🧘‍♀️ Breathing exercises don't help with work stress. At least not in the long run.

They are extremely popular in vitality programs. Employees start full of courage and often feel better temporarily. But if we are really honest, we have to ask ourselves: do breathing exercises have lasting effects on stress? Or do they only work as long as we are actively doing them?

📊 What does science say?

Research shows that breathing techniques such as resonant breathing , HRV biofeedback , and abdominal breathing can improve heart rate variability (HRV) — a key indicator of stress resilience.

• Lin et al. (2012): Participants saw their HRV (SDNN) increase from ~41 ms to ~56 ms after 5 weeks of biofeedback training. Three months later, this improvement was largely maintained.

• De Souza et al. (2022): Older adults still showed increased HRV (RMSSD and SDNN) up to 4.5 weeks after breathing training.

  
  

⚠️ Important detail: these measurements were not taken immediately after a session (which would only measure acute relaxation), but days or even weeks later. That sounds promising — but is it really a structural change?

⚠️ The other side of the coin

Despite promising results, this area of research also has some limitations:

• Sample sizes are often small (n=20–40)

• Good control groups are often lacking

• HRV is rarely measured over long periods of time

• 24-hour measurements are still rare

  
  

📌 To be more specific…

Imagine you are doing a breathing training. You feel better, and weeks later you come back for an HRV measurement. There is a good chance that you – consciously or unconsciously – pay extra attention to your breathing. It is like not thinking about a pink elephant . The subject of breathing is already in your head. You focus your attention on it, with positive measurement results as a result.

But that is not evidence of lasting change. The question is: what happens when we monitor your stress level unnoticed, 24/7 during your workday? In our experience: the effect disappears. Stress peaks again, and the breathing exercises often turn out to be nothing more than a temporary band-aid.

🎯 The real solution lies deeper

For lasting impact, we need to look beyond breathing itself. Not: how does someone breathe? But: why can't we breathe calmly anymore?

That is where the core of chronic stress lies. That is where lasting change begins.