A simple breathing exercise enhances emotional control, new research suggests

A new study published in the journal Psychological Reports indicates that just three minutes of slow, controlled breathing can improve a person’s ability to manage their emotional responses to negative situations. Following a brief breathing exercise, participants in the study reported feeling less negative and less agitated when viewing unpleasant images. They also felt more capable of using mental strategies to intentionally change their emotional state, suggesting this simple technique can provide an immediate boost to emotional self-regulation.

Researchers have long understood that the ability to manage our emotions is a key component of mental well-being and coping with life’s challenges. When this ability is diminished, it is associated with a range of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety. A complex, bidirectional relationship exists between stress and our capacity for emotional control. High levels of stress can impair our ability to regulate our feelings, and, conversely, poor emotional regulation can make us feel more stressed.

This impairment happens through a specific biological pathway. When we experience stress, the body’s central stress response system, known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, becomes activated and releases stress hormones like cortisol. These hormones can interfere with the brain’s higher-order thinking regions, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functions like self-control and decision-making. This process effectively weakens the “top-down” control our thinking brain has over our more automatic emotional centers, making it harder to stay calm and rational.

Given this connection, the researchers reasoned that if they could find a way to quiet the body’s stress response, it might free up the mental resources needed for effective emotional regulation. One promising method for doing this is slow-paced breathing. Deliberate, slow breathing has been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of our nervous system responsible for the “rest and digest” response that calms the body down. It achieves this by increasing the activity of the vagus nerve, a major nerve that helps regulate heart rate and other internal functions.

The scientists behind this study sought to bridge a few gaps in existing research. While many studies have explored mindfulness, they often involve long-term training or simply ask participants to focus on their breath without deliberately slowing it. This study wanted to see if a single, very short session of intentionally slow breathing could have an immediate effect.

Additionally, previous research often measured how breathing changed a person’s baseline emotional state, but did not test if it improved their ability to actively use a specific mental strategy, such as cognitive reappraisal—the technique of changing how you think about a situation to alter how you feel about it. Finally, the researchers wanted to test emotional flexibility by not only asking participants to reduce their negative feelings but also to intensify them, a less-studied aspect of emotional control.

To investigate these questions, the research team conducted an experiment with 13 undergraduate students from a college in New England, with an average age of about 21 years. The study used a “within-subjects” design, which means that every participant took part in both the experimental condition and the control condition, allowing for a direct comparison of their performance under each circumstance. The two sessions were held online via video conference and were separated by one to two weeks.

The order in which participants completed the conditions was mixed to prevent any ordering effects. In both sessions, participants engaged in a cognitive reappraisal task. They were shown a series of emotionally negative pictures (such as images of accidents or violence) and some neutral pictures. Before each image appeared, they received an audio instruction to either “enhance,” “suppress,” or “maintain” their emotional reaction.

For the “enhance” instruction, they were asked to use cognitive reappraisal to make their emotional response stronger, perhaps by imagining themselves or a loved one in the situation. For the “suppress” instruction, they were to use reappraisal to lessen their emotional response, for example, by thinking of the situation as fake or by focusing on a non-emotional detail. For “maintain,” they were told to simply view the image and let their feelings unfold naturally.

The key difference between the two sessions was the manipulation. In the control condition, participants moved directly to the picture task after a short break. In the slow-paced breathing condition, before starting the task, they were guided through a three-minute “box breathing” exercise. An on-screen animation instructed them to inhale for four seconds, hold their breath for three seconds, exhale for four seconds, and hold for another three seconds, repeating this cycle for the full three minutes.

After viewing each picture, participants provided several ratings. Using a tool called the Self Assessment Manikin, which uses simple figures to depict feelings, they rated the picture’s valence (how pleasant or unpleasant it made them feel on a 9-point scale) and its arousal (how calm or excited it made them feel on a 9-point scale). They also rated their own performance on a 4-point scale, indicating how successful they felt they were at following the instruction to enhance, suppress, or maintain their emotion.

The breathing exercise had a direct effect on the participants’ emotional state. When instructed to simply “maintain” their reaction to negative images, participants in the slow-paced breathing condition rated the pictures as less negative and felt calmer (less aroused) compared to their ratings in the control condition. This shows that the breathing exercise on its own served as an emotional buffer, toning down the immediate impact of the unpleasant stimuli.

Even more interesting were the findings related to the active use of cognitive reappraisal. The most striking result came from the self-reported success ratings. In the control condition, without the breathing exercise, participants reported that they were significantly less successful at suppressing their negative emotions compared to enhancing or maintaining them. They felt they struggled to mentally distance themselves and reduce their feelings.

However, in the slow-paced breathing condition, this struggle disappeared. Participants reported feeling equally successful at all three tasks: enhancing, maintaining, and suppressing their emotions. When directly comparing the two conditions, participants rated themselves as more successful at suppressing their emotional response to negative images after having completed the breathing exercise. This suggests that the breathing exercise subjectively improved their sense of control and their confidence in their ability to manage their feelings.

The study also found that the breathing exercise helped individuals who are naturally more avoidant of negative situations. For participants who scored higher on a measure of the Behavioral Inhibition System, which reflects a tendency to avoid aversive stimuli, a notable pattern emerged. In the control condition, these individuals found it difficult to follow the “enhance” instruction—they struggled to voluntarily increase their negative feelings.

After the slow-paced breathing exercise, this was no longer the case; they became just as capable of enhancing their emotional experience as other participants. This finding hints that the calming effect of the breathing may provide a sense of safety that allows individuals to approach and engage with uncomfortable emotions in a more controlled way.

The authors of the study acknowledge some limitations. As a pilot study, the sample size of 13 participants was small, and the findings will need to be replicated with larger, more diverse groups.

A primary limitation was a potential “floor effect.” The breathing exercise was so effective at lowering negative feelings and arousal at baseline that it left little room for further reduction. In the breathing condition, the emotional ratings for the “maintain” instruction were already almost as low as the ratings for the “suppress” instruction in the control condition. This makes it difficult to determine how much additional benefit the cognitive reappraisal strategy provided on top of the breathing itself.

Future research could address this by using more intensely negative stimuli. Future studies should also incorporate direct physiological measurements, such as heart rate variability, to confirm that the observed emotional benefits are indeed linked to increased activity in the body’s calming parasympathetic nervous system. It would also be valuable to compare the effectiveness of different breathing techniques and paces to optimize the intervention.

The study, “Acute Effects of Slow-Paced Breathing on Emotion Regulation: A Pilot Study,” was authored by Laura B. F. Kurdziel, Leah McDevitt, and Christina Hardway.