About

My name is M. Abubakar. There is no company behind this site, no team and no investors — it is one person and a web page.

Why I made it

Learning to breathe properly changed things for me. I want to be careful about how I say that, because one person’s experience is not evidence and it does not tell you what will happen to you. But it mattered enough that I kept circling back to the same question: why did nobody ever tell me about this?

That is the part I still find strange. You breathe somewhere around twenty thousand times a day. It is the one part of your nervous system you can take the controls of whenever you want. It costs nothing, it needs no equipment, it is available in a meeting, on a bus, at three in the morning — and almost nobody is ever shown what happens when you slow it down on purpose.

Most people I have mentioned it to had simply never tried it. Not tried it and decided it was not for them — never tried it at all. That gap is the entire reason this site exists.

Why it is free

Because it should be. Breathing has been free for the whole of human history and it seems absurd to put it behind a subscription, a sign-up form, or a fourteen-day trial that asks for a card.

So there is no account, no login, no email capture and no paid tier. You open the page and you breathe. If you never come back, that is fine — you have lost nothing and neither have I.

The site is paid for by advertising on the article and guide pages, and on the screen after a session ends. Never during the breathing itself, never as a pop-up, and never as something you have to dismiss before you can start. If an ad ever gets in the way of the actual exercise, that is a bug and I would like to know about it.

What I am not

I am not a doctor, a physiotherapist, a psychologist or a breathing coach. I have no clinical qualifications whatsoever, and nothing on this site has been reviewed by anyone who does.

I would rather say that plainly than let the design imply otherwise. Plenty of wellness sites are vague about who wrote them precisely so you will assume someone qualified did. You should read everything here knowing that a layman wrote it, carefully, from published research — and check anything that matters with someone who can actually assess you.

How I write it, and how I check it

• Explanations are written for a general audience from published research and from standard teaching in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, physiotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy.
• Where a claim rests on specific research, that research is cited by author, year and journal so you can go and read it yourself. Every citation has been checked against the journal or PubMed record.
• Every technique page has a “what the evidence says” section that is honest when the evidence is thin — including for the two most famous techniques on the site.
• Guides carry the date they were last gone over. When something changes, so does the date.

If something here is wrong, out of date, or overstates what a study found, I would genuinely rather know. Tell me and I will fix it rather than argue about it.

What I will not claim

It would be easy — and much better for search traffic — to write that breathing cures anxiety, fixes insomnia or lowers your blood pressure. Plenty of sites do. I will not, because it is not true, and because overpromising in health writing does real harm to people making decisions about their care.

You will not find any of this here:

• Claims that breathing exercises treat or cure any condition.
• Testimonials, reviews, user counts, awards or press mentions — there are none.
• Invented experts, fabricated credentials or borrowed medical authority.
• Statistics without a source you can check.
• Any suggestion that this replaces treatment a clinician has recommended, or a reason to delay getting help.

The medical disclaimer is not boilerplate — it lists the specific situations where you should talk to someone before trying certain techniques.

Who I made it for

• Anyone with an ordinary stressful job who wants three minutes at their desk without installing anything or explaining themselves.
• People who cannot use a visual-first app — screen reader users, keyboard-only users, anyone who finds movement uncomfortable. “Close your eyes and relax” is advice most breathing apps quietly contradict by requiring you to watch them. This one does not: every cue is on screen, spoken aloud and played as a tone at the same moment, and any one of the three is enough on its own.
• People lying awake at 3am who want something to follow that will not light up the room.
• Clinicians, teachers and employers who need something free they can point at without a procurement process. There is a page for that.

How it works, briefly

Every session is worked out in advance as a single timeline, and the circle, the voice, the tones, the vibration and the screen reader announcements all come off the same clock — so they cannot drift apart. All the audio is generated in your browser rather than downloaded, which is why it works on a slow connection and costs almost nothing to run. How it works has the detail.

The research I leaned on

Starting points for your own reading, not a systematic review. None of these authors are connected with this site in any way.

• Balban MY, Neri E, Kogon MM, et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal — Cell Reports Medicine.
• Zaccaro A, Piarulli A, Laurino M, et al. (2018). How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing — Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
• Lehrer PM, Gevirtz R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work? — Frontiers in Psychology.
• Ma X, Yue ZQ, Gong ZQ, et al. (2017). The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults — Frontiers in Psychology.
• Holland AE, Hill CJ, Jones AY, McDonald CF. (2012). Breathing exercises for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

Get in touch

Corrections, accessibility problems, clinical or workplace use, or anything about the ads and privacy — email me. It goes to a person, not a ticketing system.

Written by M. Abubakar. Not medically reviewed.