I want to be upfront about something before I explain StillHaven: I'm not a therapist, I'm not a researcher, and I have no clinical background. I'm a developer who built a journaling app because I wanted a private place to process my life, and then kept noticing a specific problem with my own journaling practice.
That problem is what StillHaven is about.
The problem it's trying to solve
There's a particular kind of journaling entry I'd write right after something difficult — a tense conversation, a bad afternoon at work, a moment that wouldn't leave my head. I'd open MoodHaven, start typing, and the entry would come out... flat. Defensive. Surface-level. I'd describe what happened, maybe assign blame, and then close the app feeling vaguely unsatisfied.
Later — sometimes hours later, sometimes the next morning — I'd open it again and often have a completely different experience. More honest. More curious. More useful.
The difference, as far as I can tell, wasn't the time that had passed. It was that I'd settled.
When I'm still in the middle of whatever activation the situation triggered — still running hot, still bracing — I can't get underneath it. I'm describing the surface of the experience, not the experience itself. Journaling is supposed to help with processing. But you can't really process something if your nervous system is still treating it as an active threat.
What bilateral stimulation is (and where I learned about it)
I came across bilateral stimulation while reading about EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — which is a clinical therapy protocol for trauma. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (typically side-to-side eye movements, or alternating tones, or tapping) as part of a guided process to help people work through difficult memories.
I want to be careful here: I'm not describing StillHaven as EMDR. EMDR is a clinical protocol administered by trained therapists, targeting specific memories with specific techniques. StillHaven is not that. What I took from reading about EMDR is a narrower, less loaded idea: that alternating left-right rhythmic stimulation seems to engage a particular kind of settling in the nervous system. Some researchers think it mimics what the brain does during REM sleep to process the day. I genuinely don't know if that explanation is correct.
What I know is that I started experimenting with bilateral audio — simple alternating tones, left and right — before journaling sessions after difficult events, and I started noticing a difference in the quality of entries I'd write afterwards. Maybe it was placebo. Maybe it was just that taking five minutes before writing helped regardless. I can't rule that out.
But it seemed worth building into the app so other people could try it and see for themselves.
What StillHaven does
It's simple by design. You open it, pick a protocol (right now there are two: General Grounding for most situations, and Fake Danger Reset for when the activation feels more like anxiety than genuine threat), and rate how wound up you feel on a scale of one to ten. Then you run a session — five minutes, ten minutes, however long feels right — while the app plays alternating left-right tones.
When you're done, you rate your activation again. Then you can write directly from the session — the app drops a pre-filled summary into the journal editor with your starting and ending activation levels and a blank space for what shifted, if anything.
The session history view shows you your patterns over time: which protocols you reach for, whether your activation tends to drop and by how much, what time of day you're using it.
That's it. No guided narrative, no affirmations, no breathing timers. Just the rhythm.
What it isn't
I want to be clear about this.
StillHaven is not therapy. It is not a treatment for PTSD, anxiety disorders, trauma, or any other clinical condition. If you are actively working through significant past experiences — especially anything involving trauma — please work with a qualified mental health professional. A tool like this is not a substitute for that, and it's not trying to be.
It's also not appropriate if you're currently experiencing dissociation, flashbacks, or acute crisis. Bilateral stimulation in those contexts can intensify rather than settle things. This is stated clearly in the app itself.
What it is, I think, is a general settling tool for ordinary stress — the kind that most of us experience regularly and that doesn't require clinical intervention but still gets in the way of clear thinking and honest writing.
Why someone might try it
If you journal and you've ever noticed the gap between what you write when you're activated versus when you're settled — this is for that gap.
If you find yourself opening the journal and then not knowing what to say, or writing something that feels like it's avoiding the actual thing, it's worth trying a five-minute session first.
If you're curious about somatic regulation tools but you're not ready to commit to a practice or a protocol, this is a low-stakes way to experiment. You can run one session and never touch it again. You can track your activation for a month and see if you notice any patterns. There's no wrong way to use it.
Some people find alternating rhythmic stimulation helpful for settling general anxiety — the kind of background hum that doesn't have a specific source. I'm not promising that. But some people do find it helpful, and if you're one of them, having it integrated into your journaling app means you don't have to switch contexts to use it.
The honest version
I built this because it seemed to help me, and I wanted to know if it would help other people too. I don't have a study to point to. I can't tell you it will work for you. The research on bilateral stimulation outside of clinical EMDR contexts is thin and mixed.
What I can say is that the mechanism is safe for most people in most situations, the feature is free, it's built with the same privacy guarantees as everything else in MoodHaven (your session data stays on your device), and the only cost to trying it is five minutes.
If it helps you write better entries, great. If it doesn't, nothing was lost.
If you're already a MoodHaven user, enable StillHaven in Settings → Health. If you're new here, the app is free and open source.
MoodHaven is not a medical product. StillHaven is a general wellness tool, not a substitute for professional mental health support. If you're navigating significant mental health challenges, please reach out to a qualified professional.