A normal resting breathing rate for an adult is somewhere between twelve and twenty breaths a minute. Paced breathing exercises are almost all slower than that, and one rate in particular keeps coming up: six.
This page is about where that number comes from and what is actually happening at it.
Six breaths a minute is simply arithmetic: five seconds in and five seconds out makes a ten-second cycle, and six ten-second cycles fill a minute. Change the pace and the count changes with it — six seconds each way gives five breaths a minute, four seconds each way gives seven and a half.
The rate has a name. Around six a minute is what is usually described as the resonance frequency for adults, and breathing at an even pace near it is called resonance breathing or coherent breathing. Both names describe the same thing: an even in and out, with no holds at either end.
Your heart rate is not constant. It rises a little as you breathe in and falls a little as you breathe out — an ordinary, continuous effect with an unwieldy name, respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
The size of that rise and fall depends partly on how fast you are breathing. Slow the breath down towards six a minute and the swing between the two gets larger, because each half of the breath lasts long enough for the heart rate to travel further before the breath turns around. The variation between beats is what heart rate variability, or HRV, measures.
That is a description of a mechanism, not a claim about what it does for you. It is the reason the rate is interesting to people who track HRV, and the reason a timer that holds an even pace is more useful for it than one that does not.
Resonance breathing has no hold at either end. The in-breath turns straight into the out-breath, and the out-breath straight into the next in-breath.
That is what separates it from box breathing, which holds at both ends, and from 4-7-8, which holds for seven counts between the two. If you add a hold you have changed the rate, because the hold takes time the breath is not using.
It is also what makes it the easiest of the three to keep going for a long time. There is nothing to brace for and nothing to recover from, so a ten-minute session is not meaningfully harder than a two-minute one.
Six a minute is a starting point, not a target. Resonance frequency varies between people — taller people tend to sit a little lower — and the honest way to find yours is to try the nearby rates and notice which one you can hold without effort.
The timer below runs from four to seven seconds each way, which covers roughly seven and a half down to four and a quarter breaths a minute. If a pace has you running out of air or waiting at the top, it is the wrong pace, whatever the number says.
The timer below is the app, running in this page. It opens at five seconds each way — six breaths a minute.
The pattern In 5 s · Out 5 s
Another name for resonance breathing: an even in and out, no holds, at a slow fixed pace near six cycles a minute.
It is the rate most often quoted, not a rate that fits everyone. Resonance frequency differs between people, and the practical test is which nearby pace you can hold comfortably.
Breathing more slowly makes the rise and fall in heart rate across each breath larger, and that variation is what HRV measures. What that means for any individual is outside what a timer can tell you.
Through the nose is how the practice is usually described, and it makes an even five seconds easier to hold to. A timer cannot tell the difference.
The pattern does not build or change, so a session is as long as you choose. Set the minutes before you begin.
On your phone it runs with sound and haptics, and it works with no connection at all.