Mindful Breathing

Why You Should Try It

Stress, anger, and anxiety can impair not only our health but our judgment and skills of attention. One way to help deal with these difficult feelings is the practice of “mindfulness,” the ability to pay careful attention to what you're thinking, feeling, and sensing in the present moment without judging those thoughts and feelings as good or bad. Countless studies link mindfulness to better health, lower anxiety, and greater resilience to stress.

But how do you cultivate mindfulness? A basic method is to focus your attention on your own breathing—a practice called, quite simply, “mindful breathing.” After setting aside time to practice mindful breathing, you may find it easier to focus attention on your breath in your daily life—an important skill to help you deal with stress, anxiety, and negative emotions, cool yourself down when your temper flares, and sharpen your skills of concentration.

Why It Works

Mindfulness gives us distance from our thoughts and feelings, which can help us tolerate and work through unpleasant feelings rather than becoming overwhelmed by them. Mindful breathing in particular is helpful because it gives us an anchor—our breath—on which we can focus when we find ourselves carried away by a stressful thought. Mindful breathing can also help us stay “present” in the moment, rather than being distracted by regrets in the past or worries about the future.

Evidence That It Works

Arch, J. J., & Craske, M. G. (2006). Mechanisms of mindfulness: Emotion regulation following a focused breathing induction. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(12), 1849-1858.

Americans who completed a 15-minute focused breathing exercise (similar to Mindful Breathing) reported less negative emotion in response to negative images, compared with people who didn’t complete the exercise. These results suggest that focused breathing helped improve people’s ability to regulate their emotions.

Who Has Tried the Practice?

The participants in the above study were mostly female and Asian or white. Additional research has engaged members of other groups:

• Chinese adults decreased in anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue, and stress biomarkers after five days of 20-minute meditations that included exercises similar to Mindful Breathing and the Body Scan.
• Japanese university students who practiced this exercise and the Body Scan for five to 10 minutes at least once a day for a week ruminated less on anger immediately after the intervention and four weeks later.
• Malaysian palliative caregivers significantly decreased in stress biomarkers after only 20 minutes of Mindful Breathing.

Mindful Breathing is one of the mindfulness practices included in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn and based on Buddhist teachings, MBSR is a six- to 10-week program that teaches various mindfulness techniques through weekly sessions and homework assignments. Research suggests that MBSR benefits the mental health of various groups, including the following:

• People in different cultures and countries, such as bilingual Latin-American families, university students in China, disadvantaged families in Hong Kong, low-income cyclo drivers in Vietnam, males with generalized anxiety disorder in Iran, Indigenous people in the Republic of Congo, and Aboriginal Australians.
• Women around the world, including pregnant women in China, rural women in India who experienced still-birth, at-risk women in Iran, Muslim women college students in the United Arab Emirates, American survivors of intimate partner violence, and socioeconomically disadvantaged Black women with post-traumatic stress disorder.
• People with certain diseases, such as New Zealanders with rheumatoid arthritis, male patients with heart disease in India, patients with diabetes in South Korea, cancer patients in Canada, breast cancer survivors in China, and HIV-positive individuals in Toronto, San Francisco, Iran, and South Africa.

More research is needed to explore whether, and how, the impact of this practice extends to other groups and cultures.

Keep in Mind

The suitability of this meditation may vary depending on your culture or other life circumstances. For example, while Filipino survivors of Typhoon Haiyan improved in self-efficacy and coping after a day mindfulness training that included Mindful Breathing, those who were displaced from their homes returned to familiar coping methods (like prayer and community support) shortly after being introduced to Mindful Breathing.

A study on American inmates suggests that Mindful Breathing is useful regardless of religious affiliation. But adapting this meditation to include religious beliefs may also be beneficial. For example, Christian university students who participated in a six- to eight-week Christian mindfulness program that incorporated beliefs about God into Mindful Breathing felt less stressed compared to those who did not participate, regardless of ethnicity.

For MBSR in general, a 2015 study found that the program “improved depressive symptoms regardless of affiliation with a religion, sense of spiritually, … sex, or age.” However, other studies suggest that MBSR may not benefit everyone equally:

• When MBSR was administered in Massachusetts correctional facilities, male prisoners experienced less mental health improvement than female prisoners.
• MBSR may not be beneficial in all cultural contexts. For Haitian mental health practitioners and teachers, MBSR contradicted some of their cultural worldviews and everyday practices. Brazilian medical students who participated in MBSR experienced no significant changes in mental health or quality of life.

Sources

Diana Winston, Ph.D., UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center

References

Mindful Breathing can increase our awareness and reduce our tendency to ruminate. Are you attuned to the present moment? Take our Mindfulness quiz to find out: