Stress is part of modern life, but its long-term effect on our health and productivity can be dramatic. Chronic stress can literally kill you, increasing your risk for heart attack and stroke by up to 50%.
Lief tracks and optimizes your resiliency to stress by increasing your natural heart rate variability (HRV), a biomarker of your physical and psychological health. A low HRV score is linked with anxiety, distraction and poor performance - things we'd prefer to avoid, right?
The good news is you can improve your HRV with Lief and stay focused and in control throughout your day. The device's scientifically-validated HRV biofeedback exercises have been used by doctors, psychologists and coaches for decades. It's safe, drug-free, non-invasive and has improved stress, mood and focus for thousands of people.
The shape of the Lief is designed to comfortably fit and bend with your torso. The patch is just 6mm thin and sits under your clothing discreetly. Lief uses stickers for all-day wear without needing restrictive straps.
Put Lief on in the morning, then forget about it. When your body needs a reset or it’s time to train, Lief's quiet vibrations make sure you're the only one that notices. You don't need a screen to understand what's going on, or what to do next. Just notice the vibration and follow along with your breath.
Lief uses short 3-minute biofeedback exercises or “doses” as a central training tool in building long-term results. By practicing throughout the day, you can maintain your physical and emotional resiliency while staying focused and balanced.
Developed with Stanford and UCSF clinicians, the Lief support app helps you record your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and sensations. The app combines with Lief to uncover and untangle thinking patterns that are negatively affecting your body.
- Thought Records
- Progress reviews
- CBT interventions toolkit
- Audio exercises
- Mood rating
Simply follow the in-app instructions to calibrate your Lief, choose your training schedule, and go. It’s that simple.
The stickers included with your Lief are skin-safe, medical-grade products that have been used by thousands of patients. We tested dozens of different brands and these daily use stickers were the preferred choice of our pilot users. While we believe you’ll love this brand, we encourage you to find stickers that work best for your needs. Most standard “ECG electrodes” on Amazon will work with Lief and we do not lock you into our stickers.
The Lief measures heart rate variability (HRV), heart rate and breathing to recognize your stress and anxiety patterns with clinical-grade accuracy.
Carefully engineered, the Lief patch offers precision that other trackers can't match. We use the medical gold-standard for HRV measurement, the electrocardiogram or ECG, with a sensor optimally placed right above the heart. Accuracy is paramount in creating results and unlocking usable insight, because even small inaccuracies in the heart signal can lead to big problems in measuring HRV.
Listen to a brief explanation of HRV and the benefits of HRV biofeedback from a pioneer in the field, Dr. Richard Gevirtz, Ph.D.
Our team went through dozens of prototypes, from a bulky chest strap vibrating to our heart beat to our final sleek patch form factor. Much of our exploration has been guided by these design goals:
- Maintain highest signal quality to give true insight
- Develop the right form factor, comfortable, flexible
- finding an interaction modality that's discreet without "broadcasting"
- Develop a training methodology that works in daily life, without sacrificing signal quality and experience.
Lief’s journey began in Harvard and Stanford neuroscience labs studying meditation’s effect on the human brain. After discovering first-hand that meditation techniques truly did have a positive impact on people’s health and wellbeing, we spent nearly a year trekking through the Himalayan mountains to measure the brainwaves and heartbeats of meditating Tibetan monks.
The journey was profound, discovering first-hand the power a trained mind can have over the body, and how deeply the heart is connected to our minds. These masters demonstrated their ability to change the temperature of their body, speed up and slowing down their heart at will, and perhaps most profound was their clarity and empathy.
Eventually we returned to San Francisco to use our personal, scientific, and data learnings to turn over a new "Lief" and build the product we have today.
