Breathwork Better Than Meditation For Stress, Health, New Study Finds

Go ahead, sigh away ... it turns out that sighing's actually good for you

A study published last month in the journal Cell tested the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation against three different breathing exercises.

The study found that one of those breathing techniques, called “cyclic sighing,” was even more effective than meditation and the other breathing techniques for helping reduce stress and promote good heart health.

This study, “Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal,” was done by a team of scientists from Stanford University’s Neurobiology and Psychiatry Departments.

The lead author was Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology, as well as in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford’s School of Medicine.

Huberman’s also well-known for his YouTube channel, which focuses on using neuroscience to improve everyday life and health.

Mindful Meditation

Both mindfulness and meditation have become popular in recent decades.

Meditation helps people manage stress and reduce the effects of stress on their psychological and physiological well-being.

Huberman’s study focused on how effectively different forms of meditation and breathing affected mood and anxiety levels, heart rate, and heart rhythm. 

Most forms of meditation involve some awareness of breathing.

Some forms direct practitioners to breathe in a certain, highly directed way.

Other forms of meditation ask practitioners to merely observe their natural breathing and bring their attention to their breath without trying to change it or interfere with it in any way.

In order to better understand the importance of breathing in meditation, this new study sought to separate the breathing from the meditation.

The researchers wanted to gauge which aspects of mindfulness practices were most effective in helping people achieve their meditation goals. 

They began their study with the hypothesis that breathing techniques in and of themselves could have positive effects on our neurological health.

The Valuable Vagus Nerve: A Master Switch to Calm Your Heart and Mind

They posited that by stimulating the vagus nerve, breathing alone might help manage stress and yield other health benefits similar to those people experience while meditation.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers compared breathing techniques to meditation techniques that did not involve any kind of special breathing. Neurologically, this isolated the breathwork from the meditation.

Breathwork has a direct effect on the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is the longest of twelve nerves in the body that connect the brain to other parts of the head, neck, and body.

Although we refer to it as the vagus nerve (in the singular), it is actually a pair of nerves that come out from the left and right side of the brain stem—the medulla oblongata.

The vagus nerve controls the autonomic nervous system to regulate both the heart and emotional stimulation levels.

In other words, it’s a master switch for calming the heart and soothing the mind.

Just Five Minutes

Most forms of meditation require that people sit still and focused for twenty minutes, sometimes longer.

However, in this study subjects spent only five minutes doing either the breathwork or meditation, rather than a standard 20-minute meditation.

Knowing that sitting still and focusing for 20 minutes is a hurdle for most people in the industrialized world, the researchers also hypothesized that a briefer intervention that yielded immediate results might encourage people to practice it every day.

The three forms of controlled breathing tested were square breathing, cyclic sighing, and cyclical hyperventilation.

For square or box breathing, participants inhaled, held their breath in, exhaled, and held their breath out, for equal periods of time (which could be from 3-10 seconds, depending on the participant’s ability).

For cyclic sighing, participants took two quick breaths in, then performed a long exhale from their diaphragm.

For cyclic hyperventilation, participants inhaled as deeply as possible through the nose and exhaled by letting all the air “fall out” through an open mouth, doing this for 30 cycles and then holding their breath for 15 seconds.

All participants were asked to sit or lie down with a timer on for five minutes, one session per day.

Meditation participants sat or laid down breathing naturally, eyes closed, and focused attention of the part of their forehead between their eyes.

When thoughts arose, they were told to regard this as normal, then focus their attention on their spontaneous, natural breathing before returning their attention to their forehead.

Sighing for Stress Relief

The study found that a five-minute daily practice, whether of breathwork or mindful meditation, improved mood and reduced anxiety.

Indeed, people in both the mindfulness meditation and the breathwork groups reduced their anxiety and improved their mood. In addition, ninety percent of the test subjects reported having positive experience while doing their exercises.

However, the study also found that breathwork showed more positive results than mindful meditation. And the most effective breathwork, according to this study, was cyclical sighing, a technique which emphasized prolonged exhales.

Sighing is usually taken as a sign of sadness, dissatisfaction, or exasperation.

But sighing is actually the body’s built-in way of regulating its response to stress.

It also occurs during sleep when CO2 levels become too high, so that the lungs can bring in more oxygen.

So, the technique of cyclical sighing, which consciously used the “physiological sigh,” is a way to deliberately use the body’s built-in, unconscious way of calming the vagus nerve.

Of all the techniques tested, cyclical sighing yielded the most positive results.

Cyclical Sighing: Do Try This at Home

The most effective way to use cyclical sighing, according to a video from Huberman’s lab that has had 318,000 views to date, is to inhale lightly and easily twice in a row (without breathing out in between). This allows you not to hyperventilate or put power into the inhale, which might speed up the heart.

Then, without holding your breath, exhale slowly, and preferably against some resistance, as you do when you sigh through pursed lips.

It’s better to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth, but if your nose is plugged, you can do both through the mouth.

Continue to sigh for five minutes.

You can do this while doing something else, even while something stressful is happening, to calm yourself down.

You can also incorporate cyclical sighing into whatever other practice you already do, including meditation, journaling, or just sitting or lying down and closing your eyes for a few minutes to rest your mind and body.

Is the take-away from this study really that we should be prioritizing breathwork over meditation, however?

I don’t think so. A breathing exercise is really just another form of mindful meditation with a different breath pattern.

Since the study found that participating in just five minutes of either conferred health benefits, to me the real take-away is that it’s good to add more mindfulness to our everyday lives.

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science journalist and book author. Support independent journalism and health freedom and get access to exclusive content by subscribing to her Substack. A different version of this article first appeared in The Epoch Times.

Related articles:

House Plants for Health
Delicious, Nutritious, Healthy Desserts (yum!)
Mocha Cake Sweetened with Apples and Dates