used to explain why the first weeks feel worse before they feel better.
- Allen Carr's method: the argument that the "relief" a bet provides is the withdrawal it created, adapted to gambling rather than smoking.
Measurement
- The Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), from the Canadian Problem Gambling Index (Ferris & Wynne, 2001): nine items over a 12-month window, the instrument behind both the app's intake and the self-check on this site. It is a screening tool: it estimates risk, it does not diagnose anyone.
What we're careful about
- The program is not a clinical trial. Silex applies material from evidence-based treatment; that is not the same as Silex itself having been trialled. Nobody has run a randomised study on this app, and until somebody has, we won't imply otherwise or quote an effectiveness figure.
- Screening is not diagnosis. Every risk score in the app and on this site carries the same line: this isn't a diagnosis, it's a snapshot of risk based on a standard self-check.
- Helplines are re-verified every release, because the numbers do change. The US national line changed in January 2026.
- The program is in English only for now, and its self-exclusion and debt guidance is deepest for the United States and the United Kingdom.
If you spot something in the program that misrepresents a source, write to support@trysilex.com. That is a bug and it gets fixed like one.
Quit gambling. Keep the money.
Silex blocks gambling across your phone and walks you through 90 days, one at a time.