Using Breath-like Cues for Guided Breathing

Abstract

Breathing exercises reduce stress and anxiety and are commonly implemented in well-being applications. Here, we compare how well three synthetic auditory feedback stimuli (breath, music, and compound) can guide slow and fast breathing. The results indicate that all three feedback types helped participants entrain the target breathing rate, however, the deviation from the target rate was higher for fast compared to slow breathing. Importantly, when target rate was fast, the compound feedback type resulted in a significantly smaller average respiration error and a longer duration close to the target respiration rate and the breath feedback type resulted in a smaller average deviation from target pace compared to music feedback type. The results point towards an advantage of compound and ecological sound stimuli in particular when the target respiration rate is fast.