Our mission at Visible is to help you manage your health and pace yourself with data. This month, we’re excited to launch a new feature to help achieve this goal - Coherent Breathing.

Note: Coherent breathing requires wearable data and is available as part of the Visible membership.

Breathing as part of a pacing strategy

Many people with energy-limiting conditions find that their symptoms get worse after exertion. ‘Pacing’ is a strategy to manage this by balancing rest and activity.

Achieving proper rest is an important part of pacing, and breathing exercises can help you enter a restful state. By spending more time in deep rest, you can give your body a better chance to rebalance and recover from exertion.

Now you can use your Visible armband to guide you through breathing exercises in real-time, right inside the Visible app.

Coherent breathing involves controlled and intentional breathing

Experts promote many different breathing techniques for chronic conditions and it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the options available. Ultimately however, they are largely variations on coherent breathing; which means intentional and controlled breathing at a specific rate to you.

What is heart rate variability (HRV), and why does it matter?

The goal of coherent breathing is to find a breathing pattern that allows you to maximise your HRV. This is a measurement of the variation in time between your heartbeats and reflects the activity of your body’s stress response and recovery systems. By measuring HRV, you can determine if your body is in a restful state (‘rest and digest’) or under stress (’flight or fight’).

Visible’s coherent breathing feature helps guide you towards a restful state which can be seen in increased HRV. By displaying your raw heart rate data in real-time and with high accuracy, you can see precisely how your breathing impacts your HRV, in order to increase it. This is often referred to as ‘HRV Biofeedback’.

Finding your optimal breathing rate

Everyone has a unique breathing rate that maximizes their HRV. This is also known as your resonant frequency.

Visible can help you to find your resonant frequency by completing a resonant frequency test. This is a 6 minute session which changes the pace of your breathing over the course of the session, and then calculates the breathing rate at which your heart rate variability was highest.

Evidence-based rest

Research shows 10 minutes daily of coherent breathing can help reduce symptoms.

Our scientific advisor, David Putrino, recently showed that breathing at around 5.5 breaths per minute (the average resonant frequency for many) for 10 minutes each day improved symptoms and wellbeing in Long Covid after 4 weeks.

This is backed up by breathing studies published in the last year with similar findings out of Leeds University in the UK and University Hospitals of Trieste in northern Italy.

Wider research studies across various overlapping chronic illnesses have similarly shown how guided breathing, as part of a healthy lifestyle, may help living well with certain chronic diseases or conditions.

What next?

We’re focused on building the best possible tools for invisible illness.

This is our first version of coherent breathing in the Visible app. We have already received some incredible feedback from our members. As always, we will continue to make improvements based on this feedback including adding sound, more accurate HRV impact analysis, and improved breathing guidance.

We'd still love your thoughts on how to improve it further, so please reach out to Member Support with any feedback you have - we'll always respond.

Onwards!

Harry