Breathing exercises for blood pressure: what studies found

How do you try slow breathing for blood pressure?

None of the studies give us a dose we can recommend. They ran from a single session to 6 months. Many used about 4 to 6 breaths per minute. If you want to try gentle slow breathing alongside your usual care:

1. Sit in a supported chair or lie down. No breath holds.
2. Breathe in through your nose for about 4 counts.
3. Breathe out gently for about 6 counts. That's about 6 breaths a minute.
4. If you feel dizzy, light-headed or uncomfortable, go back to normal breathing and stop.
5. Practise for about 5 minutes once or twice a day, if that feels fine.

We don't know the best number of minutes, how often, or how long it takes. No breathing exercise replaces your prescribed treatment or your doctor's advice.

Can slow breathing lower blood pressure?

Blood pressure is written as two numbers in mmHg (millimetres of mercury). The top number, systolic, is the pressure when your heart pumps. The bottom, diastolic, is the pressure between beats.

The most recent pooled analysis comes from Cheng and colleagues in Clinical Cardiology, 2026. They pooled 13 randomised controlled trials with 1,097 adults who had high blood pressure (Cheng et al. 2026). Randomised means people were assigned to the groups by chance. Compared with comparison groups, the voluntary slow breathing groups had:

• Systolic pressure: on average 7.68 mmHg lower (95% confidence interval 5.49 to 9.87 lower).
• Diastolic pressure: on average 4.02 mmHg lower (95% confidence interval 2.60 to 5.44 lower).
• Heart rate: about 1.15 beats per minute lower.

Most trials used about 4 to 6 breaths per minute, slower than a typical resting rate. Comparison groups varied: usual care, no intervention, music or reading, health education, a placebo (humming like a bee), or standard drug treatment. Devices that guide your breathing were left out, so these were non-device techniques such as yoga-style, mindful and pursed-lip breathing.

An earlier analysis points the same way. Garg and colleagues pooled 15 randomised trials of different breathing exercises and found about 7 mmHg lower systolic and 3.4 mmHg lower diastolic (Garg et al. 2024). The authors describe the effect as moderate. They grouped 11 different types of breathing, so we can't say which one works best.

Why shouldn't we stop at the good news?

Because the trials disagree with each other. The statistic that measures this, called I squared, was 82% for systolic and 73% for diastolic. High numbers mean the trials were very inconsistent, so one average may hide a wide range.

There are other reasons for care:

• The trials ranged from a single 5-minute session to 6 months of practice. A letter in response to the paper argued that mixing one-off sessions with long-term training means the average may not show what happens to resting blood pressure over time (Bhurgri and Shafqat 2026). The Cheng authors themselves note that longer programmes were not consistently more effective.
• Only 5 of the 13 trials clearly reported hiding the group assignment from the researchers, and only 4 clearly blinded participants. You can't easily blind people to whether they're breathing slowly.
• The paper didn't report medication use in a systematic way, so we can't tell how much the results depend on it.
• Garg and colleagues rated every included trial as unclear or high risk of bias.

Is it the breathing or just relaxing?

A 2014 analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at five trials of device-guided breathing (a gadget that paces your breath) against a sham device or music, which is a tougher comparison than no treatment (Landman et al. 2014). Individual patient data was available for three of them.

There was no significant difference in office blood pressure. The systolic difference was 2.2 mmHg, with a range that crossed zero (-2.7 to 7.0). The trials were short, and the authors said no recommendations about treating high blood pressure could be made.

That analysis is about device-guided breathing, which the 2026 paper left out, so the two don't directly contradict each other. But it's a reminder that being calm and spending time on something relaxing may be part of the picture.

The research in a nutshell

How strong is the evidence? Mixed. The averages point to lower readings, but the trials disagree and one careful comparison found no clear gain.

If you want to track your own readings, take a record of home measurements to your next appointment. The NHS notes that a home reading of 135/85 or higher is usually considered high, and that you should ask your GP or pharmacist before changing or stopping any medicine (NHS).