Just Come Back to the Breath

Why I started

Most of us don’t take up meditation out of idle curiosity. We take it up because something isn’t working.

For me, that something was work. Pressure comes with the job, and I’ve never minded hard graft. But somewhere along the way the pressure had stopped being fuel and started being a fuse: a flash of irritation in a meeting, a reply I’d regret by mid-afternoon. Stress had moved in and put its feet up.

The real catalyst for me was an incident many years ago when I came home from work fuming from some long-forgotten slight, and I ended up snapping at my son who wanted nothing other than to welcome me home. I felt immense shame at the loss of control and I wanted a real change. Caring about the outcome is part of what makes you good at the job and at home, so I didn’t want to stop caring. I wanted a gap between the thing that sets me off and what I do next, with enough room in it to choose.

The research suggests meditation builds exactly that and I’ve done it enough times myself to know that it works. In a study from Northeastern University, people who did three weeks of daily app-based meditation were then deliberately provoked. They responded far less aggressively than a comparison group who’d spent the same three weeks on a brain-training app (DeSteno et al., 2018). Their self-control hadn’t improved. They just felt less urge to hit back.

That matches my experience almost exactly. The anger still turns up. It just doesn’t get to drive.

What the evidence actually says

Meditation is not a miracle cure, and anyone selling it as one is selling something. The evidence that it helps is still solid.

The most cited review, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, pulled together 47 randomised trials covering more than 3,500 people. It found moderate evidence that mindfulness programmes ease anxiety, depression and pain (Goyal et al., 2014). The effects were modest, roughly in line with what the authors would expect from antidepressants in a primary-care population. Not bad for something that costs nothing. The review found no sign that meditation beats other active approaches such as exercise, so treat it as one more tool in the toolbox rather than a replacement for the rest.

The anger still turns up. It just doesn’t get to drive.

The changes show up in the body too. Researchers at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital scanned people before and after an eight-week mindfulness course. The more someone’s stress came down, the more grey-matter density fell in the amygdala, the part of the brain that sounds the alarm (Hölzel et al., 2010). It was a small study and proves nothing on its own, but I find it oddly reassuring that the calm turns up on a scanner.

You don’t need to become a monk, either. A study at New York University had complete beginners meditate for 13 minutes a day. After eight weeks they showed less negative mood and sharper attention and memory. After four weeks, not much had changed yet (Basso et al., 2019). Short sessions really do work, as long as you keep turning up.

The wandering mind is the workout

Sitting still is hard, and nobody warned me.

The first few weeks were a battle. I’d close my eyes, settle into the breath, and within a few breaths I’d be replaying a meeting or wondering what was for dinner. I’d catch myself, feel a stab of frustration, and decide I was rubbish at this. Some days the whole session felt like a failure.

Then the penny dropped. From persevering with apps like Calm and Buddhify, I learned that wandering is simply what minds do, including the minds of people who’ve practised for decades. It isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong.

Harvard researchers pinged more than 2,000 people on their phones at random moments through the day. Their minds were somewhere other than the task in hand 46.9 per cent of the time, nearly half our waking lives (!). People were generally less happy when their minds wandered, and no happier even when their thoughts drifted somewhere pleasant (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010).

At Emory University, researchers put experienced meditators in a brain scanner and had them press a button whenever they noticed their mind had drifted. The scans showed a repeating cycle: drift, notice, shift back, hold focus, drift again (Hasenkamp et al., 2012). Years of practice hadn’t freed them from the cycle. They went round it like everyone else.

That changed how I saw it. Noticing you’ve wandered is the rep, the same way lowering the dumbbell is part of a bicep curl. Coming back is the exercise.

So when I drift now (and I still do, most sessions), I don’t tell myself off. I notice where I went and gently guide myself back to the breath, without keeping score.

Why the breath wins for me

Once I’d made peace with the wandering, I started experimenting.

I tried body scans, moving attention slowly from the top of the head down to the toes and letting go of tension along the way. I tried anchoring on external cues, like the sounds in the room or a fixed point in front of me. Both have their place. Body scans are brilliant before sleep, and sounds help when the mind is too noisy to settle on anything subtle.

I keep coming back to the breath, though. It works best for me, and I think I know why.

It’s always there. You can’t leave it at home; it comes to every meeting and every difficult phone call.

It also runs both ways. Stress makes you breathe fast and shallow, high in the chest, and slowing the breath down brings the body along with it. A review of the research found that breathing below roughly ten breaths a minute is linked to greater heart-rate variability, a marker of a calmer nervous system, along with lower anxiety, arousal and anger (Zaccaro et al., 2018). Given why I started, that last word caught my eye.

And it’s simple. You don’t need an app or a special cushion. Breathe in through the nose, out slowly, and notice the warm (or cold) air tickling your nostrils as you inhale or exhale. It is literally that simple (not easy, but simple).

When time is short

Some days there’s no twenty minutes. There’s barely two. Those are the days you need it most, and the days you’re most tempted to skip it.

I’ve learned that something beats nothing, every time. A five-minute sit at my desk, a few minutes in the car before I walk into the office, or sixty seconds of following the breath before I open a difficult email. In one study, complete beginners showed less anxiety and fatigue, and sharper working memory, after just four 20-minute sessions (Zeidan et al., 2010). Small doses add up.

My favourite emergency tool is the physiological sigh. You’ve done it without thinking: it’s the double breath after a good cry, or just before you drift off. Your brain triggers one on its own every few minutes to reinflate the tiny air sacs in your lungs (Li et al., 2016). You can also do it on purpose:

• Breathe in through the nose.
• Without breathing out, take a second short sip of air on top to fill the lungs completely.
• Let it all go in a long, slow exhale through the mouth.

One or two of those and I can feel my shoulders drop. It’s the quickest reset I know.

A Stanford trial suggests it isn’t just me. Participants spent five minutes a day for a month on one of several breathing exercises or on mindfulness meditation. The group doing “cyclic sighing”, repeated physiological sighs with that long exhale, saw the biggest lift in positive mood and the biggest drop in resting breathing rate (Balban et al., 2023). Five minutes a day is less time than the queue for a coffee.

Don’t wait for perfect conditions. Use the time you have, wherever you are.

Start tomorrow

If you’ve been meaning to try meditation, start small. Sit somewhere reasonably quiet and set a timer for five minutes. Close your eyes, or rest them on a spot on the floor. Breathe in through your nose and out slowly, and feel the air come and go. When your mind wanders (it will), notice where it went and gently bring it back to the breath. Don’t judge it. Just come back.

Do it again tomorrow, and the day after.

You won’t feel transformed after a week. I certainly didn’t. But somewhere around the two-month mark, a meeting that would once have had me seething just… didn’t. The trigger was still there, but the gap was bigger, and in that gap I got to choose.

Sources

1. Balban MY, et al. “Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal.” Cell Reports Medicine, 2023;4(1):100895.
2. Basso JC, et al. “Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators.” Behavioural Brain Research, 2019;356:208–220.
3. DeSteno D, et al. “Meditation inhibits aggressive responses to provocations.” Mindfulness, 2018;9(4):1117–1122.
4. Goyal M, et al. “Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014;174(3):357–368.
5. Hasenkamp W, et al. “Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation.” NeuroImage, 2012;59(1):750–760.
6. Hölzel BK, et al. “Stress reduction correlates with structural changes in the amygdala.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010;5(1):11–17.
7. Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Science, 2010;330(6006):932.
8. Li P, et al. “The peptidergic control circuit for sighing.” Nature, 2016;530:293–297.
9. Zaccaro A, et al. “How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018;12:353.
10. Zeidan F, et al. “Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: evidence of brief mental training.” Consciousness and Cognition, 2010;19(2):597–605.