No Sensor Needed
Stress Detection
The app sees whether your nervous system stayed calm or tensed during the practice, and it reads that from your first full breath after each breath-hold, with nothing to wear and nothing to charge.
What The App Sees
Every breathing exercise moves your nervous system. A breath-hold that stayed within range leaves it calm. A breath-hold that went too far sets off a stress response: quicker breathing and a rush of stress hormones. The app reads which of the two just happened, and it reads it from the first full breath after the main breath-hold.
After a comfortable breath-hold, the first full breath is naturally slower and softer. After a breath-hold that pushed too far, it becomes faster and rougher. The app measures how soft and slow the first full breath was and turns it into a quality score that indicates your stress level for the round.
Nothing To Wear
The exercise does not require you to wear any straps, bands or clips. The signal the app needs is already in the breath it is guiding you through, so there is nothing extra to put on and nothing to charge.
Most ways of measuring your nervous system need a device against your skin. This one does not, because the app is already measuring the breath itself. You run the exercise, it reads the first full breath after each breath-hold, and shows how relaxed you stayed at the end of the round.
Tension You Would Not Notice
Intense breathing exercises can create tension without you noticing. You can still feel calm and in control while your nervous system is already reacting, because it reacts before the thinking mind knows anything has changed. By the time you would feel it, the round is over.
A breath-hold is intentional, governed by the intellect, the thinking mind: you decide to hold and for how long. So it is easy for the intellect to take over, while the instinct is only there to respond to what the intellect set in motion. The intellect also likes numbers. It watches the count and wants to reach a target, so sometimes you push the breath-hold to hit a certain number. In that moment the intellect is choosing the number over the experience, over the stress and intensity it actually carried. The score of the first full breath shows how your nervous system responded to the breath-hold.
The One Signal You Can Act On
Your breath works like an airplane. Almost all the time it flies on autopilot: your instinct breathes for you on its own, day and night, without a thought. But you can also take the controls and breathe the way you want, slower, longer, softer.
Your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your stress hormones have no such manual control. They only run on autopilot, and no decision of yours can change them. A wrist tracker shows you those numbers, which are worth having, but it cannot hand you the controls.
The breath is the one function you can fly by hand. So instead of watching a number and hoping it changes, you change your breath, and your nervous system follows.
Force the breath too hard, though, and you end up fighting your own autopilot. On a plane that fight causes accidents, and in your body it is what the app reads in your first full breath.
You See It In Real Time
The app does the interpreting for you. After each round it shows a color: green when your nervous system stayed calm, orange or red when it tensed. These are the breath training zones, the same idea as heart rate zones, but for your breath.
The color appears round by round, while you practice, so you can act on it straight away. If a round comes back orange, you have the answer before the next breath-hold: ease off a little. You are never guessing whether you did it right, and you never have to wait until afterward to find out.
Where The Reading Comes From
The reading depends on how the instinct and the intellect share control of the breath, how a single breath turns into a score, and how breathing rate and volume shift under tension, each covered in full elsewhere.
How the instinct and the intellect share control of the breath
Exactly how that single breath is scored
Reading about it only takes you so far. To really understand it and experience it, download the app and do the exercise yourself.