What Is Emotion Regulation?

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Slow breathing can calm your nervous system and regulate emotions, and it's something you can control.

Practicing just five minutes a day could yield both immediate and lasting psychological and physical benefits.

Nasal breathing has been found to be especially beneficial for cardiovascular, respiratory, and immune health.

Slow, smooth breathing is a critical action you can take to voluntarily influence your autonomic nervous system (ANS)—the part of your nervous system that runs in the background, controlling things like your heartbeat, digestion, and blood pressure.

The Science: How Breathing Changes Your Body

The ANS has two main branches:

Sympathetic nervous system: Activates your “fight or flight” response, speeding up your body to handle stress. The sympathetic nervous system triggers the release of adrenaline, increases heart rate and blood pressure, and diverts blood flow to your muscles for quick action (triggering both "jitters" and a stomach ache!).

Parasympathetic nervous system: Promotes “rest and digest,” slowing things down so you can recover and heal. This lowers your heart rate and blood pressure, stimulates digestion, and supports immune and repair processes throughout the body.

Most of the time, these systems work automatically and outside of your conscious control. Smooth slow, smooth breathing is the one thing you can do to consciously shift your body into a state of calm and recovery.

Unlike your heartbeat or digestion, you can control your breath at will. This makes it a unique behavior to modulate systems that are usually out of reach of conscious control—like heart rate variability (HRV), the way your heart rate changes with each breath); blood pressure; and stress hormone release.

Smooth, slow breathing interventions can reliably reduce stress, anxiety, and depression (Laborde et al., 2022; Zaccaro et al., 2018).

Benefits are both immediate—even a single 5-minute session helps—and cumulative, meaning the more days you practice, the bigger the impact (You et al., 2021; Bentley et al., 2023).

A global study of 1.8 million HRV biofeedback sessions suggests that the most benefit of smooth slow breathing arises when you are in a state of HRV coherence (Balaji, et al, 2025). This means that your heart rhythms........

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