Experts promote many different breathing techniques for chronic conditions and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the options available. Ultimately, though, most are variations on coherent breathing, which means intentional and controlled breathing at a specific rate to you.
Coherent breathing is the foundation of Visible’s breathing feature. The goal of coherent breathing is to find a breathing pattern that allows you to maximise your Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is the variation in time between your heartbeats and reflects the activity of your body’s stress response and recovery systems.
High HRV: Your heart's rhythm varies more between beats, reflecting a well-regulated nervous system, capable of adapting to different situations and stressors.
Low HRV: Less variation between heartbeats, often indicating stress, overtraining, dehydration, or illness, showing the body is working harder to maintain a constant state.
Want to learn more? Read the article What is Heart Rate Variability
How does Visible help with your breathing?
When measuring HRV, you can determine if your body is in a restful state (‘rest and digest’) or under stress (’flight or fight’). Visible’s coherent breathing feature helps guide you towards a restful state, which can be seen in increased HRV.
By displaying your raw heart rate data in real-time and with high accuracy, you can see precisely how your breathing impacts your HRV in order to increase it. This is often referred to as ‘HRV Biofeedback’.
Our scientific advisor, David Putrino, recently showed that breathing at around 5.5 breaths per minute (the average resonant frequency for many) for 10 minutes each day improved symptoms and wellbeing in Long Covid after 4 weeks.
This is backed up by breathing studies published in the last year, with similar findings from Leeds University in the UK and University Hospitals of Trieste in northern Italy.
Wider research studies across various overlapping chronic illnesses have similarly shown how guided breathing, as part of a healthy lifestyle, may help living well with certain chronic diseases or conditions.
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.