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About this tool
Extended-exhale breathing pacer for acute anxiety: matches your current breathing rate, then slows it towards 6 breaths a minute.
The Panic Breathing Pacer is an extended-exhale breathing guide built for the moment anxiety spikes, when breathing is already fast. Rather than asking you to jump straight to a slow rate, it starts near the rate you are breathing at now — often 18 to 25 breaths a minute — and ramps down breath by breath towards about 6 a minute, the rate associated with peak heart-rate variability. Most patterns give the exhale more time than the inhale, because heart rate falls during exhalation, though an even 5:5 pattern is offered for anyone who finds a long exhale uncomfortable; the instructions ask for small, quiet breaths rather than deep ones.
Open Panic Breathing Pacer on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Choose a Breathing shape — Settle 4:6, Long exhale 4:8, Even 5:5 or Box 4:2:6:2 — then enter "Breaths per minute right now" (6 to 30), "Target breaths per minute" (4 to 12) and a Session length between 1 and 15 minutes.
Press Start and follow the expanding circle, which names the current phase, counts the seconds remaining in it and shows the breaths per minute as the pace ramps down; Pause halts it and Resume picks up where you stopped.
Track Time left, which breath you are on, the exhale share of each breath and whether the ramp reaches resonance at 6 bpm; "Copy plan" puts the pattern, the ramp and the grounding steps on your clipboard.
Begins at your current rate and slows gradually, which is how breathing retraining for panic is normally taught.
Three of the four patterns give the exhale more time than the inhale, the part linked to parasympathetic activation, with an even 5:5 option for anyone a long exhale leaves feeling short of air.
The prompts explicitly discourage over-breathing, which lowers CO2 and produces the tingling and dizziness of panic.
Slowing the breath and lengthening the exhale is the most reliable self-help step: aim for the out-breath to be longer than the in-breath, and let the rate fall gradually rather than all at once. Panic attacks peak within about 10 minutes and then subside on their own — the breathing shortens the peak, it does not have to end the episode instantly.
Heart rate rises during inhalation and falls during exhalation, an effect called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Spending more of each breath exhaling therefore increases vagal, parasympathetic influence, which is why 4-in/6-out and 4-in/8-out are common calming patterns.
No — deep, fast breathing is usually the problem rather than the fix. Over-breathing lowers arterial carbon dioxide, and that hypocapnia is what causes the tingling in the hands and lips, light-headedness and chest tightness. The aim is slower and smaller breaths, ideally through the nose.
Six breaths a minute is roughly 0.1 Hz, the rate at which heart-rate variability peaks for most adults — the so-called resonance frequency, usually somewhere between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths a minute. It is the target used in heart-rate-variability biofeedback training, which is why the pacer ramps towards it rather than towards a normal resting 12 to 20.