Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis

Summary & key facts

Researchers combined results from about 220 studies to see if deliberately breathing slowly changes heart activity linked to the body’s “rest-and-digest” system. They found that slow, voluntary breathing raises measures of parasympathetic activity while people do the breathing, and there is evidence of higher activity right after a single session and after several sessions too. The authors say this makes slow breathing a cheap, low-tech option worth trying for prevention or as an add-on to care, but most of the evidence is strongest for what happens during the breathing itself.

Key facts:

• The team screened roughly 1,800 study summaries and included about 220 published studies that looked at slow, voluntary breathing.
• Most studies (about 170) measured heart activity during the breathing exercises, while fewer studies looked right after one session (about 20) or after multiple training sessions (about 50).
• Across all three time frames — during the breathing, immediately after one session, and after several sessions — slow breathing increased measures tied to the parasympathetic nervous system.
• Those heart measures are called vagally-mediated heart rate variability. That is a way researchers track the body’s ‘rest-and-digest’ response, which tends to slow the heart and help the body relax.
• Because the parasympathetic system affects many health outcomes, the authors suggest voluntary slow breathing could be a low-cost, low-risk technique for prevention or as an extra tool alongside other treatments.
• The strongest and most consistent evidence was for effects seen while people were actually doing the slow breathing; there were fewer studies measuring lasting changes after training.

Topics

Cardiac Health and Mental Health Cardiovascular and exercise physiology Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic Control

Categories

Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine Health Sciences Medicine

Tags

Anesthesia Audiology Autonomic nervous system Blood pressure Breathing Computer science Economics Heart rate Heart rate variability Internal medicine Intervention (counseling) Management Medicine Meta-analysis Physical medicine and rehabilitation Psychiatry Psychology Session (web analytics) Turnover World Wide Web