HRV Training: Do the Breathing, Don't Just Read the Number

Summary

HRV biofeedback — **trained slow breathing near your resonance frequency, roughly 6 breaths/min for ~20 minutes a day** — is a real, cheap, drug-free intervention with moderate evidence for easing stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms; this is a different thing from **passively reading your wearable's HRV score each morning**, which is a noisier, lower-yield habit that can manufacture recovery anxiety out of measurement noise. The act (the breathing) is well supported; the readout (chasing the number) is not, and at its worst the number becomes the stressor it claims to measure. ---