Ninety seconds, one tap from your home screen. No choosing, no scrolling, no signing in. It breathes with you until your body comes down, then walks you back into the room.
Free forever. Works with no signal. Never behind a paywall.
Most grounding advice starts with 5-4-3-2-1: name five things you can see, four you can touch. It is good advice and it is the wrong opening move, because it asks you to think, and thinking is precisely what has gone offline.
So SOS runs in two parts and always in the same order. First cyclic sighing, paced for you at about eight seconds a cycle, because a double inhale and a long exhale need nothing from you but a body. Then 5-4-3-2-1 grounding, once arousal has dropped far enough that naming things is possible again.
That sequencing is not a design flourish. Bottom-up before top-down is how panic protocols are structured, and it is the reason this works when generic grounding advice does not.
The rest of Shora adapts to you. SOS deliberately does not. Same two practices, same order, same pacing, every single time, and ninety seconds is all it asks of you.
There is no mood check-in, no recommendation, no learning loop, and no choice of voice or length. In the middle of a panic response, a decision is a cost, and this is the one screen in the app where we take all of them away from you. It is also why it works with no signal: if the audio cannot load, it falls back to a locally paced version.
A panic button inside an app you have to find, unlock and navigate is not a panic button. Pin the widget to your home or lock screen and it is one tap, before unlocking.
Take a deep breath is close to useless in a panic response, because a big inhale is an activating move. Cyclic sighing goes the other way: two inhales stacked, then a long slow exhale, and the exhale is where the nervous system reads safety.
It is also the best-evidenced breath we know of. A randomized trial at Stanford, published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2023, found five minutes a day improved mood and lowered respiratory rate more than mindfulness meditation. It is the best-evidenced breath in our library, graded Strong, and we wrote up exactly what that trial did and did not show.
A tool for a moment, not treatment. It will not fix why the waves keep coming, and it is not a crisis line.
If panic attacks are recurring, that is worth taking to a doctor. There is genuinely good treatment for them and it works better than anything we make. If you are in danger, contact emergency services.
About SOS specifically. Everything else is here.
Yes, permanently, and it is never counted against any limit. Putting a paywall in front of a panic button would be indefensible.
No. Install the app, add the widget, and it works. No signup, no email.
Yes. If there is no connection it falls back to a local paced version, because panic does not wait for a network.
Because grounding asks you to think, and in the middle of a panic response thinking is the thing that has gone offline. The breath needs nothing from you. Once arousal drops, 5-4-3-2-1 becomes possible, and that order is deliberate.
No. It is a tool for the moment. Recurring panic attacks are worth taking to a doctor, and there is good treatment for them.
