2. Box breathing
Other breathwork techniques attempt to control stress by improving regulation of the autonomic nervous system through the rhythm of your breathing. Box breathing, for example, is about striking a rhythm where you’re inhaling, holding your breath, exhaling and holding your breath again, each for roughly the same amount of time. It’s something which Spiegel says can promote both relaxation and focus ahead of a potentially stressful task. Studies have also suggested that box breathing can help manage chronic pain, while in a trial among women with breast cancer who had undergone mastectomies, it helped manage their stress levels.
Matching the rhythm of your breathing with other bodily functions may also be key to stress reduction. Guy Fincham, who leads a breathwork research lab at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the UK, says that there’s particularly strong evidence for the benefits of slowing down your breathing to the extent that you’re taking less than 10 breath cycles per minute. “This rhythm of breathing, found widely in traditions such as yoga, qigong, prayer and mantra, is commonly referred to as coherent breathing,” says Fincham.
The coherent breathing pattern is thought to synchronise breathing with the natural oscillations of the heart and blood pressure, something which is thought to have profound benefits for heart rate variability, the variations in time between each heartbeat. Fincham says that increasing heart rate variability is thought to be indicative of a better stress response and a more flexible nervous system, while it may even help reduce inflammation. (Read more about why you should be paying more attention to your heart rate variability.)
“In general, a higher heart rate variability can be deemed more beneficial, and coherent breathing helps to optimise this,” says Fincham.
A preparatory technique which the Navy Seals practice before going into action, box breathing can both calm the nervous system ahead of a high-pressure situation, and also improve concentration.
It involves four steps – inhaling, holding your breath, exhaling and then holding again – carrying out each step for four seconds at a time. “It doesn’t particularly trigger comfort,” says Spiegel. “It’s more kind of arousing. You’re preparing your body to go and do something.”
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