The Best 1-Minute Mindfulness Practice for Reducing Stress (2025)

Your mind is spinning, you feel out of control, your body is tensing, and you can't catch your breath. Feel familiar? These are just a few of the physical and emotional signs that accompany a stress episode. It's no surprise that you'd like to escape and crawl out of your own skin. But you don't want to resort to alcohol or other substances to "medicate" yourself; these strategies usually make things worse in the long run. So, what can you do?

Years of research have chronicled the damaging effects of stress on the body and the mind. Everything from learning and memory to mood and the immune system is negatively affected.

Interestingly, researchers have also found that it's not stress but how you react to stress that makes all the difference. If you believe you are caught like a fly in a spider's web with no way to escape, then you will experience the ravages of stress.

On the other hand, if you take time to step back and take mindful action, you can actually reverse stress's harmful effects.

Some years ago, I was asked to be part of a research study to explore the effects of a mindfulness intervention on blood pressure and stress in a vulnerable priest population that had been identified as having unaddressed health issues. I developed a brief (two one-hour sessions) mindfulness training that taught the priests how to use what I call "active breathing." They were instructed to practice for three minutes at a time, up to three times a day, for a total of only nine minutes a day.

So, did active breathing make a difference? The results showed significantly lowered blood pressure and stress scores in the priests after only eight weeks. Results like these demonstrate that a monthslong training program in mindfulness, such as is used with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), is not necessary to get health benefits from mindfulness. (Of course, programs like MBSR have additional benefits.) My anecdotal work with clients over the years has shown me that even a short practice of active breathing can yield positive results.

Cardiologist and researcher Herbert Benson was one of the first to examine the effects of diaphragmatic breathing. As excerpted from my book Simply Mindful, the psychological and physiological benefits include:

• Lowering of blood pressure and cleansing of blood lactate levels (lactate in the blood is a chemical that creates feelings of anxiety).
• Decrease in heart rate, metabolism, and breathing rate.
• Increased alpha brain waves, which produce a feeling of being alert and calm at the same time.
• Increased serotonin—a neurotransmitter that improves mood and mental flexibility.
• Greater sense of well-being and calming of the body’s reactive limbic system.

Benson’s later research examined how focused awareness turns on a set of more than 2,000 genes related to the immune system, free radicals in the body, and aging.

Mindfulness Practice for Stress: 3-Step Active Breathing

Keep in mind that active breathing helps anyone recover from stress, which can be understood as an important type of resilience. Active breathing is a conscious and intentional way to turn on your body’s relaxation system, and it takes only three to six breaths, or about 20 seconds to a minute. In other words, it drastically changes your body chemistry by turning down the stress response. I like to think of active breathing as the thermostat for the body and the brain. Whenever your emotional systems are overheating, you can reset and cool everything down with conscious breathing.

Here’s how active breathing works:

• Step 1: Set the intention to slow down and reduce stress with your breath. By consciously making this decision, you are problem-solving your stress on the spot. That's why this is active breathing.
• Step 2: While breathing in slowly, feel the breath go into the deepest part of your lungs. The pressure of the lungs on your diaphragmatic wall pushes it down onto the abdominal cavity. This, in turn, causes your abdomen to expand outward in all directions—front, sides, and back. That's why deep breathing is sometimes called belly breathing. If you feel your belly or sides of the body moving outward, then it's working. A word of caution: if you feel dizzy, then you may be taking too deep of a breath. So just do what feels comfortable.
• Step 3: Exhale slowly. Let all the air flow out, and as you do this, feel your stress leaving the body as well. Repeat breathing like this for one minute.

Conclusion

Active breathing can take time to learn. The nice thing about it is that it's portable, so you can use it anywhere and anytime you need to slow things down. Once you've done a minute, notice how you feel. Reducing stress with active breathing helps your brain's frontal cortex come back online. This gives you resilience because you are now more prepared to problem-solve issues related to your stress. How, for example, might you minimize your stress? How can you recognize that it's temporary? Don't give up practicing. Remember that active breathing taps your own resilience to help you cope and stay healthy as you do so.