This Two-Minute Hack Behaves Like an ‘Off-Switch’ for Cortisol in Your Body—I Tried It and Reaped the Benefits

"Have you tried taking some deep breaths?" - forgive me while I eye-roll.

My sister is a breathwork practitioner and, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most grounded people I know. For years, I’ve watched her use her breath to regulate everything from pre-work nerves to overwhelm, while I’ve typically opted for my own tried-and-tested coping mechanism: powering through until whatever is stressing me out goes away.

But as it turns out, she might be onto something.

Breathwork has graduated from something I once loosely filed under the 'woo-woo’ category of wellness into an area with a growing evidence base. In a 2023 trial, researchers compared five minutes of daily breathwork with mindfulness meditation over one month. All of the breathwork groups showed benefits, but cyclic sighing - a practice centred on long, slow exhalations - produced the greatest improvement in positive mood and significantly reduced respiratory rate compared with mindfulness.

And mindful sighing isn’t just a wellness trend - it’s a natural reflex that helps regulate our breathing and support healthy lung function.

MC's Senior Health and Sustainability Editor, Ally Head, uses the physiological sigh as a personal stress reset, and I'm beginning to understand why. It takes seconds, requires precisely zero equipment and can be done almost anywhere without anyone really knowing you're doing it.

It sounds almost too simple. But maybe sometimes what an overwhelmed nervous system needs really is one enormous sigh. Are you yawning yet?

While you're here, you might want to read our guide to low-effort wellness habits, somatic healing, EFT tapping and vagus nerve tuning. Plus, neuro-somatic coach Eva Syti shares the six things that women with regulated nervous systems do differently to feel their best.

Is This 2-Minute Breathing Practice Really An 'Off Switch' For Stress? We Let The Experts Weigh In

What is a physiological sigh?

The premise of the physiological sigh is actually super simple: essentially two inhales of breath followed by one long exhale.

“A physiological sigh is typically two breaths in through the nose followed by an extended exhale,” explains breathwork and running coach Ramon Ghosh, founder of Evolve Breathwork. “The two breaths in are a deep inhale followed by a shorter top inhale and then letting out air during your exhale as if you’re slowly emptying a balloon.”

There’s a physiological reason for that slightly unusual second inhale. Ghosh explains that the “top-up” breath helps recruit more of the alveoli - the tiny air sacs within the lungs involved in gas exchange - while the extended exhale can help reduce physiological arousal and slow the heart rate.

Or, as Ghosh puts it rather more simply: “If you have a dog like me, watch them do it before sleep or a nap - a big inhale, sometimes two, and then a large exhale and sigh-like sound. Mammals know how to do this intuitively.”

Can practising breathwork act as an ‘off-switch’ for stress?

Not literally - though it can be a powerful tool when used correctly and practised often.

“I wouldn’t define this as an ‘off switch’ because we are constantly fluctuating within states in our nervous system during the day,” says Ghosh. He uses driving as an example: one minute you can be listening to music and feeling completely relaxed, the next somebody pulls out in front of you and your physiology changes. A minute later, the threat has passed, and it changes again.

Stress itself isn't the enemy, either.

“Working with athletes during hard sessions, I see how useful activation and stress can be for performance,” Ghosh tells me. The important part, he says, is having “the capacity to come back down afterwards rather than remaining highly activated for prolonged periods.”

That’s where something like the physiological sigh can be useful.

Cranial osteopath Helen Johnson of the Academy of Alchemy explains that the body's fight-or-flight response is, fundamentally, protective. In a genuine emergency, heart rate increases, muscles tense and breathing changes to prepare us to respond to danger. The problem is that our bodies can respond to decidedly less life-threatening modern stressors - deadlines, money worries or relationship problems, for example - using some of the same biological systems.

“Consciously breathing is absolutely one of the quickest and most accessible ways to reset our fight-or-flight response,” says Johnson.

Calling a physiological sigh an ‘off-switch’, then, is probably best understood as shorthand for a regulation tool: something that may help turn down the intensity when your body feels overly activated.

“If you do two to four rounds of physiological sighs, many people will be able to feel a difference in their body and mind,” adds Ghosh, although he stresses that responses are individual.

What does the science say about the physiological sigh?

The research that put cyclic sighing firmly on the wellness map came from Stanford Medicine researchers and was published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2023.

Breathwork was credited as a tool to quite literally "breathe away anxiety". It has been linked to greater improvements in mood than mindfulness meditation, with the cyclic-sighing group showing the biggest increase in positive affect. It was also associated with a significant reduction in respiratory rate.

That doesn't mean one sigh can magically erase chronic stress, however.

“It’s very difficult to say because chronic stress is individual and nuanced,” cautions Ghosh. “Breathwork can be a useful part of managing stress over time, but I wouldn't present any single breathing technique as a solution to chronic stress.”

He describes the physiological sigh instead as part of a “breathwork first aid kit” - something to reach for when you notice yourself becoming overly activated.

Why is it important to reduce stress?

We all know that being stressed doesn't feel nice. But the reason experts care about chronic stress goes considerably further than feeling frazzled before a deadline.

When the brain perceives a threat, it activates systems including the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis. Cortisol is one of the hormones involved in that response.

Cortisol often gets cast as the villain, but that isn't entirely fair. It's a vital hormone involved in functions including metabolism, immune activity and our sleep-wake cycle. The goal isn't to eliminate cortisol or keep it permanently ‘low’; healthy cortisol secretion naturally rises and falls throughout the day.

What researchers are increasingly interested in is dysregulation of our stress systems over time.

So where does breathing fit in? Johnson points out that stress often shows up physically before we fully register how overwhelmed we are. “Many of us don’t link our physical symptoms to stress and are unaware that we are living in a physiological state of fear,” she says.

That’s part of what makes breathwork useful: it gives us something simple to reach for when we notice those early signs of tension.

As Ghosh puts it, “With breathwork we aren't avoiding stress; we're practising the ability to recognise changes in our state and regulate our physiology more effectively.”

Does The Physiological Sigh Really Help To Reduce Stress? I Tried It - Here's My Verdict

I hate to be the person who tells you that planning a wedding is one of the most stressful things you'll ever do, because I adored planning mine. But I was also, at various points, completely overwhelmed.

When plans, expectations, people, money and a fairly enormous amount of emotion are all funnelled towards one single day, even the best decisions can suddenly feel very loaded. In the months beforehand, I had days where the stress felt permanently lodged somewhere between my chest and my throat.

Safe to say, I did a lot of sighing. The more I started practising it, the more I realised that one proper, long exhale could create a tiny break in whatever spiral my brain had wandered into.

Strangely, after being in bits at points during the build-up, I was remarkably calm in the final few days before the wedding.

I've carried the habit with me since. When work deadlines pile up, my inbox starts looking threatening, or I can feel that familiar sense of everything bubbling towards the surface, I'll take myself away from my laptop and do a few physiological sighs: inhale, another little inhale, and then one very long exhale.

Does it remove the deadline? Obviously not. Nor does it suddenly make the source of my stress disappear. But it does seem to create a little distance between the feeling and my reaction to it.

Ghosh's description of it as a “breathwork first aid kit” feels right. I'm not expecting two breaths to solve my problems; I'm using them to get myself into a better state to deal with them.

For something that takes less time than boiling a kettle, I can work with that.

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