Hi, I'm Lety.

I never thought I'd be a breathwork person.

But there's something about the accessibility of breathing as an intervention that's been spinning around in my head for some time now.

From middle school through college, I practiced saxophone, clarinet, and flute pretty much every waking moment I wasn't sleeping or in school (incidentally, I also missed a lot of school to play and listen to music 🤫). Some family and friends could tell on the days I'd skipped. It wasn't because I mentioned it, but because I'd be grumpier, a little more wired, quicker to snap. I assumed at the time it was because I wasn't doing the thing I wanted to be doing.

A decade of professional playing followed. Gigs, recordings, teaching. In parallel, I was designing websites and doing SEO, which eventually became the UX and product design work that filled my days, starting with Mana, an app to help people spend time better. Now nearly a decade later, I'm asking myself similar questions: how can I build technology that helps people thrive doing what they love, instead of competing for their attention?

I notice these days when I'm sitting behind a desk and not practicing, I can also get grumpier. And after doing some breathing exercises on recommendation of a friend, I realized that maybe that teenage moodiness wasn't just that I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing, but that the physical part of playing woodwinds was acting as some kind of medicine: those carefully timed inhales and long, deliberate exhales. And once I started paying attention, I noticed how tense I could get without realizing it — tight inhales, forgetting to exhale, thinking I was focusing, but realizing I was just blocking myself. I started thinking about this Mexican mariachi song Cielito Lindo I always thought was a bit silly and how it goes:

"Canta y no llores, / Porque cantando se alegran"

"Sing, don't cry, / because singing makes you happy!"

Lots of songs have been written about this phenomenon. Could it also be related to the calculated rhythms and breaths you need to carry a good tune?

Now I'm aware music has its own documented benefits independent of the breath, but I started to get really curious about breathing as intervention. I've always been a bit of a stickler for research, having actually done a Fulbright after my BA at Columbia and spending some time doing an MA at Humboldt & Freie Universities in Berlin, so when I started reading about breathwork, I wanted to truly understand and validate the scientific basis for what I was feeling. I listened to podcasts like the Huberman Lab, read the Balban et al. cyclic sighing paper, and looked into the older literature on heart-rate variability and the parasympathetic nervous system. I was happy to discover the effects are real and well-documented: a handful of well-chosen breath patterns can shift you from a state you don't want to be in to one you do, in under five minutes. It's not magic. Just physiology. And incredibly enough, it doesn't require much time, money, or have negative side effects (so long as you're not doing anything too intense)!

I found some stuff that worked for me, but what surprised me was how difficult it was to find an app that fit my unique needs. Maybe I'm just too much of a princess, but most breathwork apps feel like giant, overwhelming libraries with so many features and breathwork sections tacked on or buried deep in some other exercise or meditation. Hundreds of recordings, pick one, listen to a soft voice for ten minutes (who has a lot of opinions on what you should be doing and how you should experience the exercise, your day, your relationships, etc.). That's beautiful for people who want it. But it's not what I needed at 1pm with eight minutes between meetings. I wanted a utility. The right technique for the state I was in. Started in two taps. No streaks, no journaling, no tracking the journey or working towards yet another life goal or badge.

The name came from a sideline. I overheard someone at a kids' soccer game tell a player to reset before the next play with a deep breath. The word stuck. Not a daily practice, not a habit, not a new lifetime goal to keep track of — just a small button to press when something has tilted, that puts me back in my body for sixty to three hundred seconds. I wondered if it's just me or if a lot of us need that, got excited about the possibility of building software more easily these days, and reset was born.

I still write music, some of which lives at letywrites.com, and the next version of reset has new music in it, composed, produced, and immersive-mixed in close collaboration with hidden track studio. Our goal is to create electro-acoustic soundscapes you'd want to listen to even if you weren't breathing along with it. Like all the music we work on, it'll take a bit more time than this app experiment, which I wanted to ship as soon as possible to learn more about not just what I need, but how I can support others looking for a quick breathing intervention utility in their lives.

Thanks for reading, and if you decide to try reset and would like to let me know what's working or what's missing for you, the public roadmap has a feedback form, and I read every note.

— Lety