Show HN: Apple Watch app with haptic-guided breathing to help you meditate
apps.apple.comI've been interested in meditation for many years now. Worked at meditation startups, have done Vipassana 10 day retreats. I've been able to get into some pretty deep meditation sessions and those have always been nice for me. But for whatever reason, it always felt like playing the slot machine for me. I could never consistently get into the space.
Meditation kind of would come and go in my life.
Anyways, I stumbled across this guy on Youtube talking about HRV resonance meditation (i'll link him below, but i'm not affiliated). He talked about reaching this meditative state as being a back-loaded process which kind of clicked to me. A mental state that arises by preparing the physical body in a certain way. At the least, this was intriguing to me.
His method was pretty simple:
1. Keep the breath rate under 7 breaths per minute (BPM)
2. Always Make the Outbreath Longer (AMOL)
3. Take out all the pauses between breaths
What this does is induce something called HRV resonance, where your heart rate begins to naturally sync with your breathing rhythm. This balanced pattern helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which brings your body into a calm “low-idle” state. Once you're there, mental clarity and stillness tend to arise on their own, hence, back-loaded.
So I was trying it out and had some good luck but wanted a better way to play around with the BPM and in/out ratio of my breaths. I had an idea of making a Apple watch app that used haptic feedback to indicate when to breath with a nice bodily sensation you can pay attention too.
So it's pretty simple, you can pick the in/out and BPM and then it will give one haptic indicating to breath in and 2 when you can release and start breathing out.
Id love for feedback and curious if anyone else has success with this method.
* No subscription (just a small one time fee, if you want to try it but can't pay lmk)
* I'm not overly happy with the "Smart Mode" so any feedback would be great. I think it would be cool to make it so you can hook it up to a HR chest strap to get HRV and react in real time. For now its pretty dumb (and written by Claude Code)
* I'm still new to this but do plan on doing some experimenting with my chest strap
* I'm not a doctor ;p
For more details: Forrest YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCGxan273w You can also look up his Mastering Meditation book