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Five minutes of breathing: what a Stanford study found

By Cat, founder of ReSync · 25 October 2026 · 4 min read

When your brain feels too loud, being told to "just relax" rarely helps. Changing how you breathe is one of the few things that can shift how your body feels within minutes, and there's growing research on which techniques work best.

The study

In a 2023 study published in Cell Reports Medicine, Balban and colleagues at Stanford asked 108 participants to spend five minutes a day for 28 days on one of four practices: cyclic sighing, box breathing, cyclic hyperventilation, or mindfulness meditation.

All groups improved, but cyclic sighing produced the biggest boost in positive mood, significantly more than mindfulness meditation, and the benefit grew the more days people practised. It also produced a larger drop in resting breathing rate. Anxiety and negative mood fell in all groups.

The authors describe the study as exploratory, with fairly small groups, so it's a promising result rather than the final word. But five minutes a day is a very low cost to try.

How to do cyclic sighing

1. Breathe in through your nose.
2. At the top, take a second short inhale to fill your lungs a little more.
3. Breathe out slowly and fully through your mouth, longer than the inhale.
4. Repeat for about five minutes, at a comfortable pace.

Stop if you feel dizzy, and go gently. If you have a heart or lung condition, check with your doctor before starting a new breathing practice.

How ReSync uses this

The Reset button sits in the middle of ReSync's navigation for exactly these moments. It opens guided breathing and a short four-step reset, so you can settle first and then come back to one small thing.