Breathwork improves your sleep

In small early studies, slow breathing before bed improved how well people said they slept, though the size of the effect is uncertain and, where it was reported, small. In the largest trial, which compared slow breathing with a sham breathing pattern in adults who were not chosen for poor sleep, sleep did not change in either group. A 2026 review gathered 9 studies of slow breathing before bed with 457 people in all: the seven that asked people about their sleep found they reported sleeping longer and better, while the five that measured sleep with a wrist monitor or an overnight sleep recording gave inconclusive results. Those studies were small, participants knew which practice they were doing, and no analysis has yet combined them into a single estimate. The largest trial, run online in the UK in 2023, gave 400 adults about 10 minutes a day of slow breathing or of breathing paced at an ordinary rate for four weeks without telling them which they had, and did not ask them to practise at bedtime.

Most of this evidence is for slow, calm breathing at ten breaths a minute or fewer, often around six. Fast, forceful styles, including Wim Hof style breathing and holotropic breathwork, have been little tested for sleep. In the largest trial of fast breathing with breath holds, three weeks of daily practice in 200 healthy young adults changed how much tiredness and sleepiness affected the day no more than a sham version did, and participants agreed to practise away from bedtime. These styles carry risks slow breathing does not: fainting, which can be fatal in or near water, and seizures, since brief deliberate hyperventilation is used in clinics to bring them on. Reviews of those styles advise caution for people who are pregnant or who have epilepsy, heart or blood vessel disease, panic disorder or psychosis. None of these studies tested breathing as a treatment for sleep apnea, in which breathing stops briefly or becomes very shallow during sleep. For long-term insomnia, a 2021 American Academy of Sleep Medicine guideline gives its strong recommendation to cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, and a weaker, conditional one to relaxation therapy, which includes abdominal breathing, based on low-quality evidence from five trials.

In a trial of 64 healthy young adults, 15 minutes of app-guided slow breathing each evening for 30 days led to slightly better reported sleep than spending the same time on social media. On a sleep questionnaire scored from 0 to 21, where lower is better, scores went from 3.31 to 2.91 with breathing and from 3.44 to 3.75 with social media; everyone started as a good sleeper. In a trial of 99 older adults with insomnia in Iran, 30 minutes of diaphragmatic breathing each night and group cognitive behavioural therapy both improved sleep questionnaire scores. The published summary reports the largest improvement in the first four weeks and no significant reduction at the eight-week follow-up; a quarter of participants did not finish, the trial was registered after it began enrolling, and its full results were not available to read.

Two trials compared a breathing technique with a sham breathing pattern, with participants not told which they had. Both were run online in the UK by one research group, both measured stress as their main outcome and sleep as a secondary one, and neither had a group that did nothing. In the 400-person trial, scores on a sleep disturbance questionnaire were 52.3 before and 52.0 after four weeks of slow breathing at about 5.5 breaths a minute, and 52.2 and 51.9 with breathing paced at 12 breaths a minute, with no change a month later in either group. In the 200-person trial of fast breathing with breath holds, scores for how much tiredness and sleepiness affected the day did not differ between the technique and its sham. In a third trial, run remotely from Stanford and published in 2023, 108 adults did five minutes a day for a month of one of three breathing patterns or of mindfulness meditation while wearing a wrist tracker: hours of sleep, sleep efficiency, the tracker's sleep score and a questionnaire on daytime tiredness did not change in any group. That trial was registered after it ended, and its article reports the sleep results in a few sentences, with the figures in a supplement that was not read for this summary.

Studies that recorded sleep overnight in a sleep laboratory are few and short. In 14 people with insomnia in Taiwan, a night after 20 minutes of paced breathing at six breaths a minute brought faster sleep onset, fewer and shorter awakenings and more efficient sleep in an overnight recording; the study was small and not randomized. In 20 young adults without sleep problems, one evening of 30 minutes of slow breathing raised heart rate variability and was followed by more slow-wave brain activity in deep sleep, but had no robust effect on sleep quality. Every sleep-laboratory study so far has tested a single night. Slow breathing reliably raises heart rate variability, a marker of the part of the nervous system that slows the body down, and in the 30-day trial it also raised this marker overnight. People with insomnia in the Taiwanese study had lower levels of it during the day. Whether that change is what improves sleep has not been tested directly, and in the 400-person trial breathing at the slow rate changed sleep scores no more than breathing at 12 breaths a minute.

US federal information on complementary health, updated in 2024, describes relaxation techniques on their own as having a small amount of low-quality evidence for insomnia, notes that they are sometimes part of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, and describes them as generally considered safe. The bedtime practices tested were slow, paced or diaphragmatic breathing for 15 to 30 minutes, taught in groups or through phone apps, over a single night to about a month; the trials with a sham breathing pattern used 10 to 20 minutes a day of audio-guided breathing at home for three to four weeks. All the trials described here were in adults.