Guided humming for your nervous system

Feel better.
Together.

Humming activates your vagus nerve, the body's built-in calm switch. No breathwork. No meditation. No 20-minute commitment. It works alone. It works better together.

App Store Google Play
How it works

On iPhone and Android.

Built by a dad·Backed by peer-reviewed neuroscience
60s
to feel a shift
15x
nasal nitric oxide
1
vagus nerve, activated
PRESS YOUR Reset Button
How it works

Three beats.
That's the practice.

Every HOOM session follows the same three beats. The counts and the pitch change with the Moment you pick. The rhythm never does.

01 / Beat one

Inhale

Slow, through the nose, into the belly. The app counts it for you, so you follow a rhythm instead of keeping time.

Inhale Cued for you
02 / Beat two

Hum.

A long "mmmmm" on the way out, always longer than the inhale. The vibration travels down the vagus nerve, the body's calm switch, and the sympathetic spike starts to drop. Some Moments sit low in the chest, others ride higher and more nasal.

Pitch Low to high
03 / Beat three

Reset.

Repeat for a few rounds and you're done. Every Moment runs a different length, because winding down at night is not the same job as clearing your head at 2pm.

Session 1 to 6 min
The problem

Most stress tools
ask for time you
don't have.

i.

20 minutes a day

Meditation expects a window most parents, founders, and anyone with a calendar simply doesn't have.

ii.

Weeks of practice

Breathwork apps promise change, but only after months of compliance you'll likely never sustain.

iii.

Another habit to maintain

Real stress doesn't wait for your routine. It hits in traffic, mid-meeting, at 2 AM with a racing mind.

In those moments

You don't want another practice.
You want relief. Now.

HOOM is not a journey. It's an intervention. A precise, repeatable way to interrupt stress at the level of your nervous system, in less time than it takes to refresh your inbox.

Press the reset button
Built on biology

Your body has a calm switch.
It's called the vagus nerve.

It runs from your brainstem, through your throat and chest, down to your gut. When you hum, the vibration travels along it, and your body shifts out of fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest. The science is well-established. HOOM just makes it a daily habit.

  • Humming forces a long, controlled exhale, typically twice as long as the inhale. This shifts the autonomic balance toward the parasympathetic branch within seconds. It's why a sigh feels like relief: the exhale is the relief.
  • The vagus nerve runs alongside the larynx. Vibration from humming mechanically activates it. A direct, drug-free way to send safety signals to the brainstem. Higher vagal tone correlates with better stress recovery, lower resting heart rate, and stronger emotional regulation.
  • Humming raises nasal nitric oxide by roughly 15× over quiet breathing. A finding replicated for over two decades. NO is a vasodilator: it improves oxygen uptake, supports immune function, and gives the practice a measurable physiological signature.
  • The vagus nerve directly slows the heart's pacemaker. Within a few cycles, you'll often see HR drop several beats per minute on a wearable. A reliable, repeatable shift you can verify with your own data.
  • The combined inputs (long exhale, vagal vibration, slowed heart, steady airflow) collectively read as "safe" to the threat-detection circuits in the brainstem. Cortisol drops. The amygdala calms. Clear thinking returns.

The result?
Most people feel the shift in under sixty seconds.

↓ stress
Lower cortisol response within minutes
↓ heart rate
Slower, steadier rhythm in real time
↑ clarity
Clearer thinking, less mental fog
↑ control
Greater emotional regulation under pressure
Use it when it matters

Ten moments.
One reset.

From traffic jams to bedtime to the second before you say something you'll regret. Each Moment is a calibrated 60-second to 6-minute hum, designed for a specific state.

01 · Calm

Lower the volume
on an anxious system.

4 min · Hum low · for racing thoughts and pounding hearts.

02 · Recharge

Wake up tissue
that's been dormant.

3 min · Hum bright · the post-lunch antidote, no caffeine.

03 · Focus

Give attention
a fixed point.

3 min · Hum mid · the same pitch, every round. Anchor.

04 · Stress Relief

Release what your
body has been holding.

5 min · Hum descending · for clenched jaws and tight shoulders.

05 · Wind Down

The last thing
before sleep.

6 min · Hum lowest · the screen dims with you.

06 · Morning

From sleep
into the day.

2 min · Hum rising · sets your tone for the next eight hours.

07 · Clarity

Clear the fog
from your head.

3 min · Hum nasal · resets the space behind your eyes.

08 · Confidence

Find your voice
before you need it.

2 min · Hum steady · hear yourself sound calm.

09 · Grounding

Come back to
the body that's here.

4 min · Hum low · for when attention has left the room.

10 · Cravings

Ride the wave
instead of acting on it.

3 min · Hum firm · cravings peak in under three minutes.

Six voices. Real humans.

You're not humming alone.

Every HOOM session comes with a companion. A real human voice, humming with you at the same tempo and the same breath. Not a synthetic drone. Not a chord pack. Six people who sat down in a studio and hummed, ordered from higher to lower so you can pick the pitch that sits right in your chest today.

  • Six companion voices Mela through Shawn, laid out high to low. Or hum on your own.
  • Haptic + visual sync Phase-cued vibrations and a breathing orb that responds to your real hum.
App Store Google Play
Tap the orb, or Start,
when you're ready
Humming with Theo
Higher pitchLower pitch
Start
A trainable system

State control is
trainable.

Just like your body. Just like your mind. The more you press the reset button, the lower your baseline drops, and the faster you recover when stress hits next.

Track sessions

See every hum. Watch the curve bend.

Build your streak

Daily reps build vagal tone over weeks.

Strengthen baseline

A calmer default state, by design.

This week 55 day streak
S
M
T
W
T
F
S
Personal best: 12 days · Resting HR down 5 bpm

HOOM is for you if

  • You've tried meditation apps and quietly let the streak break.
  • You need a tool for the moment. Traffic, mid-meeting, 2 AM.
  • You want something measurable. HRV, resting heart rate, real change.
  • You're a parent, founder, clinician, or anyone with a noisy nervous system and no time.

It's not for you if

  • You're looking for guided meditation, sleep stories, or soundscapes.
  • You want a magic bullet. HOOM is a tool, not a treatment.
  • You're managing a serious cardiac, respiratory, or psychiatric condition without a clinician in the loop.
  • You believe the only valid practices take 30 minutes.
For the comparison shoppers

HOOM vs. the
app you stopped opening.

Meditation apps HOOM
Time per session 10–30 min 60 sec
Time to feel a shift Weeks of practice This session
What's required Quiet room, full attention A closed mouth
Mechanism Trains attention Activates vagus nerve
Use mid-day Hard to fit in Designed for it
Streak guilt Constant Zero

Stack HOOM with whatever else you already do. It plays well with therapy, exercise, prayer, breathwork, and yes, meditation.

Just launched

Be one of the
first Hoomers.

HOOM is brand new on the App Store. The science is decades old. The product is days old. If you try it now, you're not arriving late to a crowded app. You're shaping how this practice gets built.

i.
Direct line to the founder

Email me. I read everything. Early feedback shapes the next release.

ii.
The whole library, open

All 10 Moments, six companion voices, the full HOOM library. Nothing held back and nothing to unlock.

iii.
A seat at the start

HOOM is a solo practice today. Where it goes is shared, and the people humming now are the ones who shape it.

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The evidence

Six studies.
One peer-reviewed conclusion.

Humming, measured by cardiologists, neurologists, and independent researchers, across 46 studies and 3,097 participants. Here's what the six strongest found.

520
Retunes the nervous system

Six months, 520 students, a measurable parasympathetic shift in a randomized trial.

Kuppusamy et al., 2020 · RCT
5 min
A shift in five minutes

One short hum moved the nervous system toward calm in 70 hypertension patients.

Ghati et al., 2021 · 70 patients
Cortisol
Faster stress recovery

Adolescents cleared the stress hormone more efficiently after six months of practice.

Maheshkumar et al., 2021 · RCT
4 weeks
Quieter tinnitus

Chronic ringing in the ears significantly softened after four weeks of humming.

Ismail et al., 2022 · 46 adults
15 days
Less anxiety, better sleep

Anxiety, depression, stress, and sleep all improved in just over two weeks.

Jagadeesan et al., 2022 · 42 adults
Lowest
Calmer than sleeping

By one stress measure, humming scored below sleep in the same 23 people.

Trivedi et al., 2023 · 23 adults
Read all six studies All PubMed-indexed · full breakdown at hoominc.com/science

HOOM is a wellness tool, not a medical device. It's not a substitute for clinical care. If you're managing a diagnosed condition, please loop in your clinician.

The origin story

HOOM didn't start as an app. It started in a car seat.

My infant son hates the car. Hates it. The only thing, the only thing, that ever calmed him down was when my wife and I started humming to him. Not singing. Not shushing. Humming. Within seconds, his whole body would soften.

"

And here's the thing. Babies can't fake regulation.

"

A toddler can pretend. An adult can absolutely pretend. But an infant nervous system either calms down or it doesn't. There's no performance. So when humming worked, every time, I knew something real was happening.

Then came the part I wasn't looking for. It wasn't only working on him. By the time he settled, my wife and I had settled too. Three people in a car in Chicago traffic, all breathing slower than we had been a minute earlier. We weren't taking turns calming the baby down. We were doing the same thing at the same time, and it was working on all of us at once.

That's when I started reading. The science on humming was already there, hiding in plain sight: vagus nerve activation, nasal nitric oxide, parasympathetic shift. And sitting right next to it was the research on co-regulation, which turns out to be the formal name for what happened in our car.

So I built HOOM. The same tool that calmed my son, for the nervous system you walk around with every day. And built to be shared, because the part that surprised me most was never that it worked. It was that it worked on all of us.

JJ
Josh Jacobs
Founder, HOOM
Co-regulation

Your nervous system
reads the room.

Nervous systems respond to each other. Heart rate, breathing and stress hormones measurably shift toward the people you are around, an effect researchers call co-regulation. It is well documented, it is why a steady room steadies you, and it is the part almost every wellness app ignores.

i.
Alone, it works

One hum, wherever you are. Your vagus nerve doesn't need an audience to respond, and most of your practice will be private. That part is already true today.

ii.
Together, it's better

A practice you share is a practice you keep. Knowing other people are humming today is a different kind of steadiness than a streak counter will ever give you.

iii.
Built to be shared

Almost every wellness app is built for one person. Headphones on, door closed, alone with your own head. We're building the other thing, and the hoomers here now are the start of it.

A practice you do entirely alone is an easy one to drop. That is the problem we are building against.

Common questions

Asked & answered.

Yes. The mechanism is well-documented: prolonged exhalation activates the parasympathetic branch of the vagus nerve, and humming amplifies this by adding vibration to the throat and chest cavities. Humming also boosts nasal nitric oxide by roughly 15× over quiet breathing, a classic finding that's been replicated for over two decades. HOOM doesn't invent the science; it just makes the practice frictionless.
A low hum with closed lips is barely audible to anyone more than a foot away. Quieter than typing, much quieter than a yawn. Most people use HOOM in cars, bathrooms, walking between meetings, or right at their desk. The Wind Down practice is built specifically for bed.
Meditation trains attention. Breathwork trains the breath. HOOM is an intervention, designed to shift your physiological state in 60 seconds, then get out of the way. There's no journey, no streak guilt, no spiritual framing. Just a reliable tool you can use 6 times a day or once a week. And you can stack it with anything else you already do.
HOOM has nothing to do with pitch or musicality. The lowest comfortable hum your body produces is the right hum. That's where the chest vibrates most. If it helps, you can hum along to a companion voice. Six real humans recorded in a studio, one of them will feel right for you.
No. HOOM is a solo practice, and most of the time that's exactly how you'll use it: privately, in a car, at a desk, between meetings. Together is the direction we're building, not a condition for it to work today.
No. HOOM is a wellness tool, not a treatment. It's not a substitute for medical or mental health care. If you're managing a serious condition (cardiac, respiratory, or psychiatric), please loop in your clinician. Most people use HOOM alongside therapy, exercise, or other practices, not instead of them.
Together.

Hoom with us.

A minute from now your nervous system will be in a different place. And you won't be the only one who got there today.

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On iPhone and Android ● Under a minute to your first HOOM
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