Photo by Edu Bastidas
Somatic extraction turns calm into compliance and wellness into soft control.
There’s a new frontier in design. It’s not just your screen, your attention span, or your behavior being optimized anymore. It’s your nervous system.
Welcome to the age of what I call somatic extraction. This is the shift in which technology doesn’t just track or predict what you do. It begins to shape how your body feels. Your heartbeat. Your breath. Your emotional baseline. This is no longer interface design. This is body design.
It comes wrapped in the language of care. Apps that promise balance. Wearables that claim to calm. Emotion-sensing algorithms that adjust to your mood. On the surface, it all sounds like support. Who doesn’t want to feel better? But underneath, the logic is the same one that drove the attention economy. Extract, optimize, profit. This time, through the body.
From Behavioral Design to Bodily Design
The progression was almost inevitable. Once tech learned how to shape habits, the next step was to shape sensations.
Affective computing and emotion AI are now embedded in everything from smartwatches to meditation apps. These tools detect facial expressions, vocal tone, posture, heart rate variability. They claim to make products more empathetic, more in tune with you. But what happens when tuning in becomes tuning you?
The problem isn’t the tech itself. It’s the assumptions behind it. That stress is a bug to be fixed. That calm can be engineered. That the body should be a dashboard to manage instead of a place to live in.
These aren’t neutral choices. They point to a deeper cultural logic. One that treats even our nervous systems as something to be optimized.
Photo by Edu Bastidas
When Wellness Becomes Control
Somatic extraction is most seductive when it is disguised as wellness.
Consider apps that recommend breathing patterns, meditation durations, posture corrections. Many of them are helpful. Some may even be healing. I know, I’ve designed tools like these myself. With the best intentions. But good intentions don’t always protect us from participating in systems that steer bodies more than they support them.
When tools start telling you how to feel, when to rest, or how calm you should be, it stops being support and starts being surveillance.
Calm becomes compliance. Rest becomes productivity. Your body becomes a dataset.
In this light, many wellness interfaces begin to look less like health tools and more like soft-control systems. They coach your physiology toward whatever state benefits the system most. Not necessarily what benefits you.
Calm Without Control
There’s a difference between sensing the body and controlling it. Between creating space for presence and trying to program peace.
Calm design refuses somatic extraction.
It doesn’t seek to regulate the body, but to respect it. It doesn’t hijack your rhythms. It listens for them. It doesn’t ask for biometric input. It invites somatic awareness. It is not interested in data. It is interested in presence.
Calm design is not frictionless, seamless, or biometric. It is embodied, ethical, and slow. It offers resistance not as obstruction, but as care. It asks for your attention, not your compliance.
Photo by Edu Bastidas
Toward Somatic Sovereignty
If somatic extraction turns your inner life into a metric, calm design asks a different question. What would it look like to trust the body instead of managing it?
Can design hold space for discomfort instead of numbing it? Can it invite presence without measuring it? Can it accompany us through difficult emotional states, instead of trying to eliminate them?
I believe the answer is yes.
To design with presence means honoring the body’s intelligence. It means making room for breath, slowness, rest. Not as productivity hacks, but as human needs. It means giving back what extraction has taken: sovereignty, sensation, and the right to feel without being optimized.
