“In a noisier environment such as a university campus, the device appeared to help with staying on task for a bit longer, with less tendency to be drawn away by surrounding sounds and stimulations.”
About LYEONS Heart user Trisha
Trisha is currently studying for a Master’s degree in Bioscience Futures at Imperial College London and is also contributing to the LYEONS journey as a placement student. With a scientific background and a thoughtful, reflective approach, she spent a week using LYEONS Heart across different parts of daily life – from commuting and studying to gym sessions, sleep, and waking up.
As someone involved in the day-to-day work around LYEONS while also using the device herself, Trisha brings a perspective that is both curious and grounded in lived experience. In this piece, she shares her honest reflections on using LYEONS Heart over the course of one week – not as a polished success story, but as a genuine account of what she noticed, when the device felt supportive, when the effects felt subtle, and how different rhythms seemed to feel different depending on the state she was already in.
A week of noticing what changed
Over the course of the week, three use cases stood out most clearly for Trisha: physical activity, waking up, and grounding during overstimulating situations.
Rather than describing the device as doing the same thing in every setting, she described it as something that felt more supportive in certain states than others. Some effects felt immediate and obvious. Others were more subtle, or only noticeable in specific environments.
What came through most clearly in her reflections was that the effect did not seem to depend only on the rhythm itself, but also on what her body and nervous system needed in that moment. The same device could feel calming in one setting, barely noticeable in another, and surprisingly activating somewhere else entirely.
At the gym: pushing through the last part of a set
One of the clearest effects for Trisha came during physical activity.
Using LYEONS Heart at around 55 to 60 BPM throughout gym sessions, across both resistance training and cardio, she noticed a steady and repeatable pattern. On sets where she wore the device, she completed more repetitions across exercises including leg press, leg curl, hip thrust, and lat pull-down. To keep the observations as honest as possible, repetitions were counted by a friend rather than by Trisha herself.
What stood out to her was not a sudden burst of effort, but something quieter – a reduction in the internal resistance that usually appears toward the later part of a set. She described it as being able to keep going without focusing so much on the tiredness, pushing closer to near failure without overthinking the discomfort of the final repetitions.
“I could push myself through the last part of a set without thinking too much about the tiredness.”
In some sessions, this translated into a noticeable increase in repetitions, moving from around 8 repetitions to sets of 15 to 18. On the treadmill, she noticed something similar. The urge to stop or monitor the time felt reduced, and the overall experience felt steadier. She also felt her breathing was more stable compared with the effect of listening to fast gym music.
What seemed most important here was not simply performance, but the feeling of having a little less internal friction during effort – a little less negotiation with tiredness, and a little more space to keep going.
Studying: more helpful when the environment is noisy
Trisha also used the device while studying, though here the picture felt more nuanced.
In noisier environments, such as university spaces with more surrounding activity, she felt the device helped her stay on task for longer, with less tendency to be pulled away by surrounding sounds and stimulation. In those settings, the effect felt less about concentration in the abstract and more about managing external sensory input.
In a silent environment, however, she did not feel much of a noticeable difference.
As someone with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Trisha already finds that maintaining attention while studying takes considerable effort. For her, LYEONS Heart did not feel like a universal focus tool in every setting. Instead, it seemed to offer more support when there was a sensory load to manage – when the challenge was not only studying, but studying while filtering noise, movement, and distraction.
On the Tube: when slower rhythms felt grounding
Some of Trisha’s most instructive observations came during her commute, particularly around rhythm selection.
During peak-hour travel, with long queues, delays, crowded carriages, and a lot of surrounding noise, she used LYEONS Heart at around 30 to 40 BPM and found it noticeably grounding. In those moments, the slower rhythm appeared to reduce the sense of overstimulation created by the environment.
“At 30 to 40 BPM, it felt much easier to deal with the overstimulation of a busy Tube journey.”
She described it as a kind of steadiness that was difficult to define precisely, but distinct enough to be worth noting. Rather than removing the chaos of the environment, it seemed to give her something steadier to hold onto within it.
What was equally interesting, though, was what happened when she used a faster setting in the same context. At 70 BPM or above, the effect seemed to reverse. Rather than helping her settle, the faster rhythm added to her existing sensory load and heightened the feeling of anxiety rather than easing it.
That contrast felt important. For Trisha, slower rhythms seemed more supportive when her system was already dealing with overload, whereas faster rhythms in the same state could feel too activating.
She described how simply knowing she had the device with her allowed her to attend meetings, travel to clients, and feel more confident leaving home.
“Sometimes you just need that extra support to feel like you can get through.”
Sleep: subtle support when sleep did not come easily
Trisha rarely struggles with sleep and often falls asleep early, usually somewhere between 9pm and midnight, unless there is outside stimulation such as loud noise or too much blue light from a screen.
Because of that, her observations around sleep were quite specific.
On one night where she felt very tired but could not fall asleep, using a setting below 35 BPM appeared to have a mild settling effect that gradually made her feel sleepier. It was not dramatic, but it felt supportive enough to notice.
On nights where sleep came naturally without difficulty, she did not notice much of a difference.
That honesty matters. Her experience did not suggest that the device changed sleep in every situation. Instead, it seemed more relevant on the nights when her body felt tired but her system had not yet settled enough to drift off.
Waking up: “like a caffeine burst without the caffeine”
If the gym was the most consistent effect across the week, waking up was perhaps the most immediately noticeable.
Using the device at around 78 to 80+ BPM shortly after waking, Trisha described a clear shift in alertness. The heaviness in her eyes felt easier, yawning reduced during the session, and she noticed herself moving into a more awake state more quickly.
Because she is not used to drinking caffeine daily, the feeling stood out to her. The comparison she reached for was simple and relatable: it felt like getting a caffeine burst without any caffeine.
That distinction between slower rhythms for grounding and faster rhythms for activation came up elsewhere in the week too, but waking up was where it felt most obvious. In contrast to the lower BPM settings she preferred for overstimulation or settling, the higher BPM seemed to feel more useful when the goal was alertness and starting the day.
Different rhythms for different states
Across the week, one of the clearest patterns in Trisha’s feedback was that different rhythms seemed to fit different physiological and emotional states.
For her, the slower range of around 30 to 40 BPM felt the most comfortable and versatile across daily life, particularly during moments of overstimulation or anxiety. These were the settings she found herself returning to when she wanted a sense of grounding or calm.
At the same time, faster rhythms appeared to have a different role. Rather than helping her settle, they seemed more useful for activation – especially on waking or when she wanted to feel more alert.
What felt valuable in Trisha’s reflections was how clearly they showed that the same rhythm will not feel the same in every situation. A setting that feels supportive in one state may feel unhelpful, or even too much, in another. Again and again, her experience pointed back to the same idea: the context matters, and so does the state the body is already in.
Shaping LYEONS with our users
Experiences like Trisha’s continue to shape how we think about LYEONS Heart.
Her reflections reinforce something we are increasingly seeing through our early users: rhythm is not just about preference, but about context, sensory load, and physiological state. The same person may need something different when commuting through a crowded station, pushing through the final part of a gym set, trying to settle into sleep, or waking up at the start of the day.
As we continue working with early users, we are building a clearer picture of how different rhythms may support different states – from calm and grounding to focus, recovery, and alertness. These insights are helping us refine not only the device itself, but also the way we think about usability, guidance, and future personalisation.
Over time, they will also inform how we design studies with university and clinical partners, and how we continue exploring the relationship between rhythm, physiology, and nervous system regulation in everyday life.
Trisha’s experience also sits within a broader pattern we are beginning to explore through early LYEONS user testing. In our early-stage observational work, we have seen signals that rhythm-based sensory input may influence how people describe calm, alertness, and task engagement in everyday settings. These early observations are helping shape the next phase of our testing and product development, but larger studies are still needed to understand who benefits most, in which contexts, and why.
We are very grateful to Trisha for sharing her experience so openly and thoughtfully, and for taking the time to notice both the subtle shifts and the more obvious ones. Her reflections are helping us understand what LYEONS Heart can feel like in real life – not in theory, but in the middle of ordinary days, busy commutes, study sessions, gym sets, and sleepy mornings.
Thank you, Trisha, for being part of this journey. 🙂
LYEONS Heart is a non-medical wellbeing device designed to support general everyday wellbeing and nervous system awareness. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Individual experiences may vary.
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