How long should a breathwork session be? 5, 10 or 20

Try it now: a simple 10-minute breathwork class plan

This is our own practice design, not a proven protocol. It's a starting point you can adapt.

1. Opening (2 minutes): settle in, notice natural breathing, and set the gentle ground rules ("go at your own pace, stop any time").
2. Build (3 minutes): introduce the pattern slowly, adding rhythm or depth step by step.
3. Peak (2 minutes): the fullest part, with the deepest or slowest rhythm. With no holds, the peak is still gentle.
4. Landing (3 minutes): let go of counting, return to natural breathing, and leave a quiet moment before moving on.

More lengths are in the plan table further down.

How long should a breathwork session be, according to research?

The anxiety and mood trial used 5 minutes. In the 2023 trial by Balban and colleagues, 108 adults were asked to do 5 minutes a day for 28 days. Groups did cyclic sighing, box breathing, a fast-breathing-with-holds style, or mindfulness. People actually practised about 5.8 minutes on average and completed around 20 of the 28 days. Positive mood rose more with cyclic sighing than with mindfulness, anxiety fell about the same in both, and heart rate variability (HRV, the natural variation between heartbeats) didn't change. The sample was mostly university students and practice was self-reported (Balban et al. 2023).

Slow-breathing studies used a wide range. A 2018 review of 15 small studies of slow breathing (under 10 breaths a minute) found session lengths from 1 to 30 minutes, with a few longer programmes, such as 10 sessions of 20 minutes or 150 days of 30-minute sessions. The authors said it couldn't establish an optimal dose or duration, and none of the studies were randomised (Zaccaro et al. 2018).

Is a longer breathwork session better?

Not clearly. Two findings point the same way.

A direct test of length found no extra gain. In a 2021 lab study of 59 adults aged 18 to 26, breathing at 6 breaths a minute for 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes raised a heart measure called RMSSD about equally at every length. The effect disappeared after the breathing stopped. People who breathed longer did have a lower resting breathing rate right afterwards (You et al. 2021). This measured the heart, not how people felt.

More practice didn't clearly mean more benefit. A 2023 meta-analysis of 12 trials with 785 adults found a small-to-medium drop in self-reported stress. It found no significant link between the size of the effect and total practice time, number of sessions or how often people practised. Many trials didn't report how much people actually practised, so true dose-response couldn't be tested. Total time varied from 80 to 5,625 minutes. One trial in the review did report that anxiety fell with each extra hour (Fincham et al. 2023).

Is 5 minutes of breathwork enough?

It may be a fair start. Here are other short doses from the research:

• A school pilot with 43 high school students used 5 minutes of slow breathing three times a week for 5 weeks. Anxiety scores didn't change, and taking part dropped from about 73% to 47% of sessions over the weeks (Bentley et al. 2022).
• In a lab study of 75 employees, a single 5-minute paced-breathing session after stress led to higher HRV than sitting quietly or a body scan (Chelidoni et al. 2020).
• The NHS stress exercise suggests at least 5 minutes, with regular practice (NHS).

Much longer sessions are a different thing. A 2025 study of experienced practitioners used group sessions of about 1.5 hours or two sessions of about 3 hours of intense breathing, with strict health screening and trained facilitators (Havenith et al. 2025). That's not a model for a beginner class.

What I take from the studies

1. Five minutes is the most common tested dose. It's a fair minimum for a short class.
2. For a regular practice, the Balban trial used once a day for 28 days. Whether fewer days work is untested.
3. Single sessions much beyond 20 to 30 minutes were rare in these studies. If you go longer, make it a choice, not an expectation.
4. Use a pace you can sustain. The slow-breathing studies used under 10 breaths a minute, often about 6.
5. Track how people feel, not just minutes. Taking part fell in the school pilot, and many trials didn't record actual practice.

The research in a nutshell

Early. Short sessions have been tested far more than long ones, and no study has settled the best length.

How should you shape a breathwork class?

No study I opened tested class structure, so this is simply how we design a class at Sigh Club. Our suggested split of time:

A few cueing habits we like: give one instruction at a time, invite rather than order ("you might..."), name what the out-breath does, and leave silence. These are craft habits, not research findings.