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Practicing a simple breathing exercise for just 5 minutes a day for a month can improve your mood.

Melis Yilmaz Balban of Stanford University in California and her colleagues randomly assigned 114 people in the United States, with an average age of 27, to practice one of three breathing exercises or mindfulness meditation for 5 minutes a day at home at any time that suited them.

One breathing exercise was the cyclic sighing, where you breathe in slowly and then take another short breath to fully inflate your lungs before exhaling for as long as you can.

Another exercise was box breathing: inhale, hold, exhale, and hold the exhaled breath again. The last was cyclic hyperventilation. This involves taking longer inhales and shorter exhalations for 30 times before fully exhaling, which is repeated twice.

Participants assigned to mindfulness meditation did not practice breath control, instead passively monitoring their breathing to keep their attention in the present moment.

All four groups showed improvement in mood and reduction in anxiety after one month, according to daily questionnaires. However, this was more pronounced in those who did the breathing exercises, particularly the cyclic sighing, than in the meditation.

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