Cyclic Sighing.

You already know the shape of this breath — it’s the involuntary sigh your body lets out after you’ve been crying, or the deep catch of air a sleeping child takes. A cyclic sigh makes that reflex deliberate: a full inhale through the nose, a second short sip to top off the lungs, then a long, unhurried exhale through the mouth. The pattern is sometimes called the physiological sigh, and your body already runs it automatically every few minutes to keep your lungs working well — here you’re simply doing it on purpose. Stanford neuroscientists put it to the test in a 2023 trial and found it the standout among several brief breathing practices, which is part of why it has spread so quickly from the lab into everyday use.

The mechanism is mechanical as much as it is mental. That second sip of air reinflates the tiny air sacs in your lungs that tend to collapse when your breathing has gone shallow under stress, which helps you offload carbon dioxide more efficiently with each round. The long, drawn-out exhale does the rest, stimulating the vagus nerve and nudging your nervous system out of its alarmed, sympathetic state and toward its rest-and-recover mode. In the Stanford study, five minutes a day of cyclic sighing improved mood and slowed resting breathing rate more than mindfulness meditation did over the same stretch — a striking result for a practice this quick to learn and this easy to do anywhere, with your eyes open or closed.

In Shora, this is one of the first breaths the app reaches for when your check-in reads tense and keyed up and you need relief in under a minute. There’s nothing to memorize and nowhere to be — just two breaths in and one long breath out, repeated until the pressure eases.