What if one of the simplest ways to help your body feel calmer was simply to slow down your breathing?
Welcome to Part 3 of my Summer of Beautiful Breath series. This week, we’re exploring coherent breathing, a beautifully simple breathing practice where we breathe in and out for the same length of time.
We’ll practise breathing in for five counts and out for five counts, bringing the breath down to around six breaths per minute.
In this short guided practice, I explain why slowing the breath can support the relationship between our breathing, heart and nervous system and why coherent breathing is often used to help with stress, anxiety, heart rate variability (HRV) and resilience.
I’ll also guide you through a couple of minutes of coherent breathing so you can experience it for yourself.
In this episode:
• What coherent breathing actually is
• Why we’re aiming for around six breaths per minute
• The connection between breathing and heart rate variability (HRV)
• Why HRV can be a useful marker of resilience and our response to stress
• How our everyday breathing can become faster without us even noticing
• A simple guided 5-count inhale and 5-count exhale practice
• How to adapt the count to four or six if five doesn’t feel comfortable
• Why nasal and diaphragmatic breathing still matter
• How to build this into a simple daily breathwork practice
You don’t need a wearable, an app or any complicated breathwork technique. Just a few quiet minutes and your breath.
Try practising this once a day over the next week and notice what changes. Not just in the numbers, if you track HRV, but in how you actually feel.
And remember what we’ve been building throughout this series: notice your breath, bring it lower into the body, breathe through your nose where comfortable and gradually begin to slow it down.
Small practices. Repeated often. That’s where the magic can happen.
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