About
The Somatic app is a consumer mobile app, built by an independent founder-led team, for adults who already know what HRV is and are tired of being told their stress is "high" without being told what to do about it. We built Somatic on a single conviction: a nervous-system regulation tool earns the right to be on your phone only if it can measure what it's doing — pre/post on every session, against your own rolling personal baseline, with validated PSS-10 and GAD-7 deltas to prove the trend over weeks. Somatic (the app) is unaffiliated with Somatic Experiencing International, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, HeartMath, or any clinical-therapy organization; it is not therapy and does not replace clinical care.
This is the app I wanted three years and five subscriptions ago.
Why this exists
I've used Calm. Headspace. Othership. A breathing app whose name I've already forgotten. I tracked HRV on my watch every morning. I had a HeartMath clip in a drawer for a while.
After all of it, I couldn't honestly answer one question: was any of this actually changing my nervous system, or did I just feel marginally better some weeks and worse on others?
The category gave me content. It gave me numbers. It did not give me a way to tell which practice — for my body, on this week — was doing anything. The wearable handed me an HRV number with no instruction. The meditation apps were beautiful and unmeasured. The hardware sensor drew coherence graphs I couldn't connect to anything in my actual life. After enough cycles, the suspicion lands: maybe nothing works for me, and I can't tell.
That's the gap Somatic was built to close.
Not by inventing a new technique. The techniques that work — slow-paced breathing, HRV biofeedback, extended-exhale, grounding, gentle somatic movement — already exist and have real evidence behind them. The gap was a measurement loop honest enough to show you which ones do anything for you, this week, in your own physiology.
That's what Somatic is. A scan. A matched practice. A pre/post delta in your own data. A validated stress score plotted over the weeks. The loop. That's the whole product.
What we will not do
Some explicit choices:
The polyvagal model's specific predictions are under sustained scientific challenge. We don't build the product, the copy, or the protocol library on a frame that may not hold. We frame everything as measurable regulation skills with observed effects on your data.
That word belongs to a competitor's framework and carries claims we can't verify. We won't borrow it.
The term "vagus nerve stimulation" properly describes electrical taVNS hardware in clinical settings. Humming and cold showers may be helpful. They aren't clinical vagus nerve stimulation. We don't pretend they are.
Your phone is enough. There is no $159 sensor to buy and no $349 wearable required. Apple HealthKit read is on the roadmap so if your existing wearable already tracks HRV, that data feeds in.
Somatic isn't a medical device. It doesn't diagnose. It doesn't treat. It doesn't replace therapy or clinical care. If you're in crisis, the app surfaces hotline information immediately — not a coaching script. The line between a regulation app and a clinical tool is one we respect.
We're not optimizing for session minutes or daily streaks. This is a health behavior, not Candy Crush. Five minutes a day that move your numbers is the goal. Forty-five minutes that feel nice and don't change anything isn't.
The promise
Every reading is shown against your own rolling baseline, with a confidence band, never as an absolute verdict. Every scan runs a quality gate — bad signal gets rejected, not smoothed into a clean lie. We tell you which metrics camera PPG can measure well and which it can't, and we only show you the ones it can.
PSS-10 and GAD-7 — validated, decades-used self-report instruments — re-administered every 7–14 days. Your line moves or it doesn't. You see it. We don't grade ourselves on session minutes; we grade ourselves on whether your validated stress score is going down over the weeks.
That's the contract. The rest is execution.
If the pitch lands, the only way to test it is to run the loop on yourself for a couple of weeks.