Cyclic Sighing: The Breathing Technique That Beat Meditation on Mood in a Stanford Study

Cyclic sighing is a breathing technique: a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth. In a 2023 Stanford study, five minutes of it a day for a month lifted people's daily mood more than five minutes of mindfulness meditation, and lowered their resting breathing rate. It did not beat meditation on anxiety, which dropped about equally in both groups. That makes it a useful, free tool for calming down, with a modest and specific advantage, not a replacement for everything else.

How to do cyclic sighing

The technique has three parts:

1. First inhale. Breathe in through your nose until your lungs feel mostly full.
2. Second inhale. Without breathing out, take a second, shorter sip of air through your nose to top them up.
3. Long exhale. Breathe out slowly through your mouth. Make the out-breath noticeably longer than the two in-breaths together.

Repeat for five minutes. If breathing out through the mouth feels awkward, breathing entirely through the nose is fine. That option was allowed in the study.

The double inhale copies the spontaneous sighs people take when upset or relieved. Sighs help reopen tiny air sacs in the lungs that partly close during shallow breathing, which is one reason a sigh can feel like a reset. The long exhale matters for a different reason. Your heart rate naturally rises slightly as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out, a rhythm called respiratory sinus arrhythmia that is partly carried by the vagus nerve. Emphasising the out-breath leans on the slowing half of that rhythm. Slower breathing in general is linked to lower arousal. The precise reasons cyclic sighing affected mood in the study are still being worked out.

What the Stanford study found

The study, led by Melis Yilmaz Balban with David Spiegel and Andrew Huberman, was published in Cell Reports Medicine in January 2023 (DOI). It randomly assigned 108 adults, most of them Stanford students, to one of four five-minute daily practices for 28 days: cyclic sighing, box breathing, cyclic hyperventilation with retention, or mindfulness meditation. People rated their mood and anxiety before and after each session, and wore a WHOOP strap that recorded resting heart rate, heart rate variability and breathing rate.

What it showed:

• Every practice helped in the moment. All four groups reported less anxiety and less negative mood after their daily session.
• The breathing groups gained more positive mood than the meditation group. Cyclic sighing showed the clearest advantage, and that advantage grew the more days people practised.
• Cyclic sighing lowered resting breathing rate more than meditation over the month.
• No difference on anxiety or heart rate variability. Anxiety and negative mood fell by similar amounts in every group, and heart rate variability and resting heart rate did not change in any group.

Two limits are worth knowing. The groups were small, about 21 to 33 people each, so the study could not reliably compare the three breathing methods with each other. And it was registered after it was run rather than before, which the authors acknowledge. They describe it as exploratory and are planning a larger trial. It is a promising result, not a settled one.

Why it suits people who struggle with meditation

Many people find meditation hard to start, especially when they are already stressed, because it asks for sustained attention. Cyclic sighing asks for something more concrete: follow a breathing pattern for five minutes. In the Stanford study, 74 percent of participants found their assigned exercise easy to do, and adherence was similar across groups.

That does not make meditation less valuable. Its benefits for attention and for how people relate to their thoughts are well studied, and they were not measured here. A reasonable approach is to use breathing when you need something quick and physical, and meditation if you want to build a longer-term practice.

How to build the practice

The study's dose was simple: five minutes, once a day. Participants could choose when. Because the mood advantage grew with the number of days people practised, consistency seems to matter more than timing.

For a tense moment, such as before a hard conversation, a few slow cycles are a reasonable thing to try. Just know that the study tested a daily routine, not a quick fix in a crisis. If anxiety is frequent or severe, breathing techniques work best alongside proper support, such as talking to a doctor or a therapist.

The practice costs nothing, needs no equipment and can be done almost anywhere. Its evidence is encouraging but early, which is a better reason to try it than a promise that it will outperform everything else.

Related reading: Breathing Techniques for Anxiety · Box Breathing: What the 4-4-4-4 Pattern Does · The Vagus Nerve: Hype vs. Science