Can your breathing actually decrease your stress?

After taking in a breath slowly exhale. You probably don’t realize it, but your heart has just slowed down a bit. Don’t worry; it will speed up again when you inhale. This regular-irregular beat is a sign of a healthy interaction between heart and brain. Each time you exhale, your brain sends a signal down the vagus nerve to slow the cardiac muscle. With each inhale, the signal gets weaker and your heart revs up. Inhale, beat faster. Exhale, beat slower.


As your stress and anxiety levels increase you typically will take shorter and faster breaths. This is a useful mechanism to protect you in dangerous situations that may last a few minutes; the problem arises when you have chronic long-term stress that lasts days, months or even years for some people. Normally you should be breathing an inhale/exhale cycle about 8-10 times per minute in a quiet, relaxed state. Many people are in an increased stress response state and will breathe more cycles per minute. Also when stressed these short breaths are often mostly performed by the chest and neck muscles and not as much with the diaphragm. When you work on taking bigger, slower breaths you get the diaphragm to work more, as it should.

Increase stress can lead to increases in depression, anxiety and increase your susceptibility to disease (you are more likely to catch a cold when over stressed). It will also increase the sensitivity of the nervous system, so your pain will often times be greater when you are stressed. Your brain uses two different nervous systems to control your body. You have complete control over one of them, which tells you to move your arms, legs, mouth, etc. to do things. The other is automatic (that’s why it’s called the autonomic nervous system) it speeds up your heart rate, alters your digestion and other things that happen without your full conscious control. This autonomic system has a part to it that increases activity to tolerate stressful activity and another that slows things down to allow you to keep some balance and not have your heart race out of control along with other functions. The interesting part is that through conscious control of working to slow down and use diaphragm breathing, you can actually affect the autonomic system and promote increase relaxation. So yes by working slow diaphragm breathing you can decrease your stress!