How It Works
Every session is a structured trajectory from activation to regulated calm. The curve is personalized by pre-session self-report; difficulty within each phase is adapted in real time based on performance.
Capture
High perceptual load. Low cognitive load. Fully interactive.
The session opens where the user is — often activated, distracted, or ruminating. A multi-object tracking task recruits exogenous attention: synchronized visual, haptic, and auditory pulses bind focus to the screen, interrupting internal loops that amplify arousal.
The goal isn't calm yet. It's contact — bringing attention out of internal narrative and onto a present, moving target.
Transition
Decreasing perceptual load. Increasing cognitive load. Decreasing interactivity.
As the user stabilizes, the task shifts. Sensory pulses slow. Interactivity decreases. Cognitive demand rises, moving processing from reactive/exteroceptive toward effortful/endogenous. Difficulty is adjusted in real time from multiple performance signals — task success, accuracy, reaction time, response duration, and tap precision — to hold the user in a target challenge zone within the phase.
This is the bridge: the nervous system is gradually released from sensory capture without collapsing into disengagement.
Interoception
Low perceptual load. Cognitive shift to interoceptive awareness. Non-interactive.
The final phase lands in guided breathing and interoceptive focus. With the high-arousal state already walked down, the user now has the regulatory bandwidth to engage with internal state — slow-paced respiration, attention to the breath, and sustained awareness of somatic signal.
Slow-paced breathing near resonance frequency (~6 breaths per minute) has an established literature around vagal tone and autonomic balance. Kalibrate's contribution is the scaffolding that makes a user able to engage with it.
