Breathing exercises for anxiety

If you feel anxious right now

1. Breathe out first, slowly, through your mouth, as if blowing through a straw.
2. Do one to three physiological sighs: breathe in through your nose, take a second small sip of air on top, then let a long breath out.
3. Then breathe gently with the orb, making each exhale longer than the inhale. Keep the breaths soft rather than big.
4. Notice one thing that's changed, like your shoulders dropping or your hands warming, before you carry on.

Breathing exercises that can help

In the moment, the physiological sigh and the long-exhale patterns (4-6, 7-11) are the quickest to settle you. As a daily practice, coherent breathing for 10 minutes builds a calm habit. Box breathing works for some people, but holding your breath with empty lungs can feel uncomfortable when you're already anxious, so it's not our first suggestion here.

What happens in your body

The exhale is the calming half. Heart rate naturally rises a little as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out. In an experiment with 30 people, making the out-breath longer than the in-breath made them feel more relaxed than slow breathing alone.

Gentle beats deep. Anxious breathing often blows off too much carbon dioxide, which can cause tingling, light-headedness and a racing heart that feed the fear. A clinical therapy for panic disorder teaches people to breathe slower and shallower, not bigger, and in a small trial it reduced panic symptoms. So if a deep breath makes you dizzy, make it smaller.

What the research says

• A 2023 meta-analysis of randomised trials found that breathwork reduced self-reported stress by a small-to-moderate amount compared with control groups, with similar effects on anxiety.
• A 2017 meta-analysis of heart-rate-variability biofeedback, which trains slow breathing at about six breaths a minute, found a large reduction in self-reported stress and anxiety, though many of the studies were small.
• In a month-long Stanford study, five minutes a day of cyclic sighing improved mood and reduced anxiety. Its effect on positive mood was larger than mindfulness meditation's.

Want the bigger picture? Read how breathing affects your body and mind: the heart, the nervous system, blood pressure and mood, with illustrations and 20+ studies.

When breathing isn't enough

Breathing exercises can help you feel calmer in the moment. They are not a treatment for an anxiety disorder or panic disorder. If anxiety is getting in the way of daily life, talk to your doctor or a mental-health professional: talking therapies such as CBT have strong evidence. If you're in crisis or think you might harm yourself, contact your local emergency number now.

For some people, paying close attention to the breath makes anxiety worse at first. If that happens, stop, breathe normally and ground yourself another way, for example by naming five things you can see.

Breathing safely

The slow patterns here are gentle, but holds and deep inhales can make you light-headed. Stop and breathe normally if you feel dizzy. Never practise breath holds in or near water, or while driving. If you are pregnant, or have a heart, lung or seizure condition or panic disorder, check with a clinician first. Breathing exercises can complement medical care but don't replace it.