Heart Coherence Breathing
Your heart and brain hold a constant conversation through your nervous system. Breathing slow and even, around six breaths a minute, sets a rhythm that conversation can settle into. In studies, this raises heart-rate variability, a marker of a calmer state, and people report less stress and anxiety.
When to use it
For when you have five minutes and want your chest to stop racing ahead of you.
Two minutes, kept for you
How to do it
- 1.One hand on your heart, one on your belly.
- 2.Breathe in for about five seconds, out for about five, imagining the breath moving through your heart.
- 3.As you settle in, bring to mind something you're genuinely grateful for.
- 4.Stay here three to five minutes.
What to notice
Heart and breath syncing up. A quiet steadiness. Decisions feeling less loud.
What the research says
Breathing around six breaths a minute sits at the rhythm where your breath, your heart, and your blood-pressure reflexes fall into step, and it reliably raises heart-rate variability, a marker of a system with room to flex. Training that state has reduced how stressed and anxious people say they feel across two dozen studies. Claims you may have seen elsewhere, forty thousand heart neurons, hormone changes, trace back to one organization's materials and one small unrandomized study, so you won't find them here. The slow breathing itself is the evidenced part.
If you want to see which of these your body responds to, that’s what the app is for →