5 Ways Breathing Can Calm You Down—Even Under Severe Anxiety

This post was co-authored by Emma Seppälä, Ph.D., and Dara Ghahremani, Ph.D.

You know those moments when you are juggling work stress, the news has you overwhelmed, your spouse is away, dinner is not made, your children are fighting, and you’re on the verge of losing it?

There’s a science-backed technique you can use for that. It can calm you down in minutes and doesn’t involve meds, side effects, or getting on a psychologist’s six-month waitlist. It is so simple it sounds trite: breathing.

There’s an assumption that we need complicated solutions to complex problems like our mental health, but our own and others’ peer-reviewed research shows that breathing is one of the most effective ways to calm down fast—even if the stress you’re under is as extreme as a life-threatening situation.

Breathing in Critical Moments: Jake’s Story

Jake, a Marine Corps officer, was in the last Humvee on a convoy in Afghanistan when his vehicle drove over a roadside bomb. After a deafening detonation, when the dust cleared, he saw his legs were almost completely severed below the knee. The impact of that kind of traumatic shock and pain would typically knock a person unconscious. But Jake was able to keep his cool. How? A breathing technique.

It allowed him to stay level-headed enough to check on the other Marines in the vehicle, to give orders to call for help, to tourniquet his own legs, and even to prop them up before falling unconscious. Later, medical professionals in Germany and then Walter Reid told him he would have bled to death had he not done those things. Jake’s injuries were so severe he lost both his legs. But he is alive, has a family, and is well. All because he knew how to breathe.

Breathing for Mental Health

We all know how to breathe, of course. Our first act of life was an inhale; our last will be an exhale. Between those pivotal moments, we will take roughly 20,000 breaths a day. That should make us breathing experts, yet few of us know how to use our breath to save our minds—let alone our lives.

If breathing is helpful for acute stress, could it also benefit long-term mental health? We are part of a small but growing group of psychologists and neuroscientists investigating this question. Several peer-reviewed studies now show that yes, it can.

Scientific Evidence

A randomized controlled study we ran at UCLA with at-risk youth found that a 20-minute breath training called SKY Breath Meditation—a yoga-based breathing technique offered by the non-profit Art of Living—reduced impulsivity, a risk factor for substance use disorders and other psychiatric problems, as well as public health outcomes.

In a subsequent randomized controlled study on the same breath training (SKY Breath Meditation) with college students at Yale, we found that, compared to a control group, the breathing group significantly improved mental health above and beyond more traditional cognitive interventions like mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

Michael Goldstein at the University of Arizona and Harvard found similar results when comparing SKY Breath Meditation to a cognitive stress-management program. The effects were even stronger three months out, suggesting long-term benefits. In addition, when placed under stress, the breathing group showed less of a stress response than, ironically, the stress management group, suggesting that the breathing helped them become more stress resilient.

Beyond Cognitive Approaches: The Power of Physiology

Why would breathing be more powerful than cognitive interventions? Perhaps because breathing practices don’t just settle the mind, they actively calm the body’s physiology—in line with results from Andrew Huberman’s lab at Stanford showing that changing how you breathe can benefit your mood and calm your nervous system more than mindfully paying attention to your breath.

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The field of clinical psychology currently operates under a cognitive orientation along the lines of Descartes’ famous line, “I think therefore I am”—i.e., “change your thoughts, change your life.” This implies that you can master your mind with your thoughts alone. While cognitive approaches are helpful in many instances, neuroscience research indicates that using cognitive strategies may be difficult when emotions are intense, especially during periods of high stress. In life-threatening circumstances like Jake’s, brain areas responsible for rational thought—the prefrontal cortex—are often impaired.

That’s why you can’t easily think yourself out of high anxiety, fear, or anger. Under the influence of intense emotions, our brain’s emotion centers, like the amygdala, are highly activated, while the prefrontal cortex, responsible for thinking and regulating the emotion centers, has a weakened connection with them, making it difficult to regulate those emotions. And that explains why it’s so hard to “talk yourself out of” strong feelings like anger or anxiety—that’s also why it’s so annoying when someone tells you to “just calm down” in those moments. It simply doesn’t work.

What Breathing Does to Your Brain

Enter breathing techniques. Manipulating your breath in specific ways, research shows, can slow down your heart rate in minutes and, as actors well know, shift your emotional state. You will notice how quickly you can do this if you close your eyes and breathe so that your exhales are longer than your inhales for a couple of minutes.

That’s because our breathing patterns impact the function of many critical areas of the brain. Peer-reviewed studies show that how you breathe impacts your heart rate, blood pressure, emotions, and memory. Our neurons respond to the rhythm of our breath, indicating that when we change our breathing, we can control the activity of our brain cells—it influences how we perceive the world, think, pay attention, remember and feel.

Breathing for Severe Anxiety and Trauma

One of our Yale undergraduate students suffered from major depressive disorder and anxiety. His parents, first-generation immigrants from Southeast Asia, were abusive and put immense pressure on their only son. He had attempted suicide several times—which is the number-one cause of death among young Asian Americans—and dropped out of Yale three times. He was absolutely brilliant. However, even a mind as sharp as his could not talk himself out of his debilitating anxiety. After going through the breath training, his mental health stabilized, his stutter disappeared, he graduated with Honors, became a Gates scholar, and entered a top graduate program. The deep misery in which he was immersed is now a thing of the past.

To test the impact of breathing on this type of severe anxiety, we ran several studies using the same breathing technique we studied in students with veterans with combat-related PTSD. In collaboration with the Palo Alto Veterans’ Hospital and Project Welcome Home Troops (a non-profit that offers SKY Breath Meditation to veterans and military at no cost), we found that the breath training had the same impact as the gold standard therapy for PTSD (cognitive processing therapy) and superior results for emotion regulation. Surprisingly, we found results lasted one year out, a rare finding for any brief mental health intervention.

Breathing as Precision Medicine

Why haven’t we known about the utility of breathing practices for mental health? Although the practices are ancient, with origins dating 10,000 years back in India and other regions, science is still catching up. Yet merging ancient breathing techniques with modern neuroscience can facilitate new breakthroughs that rely on a precision medicine approach for promoting mental health. For example, could we condition the nervous system for greater calm by breathing, much like we condition our bodies for greater strength through physical training?

Most situations aren’t inherently stressful—they are a function of how we experience them. By calming the body and the mind, breathing can powerfully train our nerves for stress resilience. Sure, we may still get upset or anxious, but maybe not as often or for as long.

What would happen if, in addition to their usual education and training, students and the military learned breathing techniques to benefit their mental health? What if we all did?

Emma Seppälä, Ph.D., is a Psychologist and Lecturer at the Yale School of Management and the author of The Happiness Track and Sovereign (this article is an excerpt from Sovereign).

Dara Ghahremani, Ph.D., is a senior neuroscientist and Research Professor at Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California Los Angeles.