This post was co-authored by Dr. Emma Seppälä and Dr. Dara Ghahremani.
You know those moments when you’re stressed out over work, the news is overwhelming, your spouse isn’t around, dinner isn’t ready, the kids are fighting and you just can’t take it anymore?
There’s a science-backed technique you can use to do just that — it takes just a few minutes to calm yourself down, and it doesn’t require any pills, side effects, or a six-month wait list for a psychologist — and it’s so simple, it sounds cliché: breathe.
There’s an assumption that complex problems like mental health require complex solutions, but our own peer-reviewed research and that of others shows that breathing is one of the most effective ways to instantly calm down, even when stress is so extreme it threatens your life.
Breathing in a Crisis: Jake’s Story
Jake, a Marine officer, was in the last Humvee of a convoy in Afghanistan when the vehicle ran over a roadside bomb. There was a deafening explosion, and when the dust cleared, Jake realized he had been almost completely severed from the knee down. Such shock and pain would normally render a person unconscious. But Jake managed to stay calm. How? By breathing.
This allowed him to stay calm and check on the other Marines in the vehicle, give the orders to call for help, apply a tourniquet to his own leg, and even support it before he lost consciousness. German medical experts and a doctor at Walter Reed later told him that if he hadn’t done so, Jake would have bled to death. Jake’s injuries were severe, and he lost both his legs. But he’s alive, he’s got a family, and he’s doing well. And that’s because he knew how to breathe.
Breathe for Mental Health
Of course, we all know how to breathe. The first thing we do in life is to breathe in, and the last thing we do is to breathe out. During these crucial moments, we take approximately 20,000 breaths a day. This should make us respiratory experts, but few of us know how to use our breath to save our minds, much less our lives.
If breathing helps with acute stress, could it also help your long-term mental health? We’re part of a small but growing group of psychologists and neuroscientists investigating this question, and now several peer-reviewed studies show that it does.
Scientific evidence
A randomized controlled trial of at-risk youth at UCLA found that a 20-minute yoga-based breathing exercise called “Sky Breath Meditation” from the nonprofit Art of Living reduced impulsivity, which is not only a risk factor for substance use disorders and other mental illnesses, but also has public health outcomes.
A subsequent randomized controlled trial of the same breathing training (SKY Breath Meditation) among Yale University students found that compared with a control group, the breathing group produced significantly more improvements in mental health than traditional cognitive interventions such as mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
Michael Goldstein of the University of Arizona and Harvard University found similar results when comparing Sky Breath meditation to a cognitive stress management program. After three months, the effects were even stronger, suggesting long-term benefits. Furthermore, when exposed to stress, the breathing group ironically had less of a stress response than the stress management group. This suggests that breathing helped to increase stress resistance.
Beyond cognitive approaches: the power of physiology
Why is breathing more powerful than cognitive interventions? Perhaps because breathing exercises not only calm the mind, but also actively calm the body’s physiology. This is consistent with results from Andrew Huberman’s lab at Stanford University, which have shown that changing the way you breathe can improve your mood and calm your nervous system more than consciously paying attention to your breathing.
The field of clinical psychology currently operates with a cognitive orientation that is in line with Descartes’ famous words, “I think, therefore I am,” meaning “change your thoughts and change your life.” This means that you can control your mind with your thoughts alone. While cognitive approaches are often helpful, neuroscience research shows that when emotions are intense, it can be difficult to use cognitive strategies, especially during times of high stress. In life-threatening situations like Jake’s, the area of the brain responsible for rational thinking, namely the prefrontal cortex, is often damaged.
It is very difficult to get out of strong anxiety, fear, or anger. Under the influence of intense emotions, the emotional centers of the brain, such as the amygdala, become active, while the connection between the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for thinking and controlling the emotional center, and the emotional center weakens, making it difficult to control emotions. This is why it is very difficult to “say” strong emotions such as anger or anxiety. The same is true when someone tells you to “calm down” at such times, which makes you irritated. It simply doesn’t work.
How breathing affects the brain
That’s where breathing techniques come in. Research has shown that manipulating your breath in certain ways can slow your heart rate in a matter of minutes and, as actors know well, change your emotional state. Close your eyes and breathe so that your exhale is longer than your inhale for a few minutes and you’ll notice how quickly this can be done.
That’s because our breathing patterns affect the function of many important areas of the brain. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that the way we breathe affects our heart rate, blood pressure, emotions, and memory. Our neurons respond to the rhythm of our breathing, which means that altering our breathing can control the activity of our brain cells. In other words, our breathing affects how we perceive, think, pay attention, remember, and feel the world.
Breathing techniques for severe anxiety and trauma
A Yale undergraduate student suffered from severe depression and anxiety. His parents were first generation immigrants from Southeast Asia, abusive, and put a lot of pressure on their only son. He attempted suicide multiple times (suicide is the leading cause of death among young Asian Americans) and dropped out of Yale three times. He was a brilliant student, but even his sharp mind couldn’t overcome his debilitating anxiety. After undergoing breathing exercises, his mental state stabilized, his stuttering disappeared, he graduated with honors, became a Gates Scholar, and was accepted into a top graduate program. The deep misery he had been in is now a thing of the past.
To test the impact of breathing on such severe anxiety, we conducted several studies using the same breathing techniques we studied with student veterans with combat-related PTSD. Working with the Palo Alto VA Hospital and Project Welcome Home Troops (a non-profit that provides SKY Breath Meditation free of charge to veterans and military personnel), we found that breathing training was as effective as the gold standard therapy for PTSD (cognitive processing therapy) and produced superior results in emotion regulation. Amazingly, the benefits persisted for a year, which is unusual for short-term mental health interventions.
Breathing as precision medicine
Why haven’t we known that breathing exercises can benefit mental health? Breathing is an ancient practice dating back 10,000 years in India and elsewhere, but science has yet to catch up. But marrying ancient breathing techniques with modern neuroscience could lead to new breakthroughs that rely on precision medicine approaches to promote mental health. For example, can breathing calm the nervous system in the same way that physical training can increase strength?
Most situations are not inherently stressful, it’s how we choose to experience them that determines how stressful they are. Breathing can be a powerful neurotraining tool to increase stress resistance by calming the body and mind. Of course, we may still get upset or anxious, but it may not be as frequent or last as long as it used to.
What if students and the military learned breathing exercises to benefit their mental health in addition to their regular education and training? What if we all did that?
Emma Seppala, PhD, is a psychologist and lecturer at the Yale School of Management. The Path of Happiness and Sovereign (This article is Sovereign).
Dr. Dara Ghalemani is a senior neuroscientist and research professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.
