Cyclic Sighing for Anxiety: Breathwork for Stillness

Picture a departure gate in a nearly empty airport. The flight has been canceled, six hours stretch ahead, and the person sitting there is a professional surfer who has ridden some of the largest waves on earth. Her answer to the stress of that moment is not a stretch or a snack. It is to sit down and sigh, deliberately, in a specific pattern. That scene, described by surfer and chemistry professor Sarah Gerhardt on The Science of Happiness from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, anchors an episode about cyclic sighing: a short, controlled breathing practice with two inhales through the nose, a long, slow exhale through the mouth, and a few minutes a day of repetition. Host Dacher Keltner introduces it as a technique studied by Andrew Huberman and David Spiegel at Stanford, and the episode makes a case that the body can be trained toward calm the same way it can be trained toward courage in the water.

Why does a big-wave surfer need a breathing practice for traffic jams?

Gerhardt's relationship with breath started out of necessity. She grew up on beaches, partly in Hawaii, and taught herself to get out of the water. When she set her sights on bigger waves, she ran into a problem that shows up in any serious breath-holding discipline: the body starts to panic long before the lungs run out of air. "So I needed to train my body to not freak out," she explains, describing how a long breath hold can make the hands tingle and the edges of vision go dark.

"We have a natural response to breathe when our CO2 levels get high. But that's trainable. So I can train myself to be comfortable in the chaos and the discomfort."

— Sarah Gerhardt, The Science of Happiness, 0:35

The line matters because it reframes panic as a reflex with a trigger, not a verdict on the person experiencing it. The urge to gasp is the body reacting to rising carbon dioxide, and reflexes can be retrained. Gerhardt's surf training is a case study in exactly that: she learned to stay composed while her body argued for air.

What she noticed next is the more interesting part. Her breath work was all organized around motion. "I have breathing practices when I swim. I have breathing practices before I go surf big waves," she says. "I just didn't have a practice for when I'm in my car in traffic." She did not have one for sitting still and feeling nervous, either. That gap is the reason cyclic sighing caught her attention. It is a practice built for stillness, not performance.

"I just didn't have a practice for when I'm sitting here, and I'm nervous talking to you."

— Sarah Gerhardt, The Science of Happiness, 1:00

There is a useful lesson here for anyone who has a breathing routine for the gym, the yoga mat, or the pool but nothing for the kitchen table before a hard phone call. Breath practices tend to be specialized. Cyclic sighing is meant to be portable, to work in the moments that do not come with a physical task attached.

What is cyclic sighing, step by step?

The published instructions for the practice, which accompany the episode, are concrete enough to follow without a teacher. Find a comfortable seated or standing position in a quiet place, and relax your shoulders and jaw. Then:

• First inhale. Breathe slowly and deeply through the nose, starting with the abdomen so it expands (diaphragmatic breathing), and fill the lungs about halfway. Hold briefly.
• Second inhale. Keep inhaling through the nose, now expanding the chest to fill the lungs completely. Hold this combined breath for a moment.
• Exhale. Let the air out slowly and completely through the mouth. The exhale should last about twice as long as the combined inhales.
• Repeat. Run the sequence for about three cycles, or as many as you like.
• Reflect. Notice how the body feels, looking for relaxation, reduced tension, or a calmer mind.

Gerhardt's account adds a detail that the written steps can miss: the first moment is awareness. "The acknowledgment of my body and just the awareness of, oh, my shoulders are in my ears, and I am not breathing," she says. Noticing that her shoulders had crept up and her breath had stopped was the first thing that made her calmer. Only then did the sequence begin. She also admits that filling the belly first was unfamiliar. "I don't do that normally," she says, so she had to work out how to breathe into her belly before she could fill the rest of her lungs.

"And then the step of breathing in through my nostrils—so you breathe in into the belly first. And I don't do that normally."

— Sarah Gerhardt, The Science of Happiness, 6:15

Why does the long exhale carry so much of the weight?

Most of the instructions focus on the inhales, but the practice is named for its sigh, and the exhale is where the design is most deliberate. Spiegel's explanation begins with an observation about ordinary breathing. "We all tend to breathe too fast," he says in the episode, and he describes the chest as a kind of vacuum that draws air in from outside, with the act of exhaling being what pushes air back out into the world.

"We all tend to breathe too fast."

— David Spiegel, The Science of Happiness, 22:38

The two-inhale structure is a way of filling the lungs fully before releasing, and the extended exhale gives the body a long, unhurried outflow to settle into. The practice asks you to slow down the part of the breath that most people rush. Spiegel's broader point is that the body responds to these rhythms, and that regulating them is a practical lever: "So we can do things to regulate the way our bodies feel," as the episode puts it.

What did the Stanford research actually look at?

The episode is careful to describe the work as an investigation into a simple question. Spiegel put it this way at the top of the program: "We were trying to see whether people, by just practicing a brief daily breathwork exercise, could demonstrate some significant improvement in mood and physical arousal and tension."

"We were trying to see whether people, by just practicing a brief daily breathwork exercise, could demonstrate some significant improvement in mood and physical arousal and tension."

— David Spiegel, The Science of Happiness, episode opening

Later in the episode, Spiegel describes what the group found when people practiced for short sessions: "We had people practice just five minutes a day," and those who practiced regularly over a month could see substantial effects. The accompanying description puts the finding in plainer terms: five minutes of daily practice can improve mood and lower respiratory rate. The episode presents this as science-backed, and it is worth reading that phrase precisely. It describes a body of evidence about a short, repeatable exercise and its effects on mood and physiology. It is not a promise that the technique replaces professional care for anxiety, and the material here does not claim it does.

The point Spiegel returns to most often is the scale of the commitment. The practice is short. The episode frames it as a skill more than a remedy. "You can do something in five minutes or less," the program notes, and it likens the process to learning a physical skill, such as riding a bicycle, that takes repetition before it feels natural. The argument is that minds, like bodies, need training to live better.

"You can do something in five minutes or less."

— The Science of Happiness, 27:09

Why does the sound of the sigh matter?

Keltner brings an unusual angle to the practice. His lab has studied sighs, the short vocalizations people make without thinking. He argues that one of the least appreciated parts of cyclic sighing is that it gets people to vocalize emotion. "We make sighs that sound like relief and sympathy," he says, and he points to the familiar frustrated sigh as a sound everyone recognizes. Gerhardt hears her own sighs as a little bit like relief. Keltner agrees that relief and contentment are the sounds the practice is aiming for, and he adds: "And we need them."

"We make sighs that sound like relief and sympathy."

— Dacher Keltner, The Science of Happiness, 7:10

That observation gives the practice a second dimension. It is not only a regulation of airflow; it is a permission to let out an audible release. The exhale through the mouth is where that sound lives, and it is part of why the practice feels different from silent breath counting.

How does cyclic sighing work in a real high-pressure moment?

The airport gate was Gerhardt's first serious test. She and her daughter had left Santa Cruz at 4:15 in the morning to reach a flight to her niece's wedding, and the flight was canceled. Facing a six-hour wait, a rental car, and a ferry ahead, she recognized the rising stress. "So fortunately, the airport was mostly empty," she says, and she decided to sit and do the practice. "I'll definitely use it again," she concluded.

"I just said, I'm just going to sit down here, and I'm going to do my sighing. And it was really, really helpful."

— Sarah Gerhardt, The Science of Happiness, 7:40

What makes the story useful is that it is not about the wave. It is about the situation that a surfer's training does not cover: being stuck, nervous, and unable to move. Gerhardt's account is also honest about what the practice does not fix on its own. She still experienced stress, and the technique gave her a way to meet it rather than eliminate it. That is a modest claim, and it is the one the episode makes.

Where to go from here

If you want to try cyclic sighing, the material points to a simple way to begin. Choose one quiet, sitting moment in your day, not a crisis, and run three cycles of the pattern: belly first, then chest, a short hold, and a slow exhale through the mouth that lasts about twice as long as the inhales. Afterward, notice what changed in your shoulders, jaw, and breath. Then try it again tomorrow, aiming for five minutes of daily practice, which is the dose the Stanford work examined.

Pay attention to where it fits. Gerhardt's own lesson was that the breathing practices people already rely on tend to be tied to movement, and cyclic sighing fills the gap for stillness: the car, the waiting room, the conversation that makes you nervous. Keep the practice short, keep it repeatable, and treat it as a skill you are training rather than a switch you flip. For further listening, the episode and its companion episodes in The Science of Happiness series explore the other breathing approaches Keltner's team is covering.