Headroom

About

Your brain has limited bandwidth. Headroom tracks how much of it you're using.
 
Every time you open another tab, jump between topics, or get sucked into social media, your cognitive load climbs. Headroom measures this in real time and gives you a Brain Battery score so you can see exactly when you're burning out and do something about it.
 
HOW IT WORKS
 
Headroom monitors four signals continuously:
 
• Tab count — how many tabs are open right now
• Tab switching frequency — how rapidly you're jumping between them
• Domain diversity — how many different topic categories are open simultaneously
• Stimulation level — the cognitive weight of the sites you have open (YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. score higher than docs or GitHub)
 
These four signals are combined into a single Brain Battery score from 0–100. Green means you're focused. Yellow means load is building. Red means it's time to step back.
 
WHAT YOU GET
 
• Live badge on the toolbar showing your current battery percentage
• Full popup dashboard with signal breakdown and category analysis
• Smart suggestions tailored to your current browsing pattern
• Stale tab detector — finds tabs you haven't visited in over 24 hours
• One-click Reduce Load action to clean up distracting tabs
• Topic domain breakdown — click to see exactly which categories are draining you
 
COMPLETELY PRIVATE
 
Headroom never sends your data anywhere. No servers, no analytics, no accounts. Everything is computed locally and stored only on your device using Chrome's built-in storage. The extension only reads domain names and tab counts - never page content, URLs with paths, or anything you type.
 
LIGHTWEIGHT
 
Built on Manifest V3 with event-driven architecture. Uses Chrome alarms instead of constant polling. Typical CPU usage is under 0.1%.
 
PERMISSIONS EXPLAINED
 
• tabs — required to count open tabs and detect switching
• storage — saves your score history locally on your device
• idle — detects when you're away so the score adjusts correctly
• alarms — runs the score calculation every 2 minutes without polling