Last updated 20 October 2026
Hushhh is ten minutes of breathing with one real person, in silence. None of that is a guess. Each choice in the session rests on something that has been studied, and this page says what, in plain words, with the papers.
The orb breathes at the pace of the session: in for four, hold for one, out for five. That is ten seconds a breath, six breaths a minute. It is not a random calm number. Around six a minute, breathing falls into step with the slow rhythm of blood pressure (the baroreflex), and heart-rate variability, a sign of a nervous system that can settle, rises more than at any other pace.
In a randomised trial, fifteen minutes at this "resonance" rate raised heart-rate variability and lowered blood pressure compared with breathing slightly faster, and people reported better mood afterwards. Reviews of slow-breathing studies find the same pattern: calmer physiology, lower reported anxiety, and the effect starts within a single session.
The breath guide you hear is a recording of one person breathing this cycle, so you are matching a human rhythm, not a metronome. People given only a visual pacer tend to drift back toward their usual twelve breaths a minute; a sound you can follow with your eyes closed holds the pace.
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Hushhh puts one real person on the other half of your screen because people settle better together than alone. When two people share attention, their heart rhythms, breathing and skin conductance drift toward each other; researchers call it physiological synchrony, and it shows up between parents and infants, partners, friends, and strangers who have just met.
The presence of another person also changes how the brain handles threat. In a well-known experiment, people facing a mild electric shock showed less activity in threat-related brain regions when someone held their hand, even a stranger, and the effect was strongest with a trusted partner. The body treats company as safety.
This is also why the session asks nothing of you. You do not have to talk, perform or be interesting. You only have to be there, and so do they.
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Conversation is work: finding words, reading tone, deciding what to leave out. For someone already running on empty, that work is the reason they do not call a friend at 3 am. Hushhh removes it. The microphone is never on, and there is no chat.
What is left, a face and a shared rhythm, is enough. Mutual gaze on its own raises arousal and a sense of being seen, and a visible face is one of the strongest social signals the brain responds to. Research on music as a "social surrogate" finds that the mere sense of another person being present reduces loneliness; in Hushhh the other person is not a surrogate, they are real.
Loneliness is not a mood to be talked out of. Large reviews link persistent loneliness to measurably worse health, on a scale comparable to well-known physical risk factors. A quiet, repeatable way to not be alone for ten minutes is a small thing aimed at a large problem.
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Most people who stop meditating stop because the practice asked too much: twenty minutes, every day, with a mind that would not clear. Short, bounded sessions get done. In one study, thirteen minutes a day of a simple practice, kept up for eight weeks, improved attention, memory and mood in people who had never meditated before.
A session that ends on its own also removes a decision. You do not have to judge whether you have done enough; the orb and the timer decide, and then the soft landing lets you leave when you are ready.
For people with ADHD, the two things the community most often says help are external structure and someone doing the thing alongside them, a practice they call body doubling. Early research with neurodivergent participants describes body doubling as real and widely used, but the formal evidence is still young; we describe it as what it is, a practice people find useful, not a treatment.
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The beds under a session are natural sounds, water first of all, or low brown noise, and each is levelled to sit under the breath rather than over it. A review of thirty-six studies found natural sounds lower stress and improve mood against urban noise or silence, with water the most consistent and birdsong the strongest single effect. Listening to natural rather than artificial sound also shifts the brain toward an outward, resting mode of attention.
There is no sudden sound anywhere in a session, because a startle undoes minutes of settling. And since people respond best to a sound they chose themselves, you can pick one, or let the app choose and tell us, through how long you stay, which ones work.
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We do not measure your body. Hushhh records only how long each session lasted, whether it ended on its own or early, the feeling you picked, and the hearts you sent and received. Those numbers tell us whether ten minutes is the right length and which sounds people stay with; they are the whole of our analytics.
If you want to know whether it works for you, the honest test is the one you already have: how you feel when the soft landing appears, and whether you come back tomorrow.
Hushhh is not therapy, not a medical device, and not a treatment for anxiety, depression, ADHD or anything else. The research above is about breathing, company and sound in general; it is not research on Hushhh, and no study has yet measured Hushhh itself. Ten quiet minutes with someone can make a hard night easier. It cannot replace care.
If you are in crisis, please reach a person who can help right now: in India, Tele-MANAS on 14416 (free, 24×7); in the UK, Samaritans on 116 123; in the US and Canada, 988. Hushhh will still be here afterwards.
Hushhh · Why it works · Privacy · Google Play