Breathing Zone: Breathwork

I bow to the makers of this app. They have designed Breathing Zone with all of the ideal considerations: choice of breathing pattern, rate and duration, a variety of pleasing colors (red is perfect for night use), sounds that are easy on the ear (for me, white noise is great for eyes-closed breathwork), a lovely visual … and all in an app that is very small memory-wise, so it doesn’t take up much space for people with smaller capacity phones. And it’s free! If that weren’t already good enough, the app makers were thoughtful enough not to collect private/personally identifying data, just the bare minimum to be able to see how the app is used and to make appropriate improvements. It’s also kept up to date, so you’re not downloading something that’s been abandoned years ago. Thank you, you are so kind to provide this gift for our health and well-being!

I’ve had this app on my phone for a long time. It’s been very helpful in times of need. The variety of sounds is exactly right. Commuting on the train the white noise or water really nullify the ambient sounds (with noise canceling headphones). There have been many occasions where the other sounds were helpful and welcome. I don’t use apps for meditation because I don’t want to regulate my breathing, just observe it. However, when stressed, super anxious or the chatter in my head is just too loud, this app is my go-to friend! I just finished reading “Breath” by James Nestor (recommend) and he puts forth a 5.5 second inhale/exhale as the optimum baseline for establishment of coherence and peak efficiency (oh yeah, and breathe through your nose). Needless to say, 5.5 BPM is simple to setup in this app. Every other app I’ve looked at clocks seconds without an option for increments. Anyway, if you are looking for a simple and functional timer with a very generous feature set (optional technicolor expanding flower included) mash the download button now (and breathe through your nose!)

I’ve been using this app for a week after comparing and test driving a few others. I really appreciate the way you can start at a number of breaths and then the app progressively adjusts to the desired number of breaths. However, it could be better. While I like how you can set your target number of breaths, the app is missing the ability to control how long it takes for you to get to that desired number of breaths. For example, if you’re doing a 20 minute session it would be nice to be able to set to have it slow down over the first 5 minutes... or 10... or whatever your preference is. As it is, I know it goes slower but I have no idea how long it takes, nor is it possible to see how many breaths you’re doing at any particular time, which beings me to... While the session screen is moderately cool with the pulsing orb thing, it’s kind of useless. More helpful would be an option for an easy to see (always on while using the app) display of how much time is left in your current session as well as the current breaths per minute. I’d like to be able to glance briefly at the screen and see how I’m doing and if I’m at my desired breath rate. Another minor complaint is that the app pauses very easily - by just touching the screen - which I’ve unintentionally done many times while in a session. A more deliberately styled pause button would be better. Not a bad app but these adjustments would make the app perfect for me and one that I would use much more personally and be able to recommend much more highly to others.