How the 4-7-8 Breathing Method Can Help You Unwind and Sleep

• This specific pattern of deep breathing has some surprisingly wide range of positive health benefits, experts say.

• Experts explain that simple yogic breathing may help people to breathe more simply, sleep better, digest better and more besides.

• The breathing technique called 4-7-8 is taking in for four seconds, holding for seven seconds, then breathing out for eight seconds.

Part of the reason why experts say almost everyone should be able to do the 4-7-8 method: it requires no equipment, and it would be a useful tool to fight insomnia or anxiety.

That sometimes means if you’re feeling stressed or having trouble sleeping it’s hard to get out of that headspace and just calm down. The solution could simply be to take deep breaths in and out in a particular rhythm.

In recent years a breathing technique, dubbed the 4-7-8 method, has become popular with whom began teaching the method since the 80’s is Andrew Weil, MD.

Simply written, breathing in for four seconds, holding that breath for a count of seven and breathing out for eight seconds while making a whooshing sound, placing the tongue behind the front teeth is the already named method. Ideally, a person should feel calm after four repetitions.

"So …over time …if you do it regularly, for six weeks or eight weeks, there actually does happen some real shift of the balance of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, and that is reflected in reduced heart rate, reduced blood pressure, better digestion, better circulation," he told Health. 'It's also the most effective anti anxiety I’ve ever found.'

In this post, we’ll examine the different ways that breathing affects our state of relaxation, how the 4-7-8 method can help give us better sleep, and the easiest ways to work it into your daily routine.

Breathing and The Body — A Connection

The 4-7-8 technique, as it’s called, actually came from pranayama, or yogic, breathing, said Dr. Weil. This includes hundreds of other (very many) different techniques for controlling the breath to promote health or mindfulness in other ways under this umbrella.

Todd Arnedt, PhD, professor of psychiatry and neurology at Michigan Medicine, and director of the behavioral sleep medicine program, explained that this type of breathing involves the diaphragm. Contrary to our normal stress induced breathing, this is the opposite.

It kind of redirects you to breathe from your belly, from your diaphragm, and when we’re anxious we tend to do a lot of short, quick breaths, and breathe from our chest, 'Arnedt said. There is a whole host of positive physiological responses that go along with that breathing and put you into that relaxed state."

Diaphragmatic breathing may offer some of these positive outcomes, such as higher cognitive function and lower cortisol, or stress, levels, as well as improved quality of life. Specifically using the 4-7-8 method research discovered it can also help improve blood pressure as well as heart rate variability.

Yet, it may seem strange that something as simple as breathing can have such a big impact on our health but it is this connection between breath and the parasympathetic nervous system that is likely why we see so much positive health benefit from regular practice.

"There are two main parts to our autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic and parasympathetic," says Raj Dasgupta, MD, pulmonary critical care and sleep medicine specialist at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California, and spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "It's going to be about the sympathetic so that's probably going to be our flight or fight per se, but generally, that may raise your heart rate, raise your breathing." When we activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which we call rest and digest," he told us.

In this ratio of breathing four seconds in, seven seconds of holding at the top and eight seconds of exhaling, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system and it helps our body to relax, slow down our heart rate, help with digestion and reduce the rate of stress hormones. In addition to being inhaled through your nose and then held, breathing also humidifies and filters the air and opens up the lungs, Dr. Dasgupta added.

A wide ranging problem with a simple solution.

The 4-7-8 technique is good because it can help relax the body not only in the case with stress, but also with any kind of insomnia.

We always tell people to go about practicing such things in the last hour or so before they go and sleep, in the context of a good positive kind of wind down routine as well, as it relates to sleep, put that together, Arnedt said. "Again, that’s part of a good wind down routine: This 4-7-8 breathing technique or other mindfulness and relaxation strategies can often be a really good part of a really good wind down routine that sets the stage for sleep to happen."

He said that doing this breathing technique can also be useful if a person wakes up in the middle of the night and needs help lulling them back to sleep.

In addition to making sleeping easier, being able to make your body more relaxed and ready for sleep should fix all sorts of other problems too. Sleep quality doesn't get much better in life, nor do you get adequate sleep, and that is related to a large and varied array of health issues. A simple tool to get you ready for sleep can be a great way to keep your health in check.

The 4-7-8 breathing technique does more than encourage sleep, Dr. Weil said, and can help anyone at any moment of the day. It becomes more effective the more you do it, so as long as you feel well you cannot do it too frequently, Dr. Weil wrote on his website.

"You don't have to check your phone every twenty minutes while you're eating breakfast, it's something I do when I first wake up. For me is in the evening, when I get into bed to fall asleep and anytime I feel anxious and need to be relaxed more," he explained.

Doing the 4-7-8 Breathing Technique: Best Practices

But Dr. Weil is a big fan of the 4-7-8 breathing technique because it’s so easy—which is why he recommends it so much. He explained you can do it standing, lying down or sitting but, if you're sitting, it's better done sitting upright with both feet on the floor.

Additionally, it's super simple, it's super time effective. "It's really as simple as a minute or so a day, no equipment," Dr. Weil added. "It's an utterly simple technique and it works."

If simple is what it is, and it is, some people have to get used to it even to do it.

Imagine it as just a skill. You're not going to be good at it right away, it's probably not something. Arnedt believes it's something akin to practice the piano or another instrument, or learning how to throw a baseball. "It's something that you're gonna have to practice and become good at a little bit, here."

Dr. Dasgupta added that for some people with underlying heart or lung issues, it isn't easy to keep their breath for the full 7 seconds. It can also feel a bit strange to breathe out for a longer period of time: That causes a lot of CO2 to be expelled from our lungs, which sometimes can make us dizzy, he explained. It has to be individually tailored.

'The technique by itself per se, isn't the magic bullet.'

So beyond the fact that going to therapy isn't the magic bullet doesn't mean that if you go to therapy something terrible will happen. Dasgupta said we definitely encourage people to use this breathing technique with other relaxation techniques. "This is something that’s safe for most people, but."