Help Me Breathe is a guided breathing timer. This page tells you who makes it, how the writing is done, what is checked and by whom, and exactly how the site earns money. If you are going to spend five quiet minutes with a health-adjacent website, you should be able to see all of that in one place, without hunting for it.
Who writes this
My name is Georges Rayess. I build and maintain Help Me Breathe on my own, from Lebanon. That means the code, the writing, the reading of research papers, the design, the invoices and the replies to email all come from the same person. There is no team, no editorial board and no company behind the name.
I am not a clinician. I am not a doctor, a nurse, a psychologist, a physiotherapist or a respiratory therapist. I hold no medical qualification of any kind, I have no clinical training, and no clinician has reviewed the pages on this site. I would rather you read that in the second paragraph of this page than find it buried in small print at the bottom of a legal notice.
What I can offer instead is a narrow kind of care: I read the actual papers, I quote them rather than paraphrasing them into something stronger than they say, and I write down the limits of a study next to its result. That is a real editorial standard, and it is the only one I am qualified to hold. It is not a substitute for a clinical reviewer. If this site ever earns enough to pay one, hiring a named clinician to review the health pages is the first thing the money will go to, and their name will appear on this page when it happens.
Everything on the site is written on the assumption that you may be tired, anxious, or reading at three in the morning. So the pages are short-sentenced, the timer starts with one tap, and nothing asks you to make an account until you have used three sessions and want a fourth.
Why this site exists
A breathing pacer is a very small piece of software. It is a circle that grows and shrinks, a count, and a sound. It should be simple, work on a bad connection, cost little, and never sell what you did with it.
Most of the tools that do this job are wrapped in something else — an onboarding quiz, a notification habit, a wall before the first breath, an app you have to install before you can try it. None of that makes the breathing work better. This site has a subscription too, as of September 2026, and the sections below say exactly where it sits: after three free sessions, never in front of the first breath, and never on the pages written for anxious moments and panic attacks.
So the shape of this site is deliberate. Every breathing technique is in the free sessions: your first three run with nothing to sign in to, without an email address, and offline once the page has loaded once. After that the timer is part of the one plan described below. Your settings and your session history are written to your own browser's storage and are never uploaded to a server, so nobody here can read them back; before you subscribe, the only thing kept on the site's side is a count of completed sessions against a random first-party cookie, so the site knows when the three are used. If you accept analytics, the site counts anonymous events — a page view, which technique was picked, whether a session finished — and the privacy policy lists exactly what is counted and what never is.
Something has to pay for the domain, the hosting and the hours, and the section below says plainly what that is. Since 11 September 2026 that includes the timer itself, once the three free sessions are used. That is a change from what this page used to promise, and the dated section at the end of the page says so rather than pretending otherwise.
How the techniques are chosen
There are seven patterns on the site. A pattern gets in only if it clears four tests.
It is described somewhere real
The counts come from a published description of the technique, not from a wellness post that copied another wellness post. Where a specific pattern was used in a trial, the timer runs the same pattern the trial ran.
There is a plausible mechanism
Slow, paced breathing has a physical story behind it — respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the baroreflex, heart rate variability — and that story has been measured. The science page lays out what has been shown and what has not, with every source named.
A healthy adult can do it unsupervised
If a pattern needs a teacher in the room, or a spotter, or a mat to fall onto, it does not belong on a website. Extended breath-hold work, hypoxic training and anything practised in water are all deliberately absent.
Its risks fit on the screen
Every pattern that involves a breath hold or faster-than-normal breathing carries a written list of who should avoid it. The energizing pattern asks you to confirm you have read that list before it will start. If the honest safety note for a technique would not fit in a paragraph, the technique does not go on the site.
Techniques that people ask for and do not get are as much a part of the policy as the ones that are here. The full safety position lives on the medical disclaimer, and it applies to every page.
Editorial and citation policy
This is the part I would want to read first on someone else's health site, so here it is in full.
- Only sources I have actually opened
- Every citation on this site points to a paper that was opened and read while the page was being written. Nothing is cited from a summary of a summary, from another blog's reference list, or from memory.
- Primary literature, quoted directly
- Claims lean on the original trial, review or meta-analysis rather than on press coverage of it. Where a finding matters, the sentence that supports it is quoted on the page in the authors' own words, so you can see the strength of the wording rather than my summary of it.
- Never "studies show"
- That phrase does not appear on this site as a substitute for a citation. If there is no named source, there is no claim.
- The limits get the same font size as the findings
- Sample size, trial length, absence of follow-up, risk of bias, self-reported outcomes: where a study has these problems, they are written next to the result, not left out because they are inconvenient. Breathing research is a young field with more enthusiasm than evidence, and you deserve to know which is which.
- No treatment claims, ever
- Nothing here treats, cures, diagnoses, manages or prevents any condition, and nothing here replaces care from a professional who knows your history. No page will ever suggest changing or stopping a prescribed medication.
- Prices and outside facts are dated
- Where a page names another product's price, it says the day the price was checked by hand. Prices move; the date tells you how much to trust the number.
- Corrections are made in public
- If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it. Corrections change the page and its review date rather than quietly disappearing. Email contact@helpmebreath.com — a correction from a reader is the most useful message this address gets.
- I am responsible for every sentence
- Pages are drafted, checked line by line against their sources, and edited before they publish. Where a claim could not be verified, it comes out rather than getting softened into a hedge.
How the site makes money
Three things pay for this site. All three are listed here, in order of how much they matter, and none of them changes what the timer does.
One subscription
There is one plan, $10 a month or $100 a year, and everything is in it: a custom pattern builder, saved presets, streaks and a practice heatmap with a twelve-week history and CSV export, ambient soundscapes, night mode, no ads and offline use. There is a 3-day free trial; a card is required and is not charged during the trial, and when the three days end it is charged unless you cancel first. One free trial per person. The extra tools are new. The timer is not, and since 11 September 2026 it also sits inside the plan once your three free sessions are used; the dated section at the end of this page says so plainly. This is the part of the business meant to keep the site alive.
Advertising, on content pages only
Some written guides and comparison pages carry advertising below the fold. Ads never appear inside the breathing viewport, never on the Pro, sign-in or account pages, and never on the pages written for anxious moments and panic attacks — those two carry no advertising, no upgrade prompt and no email form, and they never will. Ad slots also hide themselves while a session is running, so nothing can appear while you are breathing. A subscription removes them everywhere.
Two affiliate links, both labelled
Exactly two products on this site pay a commission if you buy through them: Headspace and moonbird. Both appear only on the apps compared page, both are marked sponsored in the page and in the link itself, and neither costs you anything extra. Other apps on that page are named and priced but deliberately not linked. Nothing on this site is a paid review, no ranking position is for sale, and the recommendation that page arrives at is the free option.
Things this site does not do
- It does not sell or rent your personal data. Your first three sessions ask nothing of you, and there are no passwords anywhere. If you subscribe, the account holds your email address, how you sign in, your plan and its dates; no profile of your practice is held under your name, because your settings and your session history stay in your own browser.
- It does not measure you before you agree to it. Analytics and advertising come from the third parties named in the privacy policy, and neither is allowed to measure anything until you have accepted it. Two clarifications, because both can be read the wrong way round. If you decline, ads on the pages that carry them still appear, but as non-personalised ads that read and write no advertising identifiers. And anonymous analytics does still run on the anxiety and panic pages, with consent, because it is how I find out which safety pages people actually reach.
- It does not run sponsored reviews, and it takes no payment for a ranking or a mention.
- It does not touch your card details. Payments run through Stripe as merchant of record, which is the seller for the transaction and issues your receipt.
- It does not keep the money if you change your mind. The subscription carries an unconditional fourteen-day refund: ask inside fourteen days and you get the whole amount back without being asked why. Cancelling takes two clicks from your account page, and it stops the next charge. Both promises are written into the terms of service.
What stays free, and what changed on 11 September 2026
An earlier version of this page promised that every technique would stay free at every length, with nothing to sign in to, permanently, and that if that ever changed this page would say so with the date and the reason. It changed on 11 September 2026. Here are the date and the reason.
The reason is that the site has to pay for itself, and advertising on the written pages does not do that on its own. So the timer now runs three sessions for anyone, with nothing to sign in to, and after that it is part of the one plan described above: three days free with a card on file, then $10 a month or $100 a year. I would rather write that down plainly than leave a promise on this page that the product no longer keeps.
What still stays free, with nothing to sign in to and no time limit:
- Your first three sessions, with all seven breathing techniques, every session length, audio cues, vibration cues and the visual pacer.
- The pages for anxious moments and panic attacks, which run the full timer for anyone, permanently, with no sign-in prompt, no advertising, no upgrade prompt and no email capture.
- Saved settings and session history, kept in your own browser.
- Offline use once the page has loaded once, and installation as an app from your browser.
- Every written guide, every technique page, and the research summary.
If any of this changes again, this section gets a new date and a new reason.
Contact, corrections and review dates
One address reaches me: contact@helpmebreath.com. Corrections, safety concerns, billing questions, refunds and press all arrive in the same inbox and are answered by the same person. If you are writing about something factually wrong on a page, quoting the sentence helps me fix it faster.
This page was last reviewed on and is scheduled for its next review by . Health and safety pages are reviewed at least every six months, and immediately whenever a source they rely on is updated or retracted.
One plan, $10 a month or $100 a year, pays for the hosting and the time.
A note on what this is
Help Me Breathe is a timer and a set of plain-language pages written by one person who is not a clinician. Nothing here is medical care, nothing here diagnoses or treats any condition, and none of it replaces advice from a professional who knows your history. Some breathing patterns are not safe for everyone. Please read the medical disclaimer before you rely on anything on this site.