Paul giving a session

PaulsRobot3: Home

My dream is that you use free Rub & Yawn stress-release procedures today and in the future to improve your life — Paul

Radical innovation

PaulsRobot is revolutionary, both in form and function. That it is radically different is apparent upon even a cursory inspection. The key point, though, is not how odd it is but
Does it work?

Most people looking at PaulsRobot for the first time — even counselling professionals — will find its parts very unfamiliar. They will tend to reject it for that reason alone without even trying it out. The various new approaches and procedures have been included not because they are new, but simply because they work. If incorporating things that are more familiar had worked better, or even worked as well, then that is what would have been done.

Stress release

These PaulsRobot pages downloaded to your own computer will deliver a fully-personalized stress-release session to you from a large variety of possible choices whenever you want one. Stress Management is where you learn to live with it. Stress Release is where you get rid of it.

Normal people

PaulsRobot is designed to be used by a layman, someone who can understand and follow the instructions, with no specialised prior training or experience needed. It is not aimed at clinical cases or the dysfunctional, although pretty much anyone can learn to use the simple, language-free Rub & Yawn procedure that is part of most of the modules here and seems to be effective in many cases.

Practitioner/client

PaulsRobot acts as the practitioner or coach and you are the client. There is no routine need for another person to be involved in the sessions, although you are very welcome to discuss it with your associates or friends. Who (without ever having tried it out) will probably tell you it's impossible or a joke and to stay away!

Sample session

If you are connected to the internet, here is a fairly realistic example of a short Core Rub & Yawn session. Someone commented that the yawning was a bit much, but, well, that's how a stress-release session is supposed to go. There is more background information at the Rub & Yawn link in the navigation bar at the top of the page.

Browser compatibility

In order for the session sound to work properly, all 4000+ PaulsRobot3 pages here are HTML5- and CSS3-compliant. Which means they won't work properly with older browsers but should be good for decades into the future.

The sound in the session pages will not work on a mobile device where background sound has been disabled by default. It should work fine on a desktop or laptop unless you are using a weird/old browser.

What to do next?

First put PaulsRobot3 on your computer per the instructions below. Then read from the general pages tabbed across the top here. Once you are familiar with the Rub & Yawn procedure you can have yourself a session, personalized to exactly what is bugging you the most. This means what it says. You choose the exact topic for yourself, maybe My abusive Uncle David. You can have as many free sessions as you want, addressing exactly which topics you want, when you want, using many different clearly-explained methods.

Adding PaulsRobot3 to your computer

  1. Point your browser at http://paulsrobot3.com/1st/downloads.htm. If you are online already, just click on the "Downloads" link in the navigation bar across the top of this page.
  2. Reload or refresh the page to ensure you have the latest version of it. Then click on the link for the "AllToDate" zip file containing the latest available version of PaulsRobot3.
  3. Download the zip file. It will be about 350 MB in size. There are no executable programs there, just web pages, mp3 files, image files, text files, and a spreadsheet (in two common formats) showing all the 7950+ files in PaulsRobot3.
  4. Unzip the file, and you're done. This page you are looking at is called "index" or "index.htm." Click on it and away you go.

US Army trying interactive automated online counselling?

See this April 20, 2012 online Wired article, Darpa to Troubled Soldiers: Meet Your New Simulated Therapist and accompanying video:

Maybe the idea of interactive automated online counselling is finally coming into its own.

No, no, we're not!

The guy running the SimCoach project says underneath that video that, "I agree 1000%. This is a supplement, not a replacement" in response to a comment that, "I just hope that it's NOT going to be used INSTEAD of offering an appointment with a real human being, ie a trained professional counselor/therapist."

Radical innovation

Hopefully he will be open to some "radical innovation," DARPA's only charter per a 2008 statement from its director, and will eventually see from his own experience that effective counselling can be achieved in an automated fashion, if it is skillfully programmed and packaged. The PR hurdles are far harder to overcome than the programming ones.

Humanitarian aim

DARPA's work seems to revolve around helping one group of humans harm other groups of humans more efficiently. PaulsRobot is aimed above national rivalries and will remain for the benefit of anyone able to use it.

Two aspects to stress

  1. The real-life situations, people and events that can be pressing in on you. Things like sour relationships, bad health, demands for money that you don't have, or an unpleasant environment at home, school or work.
  2. Your reactions to these stressors. These will include past reactions to events that are no longer present, what some people call baggage.

PaulsRobot sessions address (2). If you discharge a ton of stress associated with an abusive childhood this will not change the past, but you should be able to look at those memories without feeling the hurt again.

You may not be able to get a new boss at work, but if you can permanently get rid of the baggage associated with a lifetime of bad working environments you are likely to find your current environment at work much easier to tolerate.

Can a Robot do effective counselling?

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak. The idea tends to be so outlandish that few people would think the possibility even worth considering. But there are more factors than might come to mind at first. One significant point is that only a minority of the PaulsRobot procedures are of the "talk therapy" variety, and the majority depend for their effectiveness on more sophisticated procedures.

There is a chart of 17 discussion topics (FAQ2 in the navigation bar at the top of the page) entitled Software versus Wetware, covering such topics as cost, availability, effectiveness, confidentiality, and social acceptability (i.e. will anyone find out that you are seeking "therapy"?).

The chart compares PaulsRobot with not only a professional (human) counsellor, but also friends and family. Friends and family are usually the first port of call when looking for someone to tell one's troubles to, not a trained counsellor.

Proven success

PaulsRobot has been online since August 5, 2006. There are over 100 PaulsRobot/Rub & Yawn testimonials that you can read online or read here.

Mobile-friendly PaulsRobot site now available

There is now a responsive PaulsRobot site that delivers sessions in two versions: audio/desktop or silent/mobile. The site will automatically detect the width of the browser window in use and adjust accordingly to improve readability.

The session makes use of three Rub & Yawn procedures: Reach & Withdraw on a topic, 6-Direction and Rogerian. One can switch among these at any time during the session.

All free of charge and available 24/7 as usual.

PaulsRobot eBooks at PaulsRabbit

PaulsRobot procedures are being released in free eBook form (EPUB, MOBI [Kindle] and PDF formats), available at PaulsRabbit.com. As of 2016-01-31 Vol 1: Trio is available. Next will be Vol 2: HeavyDuty. These eBooks preserve the functionality of PaulsRobot as much as possible in that one can select links to navigate between the session pages as usual, but there is no audio.