About and editorial policy
Last updated 2026-09-26
dubchi is a free guided breathing app: 49 techniques and a set of multi-day programs, in the browser and on the phone, with no account required. This page says who publishes it, how the content is decided, and where the limits are.
Who writes this
dubchi is published by dubchi, an independent project. The written content — the technique pages, the comparisons, the guides — is compiled and edited in-house from published research and from standard practice in breathing retraining, sports physiology and yoga tradition.
No clinician reviews this site. We say so plainly because the alternative — implying a medical review that does not happen — is the single most misleading thing a page like this can do. Treat what you read here as a careful summary of public evidence, not as a clinical opinion.
How claims are sourced
Four rules, applied to everything written here.
- Mechanism over outcome. Where we can describe what a breathing pattern does to the body, we describe that, because it is checkable. “Lengthening the exhale increases vagal outflow to the heart” is a claim with a referent; “reduces stress” mostly is not.
- Physiological claims carry a reference. The guides cite their sources inline and list them at the foot of the page, with links where a DOI exists.
- Weak evidence is reported as weak. Several things here are popular and poorly supported — paced breathing for hot flushes, the BOLT score, nostril-specific effects. The pages covering them say so rather than quietly omitting it.
- Derived beats asserted. Most of what a technique page says about pace, ratio, session length and mechanism is computed from the technique's own timings rather than written next to them, so the prose cannot drift out of step with what the timer actually does.
How safety is handled
Techniques carry structured contraindications — pregnancy, hypertension, heart conditions, epilepsy, glaucoma, recent abdominal surgery. These are not footnotes. A technique carrying a contraindication is filtered out of the pages for contexts that imply it, so browsing from the pregnancy page never shows a breath-hold practice in the first place.
Two rules are treated as non-negotiable and repeated wherever they apply: no breath holds in water, ever, and no fast breathing while standing, driving, or in or near water. Both have killed people who were confident they would not.
What this site is not
It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a treatment for any condition. Breathing practices have a modest, real evidence base for stress and mood, and a much weaker one for most of the other things they are sold for.
If you have a health condition, are pregnant, are managing anxiety that interferes with your life, or have a new or worsening physical symptom, the right next step is a clinician, not a breathing app. Nothing here should delay that.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would rather know. Every guide carries an “updated” date, and material corrections change it. Pages are revised when the evidence moves, not left standing because they rank.
Read the guides, where the sourcing above is most visible.