Does breathwork actually work?
For stress and anxiety, yes, a little. Pooled trials found small to medium drops in stress, anxiety and low mood. Most of those trials were small and nobody could be blinded, so give it four weeks of daily practice before you decide.
Breathwork gets sold two ways, and both are wrong. One side says it lowers cortisol, fixes inflammation and changes your life in a weekend. The other side says it’s just breathing, so it can’t do anything. The trials land in between, closer to a small, useful effect that costs nothing.
What we’d do
Try it as an experiment on yourself. Do five minutes of a slow pattern every day for four weeks, with a 1 to 10 mood rating before and after each session. It’s free, the slow kind is low risk, and a month is enough to know if it helps you.
What the pooled trials found
In 2023, researchers at the University of Sussex pooled every randomized trial of breathwork for stress they could find. Across 12 trials and 785 adults, people who did breathwork ended up less stressed than people in the control groups. The effect size was 0.35, which is small to medium. In everyday terms, the average person who did breathwork ended up less stressed than about 64 out of 100 people in the comparison groups.
| Outcome | Trials | Effect (Hedges’ g) |
|---|---|---|
| Stress | 12 trials, 785 adults | 0.35 lower |
| Anxiety | 20 trials | 0.32 lower |
| Low mood (depressive symptoms) | 18 trials | 0.40 lower |
Most trials had some risk of bias, and the authors asked for better ones “to avoid a miscalibration between hype and evidence”. In the stress trials, slow breathing showed an effect and the two fast breathing trials didn’t.
What it doesn’t seem to do
In the 2023 Stanford trial of 108 adults, a month of daily breathing changed mood and breathing rate, but not HRV, resting heart rate or sleep scores. In a 2026 trial of 88 stressed adults, four weeks of slow breathing lowered stress and anxiety but didn’t raise resting HRV either. If you’re expecting your ring to show a new you after a month, it probably won’t. Your mood is the thing to watch.
The best case against it
You can’t blind someone to how they’re breathing. People expect to feel calmer, so they say they do.
What the evidence says back
That’s fair, and it’s the biggest weakness in the field. The strongest answer is the 2023 trial that used meditation as the comparison, since both groups expected to feel better. Anxiety fell equally in both, and good mood rose more with cyclic sighing. A 2026 pooled analysis of 18 home breathing biofeedback studies found a medium effect on low mood, but no clear effect on stress.
How strong is the evidence?
We’re fairly confident that slow breathing practice takes a small edge off stress and anxiety for a lot of people. It’s still unclear how much of that is the breathing and how much is five quiet minutes, and nobody knows yet whether the effect lasts after people stop. It’s a bit like a daily walk. Nobody expects a walk to fix their life, and people still come back from one in a better mood.
Start with where to start with breathwork, or let your personalized guide pick a pattern for why you came.
4 sources
- Fincham GW et al., Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: a meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials, Scientific Reports, 2023pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Balban MY et al., Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal, Cell Reports Medicine, 2023pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Sumińska S, Rynkiewicz A, Szulczewski M, Resonance frequency versus fixed 0.1 Hz breathing in HRV biofeedback: a four-week randomized comparison, Scientific Reports, 2026nature.com
- Vann-Adibe S et al., Efficacy and methodology of remote heart rate variability biofeedback interventions for mental health: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 2026doi.org
