Anása is not built on vibes. Every part of it stands on peer-reviewed research. Here is that research, with every source, and an honest line on what we have not yet proven.
A breath app is easy to dismiss as soft. So we will be precise. Below is each thing Anása does, the finding it rests on, and the paper you can read yourself. The references are the science we built on. They are not claims about Anása's own results, which we are still measuring.
Doomscrolling is a habit: a cue, boredom or a notification, moves your hand before your conscious mind has a say. The research on habit shows these are automatic responses learned from repeating an action in the same setting, and that the way to loosen one is to interrupt the cue.1 So Anása steps in the instant a chosen app opens, with the doors and a breath. You can set it to step in every time, only after a break, or only when it senses a spiral, and add quiet hours or a timed block for the moments you want a firm wall.
An out-breath that lasts longer than the in-breath shifts your nervous system toward its calming, parasympathetic side, which shows up as higher heart rate variability.3 In a controlled Stanford study, five minutes a day of exhale-focused breathing improved mood and lowered physical arousal more than mindfulness meditation, with an effect after a single session.2 Anása always guides an exhale longer than the inhale, and lets you choose the pause that fits you: a full breath, a quick breath, follow the dot, a dark screen, or a single question, plus a 20-minute reset when you have been at it a while.
Telling yourself to simply stop rarely holds. Forming a small if-then plan, if I am in this situation, I will do that instead, sharply increases follow-through.4 So Anása never just blocks you. It offers one concrete thing to do instead, drawn from a deep list, and first thing in the morning and late at night it suggests the small thing that fits the hour.
A commitment device is a choice you make now to bind your future self, and freely chosen commitments help people follow through on the behavior they actually want.5 Anása lets you record or write a vow in a clear moment. When your time in an app crosses your own daily limit, it reaches you as a call that plays back your own voice, or a message that shows your written words. Not the app scolding you. You, calling yourself back.
A just-in-time adaptive intervention delivers support at the moment a person is both vulnerable and open to it, adapting to their changing state.6 In an eight-week field trial of this approach for smartphone overuse, adaptive timing that learned each person's pattern beat fixed rules by a wide margin and cut how often people opened the apps.7 Anása watches for the signature of a spiral, fast bouncing between feeds, a long late session, and its optional learning engine steps in only when it matters.
In that same trial, interventions that explained their reasoning, naming the signals that set them off, were far more effective and far better received than silent ones.7 So when Anása steps in on a spiral, it tells you why, in plain words: three feeds in ninety seconds, it is 11pm, the pattern you set out to catch. You judge for yourself.
We will not claim a success rate we have not earned. The honest way to prove an intervention works is a micro-randomized trial: at each moment the app randomly varies its response, sometimes doing nothing, then measures what actually shortened the session.8 Anása has this built in as an opt-in trial that runs entirely on your phone, and its honest mirror counts the time you kept back, never the time you lost. When we have a real number, we will publish it here, with its method.
Read the studies above carefully and you will notice something: they are other people's research, on the principles Anása is built from. None of them are a measurement of Anása itself. We think that distinction matters, so we are stating it plainly.
We have not yet run our own trial, so we make no claim about how often Anása stops a scroll. We built the measurement to earn that number honestly, and when we have it, it will appear on this page with the full method. Until then, the promise is simpler: Anása learns your pattern, and tells you why it is stepping in. Everything stays on your phone.
Every source above, in full. Linked to the paper so you can read it yourself.
Free on iPhone and Android. Everything stays on your phone.