What are the best breathing techniques to calm down?

No single pattern wins, so the useful question is what the stress is doing to you right now. If your heart is pounding and your body feels revved up, lengthen the out-breath. If your thoughts are spiralling, keep the breath slow and give your attention something to hold, such as your senses or one calm word. The nearest thing to a head-to-head trial points the same way: slow breathing did about as well as exercise or meditation. So the best technique is the one you can still find when you’re upset. Pick one or two and get to know them on ordinary days.

Pick by the moment

The patterns below come in two families. Some reshape the breath, usually by stretching the out-breath or adding a pause; others leave it slow and give your attention a place to rest.

• Heart racing: breathe in through the nose for a count of four, then out through the mouth for a count of six, so the out-breath always runs longer. You can feel the air cool on your lip as it leaves. The 4-2-6 version adds a two-second pause at the top before the same long exhale.
• Focus before something hard: box breathing has four even sides, four counts each: in, hold, out, hold. Some people trace a square in their mind, one side for each phase. Four or five rounds is enough, and Calm suggests it before an important meeting. If the holds make you tense, shorten them or leave them out.
• A spiralling mind: keep the breath slow and walk through your senses: five things you see, four you can touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste. Skip any sense that has nothing to offer. Or pick a short word, such as “soften”, and let it ride the breath in and out.
• Lying awake: 4-7-8 means in through the nose for four seconds, a hold for seven, and out through the mouth for eight. Three or four rounds will do. Medical News Today adds one detail before you begin: rest the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth.
• A few seconds, in public: take three mindful breaths. Breathe in slowly, follow the air through the nose and down toward the belly, then let it go. Do that twice more. At a desk, the other quick option is the 3-3-3 count: in for three, hold for three, out for three. It leaves out the long exhale.
• Tension in the jaw and face: lion breathing pairs the breath with a stretch. Breathe in deeply through the nose. Then breathe out hard, mouth wide open, tongue stuck out and eyes rolled upward. You’ll feel the pull at the corners of your mouth. Three rounds is the usual count, and it’s best done where nobody is watching.
• Training on a calm day: resonant breathing runs at about five breaths a minute, roughly twelve seconds for each full breath in and out. Do it somewhere quiet, in the morning or the evening. Belly breathing builds the same habit: one hand on your stomach, feeling it rise and fall. Alternate nostril breathing belongs here too, in through one side and out through the other. It takes some practice before it feels easy.
• Watching, without steering: mindful breathing leaves the rhythm alone. Sit or lie somewhere quiet, feel each breath arrive and leave, and let thoughts pass without judging them. Medical News Today notes that while you do this, the breath may slow down on its own.

Breathing to Calm Down, the pillar for this topic, makes cyclic sighing its first choice and covers the trial behind it.

When you feel short of air

Anxiety can leave you feeling that you can’t get enough air, and the cause is often the breathing itself. Under stress, people can over-breathe. They take in air faster or deeper than the body needs, and the carbon dioxide in the blood drops. From the inside, this feels like air hunger, sometimes close to suffocation.

fast, deep breathscarbon dioxide dropsfeels short of air

That is why most of the patterns above lean on pace and on the out-breath. Gulping in a bigger breath is more of the same. So when air feels short, slow down and let the exhale run long.

People with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have a version of their own. Medical News Today describes pursed lip breathing as one part of pulmonary rehabilitation. You breathe in through the nose, then out through lightly pursed lips for twice as long, which helps hold the airways open. With a lung condition, as with anxiety, a breathing exercise sits alongside medical treatment and never replaces it.

Make one of them automatic

A technique you have only read about is hard to find in a bad moment. Medical News Today suggests you try a new pattern first when you’re calm and breathing normally, and then practise at the same time each day. Calm’s advice is to tie a few breaths to something you already do: three slow breaths while the kettle boils or the coffee pours, or at the office door before you walk in. If you’d rather fix a time, a phone reminder does the same job.

A technique you have only read about is hard to find in a bad moment.

Three to five minutes once a day is plenty to start, and you can build from there. Doing it most days counts for more than doing it for long.

How far the evidence goes

Most of the advice comparing these techniques comes from app makers and health websites. Calm’s breathing guides are clinically reviewed by Dr. Chris Mosunic. But none of the research gathered for this page sets box breathing against 4-7-8, or one count against another.

The nearest thing is a trial that set slow breathing against two other ways of calming down. In it, van der Zwan and colleagues (2015) randomly assigned adults with stress complaints to one of three self-help programmes: vigorous exercise of their own choosing, guided mindfulness meditation, or slow breathing paced by a device that fed back their heart rate variability. Each group practised at home every day for five weeks. All three groups came out less stressed, less anxious and less depressed, and they slept better. No method beat the others.

5 weeks

Of the 126 people assigned, only 76 agreed to take part. The results came from questionnaires. And because the breathing group had a device to pace them, the trial says less about counting in your head.

Komariah and colleagues (2022) tested the watching approach. They worked with Indonesian university students whose courses had moved online during COVID-19, and split them into two equal groups. One group did mindful breathing meditation in 15-minute sessions over four weeks. Compared with the other group, their stress and anxiety scores fell. This was one population of students, scoring themselves. Taken together, the two trials support slow, attentive breathing in general more than any one count.

If you pace your breathing with a watch or app that shows heart rate variability, read the numbers loosely. Shaffer and Ginsberg (2017) point out that baseline values shift with age, sex and the length of the recording. So a few minutes’ reading can’t be compared with a full day’s.

Go gently

If holding your breath makes you uneasy, shorten the hold or drop it. Every pattern here works with a gentler pause. And if anxiety comes often or gets in the way of your days, see a doctor or a therapist. A breathing habit can sit alongside that help.