Breathing Exercise Guide

A free guided breathing pacer with box breathing, 4-7-8 and coherent breathing presets, a visual pacing circle, a cycle counter and accurate timing.

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Follow the circle: breathe in as it grows, hold while it stays at that size, and breathe out as it shrinks. This is a general relaxation tool, not medical advice — stop if you feel dizzy or uncomfortable.

🔒 Private by design: everything runs locally in your browser and never uploaded to any server.

Written and maintained by Last updated

Three patterns the presets cover, and the shape of each

The Pattern dropdown ships three named techniques plus a custom option.

Box Breathing (4-4-4-4) is four equal four second phases: inhale, hold, exhale, hold. It is also called square breathing or Navy SEAL breathing, and it is the default here because equal counts are the easiest thing to follow once you stop watching the screen.

4-7-8 Technique, popularized by Dr. Andrew Weil as a relaxing breath, is inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight, then straight back to the inhale. There is no second hold at all, so it is genuinely a three phase cycle, and the pacer runs it as three phases rather than padding it out to four with a zero length pause.

Coherent Breathing (5-5) drops the holds entirely, five seconds in and five seconds out. Ten seconds per cycle works out at six breaths a minute, the slow steady rate the technique is named for, and it is usually the easiest of the three to sustain over a long sitting.

Following the circle from first breath to reset

  1. Pick a technique in the Pattern dropdown, or choose Custom to type your own phase lengths.
  2. Click Start. The circle grows while you breathe in, stays at full size through a hold after the inhale, shrinks while you breathe out, and stays small through a hold after the exhale.
  3. Read the line under the circle for the current phase name and the whole seconds left in it. Both holds are simply labelled Hold, because the circle already shows which one you are in.
  4. Use Pause and then Resume to step away without losing your place, or Reset to clear the counter and return to the idle state.

A second line reports how many full cycles you have finished, and it only appears once the pacer has been started.

Four phase lengths, and what a zero does

Choosing Custom reveals four number fields: Inhale (seconds), Hold after inhale (seconds), Exhale (seconds) and Hold after exhale (seconds). Each takes 0 to 20, each starts at 4, and each value is rounded to a whole second and clamped into that range before it is used.

Zero is not a degenerate value here, it is the mechanism. A phase set to 0 is removed from the cycle rather than run as an instant flicker, which is exactly how the two shorter presets are expressed internally: 4-7-8 leaves the second hold at zero, and coherent breathing leaves both holds at zero. So a six in, two hold, six out pattern is entered as 6, 2, 6, 0. Zero out all four fields and there is no cycle left to run at all, in which case the tool falls back to a plain four in, four out rather than dividing by nothing.

The thing that surprises people is that the pattern dropdown and those four fields go grey the instant you press Start, and stay grey while paused. That is on purpose, since changing a phase length mid-cycle would shift the phase boundaries under a run that is already counting. Press Reset first, then change the pattern.

Timing that survives a pause or a backgrounded tab

Every tick recomputes the current phase from scratch out of the total elapsed active time, instead of adding on however long the last frame happened to take. That accounting is shared with this site’s countdown timer and stopwatch, so pausing and resuming cannot accumulate error, and a browser that throttles a hidden tab only makes the display refresh less often, never wrong once it does refresh. The seconds figure rounds up, so a fresh phase shows its full length rather than appearing to start a second in.

There is no chime or bell at a phase change, by design. The circle plus the phase name is the entire guidance loop, which also means the tool is usable with the sound off next to a colleague or someone asleep. If you want a background sound anyway, the white noise generator has rain and ocean options alongside the noise colours, and for interval work of a different shape the Pomodoro timer handles the longer focus and break blocks with its own chime.

The honest limits of a browser breathing pacer

This is a relaxation and focus aid. It is not medical advice, not a medical device, and not a treatment for anxiety, insomnia or any diagnosed condition. Paced breathing is widely taught and widely reported to help people feel calmer, and that is as far as this page will go. If you have a respiratory or cardiovascular condition, if you are pregnant, or if you feel dizzy or lightheaded at any point, stop and breathe normally, and talk to a doctor before making breathing exercises a routine.

Nothing about a session is kept. There is no account, no history, no streak and no saved preference, so reloading the page puts you back on box breathing with the counter at zero. That is a fair trade for a tool with no sign-up, but it does mean a custom pattern has to be typed again next time you visit.

See it in action

Screenshot of the Breathing Exercise Guide tool with a breathing pacer offering box breathing at 4-4-4-4, the 4-7-8 technique, coherent breathing at 5-5 or a custom pattern, guided by a circle you breathe in with as it grows and hold while it stays still
Breathing Exercise Guide mid-process: a breathing pacer offering box breathing at 4-4-4-4, the 4-7-8 technique, coherent breathing at 5-5 or a custom pattern, guided by a circle you breathe in with as it grows and hold while it stays still.
Diagram: where the work happens on a SysFenix page that has no file input at all: the tool arrives as ordinary JavaScript inside the page, works the answer out on your own device and renders it in place, so the upload, queue and server-side record a typical online tool needs never happen
Where the work happens on a SysFenix page that has no file input at all: the tool arrives as ordinary JavaScript inside the page, works the answer out on your own device and renders it in place, so the upload, queue and server-side record a typical online tool needs never happen.

Frequently asked questions

Why can't I change the pattern once the pacer is running?

The pattern dropdown and the four custom phase fields are disabled from the moment you press Start until you press Reset, and they stay disabled while paused. Swapping the pattern mid-run would move every phase boundary underneath a cycle that is already being counted, so the cycle total and the phase on screen would stop agreeing with each other. Reset clears the counter and unlocks the controls in one click.

Does the cycle counter keep counting while I am paused?

No. The counter is derived from elapsed active time, and pausing stops that clock, so a five minute break in the middle of a session adds nothing to the total. Resuming continues from exactly the point inside the phase where you paused rather than restarting that phase from the top.

What is the longest phase I can set, and can I use half seconds?

Each of the four custom fields takes a whole number from 0 to 20 seconds. A fractional entry is rounded to the nearest second and anything above 20 is pulled back to 20, so the longest possible cycle is four phases of 20 seconds each. Whole seconds keep the on-screen countdown honest, since it displays seconds and nothing finer.

Why do both holds just say Hold instead of naming which one it is?

The two holds sit at opposite ends of the circle animation, so the visual already tells them apart. A hold after the inhale keeps the circle at its full size, and a hold after the exhale keeps it at its smallest. Labelling them differently on screen would add reading work at the exact moment the point of the exercise is to stop reading.

Will it stay in time if I switch to another tab or lock my phone?

The phase is recalculated from real elapsed time on every update, so the timing itself stays correct. What a hidden tab changes is how often the screen redraws, since browsers throttle background tabs, and a locked phone may stop redrawing altogether. Returning to the tab triggers an immediate refresh, so you land on the phase you should actually be in rather than the one you left.

Can I make it run a fixed number of cycles and stop on its own?

Not in this version. The pacer runs until you pause or reset it, and the cycle counter is there so you can decide when you have done enough. If you want a hard stop after a set duration, start a separate countdown timer alongside it, keeping in mind that the two run independently and the breathing circle will carry on when the countdown finishes.

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