About
The truce I needed first.
I’m Dr. Tiffani, D.O., SA-C — a physician and surgical assistant. I spend my professional life staying calm and precise in high-pressure moments, making careful decisions when the stakes are highest.
And then I’d come home, get into it with the person I love most, and completely fall apart.
Not by yelling. By disappearing. When conflict rose, I’d shut down and go radio silent — pull the shutters, leave the room in my head long before I left it with my feet. I knew how to keep a steady hand in an operating room, but I couldn’t keep a steady heart across the kitchen table. And I watched that silence do quiet damage: the distance it created, the way one unspoken hurt became the seed of the next fight.
I went looking for something to help in those moments — not a weekend workshop, not a book I’d read at 2 a.m. and forget, but something for the exact minute when the argument was starting and I could feel myself checking out. I couldn’t find it. So, as someone trained to solve problems, I built it.
Why twenty minutes.
The body doesn’t argue rationally when it’s flooded. When conflict spikes, your nervous system shifts into fight-or-flight — heart racing, or in my case, shutting down entirely. In that state, no one is really listening; you’re just surviving. The physiology has to settle before the conversation can begin.
Twenty minutes is roughly the time it takes for that storm to pass — long enough for the body to come back online, short enough that you don’t lose each other in the silence. That’s why the app pairs a real pause with breathwork to calm the system, then guides you back to actually hearing each other.
What I want it to do for you.
My hope for 20 Minute Truce is that it helps couples see the fight before it starts — to recognize the triggers and the patterns that pull you into the same argument again and again, and to interrupt that cycle while there’s still room to choose something else. Awareness first, then repair.
If you’ve ever felt yourself go silent, or say the thing you swore you wouldn’t, or wonder how the person you love became the person you brace against — this was built by someone who has been exactly there. It won’t make conflict disappear. But it might give you twenty minutes, and a way back to each other.
— Dr. Tiffani
Begin your next truce
Download 20 Minute Truce and keep a calmer path within reach.