5–7 BPM
Resonance
Equal inhale and exhale, slowed to five to seven breaths a minute, six by default. The default pattern, and the place to start.
The protocol
Inhale through the nose for five seconds. Exhale through the nose (or pursed lips) for five seconds. Continue for three to ten minutes. No holds. No counting beyond the cadence; the app’s blob does that for you.
Six breaths per minute (5 s in, 5 s out) is the default. If the rate feels too slow, try 6.5 or 7 BPM; if it feels rushed, try 5.5 or 5. Comfort matters more than precision. The rate at which heart rate swings most differs from person to person; Lehrer and Gevirtz (2014) report it tends to be lower in taller people and in men.
Breathe into your belly, not your chest. If your shoulders rise on the inhale, the inhale is too forced. In one study, breathing at six a minute led to mild over-breathing (Marchant et al., below). If you feel light-headed, take smaller breaths or stop.
Best for
Daily practice. The starting point.
Why it works
Resonance breathing comes out of heart rate variability biofeedback, a method Paul Lehrer and colleagues began developing in the 1990s. In its clinical form, a person watches their own beat-to-beat heart rate while breathing slowly, trying to make its rise and fall with each breath as large as possible.
Lehrer and Gevirtz’s 2014 review reports that most studies find the largest of those swings at about six breaths a minute. For why biofeedback might have the effects it does, they give the most weight to the baroreflex, the loop that adjusts heart rate to blood pressure. They present it as a hypothesis, and so do we.
What the research does and doesn’t show
During the session. Marchant et al. (2025) had 84 college students try square breathing, 4-7-8, and two versions of six breaths a minute. Six breaths a minute increased HRV more than either of the others, with small to medium effects. None of the conditions meaningfully changed mood or blood pressure.
Across studies. Laborde et al. (2022) pooled 223 studies of voluntary slow breathing and found vagally mediated HRV higher during sessions, straight after a single session, and after multi-session programmes.
Stress and anxiety. Goessl et al. (2017) meta-analysed 24 studies with 484 participants and found HRV biofeedback training “associated with a large reduction in self-reported stress and anxiety.” That is biofeedback training, built around a live heart-rate signal. Following a pacer on its own is not the same intervention, and those results don’t transfer to it automatically.
What we don’t claim.We don’t quote a minimum daily dose or an expected percentage rise in resting HRV. We haven’t found a source that supports one.
“The most supported possible mechanism is the strengthening of homeostasis in the baroreceptor”
When to use it
The daily default. If you’re going to do one pattern every day, this is the one we’d pick: it’s the rate the HRV research centres on, and in the one head-to-head comparison we know of, it moved in-session HRV more than box or 4-7-8.
Sessions in the app run three to fifteen minutes. Pick a length you’ll actually repeat every day.
Morning before email, or the late-afternoon transition out of work mode. For the last few minutes before bed, we’d use 4-7-8 instead.
Or try a different technique