Harvard sampled 2,250 people at random moments of the day. Their minds were somewhere other than what they were doing 46.9% of the time.1 808 measures what happens when you sit down and try to come back.
We'll email you when 808 is ready.
What it measures
How little you moved
How your rate drifted
How slowly you breathed
Nothing is shown during the session. You open your eyes and the results are on your phone. Every session gets one score out of 100.
02 / The cost
Days a year, gone
You will be awake for all of them and present for none of them.
Your year, one cell per day
Waking hours only, summed and converted to whole days.
03 / It works
04 / But
Dropped out across 70 trials of meditation apps, and researchers were often paying them to continue.4
Of paying Calm subscribers abandoned it, out of 3,275 tracked in the real world.5
Sessions analysed: how often you sit predicted improvement, how long you sit showed no significant effect.6
Coming back is the part that matters, and coming back is the part with nothing to show for it. You quit the gym and you can still see the mirror.
05 / So we gave it a watch
Never plotted from zero. A settle drawn from the baseline is a flat line, which is a lie about a real change.
Sampled continuously across the sit. The one signal that is unambiguous: a body that stops moving has stopped bracing.
The shaded band is the resonance zone, roughly 4.5 to 7 breaths a minute. This is the signal you can steer on purpose.
One number per sit. Any single session can go badly. Trending up is the only thing that matters.
We'll email you when 808 is ready.
808 is a wellness tool, not a medical device. It doesn't diagnose or treat anything, and your measurements never leave your own devices.
06 / The score
One number, out of 100. It sits on a spectrum between a body under stress and a body in recovery, and the subconscious only opens on the second half.
Stress
Braced, alert, closed
Recovery
Settled, open, receptive
Two minutes still counts. Thirty restless minutes still lose to five settled ones. And if a signal can't be read cleanly we leave it out rather than invent a number.
07 / What you sit through
Flagship guided track
The One Who Follows Through
25 minutes / professionally narrated
Down into deep relaxation, then twenty five minutes living as the version of yourself who brings your goals to life.
The library
Nature sounds
Brainwave frequencies
Pure tones
Silence
Or play your own audio in any app. Start a session, leave 808 entirely, put on whatever you already use. The Watch keeps measuring either way.
08 / Who built it
We built 808 because we both quit meditating for the same reason: we could not tell whether anything was happening.
So we wired it to a Watch and tested it on ourselves, session after session, including an embarrassing amount of time lying on the floor teaching the app to read a breath through the wrist.
No ads, and your health measurements stay on your phone. Want a say in what we build first? The questionnaire takes a minute.
What these do and do not show. The research above establishes that mind wandering is costly, that meditation training helps, that consistency beats session length, and that people quit apps. It does not show that 808 specifically will do any of this for you. Nobody has run that trial yet, and we won't pretend otherwise.
We'll email you when 808 is ready.