Is Loam meditation app free?

Yes. Loam is free to download and free to start. Core tools like breathing exercises, journaling, daily check-ins, and streak tracking are always available at no cost. Premium unlocks the full guided session library, unlimited custom Moments, and advanced features.

What makes Loam different from Calm or Headspace?

Loam composes every session around how you feel right now — the voice, the pace, and the therapeutic approach all adapt in real time. Instead of a catalog of pre-recorded tracks, Loam generates a new meditation tailored to your current emotional state, calibrated to your experience level, and grounded in peer-reviewed research. It also ships with Sage, a wellness coach trained in Motivational Interviewing, and 15 breathing exercises with haptic-synced animations.

Is Loam safe to use alongside therapy or medication?

Yes. Loam is designed with clear clinical guardrails. Sessions never claim to diagnose or treat mental illness, never tell you to stop therapy or medication, and always defer to professional care for symptoms that warrant it. Content is constrained to evidence-based techniques (ACT, self-compassion, MBSR, somatic experiencing, CBT-I) and a carefully reviewed voice and pacing library. Meditation is a complement to care, not a replacement. If you're in crisis, please contact a local crisis line or your care provider.

What research is Loam based on?

Every therapeutic technique in Loam cites primary peer-reviewed research. Loam's breathing library is grounded in work by Balban et al. (Stanford, 2023), Zaccaro et al. (2018), and Lehrer & Gevirtz (2014). The Moment's therapeutic architecture draws on polyvagal theory (Porges), ACT (Hayes), self-compassion (Neff), MBSR (Kabat-Zinn), and somatic experiencing (Levine). A full citation library is available at /research.

Who are the voices in Loam?

Loam uses 13 research-selected voices. Each voice is chosen for the emotional state it handles best, based on polyvagal theory, ASMR research, and voice psychology — low resonant voices for grounding, warm bright voices for light moods, measured voices for heavy ones. Loam automatically picks the voice the research says will work for your current state, or you can override manually.

Does Loam work offline?

Core tools work offline, including downloaded meditations, breathing exercises, and the journal. The Moment — Loam's custom meditation composer — requires an internet connection at the moment of generation, because the session is composed on the fly. Once generated, every Moment is saved to your library and can be replayed offline without using any credits.

Does Loam have sleep stories?

Yes. Loam includes narrated sleep stories, sleep soundscapes, and wind-down rituals. The sleep content uses anti-storytelling techniques — structured to prevent the mind from latching on to narrative — based on CBT-I stimulus control research (Bootzin & Epstein, 2011).

What breathing exercises does Loam offer?

Loam offers 15 breathing techniques across beginner, intermediate, and advanced tiers, including Box Breathing (4-4-4-4), 4-7-8 Relaxation, the Physiological Sigh, Coherent (Resonance) Breathing at 5.5-5.5, Alternate Nostril, Ujjayi, Kapalbhati, and the Wim Hof method. Every technique links to the peer-reviewed research that validates it, so you can read the study if you want to.

Will I lose my streak if I miss a day?

No. Loam's streak system is explicitly wellness-first: streaks pause, they don't break. You get two streak freezes, you can mark rest days, and the app never shames you for missing a session. Anxious users are especially vulnerable to streak mechanics turning self-care into another source of pressure — Loam is designed to avoid that failure mode.

BREATHING · 5.5 · 5.5

Every claim cited · Every technique peer-reviewed

Coherent Breathing

Name: Loam
Availability: InStock
Author: Loam

Also called resonance breathing. The training protocol. Where the physiological sigh is a rescue tool and 4-7-8 is a sleep aid, coherent breathing is what you do daily for months to permanently shift your baseline nervous system tone.

Updated April 2026·5 min read

The pattern

Inhale through your nose for about 5.5 seconds — belly first, then chest.
Exhale through your nose or slightly parted lips for about 5.5 seconds.
That's one cycle. Six cycles per minute. Continue for 10 to 20 minutes.

Depth should be comfortable, not maximal. This is one of the most common mistakes: people assume deeper is better and end up hyperventilating. Resonance breathing is about rhythm, not volume.

Where it comes from

Resonance breathing comes out of research on heart rate variability biofeedback, particularly the work of Paul Lehrer, Richard Gevirtz, and Evgeny Vaschillo. Their insight was that every person has a "resonant frequency" — a breathing rate that maximally couples their breath, heart rate, and blood pressure oscillations into a single large wave. For most adults, that frequency is between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths per minute, with 6 being the average, hence the 5.5-5.5 pattern.

HeartMath Institute popularized a closely related protocol called "quick coherence" breathing, also at roughly six breaths per minute, for the same underlying reason.

Why six breaths per minute?

At around 0.1 Hz (six breaths per minute), the natural oscillation of your baroreflex — the blood pressure feedback system — lines up with your breathing cycle. When they're in phase, the amplitude of your heart rate variability increases dramatically. Your heart rate rises with each inhale and falls with each exhale in a large, smooth, synchronized wave.

This matters because HRV is one of the best single measurements of autonomic health. High HRV correlates with cardiovascular fitness, emotional regulation, stress resilience, and longevity. Low HRV correlates with chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular disease risk.

Resonance breathing is, as far as we know, the most reliable voluntary way to train HRV upward. A daily 10-minute practice over 8-12 weeks has been shown to meaningfully improve baseline HRV in controlled studies.

When to use it

As a daily practice. The point is cumulative training, not acute rescue. 10 minutes a day, ideally at the same time, for at least 8 weeks before judging results.
Paired with a morning or evening ritual — it works well alongside journaling, stretching, or a cup of tea.
Before high-stakes performance as a longer pre-game warmup (15-20 minutes) to bring the nervous system into coherence.
As complementary therapy for anxiety, hypertension, IBS, and chronic pain, where slow paced breathing has clinical trial support.

When not to use it

Resonance breathing is well-tolerated. The main caveats: some people feel lightheaded for the first few sessions as their CO₂ levels adjust, and people with significant cardiovascular disease should talk to a cardiologist before starting a daily HRV biofeedback practice (not because it's risky, but so their existing monitoring can account for it).

Finding your personal resonant frequency

5.5-5.5 is the population average, but your actual resonant frequency might be slightly different. If you want to optimize, experiment with rates between 5.0 and 7.0 seconds per phase across several sessions and notice which feels most effortless and produces the strongest sense of synchrony. The right frequency feels almost free — like the breath is doing itself.

What the research says

HRV biofeedback via resonance breathing has one of the larger and more consistent evidence bases in complementary medicine. Lehrer & Gevirtz (2014), Frontiers in Psychology review the mechanism and clinical outcomes, and the broader slow breathing literature is summarized in Zaccaro et al. (2018), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Clinical trials have shown benefits for anxiety, depression, asthma, hypertension, insomnia, and chronic pain.

Try it in the Loam app

Loam's resonance exercise uses a slow, tidal breathing circle timed to exactly 5.5-5.5 seconds, with optional haptic cues at each phase transition. Recommended daily dose is 10 minutes. Download Loam to try it.

Related techniques

See the full breathing library, or compare against box breathing (focus), 4-7-8 Relaxation (sleep), or the physiological sigh (fast mood shift).

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