Game
Exhale
Hold the circle while it grows — that’s the inhale. Let go — the exhale. One, two or three minutes to shift your state here and now.
The tone rises as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out. Off by default.
Keyboard: hold Space to breathe in, release to breathe out.
Why breathing
In a randomised trial, 108 adults did 5 minutes of breathing exercises or meditation every day for a month. Cyclic sighing improved mood and lowered breathing rate more than meditation did.
Source: Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal (opens in a new tab) — Cell Reports Medicine (Balban et al.), 2023Slow breathing means fewer than 10 breaths a minute. “Even” has 6, “Double inhale” also 6, “Box” fewer than 4.
Source: How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing (opens in a new tab) — Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Zaccaro et al.), 2018A meta-analysis of 223 studies: slow breathing raises heart rate variability during the practice and right after it.
Source: Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis (opens in a new tab) — Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (Laborde et al.), 2022A meta-analysis of 12 randomised trials (785 participants): after breathwork, stress is lower than in control groups. The effect is small to medium.
Source: Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials (opens in a new tab) — Scientific Reports (Fincham et al.), 2023
What the game leaves out
Hyperventilation and long holds: holds are 4 seconds at most. Playing in water: hyperventilating before going under and holding one’s breath underwater are described as causes of blackouts and drownings.
Source: Fatal and nonfatal drowning outcomes related to dangerous underwater breath-holding behaviors - New York State, 1988-2011 (opens in a new tab) — MMWR, CDC (Boyd et al.), 2015How rhythm is scored
The game compares your press with the guide: hold during the inhale and hold, release during the exhale and rest. Half a second around each change is not counted — that is reaction time. The result is the geometric mean of two shares: “holding when needed” and “letting go when needed”.
The game makes one promise — a shift of state here and now. It is not a treatment and not a substitute for a specialist’s advice.