Small pauses for a calmer day
Humble Habits
The calm app you buy once
Small pauses for every part of your day — waking up, focusing, a hard moment, winding down, falling asleep. $4.99, once. No subscription, no account, and nothing leaves your phone.
What it does
Small on purpose
Most calm apps are libraries you pay for every year. Humble Habits does the few things most of us actually use, a minute at a time, and you pay once.
Wake, Focus, Move, Reset, Unwind and Sleep. Each has a few small, physical practices that take a minute or less.
Switch on the practices you like and each turns up at its usual time of day. Each nudge is the practice itself, so you can do it straight from the Lock Screen.
A one-minute guided breath you can follow with your eyes closed, from a widget, Control Center, the Action Button or Siri.
Ocean and rain recordings, waves made on your phone, a timer that fades them out, and a meditation timer with a bell.
No scores, no badges, no “you missed yesterday.” Nothing in the app reacts to what you did or didn’t do.
No account, no analytics, no network requests of any kind. One payment, no subscription, no in-app purchases.
Today
One screen, top to bottom
A pebble, not a coach
Its eyes are always closed. It follows the breath and the clock and nothing else, so it is never disappointed and never proud. It isn’t watching.
The pebble
It breathes slowly, and it is the Calm Now button. Its color follows the time of day: warm sage in the morning, dust blue in the evening, night blue at bedtime.
Right now
One small practice for this part of the day, chosen by the clock and never by your history.
Six moments
Each with a line of its own. Reset: “For when it’s a lot.” Sleep: “Quiet, and then quieter.”
Calm Now
One minute. Close your eyes. Follow the buzz.
It ends with “Back to your day.” and nothing about how it went. It never picks a breath at random: in a bad moment, knowing what comes next is the comfort.
Four breaths to choose from
Long exhale: in for four, out for six. Deeper exhale. Double sigh: two in, one long out. Hum. One, three or five minutes.
Follow it with your eyes closed
A gentle vibration swells and settles with each breath, so you never need to watch the screen.
Wherever you are
Start it from a Home Screen or Lock Screen widget, Control Center, the Action Button, or by asking Siri.
Quiet nudges
The nudge is the practice
There are fifteen small practices across the six moments. Switch on the ones you like and they take turns in your nudges. One is plenty to start with.
Only when you want them
Pick the parts of the day that feel heaviest — morning, afternoon or evening — and get one nudge in each, or two. Never at night.
Done from the Lock Screen
“Drop your shoulders away from your ears. Unclench your jaw.” Do it, tap Done, and get on with your day.
Never pushy
Each nudge lands at a slightly different time each day. None of them break through a Focus mode, and the app never puts a badge on its icon.
Sounds and Sit
Steady sound, and a timer with a bell
Steady sound to cover the noise around you. No sleep stories, no music, no library to scroll through. A timer and a bell. That’s all.
Ocean
A recording of waves on a shore that comes inside the app. Nothing streams.
Waves
Soft waves, in and out, made on your phone as they play, so each one is a little different.
Rain
A recording of steady rain that comes inside the app. Nothing streams.
A timer that fades out
From 15 minutes to an hour and a half, or until you stop it. Sounds keep playing with the screen locked.
Sit
A meditation timer from one to ten minutes: a bell to begin, a bell each minute or two if you like, three soft bells to end, and a sound underneath if you want one. Wake and Move have a one-minute stretch on the same timer.
Honest about the science
We say which is which
You don’t need a protocol. You need a long exhale.
Every practice card says how much is known about it, and the studies are cited in full inside the app. None of this is medicine, and none of it needs to be done perfectly.
Humble Habits is a set of reminders and simple tools, not a treatment. If stress, anxiety, panic or sleeplessness is getting in the way of your life, please talk to a doctor or a mental health professional. In the US and Canada you can call or text 988, any time.
Well studied
In a 2023 randomized trial, people who did five minutes of slow, double-inhale “cyclic sighing” every day for a month reported better mood than people who meditated for the same time. That’s the Double sigh.
Known physiology
Cold water on your face slows your heart rate. That is the point, and it is why the app asks you to check with your doctor first if you have a heart condition.
A simple habit
Softening your gaze or looking around the room have a long history and little research behind them. The app tells you that, too.
Nothing measures you
Nothing to keep up, nothing to collect
We collect nothing. There’s no server to send it to.
Days, never counts
Days you pause get a soft tint on a simple calendar. Days you don’t look exactly like days before you had the app.
No measuring
No heart rate, no HRV, no sleep tracking, no stress ratings. Once an app measures your calm, it becomes one more thing to do well at.
No network, at all
No account, no analytics, no crash reporting. The app makes no network requests and works the same in Airplane Mode.
Every calm app wants twenty minutes a day. This one wants ten seconds.
$4.99, once. No subscription, no account, nothing leaves your phone.