Nine states, twenty-four seasons
Your body is not the same body in February as it is in July. Find the state you are in now, and the one practice today asks of you — with a prediction you can check against your own data.
Clear Stream · Gentle Ember · Winter Sun · Summer Lantern · Morning Mist · Monsoon · Quiet River · Knotted Pine · First Snow
Your ring knows your resting heart rate to one decimal place. It does not know that it is late August, that humidity flattens you, or that the ten-minute walk you skipped after lunch is the one thing that would have moved the number. Measurement got cheap. Instruction never did.
How it works
Ten questions, ninety seconds. You come out as one of nine — Winter Sun, Knotted Pine, Morning Mist — and that decides which practices carry weight for you, and at what dose. It is a state, not a type: you re-take it as the year turns.
Twenty-four solar terms, not four seasons. The sleep window, the light rule and the walk all shift as the year moves. Today is Beginning of Autumn 立秋 — begin nudging bedtime earlier — 15 min this fortnight.
Never a checklist. At most three cards a day and usually two, chosen for where you are and what your data did last night. First Light in the morning. Returning before eleven. One tap to close it.
What a day looks like
Not a mock-up. These are three of the ten anchor practices, with the dose we would ask of you and the change we are betting on — stated before you start, so you can hold us to it.
Within an hour of waking, get outside — or to the brightest window you have — for a 5–10 minute slow walk. No sunglasses, no phone. Let the day set your clock.
After your largest meal, walk. Ten to fifteen unhurried minutes at a pace where you could still talk. The oldest advice in the book, and the best-measured.
The same four moves in the same order each night — wash, dim, phone out of reach, lie down. Then four to six minutes of slow breathing, exhale a little longer than the inhale, about six breaths a minute. In bed with lights out before 11.
Why it is checkable
A recommendation that cannot fail is not advice, it is decoration. So each of the ten anchors ships with a named metric, a direction, and a window — sleep onset earlier by ten to twenty minutes within fourteen days. You will see it on your own wearable or you will not, and we keep the ledger either way.
It works without a wearable. It gets sharper with one.
The honest distribution
Four of the ten rest on multiple randomised trials. Three rest on traditional basis and physiological plausibility with limited direct trials — and we grade those C, in the product, where you can see them. The alternative is to imply that all ten are equally proven, which is not true and would be the easiest thing in the world to write.
The lineage
The seasonal sleep prescriptions are from the Suwen: in the three months of spring, sleep later and rise early; in the three months of winter, sleep early, rise late, and wait for the daylight. That is a circadian instruction, written down long before there was a word for it. The twenty-four solar terms are an agricultural calendar of the same age and still the most precise seasonal instrument built for these latitudes.
The nine states are not ancient. They come from a modern national standard, and we have renamed them, because nobody should have to read a pathology word to learn something about their own mornings.
What we build on top of that is ours, and we will say so. Where a modern recommendation is an extrapolation rather than a literal classical prescription, it is marked as one in our own source table. The tradition gives us the shape of the day. It does not give us the evidence, and we will not pretend that it does.
The nine
Steady flow; adapts to most seasons without strain.
Warm but easily drafted; energy runs out before the day does.
Runs cool; the engine lights slowly and loves the morning sun.
Bright and quick; runs warm and dry when the night comes.
Grounded and unhurried; the morning takes a while to clear.
Intensity with heat behind it; power that needs a vent.
Deep water; flow slows at the edges when still too long.
Strong grain that holds tension; feeling runs deep and stays.
Finely tuned to the environment; feels every shift first.
Ten questions. Your result, a real card, then the email.
Questions
No. Every practice is a behaviour you can do with nothing at all. A wearable turns it from a suggestion into a measurement, because you can watch the predicted change arrive or fail to. Oura and Apple Health first.
No. These are behavioural suggestions — when to walk, when to dim the lights, when to stop working — and nothing here diagnoses, treats, or replaces care. If a practice causes pain, dizziness, or breathlessness, stop and speak to a clinician.
No, and the difference is testable. Nothing here depends on your birth date, and every recommendation is tied to an observable metric with a stated direction and time window. A horoscope cannot be wrong. All ten of these can.
Now: your state, what it tends toward, and one real daily card, free and without an account. By email: the full guide for your state — all ten practices weighted for you. Later: the app that surfaces the right card each day and keeps the ledger of what its predictions did.
We store your email address, which test variant you saw, your quiz result, and a timestamp. That is the whole list. No selling, no sharing, no ad networks, and one click to delete everything. The assessment runs entirely in your browser.
A small team building the daily-practice app this page describes, with the protocol reviewed by practitioners in the classical tradition. We are pre-launch: this page exists to find the people who want it and to test whether the nine-state framing is the right way in.
The light turns gold a degree at a time.
