Five minutes of meditation can reduce stress markers, but less effectively than structured breathing exercises.

“Breathwork reduces stress”

“And we are seeing some very impressive and significant effects on stress reduction not just from respiration protocols that allow people to calm themselves but also respiration protocols that bring people into a heightened state of autonomic sympathetic arousal, AKA stress.”

“You could do a five-minute deliberate breath work practice. My laboratory has published some work related to that. The breath work practice could be any number of things. The two that I recommend the most would be double inhale, followed by a full exhale, and then repeat for a period of five minutes.”

“interestingly when we had people just do 5 minutes of u meditation which during which of course they are breathing but they're just allowing their breathing to progress however it happens to be in that moment um or moments across the five minutes uh there were reductions in the same sorts of markers of stress that I described but not as significant as breathing”

“First of all, we discovered that deliberate breathwork practices done for about five minutes per day across the course of about a month led to greater reductions in stress than did a five minute a day meditation practice.”