Study: 5 minutes of breathing exercise improves mood and sleep quality

New randomized controlled study from scientists at Stanford University showed that five minutes of daily breathing exercises can have the same positive effect on mood and anxiety levels as five minutes of daily meditation awareness. So if you're having trouble meditating, you can try an alternative method.

To test this hypothesis, the scientists recruited 108 volunteers, who were divided into four groups. The first group did mindful meditation, and the other three did breathing exercises:

1. Cyclic sighs - a normal breath for 4 seconds, then a second breath to get air (1 second), after a slow exhalation for 8 seconds. Time can be adjusted for yourself, the main thing is to maintain proportions.
2. box breathing - inhale → breath-hold → exhale → breath-hold, each stage lasts the same number of seconds. To make it easier, imagine that you are moving in a square, where each side is responsible for one action.
3. Cyclic hyperventilation followed by breath holding
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   - inhale for two seconds, exhale for one (or multiple values). Repeat 30 times, then hold your breath for 15 seconds.

Participants reported daily on their mood, and data was also collected on heart rate, breathing rate, and sleep quality. Sleep was analyzed using WHOOP smart bracelets.

All four methods had a positive effect on mood and sleep compared to the state at the beginning of the experiment. The researchers noted a decrease in anxiety levels (not to be confused with anxiety, a personality trait: it was expectedly not affected by any of the methods) in all cases.

The technique of cyclic sighs turned out to be the most effective. Participants in the group with this method not only reported more noticeable improvement in condition, but also skipped exercises less often compared to members of other groups. The effectiveness of the other methods was about equally effective: mindfulness meditation gave way to box breathing and cyclic hyperventilation, but not by much.

In the research article, the authors suggest that breathing exercises may be more powerful and effective for mental health than meditation, which alone can compete with antidepressants in the treatment of anxiety.