A busy mind has less room to spiral.
Brain Settle doesn't try to empty your head. It gives it something else to hold — and that's the part with research behind it.
Why I built this
I built Brain Settle out of my own experience with stress and anxiety. Like a lot of people, I turned to meditation and breathing apps for help — and they were genuinely great, when I could sit somewhere quiet and actually use them.
But real stress doesn't wait for a quiet moment. Mine used to hit hardest on a packed train during rush hour, wedged in with dozens of other commuters, no room to move and nowhere to step away to. In that moment, a ten-minute guided meditation wasn't something I could reach for. I needed something that worked right there, in the middle of the crowd, in real time.
So I did some research — and couldn't find an app built for that. So I built the one I couldn't find: something designed for the actual moments stress shows up, not just the moments it's convenient to deal with it.
The short version
Anxious thoughts and rumination lean heavily on working memory — the small amount of mental "workspace" you use to hold and juggle information moment to moment. When that workspace is occupied with something else, there's simply less of it left over for the spiral.
Word cycling and paced breathing are a gentle way to occupy that workspace. Not by force, not by trying to "not think" about something — just by giving your attention somewhere else to rest.
In practice, that means we're not trying to force your brain to relax. We're directing it somewhere else instead. Here's how:
- Speed up or slow down the words to match how fast your thoughts are moving.
- Pick an inspiring word category, or build your own list to support your own wellbeing.
- Turn up the stars to help cancel out the noise.
- Set the colours the way you like.
- Push the pace and visuals as fast or as challenging as you can genuinely follow — the harder it works, the less room is left for the spiral.
What the research says
Occupied working memory dulls emotional reactivity
When researchers loaded people's working memory with a task, participants stopped reacting more strongly to distressing images than to mild ones — the mental load left less capacity for the emotional response to take hold. Related work found that increasing cognitive load reduced the pull of emotional content on attention.
Clearing the Mind: A Working Memory Model of Distraction from Negative Mood ↗Rumination and working memory compete for the same space
Inducing rumination — versus a neutral or distracting comparison condition — has been shown to reduce executive functioning in people prone to low mood, particularly their ability to inhibit distraction. Rumination and mental workspace appear to draw on the same limited resource.
Induced Rumination Dampens Executive Processes in Dysphoric Young Adults ↗Training that workspace can ease rumination over time
In a 21-day trial, people with high trait anxiety who did daily working memory training — especially with emotionally engaging material — reported a meaningful drop in rumination by the end.
Emotional Working Memory Training Reduces Rumination in Anxious Individuals ↗The honest caveat
Not every study agrees. Some find that working memory training doesn't reduce rumination even when it improves the underlying cognitive skill — suggesting the benefit may come less from "keeping busy" in the abstract, and more from how engaging or personally relevant the distraction is. That's part of why Brain Settle uses real, pleasant words rather than an abstract drill.
A Working Memory Training to Decrease Rumination in Depressed and Anxious Individuals ↗ Effects of Rumination and Distraction on Working Memory Performance ↗Why word cycling, not a drill
The caveat above shaped a real decision in how Brain Settle is built. If engagement matters as much as load, a cold, abstract task isn't the goal — a warm, easy one is. That's why the word libraries are things you'd actually enjoy noticing, paced alongside your breath rather than raced against a clock.
Sources
- Onraedt, T. & Koster, E.H.W. — Training Working Memory to Reduce Rumination, PLOS ONE, 2014.
- Philippot, P. & Brutoux, F. — Induced Rumination Dampens Executive Processes in Dysphoric Young Adults, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2008.
- Wanmaker, S., Geraerts, E. & Franken, I.H.A. — A Working Memory Training to Decrease Rumination in Depressed and Anxious Individuals, double-blind RCT, ScienceDirect, 2015.
- Emotional Working Memory Training Reduces Rumination and Alters the EEG Microstate in Anxious Individuals, ScienceDirect, 2020.
- Clearing the Mind: A Working Memory Model of Distraction from Negative Mood.
- Affective Attention Under Cognitive Load: Reduced Emotional Biases but Emergent Anxiety-Related Costs to Inhibitory Control.
- Effects of Rumination and Distraction on Working Memory Performance in Individuals with Depressive Tendencies and Trait Anxiety, ScienceDirect, 2026.