Which breathing exercise is best for anxiety?
On this page
Cyclic sighing, five minutes a day. Breathe in through your nose, sip in a little more on top, then let it all out slowly through your mouth. In a month-long trial it lifted mood more than meditation did. If the double breath feels fussy, six slow breaths a minute is next.
Search for breathing exercises for anxiety and you get a list of ten, all presented as if they were equal. You’ll see box breathing, 4-7-8, belly breathing, alternate nostril and more. The lists rarely say which ones were tested, against what, or for how long, so most people pick the one with the catchiest name.
What we’d do
Do five minutes of cyclic sighing every day for four weeks, sitting down, with a quick rating of how anxious you feel before and after. If it doesn’t suit you, switch to six a minute, five seconds in and five out, no holds. Do it on calm days too, so it’s familiar when you need it.
What did the trial find?
In 2023 a Stanford team (Andrew Huberman and David Spiegel were the senior authors) had 108 adults spend five minutes a day for 28 days on one of four things. Some did cyclic sighing, some box breathing, some fast breathing with a hold, and some mindfulness meditation, where you watch your breath without changing it.
Anxiety and bad moods fell in every group, by about the same amount. Good moods were where the groups split. They rose more with the breathing exercises than with meditation, and cyclic sighing was the only one clearly ahead on its own. It also slowed people’s breathing rate the most, and the people who did it more days got more out of it.
The groups were small, 21 to 33 people each, and nobody can be blinded to how they’re breathing. The authors call the study exploratory. It’s still the best head to head test of these patterns we have.
The patterns for anxiety, by their evidence
| Pattern | How | What the evidence says |
|---|---|---|
| Cyclic sighing | In through the nose, a short second sip, a long breath out through the mouth. Our timer paces it at 3, 1 and 6 seconds | Lifted mood more than meditation in 108 adults over 28 days |
| Six a minute | 5 seconds in, 5 out, no holds | Lowered stress and anxiety against a waiting list in 88 stressed adults, 20 minutes a day for four weeks (2026) |
| Box breathing | 4 in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold | One group of 21 in the 2023 trial. Mood rose, but not clearly more than with meditation |
| 4-7-8 | 4 in, hold 7, 8 out | No month-long trial for anxiety. In one session with 84 students it moved HRV less than six a minute, and mood didn’t change |
Why does it work at all?
Your heart speeds up a little every time you breathe in and slows every time you breathe out. A pattern with a long out-breath spends more of each minute on the slowing side. At our timer’s pace, the out-breath in cyclic sighing runs half again as long as the two sips in.
A breathing exercise for anxiety works a bit like a fire drill. The people in the trial practiced every day, mostly when nothing was wrong, so the pattern was automatic by the time they needed it.
The best case against it
Anything you do with your full attention for five minutes would help. The breathing is beside the point.
What the evidence says back
That’s partly right, which is why the trial had a meditation group. They got the same five minutes of attention, and their anxiety fell just as much. The extra lift in good mood came with the breathing. Across 20 trials pooled in 2023, breathwork lowered anxiety a small amount more than control groups did, though most of those trials had some risk of bias.
Your turn
Start a session with the timer on the home page, or print the calm sheet with the three patterns, how long to do each and the trial behind it. If you’re not sure which suits you, your personalized guide picks one in six taps. If panic hits out of nowhere, see how to breathe during a panic attack.
Every other pattern, slow or fast, is on the map of practices, with how well each one is tested. None of it needs an app or a gadget, and how to breathe better naturally covers the free moves that come first.
5 sources
- Balban MY et al., Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal, Cell Reports Medicine, 2023pmc.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
- 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
- Marchant J et al., Comparing the effects of square, 4-7-8, and 6 breaths-per-minute breathing conditions on heart rate variability, CO2 levels, and mood, Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 2025pubmed.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
