App Review: Syntropy

Review by Casey Douglass

Syntropy is a word for the way that order forms from chaos, which is an apt name for a well-being app that was created by a company that itself, was formed during Covid lockdown. In the broadest of strokes, Syntropy is an app that uses art, music and breathing science to help the user to relax or to lift their mood.

If you’re anything like me, the “breathing science” part of that intro might have tickled your fancy. There are many studies that show the link between the breath and our state of relaxation or alertness and the Syntropy app utilises a mixture of audiovisual breath pacers, music, and art therapy to help bring about positive changes in the user’s state. Some of the benefits that the user might experience include improved cognitive performance, stress reduction and increased coherence between bodily systems. If you’ve read my reviews of the HeartMath Inner Balance, or of the Syntropy breath pacers when they were available separately, I get more into the science there. I'll link to those reviews at the end of this post.

When you enter the Syntropy app, it’s a good idea to click on the information icon at the top left of the screen. This opens up a selection of tutorials about how to best use each element of the app, the kinds of meditation that it aids, and it also offers more information about the artists involved. Once you’re back on the opening screen, below the video of the week, you’re presented with three categories of experience: Breathe, Relax and Elevate. Making a selection leads you to a screen on which you can choose from a number of galleries, each gallery tending to offer seven videos that you can view. The Breathe galleries are geared towards helping you to pace your breathing along with the animation of the video. The Relax section is tailored for the user to simply watch and go with the flow, and the Elevate offerings present art and music that hope to uplift the viewer’s mood.

I enjoyed the quite eclectic selection of artwork on display, and I was able to find a fair few that appealed to me. A number of the videos make excellent use of light, videos that seem to hint at the sparkling quality of sunlight as it gently reflects from rippling water, or the soft glow of sunrise and/or sunset. Two of these are in the Chromatic gallery and are called “Tabula Rasa” and “Breathe in the Light”. As far as I can tell, the Syntropy breath pacers that I reviewed previously can be found under Breathe>Geometry and Relax>Energy Centers respectively. Once again, I'll post the links below.

I found that using Syntropy proved to be a nice little break in whatever I was doing. As someone with chronic illness and perpetual anxiety, I often make time to be in the moment or to focus on a couple of breaths. I’m not always that sure that it helps to any great degree, but I do feel a little worse if I don’t. I guess like many things in life, it’s the tiny acts building up over time that make the biggest differences, for the most part. The Syntropy app is an additional way to take some time for yourself, and if you’re like me and have a very ruminative mind, having the visuals to focus on and the music to listen to often proves engrossing enough to free whichever cog is stuck in my mental cogitating machinery.

The Syntropy app’s interface is clean and easy to navigate. There is no clutter, and I found the app to be responsive and reasonably intuitive. I did encounter an issue with switching between dark and light mode however, insofar as it wouldn’t switch. I have an older android phone, so this could possibly just be a phone issue, but upon choosing light mode, the app hangs on a loading circle for minutes on end and doesn’t do anything. Even if it had worked, I’d have much rather preferred being able to switch between light and dark mode on the main screen or in the settings, rather than only seeming to be able to once I started to watch a video. Luckily, it was a minor issue for me as I do prefer the dark videos anyway.

Another area that I’d like to see tweaked is the option to download the video to your phone. This can only be done once the video is streaming, and on a slow connection, this can make it take a looong time. If you want to playback the downloaded video, you cannot play it in the same manner; you have to go into Settings>Downloads and choose it from quite a boring list of filenames. Ideally, I would like to be able to download a video from the gallery screen, and then to see some kind of visual indication that that particular file is downloaded, and then to browse the gallery when offline and be able to see which video is which. As it stands, with no net/data connection, the gallery interface doesn’t work. These two issues were the only real qualms that I had with the Syntropy app, and the download issue is just me being really fussy. I know it.

When it comes to the cost, there are a number of options. Firstly, new users get a one month free trial, which is a good way to see how you get on with things. After your trial is up, you can subscribe for £2.99 per month or pay £29.99 for a year’s access. This seems very reasonable to me, especially as Syntropy are continually expanding the number of videos available, and supporting international artists in the process. On a personal level, I also appreciate how they are bucking the trend of releasing a subscription-based well-being app that doesn’t have truly eye-watering yearly subscription prices.

The Syntropy app is a good way to give yourself some extra tools for your mental toolbox. If you’d like to check it out, you can visit the Syntropy website for more information, or you can find the app itself on the Google Play and Apple Store.

As promised, you can read some more in-depth information about certain of the breath pacers here and here. You might also like to check out my Inner Balance review, which is a gadget that helps you with the kind of breath-work promoted by the Syntropy app.

I was given free access to Syntropy for review purposes.

App Name: Syntropy

Available on: Google Play & Apple Store

Price: One Month Free Trial / £2.99 per month / £29.99 per year.

Gadget Review: Inner Balance

Review By Casey Douglass

Heartmath have a nifty gadget called the Inner Balance. It connects to your smartphone and, by monitoring your heart-rate variability, gives you feedback as to whether you are in the synchronised state known as heart coherence. Heartmath UK+IRL kindly sent me an Inner Balance to have a play with, and after a few months of experimentation, I finally feel ready to put some thoughts out there.

The Inner Balance & The Inner Balance App

The Inner Balance sensor is a small, light, pebble-shaped device. It has a clip on the back to attach it to your clothing, and a wire that connects to an ear-clip. The plastic body is home to one large rubbery button to turn it on and off, alongside a tiny blinking led for status updates. The whole thing is very comfortable to wear, and I was particularly pleased that the ear-clip didn’t pinch; it just gently clasped. My sessions lasted anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, and I never became uncomfortable with the device. This is a great thing, as you don’t want unnecessary distractions when you are trying to focus.

I installed the Inner Balance app from the Google Play Store, and my Android smartphone connected to the Inner Balance via Bluetooth without issue. The app itself is home to a lot of stuff, and to be honest, I could probably write a whole review on just the app alone. It contains tips and tutorials, your own logs and journal, and even synchronises to HeartCloud, a free account that you can sign-up for, that allows you to compare your coherence stats with others in a global community. The most important element of the Inner Balance app however, are the breath pacing animations that it uses to help you to enter into a state of heart coherence.

What Is Heart Coherence?

Research has shown that the heart and the brain communicate in both directions, each affecting the other in a variety of ways. If someone is in a state of coherence, these interactions will be more harmonious or beneficial. When someone is not in a coherent state, these signals can become disrupted and more chaotic. The Inner Balance measures the user’s level of coherence by way of their heart rate variability (HRV). When you are in a coherent state, the graph of your HRV, when plotted over time, will look closer to a smooth sine-wave pattern. When you are in a non-coherent state, the plot is more irregular and jagged. The Inner Balance app gives you the on-screen pacers and feedback information you need to effectively put Heartmath’s Quick Coherence Technique to work, and to bring yourself into coherence.

The Quick Coherence Technique is very simple. The first step is to bring your attention to the area of your heart and to slow your breathing until both your inhalation and exhalation each last around five seconds. The second step is to try to feel a positive, heart-felt emotion, such as love or appreciation. As far as I understand it, the change in breathing rhythm helps to shift your nervous system into a more balanced state, and the heart-felt emotion further amplifies this effect. There are other techniques in the Guides section of the Inner Balance app, but the Quick Coherence Technique is the main one that I used.

The Inner Balance App Part 2

The Inner Balance app gives the user a number of animations that help to get their breathing into a suitable rhythm. It’s worth noting that the target breathing rhythm and many other session settings can be altered to taste. It’s best if you try each of the breathing animations or views to see which is most pleasing. The first two feature large animations to set your breathing to. I did find that these tended to chug at times on my low-end smartphone though. You can also have a mini-HRV graph undulating above some of the animations. I personally found this to be distracting but it is something that you can easily turn off. All of these animations (and their accompanying sounds) give you feedback as to what your coherence level is. Or you can choose to sit with a screen of data, one that presents you with a number of graph plots, including your HRV, Coherence over time, and your Pulse.

I appreciated the tools that the Inner Balance app provided, and the configurability it offered. It didn’t take me long however, to feel that the chiming sounds and the information on-screen served as more of a distraction than any thing else, so I promptly muted the sounds and soon adopted a practise of using the animation to set my breath rhythm and then looking away. This suited my mindset and my practise but I didn’t find anything particularly wrong with the app. It crashed occasionally, as any app will, but that only happened once during an actual session, and I had almost 170 sessions with it before I wrote this review.

My Experiences

So how did I get on? Did those 170 sessions with the Inner Balance give me any noticeable benefit in my life? The answer is, I think so. It was subtle, but it was there. It’s really great to have a device like the Inner Balance that can give feedback on what you are doing. I’ve lost count of how many times that I’ve read a certain breathing technique lowers stress or activates your parasympathetic nervous system and relaxation response, among other things. It’s one thing to believe that the technique helps, it’s another thing entirely to have data on the screen of your smartphone that actually proves that you are entering a certain state, even if it can’t quantify every knock-on effect that said state might have in your body.

I’ve been engaging with various meditation practises for decades. I'll admit that when I was a teenager, this was in the hope of developing some kind of extra sensory perception. As life has continued, and my health has taken a dive, I’m more than happy if a meditation or a mindfulness technique just helps me to experience a little space between miseries. I’m saying all of this to highlight that I didn’t come into this as a total novice, and altering my breathing and focussing in certain ways comes quite easily to me. As an aside, I’d like to think that there is some kind of depressive rock band somewhere, or at least a song, called “A Little Space Between Miseries.”

When I performed the Quick Coherence Technique, I could see confirmation on my smartphone that my HRV was responding to what I was doing. Sure, I wasn’t given proof that I was relaxing or that my brainwaves had changed, but I was given enough reassurance to know that I was doing the technique properly, and that my body was responding, and that felt very liberating. My coherence score and the ability to make notes in my in-app journal after the session, meant that I could easily see what helped me to achieve a higher level of coherence. As an example, when trying to cultivate a heart-felt positive emotion, I found that a feeling of appreciation consistently seemed to give me higher coherence than the feeling of love. I wouldn’t have guessed that would happen. True, it could be that I’m not very adept at cultivating love in that way, and that might change over time, but as something concrete to point at and to ponder, it was valuable to note.

For me, the state of coherence itself felt like a bit of space had opened up. Yes, a little space between those miseries I mentioned a short while ago. A five or ten minute session left me feeling calmer, and less easily triggered by my thoughts. I’ve suffered with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for around thirty years. When my body is in an anxious or triggered state, any negative or fearful thoughts can continue to amplify my fight, flight or freeze response for some time after I’ve calmed down. On the occasions where I had a short session with the Inner Balance after the first peak of my anxiety, I noticed that the same, intrusive thoughts didn’t have quite the same effect again. They were still there, but a bit further away. A bit like if you have a wasp in your room and you manage to shepherd it to the window, which you promptly close once its outside. It might still be bouncing against the glass, but as it’s on the outside now, it doesn’t upset you so much. That’s kind of how I felt.

In a broader sense, I felt other benefits too. Having an Inner Balance session before getting to sleep did seem to give me a slightly better night’s sleep. My sleep felt like it had a different quality but again, it was a subtle difference that felt slightly better to me. I think that my sessions with the Inner Balance also settled my stomach a little. Again, nothing I’d shout from the rooftops about, but it seemed to be a change for the better and it seemed to last. I can’t say that I noticed any improvement in my concentration levels or in other areas related to any kind of mental or physical performance, but my health is pretty grotty at the best of times, so it’s not always easy to discern these things.

Let’s Plot Some Data!

I was also curious to see if I could increase my coherence levels over time. The goals that already come in the Inner Balance App suggest practising three times per day for at least five minutes, with a longer fifteen minute session once per week to build your Coherence Baseline. This I did, as best I could, for almost fifty days in a row. Some days might have only had two sessions, but the vast majority had three. I decided to plot my results on the graph below:

My days of A-level maths are a long way behind me but I think I made a decent go of things. I decided to calculate the average coherence across my sessions for each day. This melded my session coherences into one figure that was easily plotted. If I had three sessions with a coherence rating of five on a given day, the average for that day would naturally be five. This approach also allowed me to plot the sessions where I hadn’t really committed to being so routine with things. The two red data points on the graph above are the bookends for my “three times per day” experimental period. The zone to the left of the first red point was a time when I was a bit haphazard and didn’t do my sessions every day. The zone to the right of the rightmost red spot is where I relaxed things to just one session per day. I plotted the averages and asked Open Office Calc to draw a trend line, which you can see in a tasty plum colour.

Before drawing the trend line, I did get the feeling that the data points became more focussed in the 5-6 Coherence band, but to see the trend line paint the picture of a slow increase was heartening. I will also add that one lower coherence session in a day really scuppers the average when the other two were nice and high. I also found that coughing drags my coherence level down too. Guess who has a chronic cough? Yup. Me. I think the graph speaks quite well for itself, so I will let you draw your own conclusions.

I also wanted to add that in the middle of my stricter experimental period, I tested the Audio Visual Coherence Breath Pacers, also available from Heartmath UK+IRL, which were included in those averages depicted above. 

Final Verdict

When I started using the Inner Balance, I did so with an open mind and with the hope that it would be beneficial. I didn’t expect miracles, and I didn’t expect any changes that might occur to happen particularly quickly. Like many things to do with health, the change is gradual, but I do feel that I could see the benefits of using the Inner Balance, even in such a relatively short period of time. I also think that it’s really helpful that even a five minute session, a couple of times a day, can seemingly give you a helping hand. When it became time to do a session and I didn’t feel like it, the thought “It’s only five minutes!” really helps remove some of the friction towards taking action.

It is here that I will mention the only hiccup that I had with the actual Inner Balance device, and it’s a minor one. The clip that fastens the Inner Balance to your clothing is a nice chunky thing. It has a little bump near the hinge that you can push on to lever the clip one-handed. Near the end of my 170 sessions, that little bump snapped off. Its loss simply means that I have to pull the clip open from the other end, and that’s easy enough to do. My Inner Balance was a demonstration model, so I have no idea how old it is or how many people played with it before it came to me. I can’t even be sure it wasn’t my fault and that I didn’t try to open it in a mindless way.

The Inner Balance is a great piece of technology and it does what it sets out to do with a minimum of fuss. The Inner Balance app lets the user tailor many things to their own taste, and the whole thing does a fine job of getting out of the user’s way. If you want to experiment with any kind of focussed or meditative state and have a thirst for a way to measure your progress, the Inner Balance seems to be a good solution for that thirst.

Thanks again to Heartmath UK +IRL for the review access to an Inner Balance.

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The Inner Balance is available from Heartmath UK + IRL and is currently £159. It is available for iPhone/iPad, Android and Kindle Fire HD devices. Visit the Inner Balance page on the Heartmath store for more information.

If you’d like to read more about the science and research behind heart coherence, Heartmath.org has a freely browsable online book called Science of the Heart. It’s well worth having a browse through and it goes into a lot of depth.

You might also like to watch Howard Martin’s TEDx talk. Howard is one of the key figures who has played a role in Heartmath over the years.

Review: Audio Visual Coherence Breath Pacers

Written by Casey Douglass

Heartmath UK+IR offers customers a number of tools that help to bring their mind and body into a state of coherence. They’ve just released a pack of new Audio Visual Coherence Breath Pacers from Syntropy States, and I’ve been putting them through their paces for the last couple of weeks.

Added Nov 2022: These breath pacers now only seem to be available as part of the Syntropy app. You can read more in my review.

So what is coherence and why is it useful to enter it? Basically, your heart rate varies in timing between each beat. This is your Heart Rate Variability (HRV). When you’re experiencing negative emotions, such as anxiety or frustration, your HRV, if plotted over time, would look jagged and dramatic. When you’re experiencing positive or heartfelt emotions, such as appreciation or love, the time plot would look closer to a smoother, sine-wave pattern. Your system would be in a state of coherence, where various bodily systems are working more harmoniously together. This helps you to think more clearly and puts your body into a more synchronised state.

Heartmath provide sensing devices that actually give your current coherence a score, and they also offer tools and techniques to help you to deepen and expand your capacity for coherence. I was lucky enough to be sent one of their Inner Balance review devices after my previous post about their Syntropy States relaxation aids, and I’ve been experimenting with it for the last couple of months. I hope to write an in-depth piece about my experiences with the Inner Balance device soon.

You don’t need Heartmath’s gadgets to practise their coherence techniques however, you just need to adopt a slightly deeper and even breathing pattern, focus on your heart area, and if you can, generate a heartfelt emotion, maybe by thinking of something you’re grateful for, or about someone you love. These new Coherence Breath Pacers take away the burden of making sure that you’re breathing in a suitable rhythm, and help you to focus in a slightly easier way.

There are seven videos in the collection, each coming in a light and a dark variety, and each makes use of a different geometric shape in the pattern that it presents to you: Cube, Sphere, Dodecahedron, Isohedron, Merkaba, Octahedron and Tetrahedron. When you begin playing a video, you’ll see an expanding and contracting pattern that makes use of whichever shape is at its base. You will also hear a soothing soundscape to help you to focus and relax into the process.

The videos are available in three breathing paces, 8/10/12 seconds, and as you watch the shape ebb and flow, you time your inhale and exhale to begin and to finish when the direction changes. If you’ve opted for the 10 second pace videos, it means that you will be inhaling for 5 seconds, and then exhaling for the next 5. There are sample videos of each breath cycle duration on the store page, so you can try each one to see which feels most comfortable before your purchase.

I found myself gravitating towards certain of the videos more than others. I think that Sphere was my favourite. The soundtrack had trickling water and a nice vocal too, but what I really enjoyed was the dark mode version. Watching it felt like looking down a tunnel, and also gave me the impression, of what a black-hole might look like if it was “liquid”, if that makes sense. In general, the light mode videos all had a really pleasing “sunny” light source in the middle, with the Merkaba video giving me an impression of said sunlight shining through blinds on a quiet afternoon.

The dark modes of each video had a kind of neon feel for me. The colours of the Merkaba video in its dark form, made me think of desert sand and a glowing evening warmth. Another thing that I found quite fun was to reverse my breathing pattern on subsequent viewings. If I watched a video by inhaling at the start of the pattern, the next time, I would exhale first or wait one cycle to begin with the exhale. Inhaling when the outer edges of a pattern are expanding towards you feels a certain way, but inhaling when you see the opposite happening feels a bit different. That gave me two ways to approach each video and in a way, gave each video four variations.

I had hoped to use some of my Inner Balance device readings as a way to gauge how effective these Coherence Breath Pacer videos are, but it doesn’t seem that I can, right now at least. My average coherence rating for my daily sessions has gradually increased, barring the odd exception, so any benefit that the videos might have given me could well be masked by this general increase. What I can say however, is that my highest average coherence ratings often seem to go hand-in-hand with using the videos, so at the very least, they are helping rather than hindering me.

Something else that I really appreciate, is using the videos to help with my breath pacing. On my low-end smartphone, the Heartmath app is a little bit laggy at times, which makes using the on-screen animations and pacers a little off-putting as they can chug at times. Using one of these videos and being able to watch along, being less concerned with my breathing pattern, brings a different feeling to doing my Heartmath exercises. It also had the unlooked for benefit, of helping me to feel a heartfelt emotion when I was struggling to find one, because if nothing else, I could reflect on how pleasing the patterns on screen are to watch. If you are feeling down or numb, that feels a lot more doable and immediate than using your memory or imagination to coax a feeling to the surface.

I think that the Coherence Breath Pacers are a great way to experiment with coherence practices, and whether you own a snazzy biofeedback device or not, the breathing is such an important element. Once I get my breathing settled, coherence often occurs moments later, so having these videos did free me up to lean more into the heart-focussed emotion aspect of entering coherence. They are something that I intend to use regularly, at least once per day, and I think that they would make a nice addition to anyone’s meditation or focussed-practice toolbox.

The Audio Visual Coherence Breath Pacers are available from Heartmath UK+IR. They’re also currently on sale at £12 from their regular price of £15. You might also be interested to know that the Relaxation Aids from Syntropy States are also currently on offer at £15 instead of £19.

I was given review access to this product.

Syntropy States Review

Written by Casey Douglass

I’ve been doing various kinds of relaxation and mindfulness meditations for decades. My at times rampant OCD and other health issues mean that losing a bit of tension, when I can, makes all the difference between coping, or falling down the rabbit hole. As a consequence, I’m always on the lookout for new ways to relax. It was while browsing the net one day that I stumbled across Syntropy States, a collection of relaxation videos that make use of evolving geometries and soothing music to help the viewer refocus and refresh. The folks at Heartmath UK+IR kindly provided me with review access to Syntropy States, and in this post, I will describe how I got on with them.

Added Nov 2022: These breath pacers now only seem to be available as part of the Syntropy app. You can read more in my review.

Syntropy States consists of eight, five minute videos. Seven of these are themed around the chakra energy centres of the body, with the eighth being a heart coherence breath pacer. If you haven’t encountered them before, chakras are energy centres in certain parts of the body, and are the focus of a variety of Eastern spiritual and healing traditions. On a personal level, I neither fully believe they exist, nor disbelieve it. I do think that they are a nice concept to theme the various videos around, and they do lend themselves to focussing on a particular video with the attributes of that particular chakra in mind, such as the creativity and passion engendered in the Sacral chakra.

The heart coherence breath pacer is a tool to help you reach a ten second breath cycle, and to enter a state of coherence. Coherence is something that is core to many of the HearthMath techniques and devices. It is a state of balance that the experiencer can train themself to achieve, to use in situations where they can’t simply shut themselves away from the world, close their eyes and navel-gaze until they feel better. This state isn’t the same as relaxation, although it shares some of the same benefits. HeartMath sell a range of biofeedback devices and tools to help you monitor and reach this state. Sadly I don’t have one of these devices, so I couldn’t tell you if using Syntropy States put me into coherence. What I can describe however, are the effects that I was able to notice in a bodily, and a mental sense.

I spent around a week with the videos, beginning with the Root chakra video, which is themed around the notions of self-regulation and security. I have been suffering with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for decades and I find myself in a particularly bad period. Bad enough that I have been cranking out Exposure and Response Prevention charts at least twice a day, trying to expose to my fears and to get my brain to come down from high alert. This is the state that I would often bring into my session with each video, a pounding heart, a racing mind and a fatigue that would have happily seen me go to bed and not wake up for weeks. I didn’t expect a five minute video to flip a switch and make me feel like a unicorn had just pooped a winning lottery ticket into my hands; I just want to paint the picture that it was quite a severe frame of mind I was experiencing. So did the videos help? I think they helped to some degree.

One small fear that I had about using the videos was that the shifting patterns and shapes would cause after-images while I focussed on them. I often suffer with very tired eyes, tired enough that reading a page of black text on a white background gifts me the lovely illusion of floating black line-shaped shadows as my eyes roam the page. The few times I’ve used other visual meditation videos, this effect occurred, and just became irritating. The Syntropy States videos do make a lot of use of white space, but I’m glad to report that the shifting geometries and colours didn’t once cause me any eye fatigue symptoms. So that was a great start. The geometric patterns and colours shift, undulate and flow, and there seems to be so much movement at times that it’s nice to realise that you can’t really keep track of it all, nor do you need to. I think that this is partly what helped me to get out of the hyper-vigilant, controlling frame of mind my anxiety often puts me in. The ambient chill-out soundtrack also helped, even though my mind tends much more towards a love of dark ambient, when I get the choice.

As far as their effect on my stress level, I found that about half way through each video (around the two and a half minute mark) a state of clarity or mental calm did seem to emerge in my mind. It was subtle, but it was there, a bit like the moment you realise that you are holding your breath and you didn’t even realise it. This state stayed with me until the video ended and for some time beyond. Hand in hand with this, I did notice a slight calming of the sensation of my heartbeat. Nothing major, but enough to notice that I felt slightly less “pulsey”. This seemed to be my general verdict on each video, that it did have a modest positive effect on me. Naturally, there were some that appealed to me more than others, with a favourite being the swirly patterns of the Third Eye video (the still at the top of this post is from that video). I also came to realise that I’d also have been perfectly happy to watch a video that was far longer than five minutes.

I enjoyed the time that I spent with the Syntropy States videos. Before I tried them, I was much more of an “eyes shut” kind of meditator, because I like to rest my eyes and focus in the darkness. Having spent time watching pleasing geometries flow and expand in these videos, backed by chill music, I can certainly see the benefits that open-eyed focus can bring. If you think Syntropy States might be something you’d be interested in, head over to the HeartMath UK+IR website for more information.

HeartMath UK+IRL commissioned Syntropy States from The Syntropy Partnership. It features the geometries of artist Allie Joy and soundtracks from Serenity States.

Thank you to HeartMath UK+IR for giving me review access.

Product Name: Syntropy States

Available From: HeartMath UK+IR

Price: £19