Breathing is one of those things you often don’t even think about. But, while simple, breathing exercises before bed can have a powerful effect.
The right exercises can help ease anxiety, lower your heart rate, and help you drift off. And breathing in the right way — such as through your nose, not your mouth — both while awake and asleep has a whole host of health benefits.
Breathing is a part of your autonomic nervous system, along with your heart rate, blood pressure, and digestive system. But breathing is one of the functions you have control over. Changing your breathing can help you change other aspects of your body, such as your stress levels, heart rate, and how well you fall asleep.
Below, we’ll cover breathing exercises you can do before bed to help you fall asleep and boost your overall energy, health, and well-being. Plus, we’ll share how the RISE app can guide you through diaphragmatic breathing, a breathing exercise with many science-backed benefits, and how the app can help you do other activities that make a huge difference to your sleep and health.
Breathing exercises before bed are useful as they can help you sleep in a few ways.
Firstly, it’s a relaxation exercise. Breathing exercises can slow your brain and body down before bed and promote your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, or the relaxing state of “rest and digest.” This is opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which is your body’s stress response, or “fight or flight” response.
Our affects our breathing (you might notice you breathe faster and more shallowly when you’re stressed), but the link works the other way around, too. Our breathing can affect our emotional state. In other words, by slowing and lengthening your breathing you can lower your stress and anxiety levels. This is useful before bed.
Another reason to do breathing exercises? They can help if you find yourself awake with anxiety, either when you’re trying to drift off or if you’ve woken up during the night. As well as calming you down, mindful breathing exercises can give you something to focus on to stop rumination, or endless worrying.
Breathing exercises at any time of day can help keep stress levels in check, something that’ll be useful when bedtime rolls around. And they can also help promote the “correct” way of breathing (i.e. slowly, low or deeply to engage the diaphragm, and through your nose, more on that soon), which has huge benefits for your overall health and wellness, as well as your sleep. They can help at any time of day, but before bed can be a great time to do these exercises, especially when your days are busy.
Breathwork has become a bit of a buzzword lately, but more scientific evidence is emerging to show how useful it can be. While promising, more research needs to be done, though. Many studies on breath control or breathing exercises come with limitations, like being small in size, having a risk of bias, or being done in populations with health conditions or impaired breathing, meaning we don’t know much yet about how breathing exercises can help the general population.
One thing that is clear though is there’s very little downside to doing these exercises, and some benefits are backed by science.
Heads-up: Naming conventions for these breathing exercises aren’t consistent. Some overlap with each other, but are listed as separate exercises (like deep breathing and diaphragmatic breathing, which both engage the diaphragm, for example). While there’s overlap, we’ve kept these exercises separate to reflect the naming conventions used in studies. This keeps the health benefits attributed to each exercise as accurate as possible.
Here are some exercises to try.
What it is: Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing or deep breathing, involves breathing slowly, deeply, and while engaging the diaphragm, the major breathing muscle found below the lungs.
Despite breathing all the time, many of us only engage our diaphragm . Instead, we breathe shallowly from our chests, which can put pressure on the heart and increase blood pressure. This can limit the range of your diaphragm and your lung capacity.
Diaphragmatic breathing has been shown to trigger your body’s , slowing your heart rate, lowering your blood pressure, and reducing stress and anxiety. And it may even help those with like eating disorders, chronic functional constipation, high blood pressure, migraines, cancer, gastroesophageal reflux disease, heart failure, , and sleep disorders like .
It sounds powerful for a simple breathing exercise, but science backs it up:
Just five minutes of diaphragmatic breathing a day can help to ease stress and anxiety, which can help you drift off more easily. And even a has been shown to reduce blood pressure, increase heart rate variability (a sign of heart health), and boost how much oxygen you have in your system.
Diaphragmatic breathing helps you get into a relaxed state in the moment, and over time you should begin to breathe more slowly and deeply in everyday life.
How to do it: There are many different ways to do diaphragmatic breathing. Try this to get started:
The RISE app can walk you through diaphragmatic breathing with a two-minute guided session.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click to go right to their relaxation audio guide homepage and get started.
What it is: Box breathing is a type of diaphragmatic breathing that involves inhaling, holding your breath, exhaling, and holding your breath, for a set count.
It not only promotes deep diaphragmatic breathing, but holding your breath momentarily can further promote , or relaxation responses, in the body.
How to do it:
It can help to use a visualization of a box. As you breathe in, imagine moving along the top of a box, hold your breath as you imagine moving down the right-hand side, breathe out as you move across the bottom, hold as you move up the left-hand side of the box, and repeat.
You can get started with four seconds. To determine how long exactly you should count for to maximize the exercise’s benefits, .
If you exhaled for 20 seconds or less, try box breathing for three seconds on each side. If you exhaled for 20 to 45 seconds, try five to six seconds for box breathing, and if you exhaled for 50 seconds or longer, try box breathing for eight to 10 seconds.
Be sure to pick a length of time that doesn’t cause any strain or anxiety while you’re doing the exercise.
You can increase how long you inhale, exhale, and hold your breath as you get stronger with this breathing exercise. If you find the exercise easy after a few weeks, try retesting your carbon dioxide tolerance to find a new time.
What it is: The 4-7-8 breathing exercise was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil, a doctor and the founder and Director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.
The exercise involves breathing in for a count of four, holding your breath for a count of seven, and then breathing out for a count of eight.
The technique is based on yogic pranayama breathing techniques, and it can ease anxiety and stress to help you fall asleep.
looked at how the 4-7-8 breathing method could help patients after bariatric surgery. The study found it helped to lower stress and anxiety.
Another found the 4-7-8 technique can improve heart rate variability and blood pressure, both when sleep deprived and when you’re getting enough sleep — although it worked better in those who weren’t sleep deprived.
The breathing exercise has even been shown to help reduce .
How to do it:
Stop if you experience lightheadedness, and try doing the exercise for shorter periods of time next time.
What it is: Paced breathing involves slowing your breathing to about six breaths per minute and extending your exhales to be longer than your inhales.
Slow breathing helps activate your body’s relaxation response and improve your sleep. One found when insomniacs practiced paced breathing for 20 minutes before bed, they had reduced sleep latency, number of awakenings, and time awake during the night.
How to do it:
