If you've tried a pause in Grinly, you'll have noticed the circle grows for four seconds and shrinks for five or six. In for four, out for longer. Never a hold of more than four seconds. That isn't an accident, and this is why.

What a recent study found

In 2023, a team at Stanford led by Melis Yilmaz Balban, with David Spiegel and Andrew Huberman, ran a month-long randomised trial. People spent five minutes a day doing one of four things: three kinds of breathing exercise, or mindfulness meditation.

The breathing that did best was built around a long, unhurried breath out, which the researchers called cyclic sighing. Compared with the mindfulness group, the people breathing this way reported a bigger lift in mood across the month, and their breathing rate slowed more.

What that study doesn't tell us matters too. It compared breathing with meditation, not with doing nothing, and people rated their own mood. It's one study, and there's plenty still to learn about how breathing and mood affect each other. We're not claiming a breath can fix a hard week. We just think a longer breath out is a nice thing to have in your pocket.

The one-minute version

This isn't the exact exercise from the study. It's the gentle version Grinly uses, and you can do it at a desk, on a train, or in the car park before you walk in.

  1. Sit or stand however is comfortable. Let your shoulders drop.
  2. Breathe in through your nose for a slow count of four.
  3. Breathe out through your mouth, gently, for a count of six. As if you were fogging a window from across the room.
  4. Don't hold your breath at the top or bottom. Just turn around and go again.
  5. Six breaths is about a minute. Then carry on with your day.

If counting feels like work, forget the numbers. Just make the breath out a little longer than the breath in. That's the whole idea.

In for four. Out for longer. No holding, no rush.

Why we keep it short

Long practices are wonderful, but they ask a lot of a busy day, and most of us don't keep them up. A minute is easier to say yes to. You can try it right now: there's a one-minute pause on the front page of this site, and fifteen short pauses for different kinds of day in the app.

If things feel like more than a minute can help with, please talk to someone. In Australia, Lifeline is there on 13 11 14, any time.

Sources