The question: What breathing exercise helps with anxiety?
The short answer: James Stewart teaches that anxiety often means your nervous system is stuck in go mode, and your breath is the quickest way to influence it. Faster, shallower breathing tends to activate you, while lower, slower breathing tends to relax you. He recommends practicing coherence breathing daily and using 4-7-8 breathing when you need it.
What James explains
James describes the autonomic nervous system as a teeter-totter rather than a red light and a green light. On one side is the sympathetic, fight-or-flight side; on the other, the parasympathetic, rest-and-digest side. Most of us try to calm down with our thinking, but James says the mind listens more to the breath than to our thoughts. It works more bottom-up than top-down, which is why he calls the breath the remote control for the nervous system.
Regulation is a bit like conditioning a muscle. When you train your nervous system, you improve your baseline, so when stress pulls you away from it, you come back faster. That doesn't make you robotic or unemotional. It means that when the train leaves the station, you can bring it back more comfortably. James links this to better emotional control, better sleep and faster recovery from physical and mental stress.
The more you practice, the more your body learns that calm is available to it, not something it has to chase.
Try it: coherence breathing (5-5)
- Inhale low and slow through your nose for a count of five.
- Exhale low, slow and steady through your nose for a count of five.
- Keep going for at least 3 minutes, ideally 5.
- Practice three times a day while you're relaxed, for example when you wake up, at bedtime and once during the day.
What to watch for
Practice coherence breathing when stress is low so it builds your baseline. For 4-7-8 breathing (in for four to a full lung, hold for seven, a long, slow exhale for eight), do four cycles, rest for 30 seconds to a minute, then do four more only if you feel the need. Start gently. If the breath holds feel uncomfortable, return to normal breathing or use a simple slow-breathing pattern instead.
Key points
- Your breath is the quickest, most accessible way to shift between activated and relaxed states.
- Lower, slower breathing and a relaxed exhale tend to tell your body it is safe.
- Regular practice when you're calm makes it easier to recover when anxiety shows up.
Common questions
How do you do 4-7-8 breathing?
Inhale to a full lung for a count of four, hold for seven, then exhale long, slow and steady for eight. James suggests four cycles, a 30-second to one-minute break, then four more if you feel the need. If the hold feels uncomfortable, return to normal or slow breathing.
Why does breathing calm you down better than thinking?
James explains that the mind listens a lot more to your breath than to your thinking. Calming yourself through the breath is a bottom-up approach, working through the body's signals instead of trying to talk yourself into feeling calm.
Does breathwork mean I'll stop feeling stress?
No. James says it's not about never feeling stress. It's about recovering quickly from activated states and getting back into the driver's seat when anxiety, overwhelm or overthinking show up.
Is breathwork a cure for anxiety?
The episode notes say your breath isn't a cure for anxiety and isn't a substitute for professional diagnosis or treatment. It's an accessible tool for changing your physiological state.
Research mentioned
Laborde S, et al. (2022). Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 138, 104711. Across 223 studies, slow breathing increased vagally mediated HRV during practice, right after a session and after multi-session training. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104711
Zaccaro A, et al. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353. Slow breathing was linked to higher HRV and to greater relaxation and lower anxiety and arousal. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30245619/
Vierra J, et al. (2022). Effects of sleep deprivation and 4-7-8 breathing control on heart rate variability, blood pressure, blood glucose, and endothelial function in healthy young adults. Physiological Reports. A small study of 43 young adults that found 4-7-8 breathing may improve HRV and blood pressure, mainly in participants who were not sleep deprived. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9277512/
Read the full transcript
Auto-generated from the video captions, so expect small errors.
I'm sure most of us have felt some of those symptoms of feeling anxious or overwhelmed. I know for some people it is very debilitating. Most likely there's nothing actually wrong with you. It's just that your nervous system is stuck in go mode. Most of us try to relax or calm ourselves down with our mind. The reality is that our mind will listen a lot more to our breath than it will to our thinking. It's much more like a bottom-up than a top-down situation. Your nervous system runs throughout your body and it's an integral part of you surviving each and every day. It takes on many
roles. It's a front line of defense and it is a resource allocator. We receive millions of bits of information each and every second. We're receiving this information and our body responds in order for us to operate normally, function well, and really it's all about survival. So, these are basic and intrinsic survival instincts for our body. When you think about the role that it plays in receiving this information, it's a lot like threat assessment. And then it responds accordingly and send resources of of chemical or movement or messages to our body in order to keep us alive. The basic way to think about your autonomic nervous
system, and it's autonomic because it happens without us thinking, is is two major players. We have the sympathetic, which is activating or you might know it as the fight or flight side, and then we have parasympathetic, which is the relaxing or the rest and digest side. I want you to think not so much as a red light and a green light, much more like a teeter-totter. And that the way in which our body responds tends to put us into a sympathetic dominant state or a parasympathetic dominant state. The good news is that we can use our breath to influence and change the state that we
are in moment to moment. So, our breath is the quickest and most accessible way for us to be able to create influence and change whether we're sympathetic dominant or parasympathetic dominant. It is no accident the relationship between our breath and the physical and non-physical parts of us is both intricate and profound. Faster and or shallower breathing tends to put us into an activating or sympathetic dominant state. And lower, slower breathing tends to put us into a relaxed state. When we inhale and leave our air full in our lungs, that tends to be activating. And when we exhale and relax in certain situations with a neutral
lung, it tends to be more relaxing. Our body feels safe. It enables us to downshift into that parasympathetic dominant state. So, think about our breath as the remote control to our autonomic nervous system. Nervous system regulation, why is it important and what are some of the benefits? When you think about regulating your nervous system, again keeping in mind that most of this is happening without us knowing or understanding, it is a little bit like conditioning a muscle. The work that you are able to do to condition a muscle keeps it more able and ready to act in a beneficial way when you need it. Our
nervous system acts in a similar way. We can think about it of having a baseline. And if we improve that baseline when we get deviate away from our baseline through a stress state or an activated or sympathetic dominant situation when we have worked that muscle, we are able to come back to a place of stasis or baseline much more quickly. So, regulation of our nervous system enables us to come down much more quickly from a stressed or activated state. It also will improve the ability for us to control our emotions. Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to end up being, you know, robotic, static,
unemotive beings. It just means that when we get when that train leaves the station, we are able to bring it back to the station in a much more comfortable way. It improves our our sleep, and it enables us to have faster recovery from stress, whether that's physical in nature or mental or non-physical in nature. So, it's not about not feeling stress, it's about the ability for us to recover quickly from those activated states. The more you practice, the more your body realizes and learns that calm is something that's available to it, and it's not something that has to chase or seems elusive. What breathwork techniques
can I use in order to influence my nervous system? The most studied breathwork on nervous system regulation is coherence breathing or 5-5. I've talked about it before, and it is simply breathing in for five and breathing out for five. You want to be doing a low slow nasal inhale for a count of 5 seconds, and ideally a low, slow, steady nasal exhale for a count of 5 seconds. You want to do this technique for a minimum of 3 minutes, ideally five, and do it three times a day when you are in low stress situations. So, maybe it's when you first wake up and when you
go to bed, and one other time during the day when you are relaxed. This will help improve that baseline, improve your HRV and vagal tone, and as it activates that parasympathetic dominant signal in our body. The other breathwork technique that you can use is called 4-7-8, often called the cadence of bliss. And what that looks like is we do an inhale to a full lung with a little pressure for a count of four. We then hold our breath with that full lung for a count of seven, then a long, slow, steady exhale for a count of eight. This low, steady exhale enables us to activate
that parasympathetic dominant signal in our body giving us a sense of relaxation. The way to use this is to do that for four cycles of that breath work, then take a 30 second to a minute break, and then if you feel like you have the need, you do that for another four cycles. So that's a breath work pattern of about 21 seconds. So you're doing four of those, take a little break, four of those again if you feel the need. So that's a lot of information and we really only scratch the surface of what your nervous system is and does for your body. The important
thing to understand is that you can with consistent practice not only gain control and influence, but improve your ability to do so when activated, improving that baseline, improving that HRV and vagal tone will enable you to get firmly back into the driver's seat when those symptoms of anxiety, overwhelm, and overthinking come on. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about breath work nomenclature. Did I say that right? I've had a lot of questions as with this explosion of breath work and its popularity, what are some of the terms mean, how to use them, and what people are talking about when they talk about breath
work. So in the next episode, we're going to demystify any of those terms that people use in order to make breath work sound a lot more complicated than it actually is. I look forward to chatting with you then.