Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have benefitted greatly from my Spire and its accompanying iPhone app. As an anxiety sufferer, I have found it very useful to work with the biofeedback data that the Spire provides. Firstly, it gives me an early warning when my breathing is starting to get a bit too excitable and I can just do a few minutes of breathing slowly. I use a metronome app on my phone to click at 60bpm (4 beats breathing in, 4 beats breathing out). This gives me a breath per minute rate of 7.5 and, if I'm starting to have a panic attack, 20 minutes of doing that will cause most panicky feelings to go away just as well as if I had taken a Xanax. Secondly, the Spire has taught me a lot about when and where my breathing starts to go wrong and this can be quite useful in terms of general self-knowledge. I didn't realize that I was so tense when practicing piano, for example, or that I can be strangely calm when dealing with a medical emergency. There are a few connection problems between the Spire monitor and the app but that is mostly down to Bluetooth being a terrible technology, as we all know. The good thing is that it doesn't really matter because the monitor unit itself will remember the last 6 hours of your breathing and will send it to the app as soon as it reconnects. You also might take a few days to work out where best to situate the monitor on your body - I find it works well on the belt of my underwear. Occasional repositioning is necessary but not too bothersome. Most importantly, I am interested in where this technology will go in the future - updates are quite regular. I truly believe that breathing, being both automatic and voluntary is the 'interrupt point' for a variety of anxiety disorders. We breathe pretty well as babies - instinctively diaphragmatically - but we forget that as we grow up into a world of whizzing cars and stuff exploding on TV. The Spire has helped me pinpoint and work on my breathing issues. Definitely worth the price for me.