What we are building, what we are not, and why

We are building a breathwork app. That is a pretty unassuming description.

And it understates the fact that the market for breathwork apps is crowded. Calm, Headspace, Othership, Breathwrk, Breathpod, Lungy. The list has grown longer than we want to recite.

We know most of these apps. We have tried them, we have watched our children play with them, we have filled out score quizzes and wondered why a breathwork app is giving us multiple-choice questions. And we have thought about what we are missing in all of that.

This piece is the attempt to write it down. Not as advertising, but as a statement of position. We are not claiming to be the only path. We just want to say which path we are on, and why.

Five anchors

We have committed to five sentences that we hold on to when we need to make a decision.

That sounds dry at first. But each of these sentences has a counterpart in the market, and that is precisely why they are where they are.

Low-stimulus

Most breathwork apps look like slot machines. Pulsing orbs, animated galaxies, confetti when you hold your breath. Some of this work is genuinely impressive. We have seen apps where the breath-reactive rendering is better than in many games.

The problem is not the craft. The problem is the logic. A breathing exercise that pulls your attention outward, onto a screen, onto an animation, onto a score, works against what we think it should do. That mechanic functions as entertainment and creates attachment to the app, and at the same time it is part of the answer to the question of why breathwork apps often do not help.

Breath is your experience, your perception. The more you are pulled outward, the less you learn about the unique interplay between your Gestalt and your breath. The path should lead inward, not outward.

We build accordingly, in the other direction. Cream background, serif headlines, no confetti, no pulsing orbs. A quiet center that you can carry in your pocket without it shouting at you when you open it.

Anatomically grounded

We are GPs, intensivists, and emergency physicians. That means we have an unusual view on breath, because we have patients to whom we cannot recommend an exercise that might harm them. We have patients with COPD, patients with panic disorders, patients with hyperventilation tendencies, patients after pulmonary embolism, traumatised patients, patients with cardiac disease. A breathing technique that works for a healthy 28-year-old can be a bad idea for a 62-year-old with emphysema.

That is why we check every technique against the anatomy and physiology we know. We use resonance breathing at roughly five breaths per minute, because that is the frequency at which HRV and RSA come into phase for most people. We vary that individually, because breathing frequency scales with body size, age, and lung capacity.

Evidence-based

This is delicate territory, because it is also a term that manufacturers of vibration mattresses use.

What we mean by it: we build on studies that we have read and understood. We do our best to keep the methodology of the app as close to that literature as possible.

We are wary of proprietary scores in the breathwork space. A number between 0 and 100, produced by four tap tests and eight questions, is not necessarily science. Sometimes it is, often it is not. We would rather make our methodology transparent before we start waving a number of our own. A first overview of the studies we lean on is on our methodology page.

We measure. You decide.

Many apps in our category lead you. They tell you what to breathe, how long, with which animation. Some ask you in advance how you feel and then adapt the program. Both approaches take part of the decision away from you.

We take a different path. We measure what happens when you breathe: frequency, depth, rhythm, the I:E ratio from the microphone, HRV and RSA from Apple Watch, HealthKit, or a BLE chest strap. We show you those values and what they mean. What you do with them is up to you. The app is meant as a tool for you, not as entertainment.

The asymmetry is deliberate. It probably costs us conversion, because apps that give you instructions feel more helpful at first. But it protects your autonomy.

Attention inward

The last anchor is also the test for all the others. With every design decision, we ask: does this turn attention inward or outward?

A pulsing orb: outward. A score number that counts up: outward. A push-notification streak: outward. A quiet, almost invisible indicator of your own heart-breath coherence while your eyes are closed: inward.

We do not always pass this test. Sometimes a feature ends up in the app that we later remove, because it reinforces the wrong direction. That is part of the work.

Opening a category, not claiming one

We have a working term for what we are doing: Silent Biofeedback. Silent here not in the acoustic sense — the app has breath sounds and sometimes music. Silent in the sense of: no intrusive prompt, no animation, no instruction.

We know that "opening a category" sounds like marketing. We mean it modestly. We are not claiming to be the only app of this kind. We are only claiming that there is space for an app that works this way, and that we are trying to fill that space as well as we can.

If you are looking for an app that entertains you, we are not for you, and there are very good apps for exactly that. If you are looking for an app that gives you a number to measure yourself against, there are good addresses for that too. If you are looking for an app that measures, shows you what it measures, and then steps back, then we may be what you are looking for.

What comes next

We launch on May 26th. The closed tests are running until then. If you want to follow along, find us on Instagram. We will keep writing here about each of the anchors, with more detail on methodology: which studies we draw on, how our microphone algorithm works, where its limits are. And how we plan to clinically validate our approach.

We welcome disagreement. If you are a respiratory therapist and something here reads wrong to you, write to us. If you build breath tech and do not share our anchors, that is fine too. The market is large enough for several paths.

"shii… haa."