Nobody notices their own spiral
By the time you feel anxious enough to act, your body has already been struggling for fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Madhya is a small worn clip that catches that gap — and closes it.
If you're a student who knows what to do but freezes the moment it actually matters — we built this for you.
You've heard the advice. You know what a breathing exercise is. But when the spiral actually starts, that knowledge disappears and the hour is already gone to a phone. Madhya is built for exactly that gap — the moment between knowing and doing.
Your breathing and micro-movement change before you're consciously aware you're struggling. Conscious awareness of stress and anxiety typically lags 15 to 25 minutes behind physiological onset — Madhya uses that gap to reclaim your time when you need it most.
how far behind your own body conscious stress-awareness lags, on average
Iqbal et al., "Stress Monitoring Using Wearable Sensors: A Pilot Study and Stress-Predict Dataset," Sensors 22(21):8135, 2022 (University of Galway) — wrist-worn accelerometer and PPG tracked respiratory and motion signals through an induced hyperventilation session.
An inertial sensor and a small mic sit close to your chest, quietly reading breathing and micro-movement. An on-device classifier sorts every five-second window into calm, focused, or escalating; nothing leaves the clip.
We read breathing because it's voluntary: you can consciously control it to calm yourself, unlike heart rate. On escalation, Madhya delivers a low-frequency haptic rumble: not audible to anyone nearby, felt only by you.
Umair, Sas, Chalabianloo & Ersoy, ACM DIS '21: low-frequency haptic actuation (≤30bpm) lowered self-reported and physiological (HRV) anxiety during induced stress, 23 participants.
Breathe with the haptic motor: four seconds in, six seconds out, close to six breaths a minute, the pace research shows calms the nervous system fastest. Or say "Hey Madhya" and talk it through for one to three minutes instead.
Steffen, Austin, DeBarros & Brown, Frontiers in Public Health 5:222, 2017: paced breathing near 6 breaths/minute maximizes HRV, the physiological marker of a calmed nervous system.
Every episode is logged and every talk session transcribed, free. Pattern history across weeks, natural-language summaries of your spirals, and secure export to Notion or BetterHelp are part of the paid tier. Your raw body data never leaves the device.
The part that catches your spiral is free forever.
- Episode logs — when it happened, how long it lasted
- On-app breathing exercise, no spiral required
- Manual mode — open it any time
- Adjustable haptic intensity and breathing pace
- Personal baseline calibrated over your first week, including neurodivergent patterns
- Talk sessions transcribed into natural-language summaries
- Concrete next steps generated from each summary
- Pattern history across weeks — when spirals cluster, what triggers them
- Daily and weekly voice-journaling check-ins
- Export to Notion, or share approved snippets to BetterHelp
We're opening a small beta group.
Want in?
You'll only hear from us when there's something real to try.