Coherent Breathing
Five and a half breaths a minute. The most studied, the easiest to learn, and open from the start in the app. Why this speed, and what the evidence actually shows.
6 min read
Five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out. No hold, no mouth, no effort. That comes to about five and a half breaths a minute.
That is the whole thing. The technique has no trick to teach — the difficulty is keeping it up without getting bored.
Why this speed
There is a relationship between breathing speed and the heartbeat: the heart speeds up as you breathe in and slows as you breathe out. Everyone has this rise and fall, and it is taken as a sign of health.
When you breathe at close to six breaths a minute, that rise and fall lines up with the circulatory system's own rhythm and heart rate variability increases markedly. It is a measurable, repeatable effect. The best speed shifts a little from person to person — five breaths a minute for some, six and a half for others. The "your own pace" part of the app exists precisely to find it.
Five and a half is a reasonable starting point for the average. Once you move to your own pace, the app pulls it to the value you measured.
What you can expect
The increase in heart rate variability is well demonstrated. Claims beyond that — reducing anxiety, lowering blood pressure, improving sleep — sit on a messier picture: some studies find an effect, others don't, participant numbers are mostly small and the comparison groups are weak.
So "your heart rate variability goes up" and "your anxiety goes away" are not sentences of equal reliability. The app keeps the two apart.
In practice what most people report is more modest: after a few minutes the shoulders drop and the mind slows a little. That is not nothing.
How to do it
Sit upright or lie on your back. Keep your mouth closed, breathe in through the nose and out through the nose.
Breathe in as the circle grows: let the belly widen first, the chest after. Breathe out as it shrinks: don't push the breath, let it go. The exhale should be free, not muscular.
There is no hold. There is no pause between breaths either — as the exhale ends, the inhale begins. The flow should be unbroken.
Common mistakes
Taking it for deep breathing. Coherent breathing isn't deep breathing, it is slow breathing. If you try to fill your lungs completely, five and a half seconds will feel long and you will struggle. Normal volume, just slow.
Forcing the exhale. Pushing the exhale out with muscle is the most common mistake. The app hears it: the sound comes out louder than it should and the report says "let the breath go, don't push".
Breathing from the shoulders. If your shoulders rise, you are breathing from the chest. Put a hand on your belly; the movement should come from there.
How the app measures it
Coherent is a calm technique breathed out through the nose, so the sound is low. The thresholds are set accordingly — listened to with the threshold of a mouth-exhale technique, nothing would be heard at all.
What gets measured: whether the exhale starts at the same moment as the circle, how long it lasts, how steady the sound level stays through the exhale, and whether the inhale was heard. There is no hold phase, so there is no hold measurement.
Not hearing the inhale at all is normal: a nasal inhale really can be silent. It has a small share of the score, so on its own it doesn't sink a session.
Who should take care
This technique has no known risk; it is one of the gentlest in the app, which is why it is open from the start. Even so, the rule that applies to every breathing exercise applies here: if you feel dizzy, stop and go back to your normal breathing. If slow breathing is new to you, there can be a mild feeling of air hunger in the first minutes, and that usually passes within a few sessions.