Where to start

Where do I start with breathwork?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 20264 sources

Sit down, set a timer for five minutes, and do cyclic sighing. Breathe in through your nose, take a short second sip on top, then let out a long, slow breath through your mouth. Rate your mood from 1 to 10 before and after. Leave the fast rounds for later.

Most people meet breathwork through its loudest version. It’s a video of someone breathing hard for three rounds, or a class where people lie on mats for an hour with music and come out tingling. Many beginners start with the most intense version there is, and they either feel strange and quit, or decide the tingling is the point.

Your first session

1. Sit in a chair or lie down somewhere you won’t be interrupted. The people in the trial did the same.
2. Rate how you feel right now, from 1 to 10.
3. Open the timer on the home page, pick cyclic sighing and five minutes, and press Start.
4. Follow the sphere. Breathe in through your nose as it grows, sip in a little more at the top, and let the air out slowly through your mouth as it shrinks.
5. When it ends, rate how you feel again. Do the same thing tomorrow.

If you feel lightheaded or your fingers tingle, you’re moving too much air. Make each breath smaller and quieter, keep the same slow pace, and it passes.

The two kinds of breathwork

Slow patterns, like cyclic sighing, six a minute, box breathing and 4-7-8, settle you down. Fast rounds, like Wim Hof breathing and the long sessions with music, rev you up on purpose. They blow off carbon dioxide, which is what makes your hands tingle, and they can make you pass out. The Wim Hof method’s own page says to do its rounds only sitting or lying down, because passing out in or near water or while driving can be very dangerous.

Starting with the slow kind is like learning to swim in the shallow end. You find out how your body reacts to breathing on purpose before you try the version that can knock you over. Every kind, slow and fast, is on the map of practices.

How small five minutes is

At 12 to 18 breaths a minute, the resting range for an adult, you take somewhere between 17,000 and 26,000 breaths a day. Five minutes of cyclic sighing at six a minute is 30 of them, done on purpose. In the 2023 trial, that was enough to lift people’s mood over a month.

What next

• To pick a pattern for you, your personalized guide asks six quick questions and gives you four weeks of dates.
• For anxiety, see which breathing exercise is best for anxiety.
• If you have a health condition, check who should skip which breathing exercises before you try fast rounds or long holds.