808 iPhone + Apple Watch Join the waitlist

You spend half your life somewhere else.

808 measures your biometric data on your Apple Watch while you meditate, and displays it afterwards so you can see your improvement session after session. Use it with our guided track, or with whatever you already meditate to.

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01 / The cost

A mind that is elsewhere has a price.

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, and the wandering came first, with the unhappiness following.1

114

Days a year, gone

You will be awake for all of them and present for none of them.

Hours awake 16
1219

Your year, one cell per day

Elsewhere (114) Present (251)

Waking hours only, summed and converted to whole days.

02 / Meditation works

Meditation itself has the evidence.

+16

Percentile points on GRE reading comprehension after two weeks of meditation training, in a randomized trial.2

47

Meditation trials showing real reductions in anxiety and depression.3

03 / The catch

Almost nobody keeps meditating.

39%

Dropped out across 70 trials of meditation apps, and researchers were often paying them to continue.4

~half

Of paying Calm subscribers stopped using the app, out of 3,275 tracked in the real world.5

280,000

Meditation sessions analysed. How often you meditate predicted improvement. How long each one lasted showed no significant effect.6

Coming back is the part that matters, and coming back is the part with nothing to show for it.

04 / So we gave it a watch

Now there is something to see.

Every session is scored and kept. You get the detail of the meditation you just finished, and the run of every one before it, so you can watch the numbers move over weeks rather than guess.

01

Pick a track

One of ours, or press play in any other app you already meditate to.

02

Begin

From your phone, or straight from your wrist. The Watch takes over.

03

Meditate

Nothing on screen the whole time. End it whenever you are done.

04

See the shift

Whether your body moved into its parasympathetic state, the recovery side, and how far it got.

Heart rate 74 → 63
0 min25 min

A heart rate that drifts down while you sit still is your parasympathetic system taking over. That is the state the subconscious opens in.

Stillness 91%
0 min25 min

Sampled continuously across the session. The one signal that is unambiguous: a body that stops moving has stopped bracing.

Breathing 5.8 br/min
0 min25 min

The shaded band is roughly 4.5 to 7 breaths a minute. Breathing that slowly swings your heart rhythm the hardest, which is the quickest way into that same state.

Score, last 12 sessions 82 /100
Six weeks agoToday

One number per session, kept for every meditation you ever do.

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We'll email you when 808 is ready.

05 / What you sit through

Flagship guided track

The One Who Follows Through

25 minutes / professionally narrated

The track takes you down into deep relaxation, then spends twenty five minutes with you living as the version of yourself who brings your goals to life.

The library

4

Nature sounds

3

Brainwave frequencies

4

Pure tones

1

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.

06 / Who built it

Two friends, Aziz and Melvin.

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.

Where these numbers come from
  1. Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. doi:10.1126/science.1192439. 2,250 adults, experience sampling. Mind wandering in 46.9% of samples. Time-lag analysis supported wandering causing unhappiness rather than the reverse.
  2. Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776–781. doi:10.1177/0956797612459659.
  3. Goyal, M., et al. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(3), 357–368. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018. 47 trials with active controls, 3,515 participants. Moderate evidence, effect sizes around 0.3.
  4. Linardon, J., et al. (2023). Rates of attrition and engagement in randomized controlled trials of mindfulness apps. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 170, 104421. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2023.104421. 70 trials, 9,258 participants. 24.7% pooled attrition, 38.7% in larger trials.
  5. Mindfulness meditation app abandonment during the COVID-19 pandemic: an observational study. Mindfulness (2023). doi:10.1007/s12671-023-02125-4. 3,275 Calm subscribers; 47.9% to 53.2% abandonment depending on cohort.
  6. Cearns, M., & Clark, S. R. (2023). The effects of dose, practice habits, and objects of focus on digital meditation effectiveness and adherence. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 25, e43358. doi:10.2196/43358. 280,000 sessions from 10,409 people. Consistency rather than length best predicted improvement; session length showed no significant association with mood (p=.19).

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.

Sit down. See what happened.

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We'll email you when 808 is ready.