Float didn't start as a mental health product. It started as a creative experiment. Doron Meir, who spent 25 years working in animation and games for studios including DreamWorks, Netflix, and Warner Bros., had no idea he was building something useful. But early users were saying things like "this is breaking my brain loops" and "this is like an out-of-body experience." Meir started using it himself to cope with the pressures of directing a DreamWorks project, and something was clearly happening.

So he brought in a psychologist. Then more researchers followed. What surprised everyone — the psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health researchers who evaluated Float — was that none of them could explain why it worked.

It took nearly four years to find the answer: a relatively obscure area of science called Directed Attention Fatigue and Attention Restoration Theory.

Directed Attention Fatigue, Meir explains, is what happens when the brain's capacity to focus becomes depleted. Our ability to ignore distractions and direct attention where we want it is a finite resource. Almost everything we do draws on it. When it runs low, the symptoms look a lot like ADHD — difficulty focusing, planning, deciding, controlling impulses, reading social cues. "This isn't just tiredness," Meir says. "It's a specific condition."

Attention Restoration Theory is the science of how that capacity recharges. It's been studied for 40 years with consistent results — and yet almost nobody knows it exists, including most mental health professionals. Meir attributes this partly to the fact that the research sits at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and environmental design, and never found a clear institutional home.

Float, the product Meir built through his company BrainSwitch Labs, is designed around a concept from Attention Restoration Theory called Soft Fascination: the state of being neither too interested nor too bored. Research shows that time spent in this state reduces stress and recharges directed attention. Float creates that state deliberately — users float through generative landscapes they can calibrate to their needs, with no instructions, no demands, and nothing to learn. Studies have found measurable effects in as little as seven minutes once a week, with results that compound over time and EEG data confirming the shift in brain state.

Meir received his own ADHD diagnosis at 52, while already building Float. "Many of our users identify as ADHD, and the more I learned about the symptoms the more I realized I needed to get diagnosed," he says. "The research, what users were telling me, and my own life — it all connected."

He's particularly focused on the tech and creative sectors, which he sees as especially vulnerable to attention fatigue. People in those industries deal with high stakes, low predictability, and constant task-switching — all of which depletes directed attention. They also have higher rates of neurodivergence: around 29% of entrepreneurs have ADHD, Meir says, roughly five times the estimated general population rate. "It's both sides at once. We already deal with attention challenges, and we work in depleting environments."

Meir is now taking this message beyond the product itself, speaking to founders and leaders in Vancouver about what he sees as an urgent and largely unaddressed problem. "There's a well-studied area of science that addresses exactly what we all so desperately need, but almost nobody knows it exists," he says. "What gets to me is that the fix isn't just in encouraging people to take more break.