Diaphragmatic breathing is a breathing exercise that helps strengthen your diaphragm, an important muscle that enables you to breathe. This breathing exercise is also sometimes called belly breathing or abdominal breathing.

Diaphragmatic breathing has many benefits that affect your entire body. It’s the basis for almost all meditation or relaxation techniques, which can lower your stress levels, reduce your blood pressure, and regulate other critical bodily processes.

Let’s learn more about how diaphragmatic breathing benefits you, how to get started, and what the research says about it.

The most basic type of diaphragmatic breathing is done by inhaling through your nose and breathing out through your mouth.

Here’s the basic procedure for diaphragmatic breathing. It may be easiest to practice while lying on the floor when you first start.

The rib stretch is another helpful deep breathing exercise to help you expand your breath into your rib cage. Here’s how to do it:

Numbered breathing is a good exercise for gaining control over your breathing patterns. Here’s how you can do it:

Feel free to count higher if you feel comfortable. For an additional mindfulness component, you can start over again from one, noticing if you accidentally count beyond 10.

Lower-back breathing or kidney breathing can help you train yourself to breathe spherically rather than simply out and in.

Note: You can’t actually breathe into the back or belly. You can only breathe into the lungs. This exercise involves using the expansion of the lungs within the body to help stimulate sensation and movement in the lower back.

See lower-back breathing video instructions on Healthline’s Instagram.

Box breathing is also known as square breathing. This is because each of the four steps involves breathing or holding the breath for 4 seconds, creating a 4×4 effect.

The 4-7-8 breathing practice is based on an ancient yogic technique called pranayama. It was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil.

Diaphragmatic breathing has a ton of benefits. It’s at the center of the practice of meditation, which is known to help manage the symptoms of conditions as wide-ranging as irritable bowel syndrome, depression and anxiety, and sleeplessness.

Here are more benefits this type of breathing can have:

One of the biggest benefits of diaphragmatic breathing is reducing stress.

Being stressed keeps your immune system from working at full capacity. This can make you more susceptible to numerous conditions.

Over time, long-term or chronic stress — even from seemingly minor inconveniences like traffic — can lead to anxiety or depression. Some deep breathing exercises can help you reduce the effects of stress.

Diaphragmatic breathing is often recommended for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD causes the diaphragm to be less effective, so doing breathing exercises that benefit the diaphragm specifically can help strengthen the diaphragm and improve your breathing.

With healthy lungs, your diaphragm does most of the work when you inhale to bring fresh air in and exhale to get carbon dioxide and other gases out of your lungs.

With COPD and similar respiratory conditions, like asthma, your lungs lose some of their elasticity or stretchiness, so they don’t go back to their original state when you exhale. Losing lung elasticity can cause air to build up in the lungs, so there’s not as much space for the diaphragm to contract for you to breathe in oxygen.

As a result, your body uses neck, back, and chest muscles to help you breathe. This means that you can’t take in as much oxygen, which can affect how much oxygen you have for exercise and other physical activities.

Breathing exercises help you force out the air buildup in your lungs, which helps increase how much oxygen’s in your blood and strengthens the diaphragm.

The diaphragm is a dome-shaped respiratory muscle found near the bottom of your ribcage, right below your chest.

When you inhale and exhale air, the diaphragm and other respiratory muscles around your lungs contract. The diaphragm does most of the work during the inhalation part. During inhalation, your diaphragm contracts so that your lungs can expand into the extra space and let in as much air as is necessary.

Muscles in between your ribs, known as intercostal muscles, raise your rib cage to help your diaphragm let enough air into your lungs.

Muscles near your collarbone and neck also help these muscles when something makes it harder for you to breathe correctly. They all contribute to how quickly and how much your ribs can move and make space for your lungs.

Some of these muscles include:

Also, breathing is part of your autonomic nervous system (ANS). This system is in charge of essential bodily processes that you don’t need to put any thought into, like:

The ANS has two main components: the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions. Each division is responsible for different bodily functions.

The sympathetic usually gets these processes going, while the parasympathetic stops them from happening. And while the sympathetic controls your fight-or-flight response, the parasympathetic is in charge of everyday functions.

Even though most ANS functions are involuntary, you can control some of your ANS processes by doing deep breathing exercises.

Taking deep breaths can help you voluntarily regulate your ANS, which can have many benefits, including:

Diaphragmatic breathing isn’t always helpful on its own.

Research on ANS-related conditions like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) has found that deep breathing is often most effective as a treatment when combined with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or hypnotherapy.

Deep breathing exercises aren’t always helpful if you have a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or similar mental health conditions.

GAD can last for up to several months or years, and the numerous worries or anxieties that accompany it may feel hard to control. Deep breathing exercises may cause more stress if they don’t appear to be working.

Techniques like CBT are usually a better option for helping someone cope with anxiety or other matters of mental health.

There are a lot of different breathing exercises out there, but they may not all be the right choice for you.

Talk with one or more of the following professionals for advice on breathing exercises:

Creating a routine can be an excellent way to get in the habit of diaphragmatic breathing exercises. Try the following to get into a good groove:

Talk with your doctor or respiratory therapist if you’re interested in using this exercise to improve your breathing if you have COPD.

Diaphragmatic breathing may help relieve some of your symptoms in the case of COPD or other conditions related to your ANS. Still, it’s always best to get a medical professional’s opinion to see if it’s worth your time or if it will have any drawbacks.

Diaphragmatic breathing is most effective when you’re feeling rested. Try one or more techniques to see which one works best for you by giving you the most relief or feelings of relaxation.

Last medically reviewed on November 5, 2021

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