About

About Breathing Room

A free, private collection of short exercises for calming the body and settling the mind.

What this is

Breathing Room brings together simple, well-known techniques that therapists, counselors, teachers and parents use every day: slow breathing, grounding, muscle relaxation, guided imagery and more. Each one has a gentle visual or a step-by-step guide, sensible default timings and settings you can change.

It exists so that anyone, including people working with a therapist, can use these tools without paying for an app or creating an account.

Install it on your phone

Once installed, Breathing Room opens like an app and works offline, even with no signal.

iPhone or iPad

1. Open this site in Safari.
2. Tap the Share button, the square with an arrow pointing up.
3. Scroll down, tap Add to Home Screen, then tap Add.

Android

1. Open this site in Chrome.
2. Tap the menu, the three dots in the top corner.
3. Tap Install app or Add to Home screen, then confirm.

Computer

In Chrome or Edge, click the install icon at the right end of the address bar.

Background music downloads the first time you play a track. After that, that track works offline too.

Your privacy

• No accounts, no sign-up and no email address.
• No ads, no analytics, no cookies and no tracking.
• Your settings, like timings, sounds and music, are saved in your browser on this device only. They are never sent anywhere.
• Anything you type into an exercise, like a thought on a leaf, is never stored or sent. The one exception is the cue word on the Calm place page, which stays on your device only if you choose to keep it.
• Spoken cues use your device’s own built-in voice.

This is not medical care

These exercises can help with everyday stress and anxiety, but they are not a substitute for professional care, diagnosis or treatment. If an exercise makes you feel worse, stop and try something else. If you have a heart or lung condition, or are pregnant, check with your doctor before practicing breath holds.

Where these techniques come from

• Box breathing: a simple equal-count breath, widely taught to people in high-pressure jobs.
• 4-7-8 breathing: popularized by Dr. Andrew Weil, drawing on yogic breathing (pranayama).
• Coherent breathing: slow breathing at about six breaths a minute, studied in heart rate variability research.
• 5-4-3-2-1 grounding: a common sensory grounding technique in anxiety and trauma care.
• Body scan: a core practice of mindfulness programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
• Progressive muscle relaxation: developed by physician Edmund Jacobson in the early twentieth century.
• Butterfly hug: developed by therapist Lucina Artigas and colleagues in the late 1990s.
• Leaves on a stream: a cognitive defusion exercise from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
• Loving-kindness: a traditional Buddhist meditation (metta), now widely taught in secular settings.
• Calm place: a guided imagery exercise used in many kinds of therapy.
• Dandelion, balloon, shape and candle breathing: playful pictures for slow breathing, popular with children and in classrooms.

Accessibility

Every exercise works with a keyboard (the space bar starts and pauses), announces each step to screen readers, and follows your device’s reduced motion and dark mode settings. Most exercises can read their cues aloud.

To prevent accidental zooming during an exercise, pinch-zoom is turned off on phones and tablets. If you need things larger, your phone’s built-in accessibility Zoom still works, as does your browser’s text size setting.

Credits

Breathing Room is made by Tiempo Software. Background music by AndriiG, Atlas Audio, Cinematic Soul and Velario Music. Sounds, illustrations and words are original to Breathing Room.