Physiological sigh timer: breathe along online

The second inhale goes on top

There’s no pause and no exhale between the two inhales. The second one is smaller than the first, and that’s how it should be. Let the breath go into your belly and sides, and keep your shoulders down. When you breathe out, don’t push the air out: just let it flow out, like a sigh of relief.

If the pace doesn’t suit you

If the pace feels too fast or too slow, Find your breathing pace helps: you tap four times as you breathe in, and the orb starts at your own pace. The pattern stays the same: two inhales, then one long exhale. The exhale takes clearly longer than both inhales together. That’s also how the Stanford researchers taught it: two inhales through the nose, a slow exhale through the mouth. People who preferred to breathe only through the nose were allowed to.¹

What studies show

The best-known study comes from Stanford University: 108 healthy adults practiced for five minutes every day for a month, each randomly assigned to one of three breathing exercises or to mindfulness meditation. Tension went down about equally in all groups. Cyclic sighing, physiological sighs for five minutes in a row, lifted mood a bit more than meditation.¹ Resting heart rate, heart rate variability and sleep didn’t change meaningfully in any group. The study ran online, and each group was small.

In a smaller real-life study, 47 students did one minute of cyclic sighing, one minute of box breathing, or nothing when they felt tense. Both breathing exercises lowered in-the-moment tension more than doing nothing.² That doesn’t prove the sigh beats other slow breathing exercises; box breathing did about as well. These studies tested the technique, not the nowa app. More on this, including what happens in your body: The physiological sigh: two breaths in, one long breath out.