Breath Ball: Breathing & HRV

Fun Driven

About this app

Discover one of the highest-rated breathing apps designed to help you reduce stress, anxiety, and panic attacks while improving your heart rate variability (HRV) and overall well-being.
Practice guided breathing, train your autonomic nervous system, and experience how a few calm breaths can restore balance, focus, and relaxation.
Breath Ball bridges the gap between breathing apps and HRV apps, combining the best features from both worlds.

Breathwork features you won’t find in most HRV apps:

⭐️ Create your perfect breathing rhythm – The extensive breathing-exercise editor lets you control every inhale, exhale, and pause for truly personalized breathwork or coherent breathing sessions.
⭐️ Relax into sleep – Play calming background sounds that continue after your exercise to help you fall asleep faster and stay relaxed.
⭐️ Practice anywhere – Run breathing exercises or HRV monitoring even with the screen switched off – ideal for meditation or bedtime use.
⭐️ Track your progress & mood – The exercise diary and mood tracker help you see how consistent breathing improves calmness, stress relief, and HRV training results.
⭐️ Exercise with closed eyes – Follow audio guides to stay mindful without looking at the screen.
⭐️ Customize everything – Choose your own colors, brightness, and accessibility settings for visually impaired users.
⭐️ ...and much more – explore new ways to build resilience, mindfulness, and relaxation every day.

HRV features you won’t find in other breathing apps:

⭐️ Live biofeedback – Watch your heart rate variability change with every breath. Real-time graphs reveal your cardiac coherence and vagal tone improvements.
⭐️ Detailed time-domain metrics – Track heart rate, RR intervals, RMSSD, SDNN, pNN50, and RSA (acceleration & deceleration) to understand how breathing shapes your body’s rhythm.
⭐️ Frequency-domain insights – View Heart Coherence, VLF, LF, HF, and LF/HF ratios (displayed in percent or ms²) for complete HRV analysis.
⭐️ Interactive Poincaré plot – Visualize your heart rate variability and coherence together for an instant overview of your inner balance.

Included breathing exercises:

⭐️ Deep relaxation through heart coherence – A few minutes of heart-coherent breathing can lead into deep meditative relaxation. Connect a Bluetooth heart rate sensor to view real-time biofeedback while training heart coherence and HRV.
⭐️ 478 Breathing for better sleep – Based on Dr. Andrew Weil’s method: inhale 4 s, hold 7 s, exhale 8 s. Combine it with calming background audio to sleep better.
⭐️ Slow-paced breathing for anxiety relief – The go-to technique for panic and anxiety attacks: inhale 4 s, exhale 6 s to restore balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
⭐️ Box breathing for focus & performance – A technique popularized by US Navy SEALs to build resilience, focus, and stress management: inhale, hold, exhale, hold 4 s each.
⭐️ COPD breathing to catch your breath – Recommended by the COPD Foundation to ease breathlessness. Adjust inhale/exhale timing (2/4 or 3/9 s) with Breath Ball’s intuitive slider for personalized breath training.

Since 2017, Breath Ball has been developed together with its community of therapists and users like you. Your feedback made it the trusted HRV biofeedback and breathwork app it is today.

Have ideas or suggestions? We’d love to hear from you at [e-mail]

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use breathing app, free of ads, in-app purchases, and sign-ups, give Breath Ball a try and experience how calm feels — one breath at a time.

Ratings and reviews

Awesome. I have ASD. The voicing and visualizing of steps along with countdown for inhale and exhale are easier than trying to do both without an app/site/device or someone else doing those things instructions/counts. Reminders help with routine in making sure we don't forget. No ads is a huge save on stress that comes from seeing them. I can't donate (never have excess beyond necessities). But hope that you get enough donations to stay around for years to come. I highly recommend app.

By far, this is the best app I have found for breathing exercises. Very customizable, or it comes with preset exercises, if you prefer. The tone and visuals (also customizable) are very easy to follow, not overstimulating, and make it so you can do them with your eyes closed. The app also keeps track of mood and progress and has a timer for practice. What more could you ask for?

EXACTLY what I was looking for. I know about meditation & stuff, I just wanted a breathing tool like the robot in Woebot, but without having a conversation first. I'm using the free version, but I looked at the subscription price, and it's far more reasonable than the fancy meditation apps that are listed as editor's choice. I can stop downloading and uninstalling now!

What’s new

Screen exercise diary has been redesigned.
Third-party media players can now be used to play audio during breathing exercises in Breath Ball.
The pro Screen now has an option to automatically connect to a heart rate monitor before a breathing exercise. (Thanks, Simone)
A bug that caused empty HRV recording files to display some UI elements as grey rectangles has been fixed. (Thanks, Sven)