The physiological sigh: coming down in two breaths

I teach this breath before all the others. Two breaths in through the nose, one long breath out through the mouth, ten seconds, and you can go back to your meeting. I came to it late, after years of handing employees ten-minute exercises that I knew perfectly well, as I packed up my kit, they were never going to repeat at home. It is now the only thing I pass on that I am reasonably sure leaves the room with them.

The name is a little grand: the physiological sigh. Your body produces it on its own, several times an hour, without asking your opinion. The exercise is simply to trigger it when you need it, instead of waiting for it to turn up by itself. In workshops I always begin there. If people keep one single movement from the day, I would rather it were the one they can make their own in a minute.

You already do it without noticing

Watch a child who has been crying for a long time. The breathing settles in stages, with those stuttering double inhales, almost hiccups, followed by a long release. You do the same at night, at regular intervals, and you will never know a thing about it. You do it as you shut your laptop after a meeting that went badly: that sigh which escapes you, and which your colleagues read as irritation, is an internal adjustment. Respiratory physiology describes the reflex and its part in gas exchange. What I take from it in a session is far more modest: the body already knows the movement, I have nothing to install, I only have to make it deliberate.

The movement, in detail

Nothing to count, no durations to memorise. The only technical point is the second inhale, which almost everybody skips on the first attempt because it looks pointless. It does all the work. Take the time to feel it once, sitting quietly, before you carry it into a full day. Otherwise you will produce an ordinary big sigh and believe you have done the exercise, which happens to half the room in my workshops.

1. 01Sitting or standing, it makes no difference. Let the shoulders fall, unclench the jaw.
2. 02Breathe in through the nose, calmly, to about three quarters of your capacity. No great diver's inhale.
3. 03Without breathing out, add a second inhale through the nose, short and sharp, set on top of the first like a small catch.
4. 04Release through the mouth, lips barely parted, long and unforced: roughly twice the length of the inhale.
5. 05One second of stillness. Then go again, two or three times, which is nearly always enough.

Why it comes down so fast

Two things happen at the same time. The short second inhale reopens small air sacs that have collapsed over hours of shallow breathing hunched at a screen, and the exhale that follows clears more of what needs clearing. Then comes the long exhale, the part that talks to the nervous system: when the breath goes out for longer than it came in, the heart rate slows and the body concludes that nothing is about to land on it in the next second. Ten seconds, where a seated meditation asks for ten minutes. I am not promising you a serene day or a softer temperament, and to be honest I distrust anything that does; the wellbeing industry sells a great deal of inner transformation to people who would mainly like to stop clenching their jaw at four in the afternoon. You come down a notch, straight away. That notch is often enough to keep you from answering badly.

Where to slot it into a working day

• Just before you speak up, while someone else finishes their sentence.
• Between two video calls, the second you hang up.
• In front of an email that has annoyed you, before you write the reply. That one above all.
• In the car, parked outside your own front door, to avoid unloading eight hours of work onto whoever opens it.
• At the start of a workshop, when the group arrives scattered and the meeting room has no window. Three sighs, and the temperature changes.
• In the evening, lying down, when your thoughts keep circling. Five or six very slow rounds have their place there.

At the Pointe Rouge, on a Tuesday in November, I did it with a group before the boards went into the water, and eight people shivering in a half-pulled-on wetsuit went quiet all at once. You could hear the water slapping the pontoon. The setting makes no odds, it simply happens to be mine. Try it three times today, at moments when it would never cross your mind to reach for a technique. If it does nothing at all for you, tell me: I still cannot say why it works so well for some people and not at all for others.