Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Happy Tuesday, founders.
A few weeks ago, I walked into an evening event straight off a full day of back-to-back calls.
My eyes were tight, my thoughts were all over the place, and when it was my turn to speak, I blanked out and started telling a story I was even confused about where it was going. I sat through the rest of the event barely present, finding it impossible to catch up to my own nervous system.
The chances of me meditating for more than 7 seconds right before I enter a stress-inducing meeting or event are nearly zero.
I needed one technique besides meditation I could count on to quickly change my physiological state when I already feel like my soul is floating above my head.
A Stanford study saved the day: a group of researchers compared five different breathing and meditation practices over a month and found the simplest one won on mood by a wide margin, in five minutes a day.
Luckily for you, in this essay I walk you through the exact steps to fit this into your crazy Q4 schedule.
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A short field guide to breathing techniques
Controlled breathing has a long history in traditional practices like yoga, tai chi, and meditation, but scientists are only beginning to study how these exercises work and which ones help most.
A few common ones give a sense of the range:
Box breathing, used in military and first-responder training, spaces an equal-length inhale, hold, exhale, and hold to steady the nervous system before a high-stakes moment.
Diaphragmatic breathing pulls the breath low into the belly instead of the chest.
Alternate nostril breathing, borrowed from yogic pranayama, closes one nostril at a time.
The 4-7-8 technique stretches the exhale to nearly double the inhale, close to the ratio cyclic sighing uses.
Wim Hof-style breathing does the opposite of all of these: rapid breathing meant to energize, followed by a breath hold.
Cyclic sighing: sits closest to the 4-7-8 family, exhale-dominant and short, but it's the one now tested directly against meditation in a controlled trial.
The month-long trial: Cyclic sighing
In 2023, a team led by psychiatrist David Spiegel and neuroscientist Andrew Huberman put 111 healthy adults through a randomized controlled trial, published in Cell Reports Medicine, that ran for a full month. Each person was randomly assigned five minutes a day of one of four practices: cyclic sighing, box breathing, cyclic hyperventilation (long inhales), or mindfulness meditation.
Everyone completed the same mood and anxiety questionnaires before the month began and again after it ended, and researchers checked participants' resting breathing rate under supervision at the start, midpoint, and finish.
All three breathing groups improved positive mood more than the meditation group did, and cyclic sighing improved it most, about 56% more than meditation by the end of the month. The gain didn't plateau either. It grew with each consecutive day of practice, a detail Stanford Medicine's own coverage of the trial called out specifically.
Cyclic sighing was also the only technique that lowered participants' resting breathing rate across the entire day. A slower baseline breathing rate is one of the more reliable physical markers of a calmer nervous system, which means this wasn't a mood report alone.
How to do cyclic sighing
First Inhale: Take a deep breath in through your nose to fill your lungs about halfway.
Second Inhale: Immediately take a second, deeper breath or "sip" of air through your nose to fully expand your lungs and inflate the small air sacs.
Exhale: Release a long, slow, and steady exhale through your mouth until your lungs feel completely empty.
Repeat: Continue this pattern for about five minutes, or for a few dedicated cycles when you feel overwhelmed.
If you feel lightheaded, ease off the second inhale.
With this technique, you don’t need to sit in a specific posture, nor does it require a quiet room. You can be seated at your desk, in a parked car, or on mute before a call.
You can follow along with this video.
Why are exhales so effective
Cyclic sighing involves two inhales through the nose: a normal breath followed immediately by a shorter one to top off the lungs, then a long, slow exhale through the mouth, longer than both inhales combined.
Our lungs do a smaller, involuntary version of this on their own. Roughly every five minutes, our body triggers a spontaneous physiological sigh, a double inhale that reinflates air sacs that have started to collapse. Cyclic sighing draws on that pattern with an extended exhale, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system and, as a result, slows your heart rate.
Compared with meditation, whose effectiveness comes from sustained practice, cyclic sighing works quickly to relax the body. Cyclic sighing acts on the breath directly, which is why Dr. Spiegel has described the breath as sitting right at the edge of conscious control: unlike your heart rate or digestion, you can reach in and change it on purpose.
You can watch Dr Andrew Huberman explain it in this video.
Key takeaways
Use it before the hard moment, not during it. Five minutes ahead of a board meeting, an investor call, or a difficult conversation with a co-founder- the same window the study tested.
Consistency is what compounds. The trial's gains grew with consecutive days, not with one long session.
The exhale is the whole mechanism. If you remember one instruction, make it this: breathe out longer than you breathe in.
Keep meditation if it's already working for you. Cyclic sighing solves a different problem: calm in the next five minutes, not the next five weeks.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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