Safety & scope

01 This is training, not care

Nerve is confidence and conversation training. It makes no clinical claim of any kind: it does not treat, diagnose or assess social anxiety or any other condition, and no score it produces means anything medically.

If you have diagnosed social anxiety, or you think you might, work with a clinician. Structured exposure work is a real and effective thing, and it is better done with somebody qualified who knows your history. Nerve can sit alongside that — plenty of people practise between sessions — but it is not a substitute for it and we will never describe it as one.

02 Adults only

18 and over. The category attracts teenagers and we are not equipped for them. Sign-up asks for your date of birth and the account is not created if the answer is under 18. Accounts created before that check existed are asked the same question before anything else in the product opens.

A date of birth is a claim rather than a proof, and we are not going to describe it as more than that. What it means is that we asked, that the answer is on the record, and that an account we find to belong to somebody under 18 is closed and deleted.

03 PG-13, and it is not a preference

Sessions are bounded at PG-13. Steering one toward sexual or explicit content is a breach of the terms of use. The characters are written to decline in frame and to end the conversation rather than to play along, the event is recorded, and repeated breaches cost the account.

Automated moderation runs on both sides of every conversation — what you say and what she says. The first breach is declined in character and the session continues; a second one ends it. Content involving minors ends a session immediately and is never given an in-character answer. Every one of those decisions is recorded against the account.

What is recorded is the decision, not the conversation: which category was triggered, which side of the conversation it came from, and what we did about it. The words themselves are not copied into that record.

04 The real-world exercises

Every exercise in the library is written by hand, reviewed before it ships, and tested against one rule: the worst realistic outcome is somebody politely saying no. Nothing is generated for you on the fly, because a model inventing a challenge at runtime is a model that will eventually invent a bad one.

Nothing in the library asks you to:

• continue after somebody has declined, in any form;
• film, photograph or record another person;
• approach somebody who cannot easily leave — at work, cornered, or alone at night;
• use a script designed to manipulate, negotiate or wear somebody down.

The higher tiers carry their own safety line and it is shown before you accept them. The instruction is always the same shape: say your piece, and leave. Nothing here depends on anybody saying yes — that is the whole design.

05 No manipulation content, ever

There is no negging, no pressure close, no persistence script and no technique framed as overcoming somebody’s reluctance, anywhere in the product. The scorecard is built the other way round: reading a no correctly and leaving warmly is one of the six things it scores highest, and pushing costs you points rather than earning them.

06 If a session stops being an exercise

Sometimes practising a hard conversation surfaces something real. If that happens, the right move is to stop — close the session, and the timer stops with it. Nothing is lost and nothing is scored against you for ending a rep early.

The product will also stop by itself. If a session carries signals of genuine distress it ends there and then, the character does not answer, and what you get instead is a short page with places you can call. It diagnoses nothing and it does not pretend to know what is going on — it is a list of phone numbers and a door out of the exercise.

If you are struggling, talk to somebody who is not a piece of software: a GP, a therapist, a crisis line, or a person who knows you. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number. International crisis line directories such as findahelpline.com will list a service in your country. We are not qualified to be that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

07 Telling us something went wrong

If a character said something it should not have, if an exercise reads as unsafe, or if anything about the product feels off, write to support@nerve.training, or use the Report a problem control on the result, scorecard and transcript screens of any rep — it carries the session with it, so there is no date and time to remember. Both reach the same person.

Reports about characters are how the contracts get fixed. They are worth sending.