How long does it take your heart rate to settle?

The short answer

For most people, a few minutes. After you sit or lie down and breathe slowly, heart rate drifts down and then levels off. How long that takes changes from person to person and from day to day: exercise, caffeine, a hard conversation, heat or a late meal can all keep it up for longer.

One example from LumaWe: in one logged session on Apple Watch, heart rate went from 81 to 67 bpm and leveled off after 2 minutes 28 seconds. That is one session on a demo profile, not an average. Your numbers will be your own.

Why slow breathing brings it down

Your heart speeds up a little each time you breathe in and slows a little each time you breathe out. This is normal, and it is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Breathing slowly, with a longer out-breath, spends more of each minute in the slower phase.

This effect is well studied. A pooled analysis of 223 studies found that slow breathing raises vagally mediated heart rate variability, a sign of the body's calming branch at work, during practice, right after it and over programs of several sessions (Laborde et al., 2022). In a Stanford randomized study, five minutes a day of breathing with long exhales improved mood more than the same time of mindfulness meditation (Balban et al., 2023).

Try it tonight

Sit or lie down somewhere quiet. Breathe in through your nose for about 4 seconds and out, slowly, for about 6. That is around six breaths a minute. Keep going for 3 to 5 minutes. If counting feels like work, just let each out-breath be a little longer than the in-breath.

With an Apple Watch you can watch your heart rate while you breathe. Wear the Watch snugly and keep your arm still, because the sensor reads less well when it moves.

What “settled” means in LumaWe

LumaWe reads your heart rate from Apple Watch during a session and calls it settled when it has come down and stopped falling: over the last half minute or so, it stays in a narrow band. Settle Time is the time from the start of the session to that moment.

To make the number about you, LumaWe first measures two quiet minutes with no guidance. After that, each session shows how much faster you settled than when you sat quietly. LumaWe measures heart rate level and trend only. It does not claim to measure heart rate variability from the Watch.

A note on health

LumaWe is a wellness app, not medical care. If your resting heart rate is often high, or you notice chest pain, fainting, a racing or irregular heartbeat, or shortness of breath, talk to a doctor.

Sources

• Laborde et al. (2022). Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: a systematic review and meta-analysis
• Balban et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine