Start, Pause, and End an Aura: Focus Session Controls
Learn how to start an Aura, manage it with session controls, and end it — including how Strict Aura handles early exit and what happens on restart.
Starting an Aura
From the AuraLock home screen, follow the walkthrough below.
Starting an Aura
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Tap the Aura you want to start
From the AuraLock home screen, tap the Aura you want to run. Saved Auras appear here for one-tap access.
Review what stays alive
Check the apps you selected for this Aura. Adjust if the moment calls for something different.
Set or confirm the duration
Choose a named duration such as Pomodoro (25 min) or Flow (60 min), or confirm the saved one.
Tap Enter Aura
Your Aura becomes active. Only your selected apps remain accessible; everything else waits outside.
Confirm if prompted
A Strict Aura asks for an extra confirmation before it starts, because once it begins there is no exit and no pause until the session completes.
Your Aura is now active. Only your selected apps remain accessible; everything else waits outside.
Quick start
If you are in a hurry, use a one-tap preset from the Home screen: Quick Focus (15 min), Deep Work (45 min), or Power Hour (60 min, strict). Each one enters an Aura in a single tap.
During an Aura
While the Aura is active, the overlay shows the Aura name and purpose, the remaining time with a progress ring, the apps that stay alive, and the session controls.
The timer also runs in the background, so you can use a kept-alive app and still see your progress in the persistent notification.
Session controls
Open the session controls to manage your Aura:
- Pause — take a real break; the timer pauses and the boundary relaxes briefly
- Extend time — add 15, 30, or 60 minutes if you are in flow
- Change allowed apps — adjust what stays alive mid-session
- Session settings — review or adjust the current session
In flow? Extend
Returning to your Aura
If you navigate away from the Aura screen, tap Return to Aura from the notification or reopen AuraLock. When you open an app outside the Aura, a boundary screen appears with a Return to Aura action.
The boundary screen
Opening an app that is not in your Aura shows a calm message: "This app is outside your Aura." It does not shame or punish you. It simply asks you to decide whether this is what you need right now. You can return to your Aura, or leave it.
Ending an Aura
To end a Standard Aura early, follow the walkthrough below.
Ending an Aura
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Open the session controls
During an Aura, open the session controls to manage the session.
Tap End Aura
Choose to end the session early. This is only available in a Standard Aura.
Confirm your choice
Confirm to end the session. A summary shows what you protected and how long it lasted.
Strict Aura
When an Aura completes
When the timer reaches zero, AuraLock marks the session as complete and shows a summary: the Aura you protected, how long it lasted, and the apps that stayed alive. From there you can start another Aura, write a quick journal entry about the session, or return to Home.
After a phone restart
If your phone restarts mid-session, AuraLock remembers. When the device comes back, it offers to Restore your Aura, showing how much time remains and which apps stay alive. A reboot does not silently end your focus.
Close the loop
A finished session is a good moment to reflect. Open the Journal and write a line or two about what you worked on and how it went, and attach a mood tag. It takes seconds and helps make the practice stick. See how the journal works.
Pause and resume
Pausing freezes the timer and relaxes the boundary — while paused, no end alarm fires and every app is reachable again. Resuming restores both the countdown and the boundary exactly where they were, and time spent paused is added back so your remaining focus time is never silently eaten.
You can extend a session while it is paused too. The added time is folded into the remaining countdown, and it stays there across a resume, a process restart, or a phone reboot.
No-pause mode
Pause is available in every Standard Aura by default, but you can switch it off when you start a session. With no-pause mode active there is no pause control anywhere — not in the app, not in the notification, not on the lock overlay. Emergency Unlock still works, so it sits between a fully flexible Aura and Strict: no breaks, but still a way out.
Emergency Unlock, step by step
There is deliberately no plain “End Aura” button during a session. In a Standard Aura the only early exit is Emergency Unlock, and it asks you to pass a short attention check first:
- Tap the blocked app. You land on the boundary screen instead of the app.
- Choose Emergency Unlock.
- Solve the math challenge — Easy 2, Medium 3, or Hard 4 problems, depending on your difficulty setting.
- Wait out the cooldown, which you can set from 10 seconds to 5 minutes (default 30 seconds).
- The session ends and the boundary lifts.
Tune the friction in Focus Defaults
Strict has no early exit at all
Ending a session well
When the timer reaches zero the session completes on its own — you do not need to do anything. AuraLock records the completed session, awards your Focus XP, and updates your streak and daily goal. How you finish matters less than the fact that you started; a session you ended early through Emergency Unlock still protected the minutes you were in it.