Reliefr
Get it free
Reliefr
Get it free
A joke arrives the moment your body says you need one. Then it leaves.
Free · No ads · No subscriptions · 18+
14:02 · Tuesday
Most of it is flat. You already know which parts aren't.
Rising
Not a workout — the last one ended hours ago. Not movement. Your heart rate is climbing against your own baseline and nothing on your calendar explains it.
+20 bpm above awake calm
The threshold isn't a percentage. It's the same fixed jump measured across 171 lab studies of acute stress.
Delivered
“Every meeting that could have been an email was, in fact, also an email.”
00:30
No feed to fall into. No second joke. The app has nothing else to show you, on purpose.
Three reasons
Everything else about the app is off by default. These are the only three things that make it open its mouth.
07:14 · Health Connect
Four hours fifty-one. Sleep stages come from your watch, and the check re-runs until 11:00 so a late Garmin sync still counts.
Calendar · your chosen offset
You pick the moment: a set time before it starts, right as it begins, or partway through. Micro-break research puts brief recovery moments squarely where they help.
14:02 · Wearable
Five over your threshold. No workout in the recovery window. Movement samples already filtered out. That qualifies.
Reliefrnow“Sleep is just a nightly rehearsal, and honestly the reviews are mixed.”
Reliefrnow“My five-year plan is mostly a hostage negotiation with my thirty-year-old self.”
Reliefrnow“Every meeting that could have been an email was, in fact, also an email.”
The darkness dial
The dial moves how taboo the territory is — never who it's aimed at. Zero to four is the affiliative humor with the strongest wellbeing evidence. Five to ten is gallows: the territory Willinger's 2017 study found tracks with higher verbal and non-verbal intelligence and lower aggression.
How close the joke sits to the taboo — mortality, work, money, the state of things. Catharsis, which Martin's framework calls self-enhancing.
Whether a joke punches at a person or a vulnerable group. Aggressive humor damages wellbeing, so it's curated out at every level — including ten.
Inside the app
Every screen here is a real capture from Reliefr running on a phone, in dark mode. Including the notification — that one actually fired.
The signal
Most trackers fire when heart rate runs some percentage above resting. That quietly punishes anyone whose resting rate isn't average — an endurance athlete at 42 bpm is already 31% up just by standing at a desk. Pick a body and watch.
Every read happens on your device. Health Connect data is held in memory long enough to make one decision, then discarded.
Privacy
Most apps put a privacy policy behind a link and hope you never read it. Reliefr ships a tab that lists what it holds about you, with live counts, and says in plain language where each item lives.
Health Connect data is read into memory, used for one decision, then discarded. It is never stored and never leaves the phone.
Evidence
Mayo Clinic, Stanford, Harvard, Gallup and a stack of systematic reviews. Where a source is weak, we say it's weak.
Healthy adults across 171 lab studies of acute stress — what the thresholds are calibrated to.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2025Of workers globally report experiencing stress “a lot of the day.”
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2024More meetings per week for the average knowledge worker versus early 2020.
Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2022Studies in a 2023 review where humor interventions reduced depression and anxiety symptoms.
Systematic review, PMCThe caveat that matters
Martin's Humor Styles Questionnaire splits humor four ways and maps each to wellbeing. A joke about death can be self-enhancing or aggressive — same topic, opposite effect.
Sharing humor to build connection.
Finding humor in adversity, as coping.
Sarcasm, mockery, disparagement of others.
Putting yourself down for laughs.
The anti-pattern
Reliefr is a delivery app, not a content app. No feed, no pull-to-refresh, no just-one-more. A joke arrives at a moment it's likely to land, and then it steps aside.
Satici and colleagues validated a doomscrolling scale across 500 adults: more doomscrolling tracked with higher distress and lower wellbeing, independent of total social media use. Ward and colleagues went further — a phone merely present on the desk measurably reduced working-memory capacity, without ever being touched.
A good joke is a 30-second interruption, not a 30-minute distraction.
Timed relief, not infinite content
The research
Every timing decision in the app traces back to published work. These are the same three reads the app carries in its Learn tab — nothing here is marketing dressed as evidence.
Cortisol, dark humor and intelligence, and the four humor styles that decide whether a joke helps or hurts.
Why jokes reduce stress →Meeting fatigue, micro-breaks, psychological safety, and the cost of being present but depleted.
Research on laughter and teams →What the app reads from Health Connect, and why the obvious percentage approach is broken.
The algorithm explained →Limits
Reliefr contains adult humor, dark jokes, innuendo, and content that might make you spit out your coffee. You control the intensity, but even at lower levels things get spicy.
If you're easily offended, this might not be your app. If you're not — welcome home.
18+ onlyOur tagline says it out loud: cheaper and worse than professional help. If you're struggling with your mental health, please talk to someone qualified. Humor supports wellbeing — it doesn't replace care.
Two minutes to set up. Then forget it exists until the moment it's useful.