Coherent breathing is a powerful technique that helps you enter a deep, restful state. By spending more time in deep rest, your body can rebalance and recover, which is a crucial part of pacing.

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.

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.

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 dots should form into a sine wave. The distance between the peaks and troughs in the wave represents your heart rate variability (HRV). The more pronounced the wave, the higher your HRV.

These peaks and troughs coincide with your breathing pattern and should become more pronounced as you practice, indicating improved HRV.

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.

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.

Coherent breathing can be practiced at any time of day. However, choosing a consistent time can help in forming a daily habit.

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.