Jisoo, a 26-year-old graduate student living in Seoul, had spent most of her adult life excelling. She had pushed through sleepless nights, aced exams, and filled every hour with something productive. But when her body began refusing to get out of bed, and her mind turned foggy and numb, she didn’t recognize it as burnout.
She assumed it was a personal failure.
“I thought I was just being lazy,” she later said. “Like maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough anymore.”
In South Korea, where conversations around mental health are still often private or stigmatized, Jisoo didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone how overwhelmed she had become. Therapy felt out of reach. Between long wait times, cost concerns, and cultural hesitation, she kept telling herself things would get better on their own.
But they didn’t.
One evening, after yet another crying spell in her tiny studio apartment, Jisoo opened ChatGPT and typed: “Is there an AI therapist I can talk to right now?”
That’s how she found Noah AI, an AI Emotional Coach available in Korean and six other languages. She downloaded the app, opened chat mode, and typed, “I think I’m broken.”
What she received back wasn’t advice, but a question.
“When did you first start feeling this way?”
That question opened a door.
Over the next few weeks, Jisoo began checking in with Noah daily, sometimes typing, sometimes speaking out loud in voice mode. The app helped her trace her exhaustion back to patterns of overcommitment, perfectionism, and guilt — traits she once wore with pride but had quietly eroded her sense of peace.
“I was so used to ignoring how I felt,” Jisoo explained. “Noah helped me notice it again. Not judge it, just notice.”
Using Noah’s guided journaling during conversations, she began unpacking old beliefs about what it meant to be strong, successful, and worthy. She explored the pressure she felt to always be available to her family, professors, and classmates. She admitted how hard it had become to pretend she was okay.
“I wasn’t used to speaking kindly to myself,” she said. “But with Noah, I practiced. And it didn’t feel fake.”
One night, after Noah asked her to describe a version of rest that didn’t involve guilt, she wrote something she hadn’t dared to before:
“I want a life that doesn’t hurt so much to live.”
That sentence became her turning point. She began saying no to extra academic obligations. She took quiet walks without her phone. She used Noah before bed to reflect, regulate, and breathe.
Most importantly, she stopped calling herself lazy.
Today, Jisoo still uses Noah AI as part of her emotional routine. She refers to it as her “mental health companion,”especially during exam season or when family pressure creeps in.
“I still want to try therapy someday,” she said. “But until then, Noah is helping me recover parts of myself I didn’t even know were missing.”
For Jisoo, Noah AI became more than just an app. It became a gentle, non-judgmental space to rebuild trust in her own emotional world — one quiet check-in at a time.
Read more real-life Noah AI user stories.
Download the Noah AI app for iPhone and Android today. Contact us about Noah for your school, university, or organization. You can reach out to us on sophia@heynoah.ai
Disclaimer: The images used in this article are either AI-generated or sourced from Pinterest for illustrative purposes only and do not depict the actual individuals mentioned in the story. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of our users.
