Is breathwork better than meditation?
For mood, a little, in the one trial that put them side by side. Five minutes a day of cyclic sighing lifted good moods more than five minutes of meditation. For anxiety they tied. Pick the one you’ll actually do every day.
People treat these as rival camps, with the meditators on one side and the breathers on the other. In practice they overlap a lot. Plenty of meditation starts with the breath, and a slow breathing pattern asks for the same five quiet minutes.
What we’d do
If you already meditate and like it, keep going. If sitting still with your thoughts drives you up the wall, try cyclic sighing instead. The pattern gives your attention a job, and in the trial it did at least as well.
The one trial that compared them
In 2023 Stanford researchers split 108 adults into four groups for 28 days. Three did five minutes a day of a breathing pattern (cyclic sighing, box breathing, or fast breathing with a hold). The fourth did five minutes of mindfulness meditation, where you pay attention to your breath without changing it.
Good mood
108 adults, 28 days, 5 minutes a day. Balban and others, Cell Reports Medicine, 2023
Rose more in the breathing groups than with meditation. Cyclic sighing was the only single pattern clearly ahead.
Groups of 21 to 33 people, and the authors call it exploratory.
Anxiety and bad moods
Same trial
Fell in every group, with no difference between breathing and meditation.
Nobody in a breathing trial can be blinded to what they’re doing.
Breathing rate
Same trial
Fell more with breathwork, and most with cyclic sighing.
HRV, resting heart rate and sleep didn’t change in any group.
The breathing groups also stuck with it a little better. They did about 20 of their 28 days on average, against about 18 for the meditation group.
The authors’ guess at why breathing might help more is control. In meditation you watch your breath. In breathwork you take the wheel, and feeling out of control is a big part of anxiety. It’s a bit like the difference between watching the waves and rowing the boat. Both can calm you, and some people do better with a job to do.
What happens on your watch
In a 2026 study of 90 people wearing Garmin watches, HRV rose about 4.7 ms during meditation sessions and stayed up for at least half an hour after. But the meditators’ everyday HRV, across three weeks, was no higher than that of people who didn’t meditate (40.8 against 42.0 ms). Slow breathing does the same thing during a session. The effect is real while you’re doing it and hard to find the next morning.
Do both?
You can. A minute of cyclic sighing to settle, then a few minutes of sitting quietly, gets you the active part and the watching part. Across 20 trials pooled in 2023, breathwork lowered anxiety a small amount more than control groups did. In the stress trials the effect showed up for slow breathing, while the two fast breathing trials didn’t show one. Whichever you pick, the habit of doing it daily is what the trials tested.
The timer on the home page runs cyclic sighing for 1 to 10 minutes, and your personalized guide picks a pattern for what brought you here.
4 sources
- Balban MY et al., Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal, Cell Reports Medicine, 2023pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Takezawa J et al., Daily stress and heart rate variability among mindfulness meditation practitioners: mHealth observational study, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2026pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Shaffer F, Meehan ZM, A practical guide to resonance frequency assessment for heart rate variability biofeedback, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2020pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- 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
