Mind and breath—a shift in one impacts the other. We can train our breath to influence our emotional state, and loosen the grip of stress and anxiety.

How you’re breathing can tell you something about your current state of mind—maybe you’re feeling pretty good, thinking about happy hour cocktails with colleagues. Or maybe you’re feeling a bit stressed, trying to wrap everything up before the workday ends.

Not to say that all stress is bad, says Emma Seppälä, Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford. But if you’re running on high-octane all the time, you can easily become a candidate for burnout.

The breath restores us, and helps us save our energy for those big moments when we need our mental resources the most.

“We know that short-term stress can be great. It can really help you get through a deadline and mobilize you,” says Seppälä in a recent video for Big Think, “However, if you depend on that day after day after day you’ll find that your body becomes worn out, your immune system is impacted and even your mind, your attention and your memory are impaired through that long-term chronic stress.“

That’s where the breath comes in: it restores us, and helps us save our energy for those big moments when we need our mental resources the most. Below, Seppälä explores the link between emotions and breath, and how you can train yourself to introduce more calm into your day.



Try This: Using the Breath to Calm Down

While the breath acts like a barometer for how you’re feeling, it’s also a tool: breathing techniques can help you shift gears, and change your emotional state—particularly helpful if you’re under pressure.

“Our breath can significantly change the state of our mind,” Seppälä says. “So usually if we’re in a very high stress moment, it’s very difficult to talk ourselves out of it…It’s just very challenging to change your mind with your own mind, your thoughts with your own thoughts. However, if you calm your nervous system, which is what we do with the breath, then your mind can start to calm down as well.”

You can soothe stress using this intentional breathing practice: