Noxy

Inspiration

My roommate tells me her dreams every morning - then forgets them by the time she's in class. She wakes with an emotional residue she can't name, heavy or tender or vaguely dreadful, and by breakfast it's dissolved into background noise. She knows something was there. She just couldn't catch it.

This is the problem Noxy was built for. Most people have low interoceptive resolution; they feel things, but vaguely, too late, without language for them. And they have no access at all to what their sleeping mind does with those feelings overnight. Neuroscience tells us that REM sleep is the brain's emotional processing system: it replays unresolved daytime experiences, strips their emotional charge, and integrates them into memory. Missing that window isn't just missing information - it's missing the processing itself.

We wanted to design a tool that makes this invisible cycle visible.

What it does

Noxy is an emotional processing companion built around a soft EEG sleep mask. It gives users a genuinely new sense: interoceptive literacy - the trained ability to catch emotional signals in the body before they escalate, name them precisely, and understand what the sleeping mind did with them overnight.

• Pre-sleep ritual: Ashley sees a body silhouette lit with the day's accumulated signals. One prompt: "your body held this today. You don't need to solve it. Just let it be known." The mask guides her breathing below resting heart rate. Sleep comes.
• Overnight: the mask passively tracks REM cycles, emotional arousal, eye movement, and HRV. No interruption.
• Morning capture: the mask wakes her gradually, preserving the dream window. One soft tone: I'm listening. She whispers whatever is there - a fragment, a feeling, a word. 90 seconds. No screen.

Over weeks, patterns emerge that no conscious attention could catch.

Built With

• figma