Safety note
If your illness is more severe, you may find it difficult to practice coherent breathing. If your Monthly Check-In score is 2.0 or below, we recommend starting with sessions of no longer than 2 minutes, and increasing this only if you feel able to.
Coherent breathing is a powerful technique for entering a deep, restful state. Spending more time in deep rest allows your body to rebalance and recover, which is crucial for pacing.
How does it work?
Visible uses real-time heart rate data from your Polar armband to guide you through coherent breathing. This helps you use your breathing to increase your heart rate variability during your session, to improve rest and recovery.
How should I breathe?
To get the most out of coherent breathing, we recommend practicing diaphragmatic breathing. This means:
Focusing on getting a full expansion of the lungs, rather than breathing into the top of your chest.
Placing a hand at the base of your ribcage can help you feel the filling of the lower part of your lungs.
Both your inhalation and exhalation should be done through the nose. We recommend aiming for a silent inward breath and slow outward breath.
Try to keep your breathing in time with the circular timer, to help keep a steady and consistent rhythm.
What do the dots mean during a breathing exercise?
The dots on the screen represent your heart rate in real-time during the session. During a breathing session, your heart rate varies. It gets faster when you breathe in and slower when you breathe out.
When you’re breathing coherently, the distance between the peaks and troughs in the wave represents your heart rate variability (HRV). The more pronounced those peaks and troughs, the higher your HRV.
These peaks and troughs coincide with your breathing pattern and should become more pronounced as you practice, indicating improved HRV.
What are the benefits?
Research has shown that as little as 10 minutes of coherent breathing can have a beneficial impact on symptoms. By incorporating coherent breathing into your daily routine, you can experience regulatory effects on your autonomic function.
A few minutes each day is all you need to build a coherent breathing habit. You can set a daily goal of 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes.
What goal should I set?
The duration of a coherent breathing practice can vary based on individual comfort and experience level. For most people, 10 minutes a day is a good starting point.
For beginners, it can be helpful to start with shorter sessions, for example two 5-minute sessions. This is especially true if your illness is more severe. Over time, as you become more comfortable with breathing practice, you can gradually increase the duration.
When should I breathe?
Coherent breathing can be practiced at any time of day. However, choosing a consistent time can help in forming a daily habit.
Finding your optimal breathing rate
Everyone has a unique breathing rate that maximizes their heart rate variability. This is also known as your resonant frequency.
Visible can help you to find your resonant frequency by completing a resonant frequency test. This is a 6 minute session which changes the pace of your breathing over the course of the session, and then calculates the breathing rate at which your heart rate variability was highest.
How do I adjust my breathing rate?
To adjust your breathing rate or take the breathing rate test, go to Breathing Settings. You can find this by tapping Breathing on the Today page.
In Breathing Settings, you can:
Manually adjust your breaths per minute
Tap "Take Test" to calculate your optimal breathing rate
What do the results at the end of my breathing session show?
Each time you complete a coherent breathing session, you'll be able to see how your heart rate variability changed during the breathing session. You'll always be shown the highest (or peak) heart rate variability reading taken. If your HRV has increased during the session, you'll also see the percentage increase.
Note: The HRV shown is the same 0 to 100 HRV scale we use elsewhere in Visible.
Coherent Breathing is in Beta. This means that there may be small bugs or changes to the feature over time. As always, we'd love your feedback on how to improve. Please reach out to Member Support with any thoughts you have, we'll always respond.