How it works
What's actually behind this check-in
How Are You, Really? looks casual on purpose — but the questions underneath are grounded in well-established research. Here's what it looks at, how your answers are read, who's behind it, and where the picture on the home page comes from.
Real questions, grounded in research
Your answers are read against questionnaires that researchers have trusted for decades — including the DASS-21 (mood, worry and stress), a PROMIS sleep measure, the UCLA-3 loneliness scale, and established questionnaires for emotional intelligence, coping, time management, perfectionism and resilience. A psychologist would recognise every one of them.
There's still no score to beat. The scales are here so what you get back is useful and grounded — not made up on the spot.
How your answers are read
Everything happens in your browser — nothing is sent to a server. Each area is compared against typical ranges from research, then written back to you in plain language, strengths first. You see where things sit, what it tends to mean, and what usually helps most people in similar spots.
What the bands mean
Results are shown as gentle bands (e.g. "Strong", "Worth a closer look", "Within a healthy range") instead of raw numbers. A single number can feel like a judgment. A band is just a snapshot — a moment in time and a tendency across lots of people. It's never a diagnosis or a label. "Most people sit here" simply means you're in the middle of the normal range (about the 30th–70th percentile against population norms) for that area.
Where the typical ranges come from
Some of the original questionnaires were shortened so the whole check-in takes about ten minutes rather than thirty. Where that happened, the typical ranges were gently adjusted for the shorter version (a standard Spearman-Brown adjustment — in practice it moves a band edge by around one percentile) and are treated as working ranges until we gather enough of our own anonymous responses to refine them further. Every scoring choice and every line of result copy was written with care — and reviewed by a clinician — to keep things accurate, kind, and useful.
What the research says
Australia runs one of the most thorough mental-health surveys in the world, so we don't have to guess how common this is:
- In any given year, about one in five Australians aged 16–85 (21.5%) goes through a mental disorder; across a lifetime it's two in five (42.9%).
- Of the roughly 4.3 million adults affected in a year, fewer than half (45%) see a health professional about it — so more than half get no professional support at all.
- Among people aged 16–24 it's higher still — close to two in five (38.8%) in a single year.
The point of these numbers isn't to worry you — it's that struggling is common, support is patchy, and noticing early is one of the few things genuinely within reach. Mental health is one of the more treatable problems there is.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, 2020–2022.
Who made this
How Are You, Really? is a personal project by Ape Labs, an Australian digital studio — built with clinical input and grounded in established research to keep the questions and wording safe and sound. It's a check-in, not a clinic — it doesn't diagnose or treat anything. It's here to help you understand yourself a little better and decide what (if anything) feels useful next. If anything in your results worries you, your GP or a trusted person is a good place to start.
Last updated July 2026.
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