Resonance breathing

Resonance breathing is slow, even breathing at the pace where your heart rate swings up and down the most with each breath. For most adults that is close to six breaths a minute, somewhere between about 4.5 and 6.5. It is the breathing pattern used in heart rate variability biofeedback.

By Jude Mc, founder of binaural. Last updated 10 November 2026. Not medical advice.

Why about six breaths a minute

Your heart speeds up slightly as you breathe in and slows as you breathe out. Separately, the reflex that steadies blood pressure makes heart rate rise and fall on its own cycle of roughly ten seconds. When you breathe once every ten seconds or so, the two rhythms line up and reinforce each other, and the swing in heart rate becomes as large as it can be. That alignment is the resonance.

The exact pace differs a little between people, and it appears to be stable for each person from one session to the next.

What the evidence says

• A 2022 meta-analysis found that voluntary slow breathing raises vagally mediated heart rate variability during a session, straight afterwards, and after courses of several sessions [1].
• A 2020 meta-analysis of heart rate variability biofeedback, which is built on resonance breathing, found a small to moderate benefit across emotional and physical outcomes compared with controls, with a lot of variation between studies [2].
• Protocols in the research usually run for several weeks, often around twenty minutes a day [3].

This is a practice, not a treatment. It does not replace care for a heart, lung or mental health condition.

How to try it

1. Sit comfortably. Breathe through your nose if you can.
2. Breathe in for about four seconds and out for about six. Don't force the depth: slow and easy is the point.
3. Continue for five minutes. If you feel light-headed, you are breathing too deeply; make each breath shallower.
4. Try a slightly slower or faster pace on another day and notice which feels most natural.

Finding your own pace

In a clinic, a resonance rate is found by breathing at several paces while a sensor records the heart, then choosing the pace that gives the largest swing. The binaural app does a version of this with the phone's camera: you rest a fingertip on the lens, it reads your pulse, sweeps the pace, and keeps the one your heart followed most. The reading is an estimate, not a medical measurement.