At a glance
Coherent breathing, without setup.
Breath: Coherence by FromNow.ai is a free, offline coherent breathing timer for iPhone. It guides either a 5- or 20-minute session at about 5.5 breaths a minute. There is no account, analytics, advertising, third-party SDK, or network connection. With permission, completed sessions are written to Apple Health as Mindful Sessions; the app never reads Health data.
Follow
The sound keeps the time.
Tap once and the screen fades to black while the session runs on. Eyes shut, or the phone face down.
Return
It counts in weeks.
Six weeks of dots. What the HRV research follows is sustained practice across weeks, so the record exists to make the weeks visible. Every session writes to Apple Health as a Mindful Session, and then it leaves you alone.
The eleven seconds
One breath every eleven seconds, and the heart begins to swing with the lungs.
Your heart rate already rises and falls with every breath you take. Breathe at about one cycle every eleven seconds — five and a half breaths a minute, roughly 0.09 Hz — and each breath lands in time with a rhythm the body already has, the way a push lands in time with a swing. The swing in heart rate reaches its widest right there. That much is measurable, and it is why paced breathing at this frequency underlies HRV biofeedback. Whether it produces lasting change is a separate and less settled question. Breath keeps the rhythm and leaves that open.
Lehrer & Gevirtz, Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work? — Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
Why it exists
I built it for myself.
Two months of the same practice, run off two audio files — hunting through a file browser every night, never sure whether I had done it. The app does exactly that much and stops. Published in case it is yours too.
- Sessions
- Two guided tracks
One short, one long - Rhythm
- 11-second cycle
≈ 5.5 breaths a minute - Platform
- iPhone
iOS 26 or later - Price
- Free
No subscription - Health
- Writes Mindful Sessions
Never reads your data - Privacy
- No account, no analytics
No network requests at all