Cathexis Is Live
By Justin DeGarbo, MA, AMFT · Founder & Clinical Director, Cathexis
Cathexis is on the App Store. Free to download, available today.
I'm not going to bury the lead or build to a reveal. If you want to start, go start: cathexis.health/download. Everything below is context for why this exists and what you'll find inside.
The gap this fills
There are roughly 55 million adults in the United States who experienced a mental health condition in the past year. About half of them received no treatment. The reasons are predictable: cost, availability, stigma, geography, waitlists that stretch months. For the people who do get into therapy, sessions happen once a week — sometimes every other week. That's one hour out of 168.
Somatic awareness — the ability to notice what your body is doing before your brain finishes constructing the emotional narrative — is a skill. Like any skill, it degrades without practice. I watch this happen every week in my clinical work. A client has a real breakthrough on Tuesday. By the following Monday, the felt sense has dissolved back into cognitive memory. They remember the insight. They can't feel it anymore.
The problem isn't motivation. It's infrastructure. There is nothing between sessions that keeps somatic awareness alive in a way that's clinically grounded.
Cathexis is that infrastructure.
What's in version 2.2
Six therapeutic programs, each built around a territory of human experience — not a diagnosis, but a pattern your nervous system may be running:
Living with Threat — anxiety, hypervigilance, a nervous system that overestimates danger. The chest tightness before meetings. The scanning when you enter a room. Your brain learned to predict threat. This program helps you see the prediction and test whether it still fits.
Living with Shutdown — low mood, withdrawal, flatness. When the nervous system decides the safest option is to feel less. Not laziness. Not a character flaw. A protective strategy that made sense once and hasn't been updated.
Living with Loss — grief, absence, the particular weight of someone or something no longer being there. Grief isn't a problem to solve. But the somatic patterns it creates — the heaviness, the chest hollowness, the sudden activation — can be observed and understood.
Living with Overwhelm — too much, too fast. Sensory flooding, emotional overload, the feeling of a nervous system running at capacity with no room to process. This program builds the capacity to regulate the volume without shutting it off entirely.
Living Under Siege — trauma. Past experiences that your nervous system still treats as present. The startle responses, the body memories, the hypervigilance that won't turn off. This is the highest-risk territory, handled with the most clinical care.
Body Under Strain — chronic pain, the nervous system's relationship with a body that hurts. Pain predictions update through movement and observation, not just rest. This program works with the body's experience directly.
Each program runs approximately 30 days. Daily check-ins with the body map, adaptive somatic practices selected for what your nervous system is doing today, psychoeducation grounded in the actual neuroscience of how your brain constructs experience, and real-world invitations that bridge what you notice in the app into what you do in your life.
What makes this different
Every session starts with the body. You open the app. You tap an interactive body map — identifying where you feel tension, heaviness, activation, numbness, warmth, pressure, whatever is actually present. You're not rating your mood on a scale. You're not selecting "anxious" from a list. You're reporting raw interoceptive data before your brain finishes constructing the label.
This is the core principle: sensation before emotion. It comes directly from Lisa Feldman Barrett's constructed emotion theory — the brain builds emotional experience from body signals, context, and prior prediction. If you can catch the signal before it becomes the story, you have more agency over what happens next.
From the body map, Cathexis delivers a somatic practice adapted to what your check-in revealed. Not a random meditation. Not a one-size-fits-all breathing exercise. A practice designed around the specific patterns in your body data, using intervention graphs that adapt in real-time to your responses.
Over days and weeks, the pattern intelligence layer connects your individual check-ins into something larger. The shoulder tension that spikes on Sunday nights. The stomach activation that correlates with specific relationships. The jaw clenching that disappears after bilateral stimulation but persists after breathing exercises. These are the observations that usually take months of therapy to surface — not because therapists aren't skilled, but because they only see one hour per week.
The prediction system
This is the feature I'm most clinically excited about. Before your day starts, you predict: what will your body feel today? Where will the intensity show up? What do you expect? Then you live your day. In the evening, you check: what actually happened?
The gap between prediction and reality is prediction error — and in Karl Friston's free energy framework, prediction error is the mechanism by which the brain updates its model. Every time you consciously predict and then check, you're engaging the same learning mechanism your nervous system uses automatically. You're just making it visible.
Over time, you start to see your nervous system's habits. You overestimate threat intensity every Monday. You underpredict activation around certain people. You're more accurate about your body when you slept well. These patterns are clinically significant — and you've never had access to them before.
What's free
Daily body check-ins with the interactive body map. Right Now breathing for acute moments. Two rotating practices per week. Basic pattern insights as they emerge. No trial period. No credit card. Free means free.
The full therapeutic programs, all intervention types, the complete pattern intelligence layer, prediction tracking, and session reports you can share with your therapist — that's the Practice tier at $12.99/month or $89.99/year.
Who this is for
Cathexis is for people who notice things in their body that they can't explain, can't control, or can't make stop. It's for people who've tried the breathing apps and the mood trackers and the journaling prompts and still feel stuck — because none of those tools started with the body.
It's also for people already in therapy who want something between sessions that speaks the same language their nervous system speaks. Something that tracks what happens in the other 167 hours.
And it's for clinicians who want a tool to recommend that isn't built on polyvagal theory, isn't dressed-up mindfulness, and doesn't reduce complex somatic experience to a number between one and ten. If that's you, there's a provider page at cathexis.health/providers.
What's coming
More territories throughout 2026. Deeper intelligence. Tools for clinicians. The foundation is built. Now it grows.
The foundation is built. Now it grows.
Start
Your nervous system is already running predictions about what's coming next. Cathexis helps you see them.
Cathexis is a somatic therapy app grounded in neuroscience. Not a meditation app. Not a mood tracker. A practice for learning to read your body's signals and understand what drives them.