Loam

When we started building Loam, the most surprising thing wasn't how little research went into most meditation apps — it was how much research already existed that nobody was using. Decades of clinical trials on slow breathing, nervous-system regulation, self-compassion, and sleep behavior. Dozens of replicated findings. A handful of apps quoting them as marketing lines. Almost none building the actual sessions around them.

We decided that every technique the app uses — every breathing pattern, every therapeutic framework, every voice-selection rule — would come from a specific, citable paper. If we couldn't find one, we wouldn't ship the feature. When the research later evolved, we'd update the app. We made this a hard rule rather than a talking point.

The research library is public. You can read every citation Loam is built on, grouped by topic, with links to the primary papers. The techniques include the 2023 Stanford cyclic sighing trial for acute stress, Porges' polyvagal theory for voice selection, Hayes' ACT defusion work for anxiety, Neff's self-compassion research for sadness, Bootzin and Epstein's CBT-I stimulus-control framework for sleep, and Lehrer and Gevirtz's HRV-biofeedback work for daily resonance breathing.

None of these researchers have endorsed Loam. We cite them because they shaped how the app works — and we think you deserve to verify that for yourself. That's the point of the badge at the top of every page: every claim cited, every technique peer-reviewed. It's not a slogan. It's a constraint we put on ourselves.

What it means in practice is that when The Moment composes a session for anxiety, the structure comes from ACT. When it composes for sleep, the technique comes from CBT-I. When it picks a low-pitched voice for a grounding session, the choice comes from ASMR and polyvagal literature on voice quality and parasympathetic response. Nothing is arbitrary, and we can show you the paper behind any decision.