Ten minutes of guided breath, wound down to your evening — no streaks, no scores, nothing to keep up with. Just the slow part of the night, kept slow.
DRIFT is a fictional app built as a MotionForge demo
The library
A technique is only a shape you give the breath — longer out than in, or the whole way round and back. The bars below are running the real counts, at the real speed, so you can watch a rhythm before you give ten minutes to it. Sit with each one for a few seconds. One of them will feel obvious.
4 · 7 · 8
In for four, held for seven, out for eight. The long exhale is the part doing the work — it is the signal the body reads as nothing is coming. Nineteen seconds a round, a little over three rounds a minute.
Box
Four counts on every side — in, hold, out, then hold at empty. The evenness is the whole idea: nothing to anticipate, nothing to brace for. The fourth side, the pause with nothing in you, is the one people are surprised by.
Coherent
Five and a half seconds in, five and a half out, no holds at all — about five and a half breaths a minute. That is roughly where the breath and the heartbeat start keeping time with one another. Nobody standing next to you can tell.
What it does
We spent six weeks with 240 people and a sleep clinic in Ghent. Here is what moved, by how much, and the part we are not going to pretend about.
Time to fall asleep
34→19min
Median across the group, weeks four to six, self-reported. It moved furthest for people who were already in bed and already tired — which is, to be fair, exactly when we ask you to open it.
Heart rate, mid-session
68→60bpm
Inside a single sitting, by the fourth round of 4 · 7 · 8. It goes back up the moment you stand — that is fine. Nobody is asking you to keep it there.
What it will not fix
Not everything.
Breath work is a way into sleep, not a treatment for insomnia. If you have been awake for months, please talk to someone who can actually help — and keep this for the nights in between.
And there is nothing here to keep up with. We do not count your nights, there is no streak to break, and the app has no idea whether you came back. Skip a month; the fourth night will work exactly like the first.
Tonight
Pick a length. After the first round the screen dims to almost nothing, so the phone can go face-down on the covers and you can just follow the voice.
About 31 rounds of 4 · 7 · 8. Start now and the lamp is off by —.
Free while it is in beta. No account, no email, and it will never send you a notification — that would rather defeat the point.