Unlike most mental health apps that simply give you content or cartoons from static libraries, the vitalme app offers the very latest neuroscience-inspired practices that will build your resilience and mental resources.
NCI was developed by Sara Hamilton, LMFT — a psychotherapist with nearly two decades of clinical experience treating trauma with EMDR, parts work, somatic therapies, and other evidence-based modalities — together with Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a neuroscientist who's spent his career at NASA, DARPA, and MIT discovering how the brain stores and processes information and rewires itself to learn.
Together, they set out to advance and extend mental health practices and offer an app that people and their therapists could use to organize daily practices designed to leverage what we've just discovered about how the brain actually changes and heals.
The result is Neural Circuit Integration — a model to extend, refine, and unify disparate mental health practices under a consistent neuroscience framework. To make these new practices and therapies more accessible, they designed the vitalme app to facilitate daily practice for the general public, and to assist therapists in working with their clients within the NCI framework to make therapy more effective.
A synthesis of the therapies that already work.
NCI draws on the therapy practices the clinical field has already agreed are effective — and arranges them around a single organising principle: the daily practices should build the kind of brain you want to live in.
The therapies NCI draws from:
Eye-movement work for processing experiences that didn't get processed at the time.
EMDR adapted for developmental and attachment wounds — building inner figures of safety, care, and protection, and creating the corrective experiences you needed but didn't receive. The positive circuits get strengthened so they can outweigh the trauma ones.
Internal Family Systems and Trauma-Informed Stabilisation Treatment — working with the different parts of you that show up in different moments.
The body-based therapies. Because nervous systems live in bodies, not in narratives.
A map of the autonomic nervous system. How you calm down — physiologically, not metaphorically.
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy — the structured reframing of unhelpful thought patterns.
The capacity to notice what's happening before reacting to it.
Each of these is an evidence-based, routinely-used clinical approach. NCI integrates them — not by mashing them together, but by sequencing them the way an experienced clinician would sequence them across the arc of a person's care.
Your brain rehearses what you give it. Whether you mean to or not.
Here's the bit of neuroscience that matters: every time you have an experience, the neurons involved fire together. If they fire together often enough, they wire together. The next time the same, or even a similar situation shows up, those neurons fire faster, more efficiently — the pathway is easier to travel. This is true for everything: how you ride a bike, how you speak your first language, and also — unfortunately — how you respond to a 3am wave of anxiety.
The brain has millions of circuits driving different behaviours. The important realisation is that the circuits fired more often tend to dominate the brain's activity. Whichever mental-habit-driven circuits it's been rehearsing become the strongest and most easily triggered. There's a calming circuit. Catastrophising has its own neural circuit. Each gets stronger the more it fires.
Standard self-help often makes this worse without meaning to. Reciting your worries — rehearsing them in a journal, narrating them in detail to a friend, dwelling on what happened last Tuesday — reactivates the very circuit you're trying to settle. The metabolic threshold to fire the worry circuit gets lower. It becomes easier to be afraid and anxious.
NCI's design choice is the opposite. Rather than rehearsing what hurts, the practice deliberately rehearses what helps — calming and stabilising strategies, confidence-building techniques, and the felt sense of being supported, safe, capable, joyful. Not denial. The hard things still get processed. But the daily reps build the circuits you actually want to live from.
The four moves the practice makes — every day.
vitalme's daily cycles aren't a content schedule. They're the four moves the NCI framework keeps coming back to, customised and sequenced in a way that fits you — your day, your nervous system, what you need right now.
Settle the body first.
The nervous system has to be in a state where it can learn — settled and stabilised enough for what comes next. This is what somatic approaches and Polyvagal Theory contribute: a regulated nervous system has access to the parts of the brain that hold new patterns. A dysregulated one doesn't. Breathing exercises, gentle self-holding, body awareness — these aren't "wellness fluff." They're the prerequisite for everything else.
Activate the good — deliberately.
The core innovation of NCI is guided practice that activates the neural circuitry of positive emotional states — the calming, stabilising, confidence-building, joyful ones. A nurturing figure. A peaceful place. An inner champion. A version of yourself that's already weathered something. You engage them with as much of the cortex as possible — sight, sound, sensation, movement — because the more of the brain that lights up, the more strongly established the new circuit becomes. Each rep fires it a little stronger than yesterday.
These positive circuits route through the nucleus accumbens — the brain's reward and wellbeing centre. Strengthening them shifts the brain's default balance away from the threat-detection response driven by the amygdala, and toward resilience and agency. Over weeks of practice, the path of least resistance changes.
Build the circuits you need.
The practice helps you build new neural patterns that support what you need in daily life: more steadiness when a familiar trigger shows up, more capacity before a hard conversation, more access to calm. The hard things don't get ignored. They get met with new circuits — strong enough that, over time, the brain has somewhere else to go.
vitalme makes itself yours.
The practices that matter most aren't the same for everyone, and they're not the same every day. The vitalme app meets you where you are — flexible in time, focused on what your nervous system actually needs. Quick sessions when you're depleted or short on time. Deeper ones when you have capacity. The framework stays the same; the practice adjusts to fit you.
Nine supporting figures to build up your nervous system.
NCI brings a powerful approach to bolstering neural and mental resilience — extending Attachment-Focused EMDR and Super Resourcing, and refined with NCI's multi-sensory approach to engage as much of the cortex as possible. Each supporting figure is an internal representation the practice helps you build and visit. They can take any form — person, place, animal, anything symbolic that carries the feeling. Some will already exist for you. Some you'll grow. They're not magical thinking; they're the deliberate construction of neural pathways that carry the feeling of being okay.
A place — real or imagined — where your nervous system is allowed to rest.
A figure or symbol of care and caregiving — whatever represents being met with warmth.
A figure or symbol of compassion — gentleness, understanding, the meeting of pain without judgement.
A figure that represents being defended — for when the world feels unsafe.
A figure that symbolises wisdom, guidance, and mentorship — perspective when you've lost yours.
A figure or symbol that represents play and joy — lightness, delight, what knows how to play.
A figure that symbolises restoration — the small, everyday repair.
A figure or symbol that represents being backed and believed in — whatever encourages you, whatever stands in your corner.
A figure or symbol of friendship, community, and belonging — the felt sense of being known and held in a positive and growing relationship.
The app's guided practices help you build, refine, and revisit each of these — engaging sight, sound, touch, body sensation, emotion, and belonging so the new circuits get encoded across as much of the cortex as possible. The point is to build what's needed — one figure, several, or all nine. The brain reaches for what's there. The practice makes sure something is there in support.
Where the science comes from.
NCI is a synthesis of well-established, though recent, clinical and neuroscience research. Some of the foundations it draws on:
- EMDR (Francine Shapiro) — the Adaptive Information Processing model and bilateral stimulation, with memory reconsolidation as the underlying mechanism.
- Attachment-Focused EMDR and Super Resourcing (Laurel Parnell, Alison Teal) — imaginal resourcing and reparative experience for developmental and attachment wounds; positive circuit-building that progressively counterbalances trauma circuitry.
- Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges) — the autonomic nervous system as a hierarchy of survival states; social engagement as the route to regulation.
- Parts work (IFS, Richard Schwartz; TIST, Janina Fisher) — the mind as a system of parts, each with its own logic and protective function; stabilisation and self-compassion as the ground for deeper work.
- Somatic approaches (Pat Ogden, Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk) — somatic resources, body-based memory, the body as a primary site of trauma and repair.
- Window of Tolerance (Daniel Siegel) — the optimal arousal zone where new patterns can actually be learned.
- Mindfulness (Jon Kabat-Zinn) — the metacognitive capacity to notice what's happening before reacting; the observing stance that makes regulation possible.
- Memory reconsolidation research — a memory recalled in a regulated state can be re-encoded with new information.
- Joe Dispenza — focused mental rehearsal and meditation as a route to psychological and physical change; the foundation for the app's manifestation phase.
None of this is new. What's new is taking these established frameworks and asking: what does the daily practice look like, if you took all of this seriously, and built it into something a person could do on a Tuesday morning?
What NCI isn't.
NCI is not a replacement for therapy. If you need a therapist, you need a therapist — and the app will help you find one. NCI also isn't a treatment for any specific clinical condition. It's a framework for daily mental-health practice, designed to complement therapy where you're in therapy and to provide structured, clinically-informed support where you're not.
For acute crisis, please reach out: 988 (US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line), or call your local emergency services.
