Breathing and meditation: how they differ

One steers the breath, the other watches it

A breathing exercise comes with an instruction for your body: in for four seconds, out for six, hold, rest. The breath is the thing you're working on. Your attention trails along behind, keeping count.

Mindfulness meditation flips that order. The thing you're working on is attention, and the breath is just where you rest it. You don't lengthen it or fix it. You notice what it's like today, you drift off, you notice that, and you come back.

Meditation: staying with what's there

The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) describes meditation as a variety of practices that focus on integrating mind and body. Some involve keeping your attention on a sensation, such as breathing, or on a sound, an image, or a repeated phrase. Mindfulness, it says, means keeping your attention on the present moment without judging it.

The idea is old. In the Buddhist Pali canon, the Anapanasati Sutta, the discourse on mindfulness of breathing, puts it this way: breathing in long, the practitioner knows the breath is long; breathing in short, knows it is short. First you get to know the breath as it comes.

Japanese Zen has a similar way in. The Rinzai school teaches beginners to count each exhale from one to ten and then go back to one. On this site that practice is called Counting breaths (susokukan).

Breathing exercises: changing the rhythm on purpose

The other family goes back centuries too. Yoga calls it pranayama, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a 15th-century manual, gives it a whole chapter of alternating nostrils, breath holds, and breaths you can hear.

Outside the traditions, slow breathing has drawn the most research. A 2018 systematic review pulled together 15 studies of healthy adults breathing at fewer than ten breaths a minute. It found higher heart rate variability and, in several studies, a greater sense of relaxation. It also cautioned that the studies were small and hard to compare. That's the territory of Coherent breathing 5-5 and Equal breathing (sama vritti).

The study that compared them

In 2023, a Stanford University team published a trial of 108 adults in Cell Reports Medicine. For 28 days, everyone practiced at home for five minutes a day. Three groups did breathing exercises: cyclic sighing, box breathing, or fast breathing with breath holds. The fourth, with 24 people, did mindfulness meditation: watching the breath without changing it.

Every group ended up with better mood and less anxiety. The breathing groups gained more in positive mood than the meditation group, and Cyclic sighing, with 30 people, gained the most. Their resting breathing rate dropped more, too. On anxiety, there was no clear difference between groups.

It's worth reading with some restraint. This is one study, run remotely, lasting a month, with small groups. It doesn't say meditation doesn't work: the people who meditated improved as well. It says that for these people, at five minutes a day, changing the breath moved mood a bit more than watching it did.

Where they meet

The line is blurrier than it looks. The Anapanasati Sutta itself doesn't stop at watching: a few steps later, the practitioner trains in breathing while calming the body. And any breathing exercise demands attention, because without it you lose count.

Sometimes the breath changes without anyone trying. In a 2001 study of 23 healthy adults, reciting the rosary or a yoga mantra brought breathing down to about six breaths a minute, the same pace so many exercises aim for on purpose. Contemplative practices, it seems, have been breathing slowly for a long time.

How to choose, and when to stop

• If your mind is restless and you want something to do, a breathing exercise gives you a job: follow the count. Start with one that has no holds.
• If attention is what you want to train, count your exhales or simply watch. There's no rhythm to hit.
• You can combine them. Five minutes of slow breathing, then two minutes where you drop the count and notice how your breath has settled.
• Neither one suits everybody all the time. A 2020 review cited by NCCIH, covering 83 studies and 6,703 participants, estimated that about 8 percent of people who meditated had a negative effect, most often anxiety or low mood. If paying attention to your breath makes you more uneasy, stop and breathe normally.
• These are practices, not treatments. If anxiety or low mood is frequent, talk with a mental health professional.