Tide: Breathwork and Sleep

Tide is a breathing timer that opens ready to go, and lets you set anything you like.

Resonance — even in, even out, no holding. The calm baseline.
4-7-8 — in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. A strong downshift.
Box — equal on all four sides. Steady and level.
Extended exhale — out for longer than in.
Wim Hof — thirty deep breaths, then holding on a full one, over several rounds.
Sit — nothing paced and nothing counted, for when you want no instruction.

YOUR OWN PATTERN

Set the inhale, the hold, the exhale and the second hold to any whole number of seconds you want, and it becomes a protocol like any other — same figure, same tone, same timer. Several of the best-known apps put their breathing patterns behind a subscription. These are decades-old public techniques with numbers for names. Nothing here is behind anything.

WIM HOF, HANDLED PROPERLY

Most breathing apps stop at box and 4-7-8. Tide includes the Wim Hof method, and puts a safety note in front of it that you have to read: never in or near water, never while driving, sit or lie down first, stop whenever you want. It says plainly that the breathing will probably make you light-headed and tingly, and that some people faint. If you are pregnant, or have a heart condition, epilepsy or high blood pressure, it tells you to speak to a doctor.

WHAT EACH ONE DOES

A Practice tab explains the mechanism behind every protocol — why a long exhale does the work in 4-7-8, why around six breaths a minute is where heart rate and breath fall into step. It describes what happens physiologically. It does not promise you an outcome, because nobody can.

THE FIGURE

You follow a figure of nine strata of light that rises as you breathe in and settles as you breathe out — not another expanding circle. You can run a session with your eyes shut and follow the sound alone.

SOUND

An optional guide tone marks each phase, and three field recordings can play underneath: rain, waves, and an open hearth. A struck singing bowl marks the couple of moments in a session that earn one. All are public-domain recordings, bundled with the app, with their provenance recorded in the app itself.

QUIET BY DESIGN

There is no streak to break, no notification telling you that you missed a session, and no library to work through. A session ends and closes rather than selling you the next one. Everything runs on the device, with no account and no connection required.