Sensation before emotion.
Cathexis is a somatic therapy app that teaches you to read your nervous system — starting with your body, not your diagnosis.
Cathexis is built on the neuroscience of how your brain actually constructs emotion...
Meditation apps told you to breathe.
You’re still anxious.
You've tried the breathing exercises. The guided meditations. The mood trackers that ask you to rate your anxiety from 1 to 10. None of it sticks — because none of it addresses what's actually happening in your body.
Your chest tightens before a meeting. Your stomach drops when you see a certain name on your phone. Your jaw clenches and you don't notice until it hurts. These aren't random. They're your nervous system running predictions about what's coming next — predictions built from every experience you've ever had.
You don't need another app that tells you to relax. You need one that helps you understand what your body is actually doing, and why.
Cathexis listens to your body first.
Cathexis is built on the neuroscience of how your brain actually constructs emotion — from body sensations, context, and prediction. Not the other way around.
Every session starts with your body. You check in with an interactive body map — noticing where tension, heaviness, or activation lives right now. You tag what's happening in your life with structured context chips that track the relationship between your world and your body over time. Then Cathexis delivers an adaptive somatic practice that responds to what your nervous system needs today, not a one-size-fits-all script.
Over time, you start to notice patterns: the chest tightness that shows up every Sunday night. The jaw tension that correlates with specific people. The heaviness that lifts after certain practices but not others. Cathexis tracks these patterns across hundreds of data points and surfaces insights you'd never see on your own — the kind of observations that usually take months of therapy to uncover.
How it works
Tap the interactive body map to identify where you feel tension, heaviness, activation — or nothing at all. Tag your current context with structured chips across four ecological layers: your inner circle, your close world, the systems around you, and the wider world. "Nothing" is data too.
Check in with your body
Cathexis selects from clinically designed somatic practices that adapt in real time to your responses. Not a playlist. A conversation with your nervous system. Each practice targets a specific neurobiological mechanism — autonomic regulation, interoceptive awareness, prediction error generation, or memory reconsolidation — matched to what your territory profile needs.
Practice what your body needs
Over days and weeks, Cathexis builds a map of your somatic landscape — connecting body sensations, life contexts, and regulation responses into patterns that reveal how your nervous system constructs your experience. Your dashboard shows a zone-by-context heatmap: which body areas activate in which life situations, revealed as a personal data matrix.
Watch your patterns emerge
Three views of one predictive system. BRAIN: Your neural activation patterns across 19 brain regions, rendered as living light — not a textbook diagram, but a map that illuminates as you accumulate data. Activation is always distributed across co-participating regions, never a single "fear center." BODY: Your 29-zone thermal self-portrait — a 30-day rolling heatmap showing where your body carries its chronic patterns. WORLD: Your ecological map — five concentric fields from your inner circle to the wider world, showing which relationships and systems correlate with your somatic activation.
See your nervous system from three angles
Before a stressful meeting, a difficult conversation, or a hard day — check in with what your body is forecasting. Cathexis tracks whether those predictions come true, and surfaces the patterns your nervous system runs before you consciously register them. This is the brain's learning mechanism made visible.
Test your nervous system’s predictions
Everything your therapist wishes you had between sessions.
Cathexis doesn't just track how you feel. It builds a clinical picture of how your nervous system operates.
Treatment Plan. A personalized clinical formulation based on your intake data, body map patterns, and territory profile. Not a generic care plan. A living document that updates as your nervous system changes.
My Story. Over your first two weeks, Cathexis builds a somatic narrative from your body map data, assessment responses, and check-in patterns. A story about your nervous system, written in your data.
Session Reports. A shareable PDF your therapist can actually use. Body map shifts, sensation patterns, intervention responses, assessment narrative, ecological context. Twelve sections of structured clinical data, generated from your practice.
Prevention. When your patterns start escalating over three consecutive days, Cathexis notices before you do. Proactive signals, not reactive coping.
Your body talks.
Cathexis listens through every channel.
Voice input. During somatic explorations, speak instead of type. Voice captures what fingers on glass can't. On-device speech recognition, nothing stored, nothing transmitted.
AI voice guidance. An on-device voice guides you through practices. Not a recording. Not a chatbot. A synthesized clinical voice that adapts to the intervention script in real time. Off by default. Your choice.
Context chips. Fifteen structured tags across four ecological layers: your inner circle, your close world, the systems around you, and what's happening in the wider world. Every check-in connects your body to your life.
HealthKit. Sleep, heart rate, HRV, activity, respiratory rate. Cathexis correlates your biometric data with your somatic patterns. All on-device. Optional.
Built on neuroscience, not trends.
Cathexis is grounded in seven foundational research programs from contemporary neuroscience and psychology: constructed emotion theory (Barrett), predictive processing (Friston), primary affect systems (Panksepp), somatic markers (Damasio), neuropsychoanalysis (Solms), the entangled brain framework (Pessoa), and memory systems and reconsolidation (Kandel, Nader, Schiller, Ecker). These aren't buzzwords — they're the basis of every algorithm, every practice, and every insight the app delivers.
This is not polyvagal theory. Not CBT with a body scan bolted on. Not mindfulness repackaged. Cathexis treats the body as a source of interoceptive data that the brain uses to construct emotional experience — and gives you tools to observe and update those constructions.
The Cathexis Somatic Ontology — a formal vocabulary for body-based therapeutic experience — is published on Zenodo with a permanent DOI and indexed on BioPortal. The clinical framework is documented in a standalone manual available to researchers, clinicians, and IRB reviewers.
Targeted programs for what you’re actually going through.
Each 30-day program is built around a specific territory of human experience — not a diagnosis, but a pattern your nervous system may be running. Programs include clinically designed intervention graphs, daily psychoeducation, and adaptive practices that respond to your progress through six universal learning levels: from somatic awareness through autonomous practice.
AVAILABLE AT LAUNCH:
Threat
anxiety and hyper-vigilance
01
Shutdown
low mood and withdrawal
02
Loss
grief and absence
03
Overwhelm
too much, too fast
04
Body Under Strain
chronic pain
05
Living Under Siege
trauma
06
ADDITIONAL TERRITORIES RELEASING THROUGHOUT 2026
Pricing
Free (always free): Daily body check-ins, Right Now breathing, 2 rotating practices per week, basic insights. Everything you need to start noticing.
PRACTICE · $12.99/month or $89.99/year
The complete therapeutic experience. Full program access · All interventions · Pattern intelligence · Prediction tracking · Neural Net brain visualization · BRAIN · BODY · WORLD trifecta · Session reports for your therapist
INDEPENDENCE · $4.99/month or $39.99/year
For when the active work is done.* Full access to everything — check-ins, practices, pattern intelligence, your complete somatic history. The ongoing rate for people who've already done the program work. Not a budget entry point — a continuation tier for users who completed active treatment.
Who Cathexis is for
Adults in therapy who want to extend their work between sessions. People who feel disconnected from their body or emotions. Those managing anxiety, chronic stress, or trauma who want a neuroscience-grounded tool. Clinicians looking for a between-session tool to recommend to clients.
What Cathexis is not
Not a meditation app. Not a crisis service. Not a replacement for professional mental health treatment. Not CBT with a body scan bolted on. Not a mood tracker that asks you to rate your day from 1 to 10.
If you are in crisis, call or text 988, text HOME to 741741, or call 911.
Your nervous system is already talking. Learn to listen.