iPhone and Apple Watch · iOS 26 · Coming to the App Store
Timeout learns your body's own signs that you are leaving the window of tolerance, taps your wrist, and walks you through a real 20-minute break. So you get to choose your words.
Everything on device · No audio stored · Free for 14 days, then 99 NOK a month
Sound familiar?
You said something you regret. You knew it while you said it.
You noticed you were angry only afterwards. By then it was too late.
You went quiet. It was read as not caring.
You saw it coming. And walked straight into it anyway.
That? Now you get a head start.
Your body speaks before your head does. Timeout listens, and gives you the seconds you need to choose.
How it works
Your watch reads your pulse every second, all day, without saving a workout. Your phone listens for body sounds when you are at home: sighs, gasps, a raised voice. Never words. Start a workout and Timeout steps aside, then opens again afterwards.
no workout saved · orange dot on the phone
When your pulse climbs while you sit still, or your body sighs the way it does before your own episodes, you get two soft taps on the wrist. One line on the screen. Two buttons. No lecture, and nobody else notices.
“The window is closing.”
Gottman found that the body needs at least 20 minutes before it can take in new social information. The ring counts down, the suggestions fit where you are, and the watch tells you when your body is calm. Afterwards: one card with sentences that repair.
Afterwards the watch asks: What do you feel? One word is enough. Naming the feeling calms it, and gives the app a label with your body in the same moment. That is how the model becomes yours, not a generic stress app.
What do you feel?
one tap · stored with pulse and deviation
How it feels
none of this left the phone · no audio · no words · no cloud
The research
Everything the app does has a place in the literature. Here is what matters most, with sources. Where the books are precise, the app follows. Where they are not, we do not guess.
Gottman and Levenson call it diffuse physiological arousal. Around 100 beats a minute you lose humour, empathy and the ability to listen. You repeat yourself, and sight and hearing narrow. The threshold is lower for the very fit. That is why Timeout learns your curve, not a fixed number.
Gottman, What Predicts Divorce (1994) · Levenson and Gottman, J Pers Soc Psychol (1983, 1985)
The stress hormones have to clear before the brain can take in new social information. Reading something unrelated lowered the pulse in the experiments. Rehearsing the argument did not. The break should not last longer than 24 hours, or it becomes avoidance. So the break has a ring, and a reminder the next day.
Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work · The Man's Guide to Women
Eighty-five percent of stonewallers in Gottman's studies are men, and men notice flooding later. So body first: pulse and body sounds, not “did you realise you were angry”. Timeout has its own variant for silence and stillness with a high pulse.
Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work · The Man's Guide to Women
Siegel describes the zone where you can think and feel at the same time. Outside it wait fight, flight or freeze. Porges shows how the vagal brake keeps you inside, and how it lets go. The app's vocabulary is his: the window is open, the window is closing.
Siegel, The Developing Mind (1999) · Porges, Psychophysiology (1995)
Lieberman showed that affect labelling lowers activity in the amygdala. One word is enough. That is why the watch asks “What do you feel?” after the break, and why the answer is one tap, not a diary.
Lieberman et al., Putting feelings into words, Psychological Science (2007)
Vlemincx found that sigh rate rises under mental load and discomfort. So Timeout counts sighs as density over minutes, not as single events, and only when the pulse agrees.
Vlemincx et al., Psychophysiology (2011, 2015)
Juslin and Laukka showed that pitch, loudness and tempo carry emotion across languages. StressSense showed it can be measured on a phone. Timeout measures the deviation from your own calm voice, and never listens for words.
Juslin and Laukka, Psychological Bulletin (2003) · Lu et al., StressSense, UbiComp (2012)
Whether the attempt is received matters more than what is said. It is the clearest line between couples who last and couples who do not. The card after the break gives you the sentences, not the case.
Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work · A Couple's Guide to Communication
Without sleep the prefrontal cortex loses its grip on the amygdala, and reactions get stronger. So Timeout reads sleep, HRV and resting heart rate from Health every morning, and knows how wide the window is today.
Yoo, Walker et al., Current Biology (2007) · Thayer and Lane, neurovisceral integration (2000, 2009)
Nahum-Shani shows that help works when it lands in the moment, and evaporates otherwise. Fogg shows that the celebration in the second after the choice is what turns it into a habit. So the alert is short, and the praise comes when you choose the break, not when you finish it.
Nahum-Shani et al., Annals of Behavioral Medicine (2018) · Fogg, Tiny Habits (2019)
The technology
Timeout is written in Swift for iOS 26 and watchOS 26, on Apple's own frameworks for health, sound and location. No server, no account, no model in the cloud. Here is what actually happens.
The watch learns what calm is for you per hour and place over the last 14 days. The signal is the deviation from that, with walking and workouts subtracted. A staircase is not an argument.
CUSUM catches the slow climb. A Bayesian changepoint catches the sudden shift. Both have to speak before the watch taps.
Apple's sound classification runs on the iPhone: sighs, gasps, breathing, shouting, crying. Only the class and the time are stored. Never audio, never text, never what was said.
Pitch and loudness are measured against your own calm voice. A raised voice is a number in a curve, not a quote in a log.
Two minutes of reading and a few groans give a signature that lives only on the phone. It separates your voice from others, and your sighs from room noise.
Home, work and gym from three points you set yourself. Driving and walking from motion, in a meeting from the calendar. Mic only at home. The suggestions follow the place.
Sleep, HRV and resting heart rate from Health say each morning how wide the window is. After a bad night the watch taps a little earlier.
At 8 labelled episodes a model is trained on your curves, tested leave-one-out with at most one false alarm a day. Below 8 the threshold is generic, and the app says so.
The words you put on the feeling are stored with pulse and deviation. The map in Insight shows what your body tends to do before each word. Feelings from Mindfulness in Health are imported.
Live Activity in the Dynamic Island and on the lock screen. Complication and Smart Stack on the watch. Double Tap starts the break from the alert.
Privacy
Pulse, body sounds, episodes and the model live on your watch and your phone. No account, no cloud, no server at Appit. Delete the app and it is all gone.
The microphone yields only classes and timestamps: a sigh, a shout, crying. No words, no buffer, no file. It runs only while the window is open, by default only at home, and never in the car or in a meeting.
When the microphone is on, the iPhone shows it. We hide nothing from you, and nothing from the people around you. The watch shows that the pulse is being measured.
No alerts to anyone else. No score on the relationship. No advice about the other person. Nothing that records children. Timeout does not judge the content of the conversation, it gives you a window to choose.
The pulse is measured with a workout session that is never saved as a workout. The feelings you log are written to Health only if you turn it on. Everything the app reads is in the permissions you grant.
Timeout is a tool, not treatment. It does not replace a therapist, and it makes no diagnoses. If you are struggling, talk to someone who can help.
Pricing
One edition. Everything included. The subscription is bought in the App Store, renews monthly, and can be cancelled any time. Those are the kroner that keep the app getting better.
0 NOK
Cancel in the App Store before the days are up and it costs nothing.
99 NOK a month
VAT included. Billed through Apple, charged monthly until you cancel.
No features are locked behind a pricier tier. There is only one Timeout, and you get all of it.
From the founder
I have read Gottman for years. I knew what flooding was, what 100 beats means, and that the body needs 20 minutes. It did not help. I noticed too late, every time. What I was missing was not insight. It was a head start of a few seconds.
The watch already has my pulse. The phone hears the sigh before I do. Timeout is those seconds, and the break that follows. I built it for myself first, and it is honest about what it cannot do. Now you can have it too.
Try it
Timeout is coming to the App Store. It does what it says, it is honest about what it does not do, and it keeps getting better.
Free for 14 days, then 99 NOK a month.
iPhone with iOS 26 · Apple Watch with watchOS 26
Timeout by Appit · Bergen, Norway
