As someone working in the entrepreneurial ecosystem — whether as a founder, coach, mentor, or enabler — you operate in a high-pressure environment. You’re making critical decisions on incomplete information, navigating difficult conversations with clients, co-founders, or stakeholders, and guiding others through uncertainty while trying to project confidence you don’t always feel.
How you show up affects everyone around you and determines whether your team thrives or merely survives. The pressure to be brilliant and perform under these conditions is high — and often, it’s easier said than done. What many people don’t realize is that they always have access to a simple and powerful tool that can help them tap into presence, clarity, resilience, and creativity whenever they need it most.
That tool is your breath.
When Stress Takes Over, We Lose Access to Our Best Thinking
Our optimal performance zone is a state of calm alertness. When we are energized, focused, and calm at the same time, we are most brilliant. In our hectic day-to-day, we often get pushed out of this zone. Instead, we slip into sympathetic overdrive — when stress triggers your nervous system’s fight-or-flight response, flooding your body with cortisol and adrenaline, pushing you into survival mode.
This can happen momentarily or become chronic. And being in this state has a significant adverse effect on our perception, emotional state, and cognitive ability.
Under stress, your brain undergoes predictable changes: tunnel vision and black-and-white thinking narrow your perspective; your emotional regulation (managed by your prefrontal cortex) deteriorates, making you reactive and impatient; your working memory falters, leaving you unable to concentrate; and your creative flexibility collapses as your brain defaults to habit over deliberation.
Under stress, we lose access to the higher-order cognitive abilities we need – precisely when we need them most. Knowing how to break out of sympathetic overdrive is a crucial leadership skill that helps us restore clear perception, emotional balance, and cognitive function.
Working with your breath allows you to regain all three: expanded perception to see the whole picture, emotional resilience to stay balanced under pressure, and cognitive clarity to think strategically and creatively.
Our Breath is the Backdoor to The Control Room of Our Nervous System
Our breath is the most direct way to influence our inner state. It directly allows us to regulate our autonomic nervous system (ANS) — the part of our nervous system that runs in the background, regulating our physiology and determining everything from our heartbeat to our blood pressure to our brainwave pattern. By governing our physiology, our ANS determines how we feel, think, and perform in every moment.
Our ANS, and therefore our physiology, is generally beyond our conscious control. We can’t decide to slow down our heart rate or lower our blood pressure. The breath is an exception: we can consciously choose to slow it down. And that slows down our heart rate, lowers our blood pressure, synchronizes our brainwaves, calms our emotions, etc.
The ANS is deeply interconnected. This means we only need one entry point to influence the entire system. Your breath is that entry point.
There’s robust scientific evidence about this. Slow, controlled breathing recalibrates our state within 1 to 2 minutes. This happens through an increase in heart rate variability (HRV) — essentially, your nervous system’s ability to shift gears quickly. Think of it like a transmission: the more flexible it is, the faster you can move from panic mode to calm focus.
Higher HRV is associated with better decision-making, better emotional regulation, and faster recovery.
Under stress, we often default to dysfunctional breathing, which amplifies the adverse effects of stress. Common patterns include mouth breathing, shallow, rapid chest breathing, and irregular breathing. All of this creates tension, amplifies anxiety, and creates physiological chaos that manifests as emotional and mental chaos. Awareness of these patterns is the first step toward change.
Consciously applying functional breathing allows us to interrupt the vicious cycle and restore balance.
The Foundations of Functional Breathing
Now that you understand the mechanism, the next question is practical: what does healthy breathing actually look like? Functional breathing has a few key elements.
- Breathe through your nose. It filters, warms, and conditions the air—and, most importantly, helps your body absorb oxygen more efficiently and stay calmer. Mouth breathing leads to dry airways, reduced oxygen uptake, and increased stress. As a general rule, breathe in and out through your nose whenever possible, even during light exercise or focused work. Using a nasal strip or dilator can help you breathe through your nose at night, too.
- Posture matters. Sit or stand tall. When you slouch, your diaphragm gets stuck and your breathing becomes shallow. When you’re upright, your breath deepens naturally.
- Breathe low and slow. Belly breathing — where your abdomen rises on the inhale and falls on the exhale — activates the vagus nerve, lowering reactivity and giving you a clear head. Slow breathing — around 5 to 6 breaths per minute — maximizes the calming effect on your nervous system and improves oxygen efficiency. For an even more substantial grounding effect, breathe down into your seat. This creates stability and resilience, especially helpful before difficult conversations or when pressure is high.
- Breathe quietly. Your breath should be smooth, gentle, and almost silent. If you can hear your breathing during rest or light activity, you’re breathing too hard.
Making these minor adjustments to your breathing throughout the day lays a foundation for better stress management, clearer thinking, and greater energy.
Box Breathing: The Go-To Tool for Clarity Under Pressure
When you’re in a high-pressure moment — before a difficult conversation, during a stressful decision, or in the middle of a demanding day — you need a technique that works fast.
Box breathing is one of the simplest and most effective tools for calming your nervous system and restoring mental clarity. It’s used by leaders from Navy SEALs to corporate executives to manage stress in real time, and it takes less than 2 minutes to experience its effects. You can do it anywhere — at your desk, in a meeting, or right before a pitch.
Here’s how:
- Inhale slowly through your nose for a count of 4
- Hold your breath gently for a count of 4 (don’t clamp — just pause)
- Exhale slowly through your nose for a count of 4
- Hold your breath again for a count of 4
- Repeat this cycle 4 to 5 times, or until you feel calmer and more centered
The equal count on all four sides of the “box” creates a rhythm that stabilizes your attention and focus — ideal before speaking or negotiating.
Beyond this technique, you can adapt your breathing throughout the day. Use a coherent breathing pace — 5 to 6 seconds in, 5 to 6 seconds out — as your default calm focus state before meetings or decisions. When emotions run high, extend your exhale to help regulate your emotions quickly. Even three slow, nasal breaths between calls or meetings can serve as a micro-reset, preventing stress from accumulating.
A Few Breaths Reset Your State. Consistent Practice Rewires Your Baseline.
It often takes only a few breaths to reset your state at the moment. But consistent practice rewires your baseline — so clarity and resilience become your default. Conscious breathing is like riding a bike — it requires mental effort at first, but can become almost effortless with regular practice.
To build the habit, try starting with a fixed practice — 5–10 minutes in the morning or evening. This primes you to be aware of your breath throughout the day. Then try applying it on demand during the day — before pitches, during conflicts, between meetings. Finally, you can pair conscious breathing with everyday routines to have a built-in “prompt” — your coffee break, your commute, waiting in line.
The beauty of breathwork is its accessibility and instant effect. You can get significant benefits from just taking the simple techniques above and integrating them into your day. Research shows that as little as 5 minutes of conscious breathing a day can significantly elevate your emotional and cognitive baseline — and influence how you show up, think, and lead.
If this sounds too simple to work, you’re not alone. Many high-performing leaders are skeptical until they experience the shift themselves. The science is robust, but the real test is trying a simple breathing technique – like box breathing – before a meeting and noticing the difference in your clarity and composure.
The next time you feel stress building, remember: you have access to a reset that takes 60 seconds. Use it.
And, if you are ready to start right now, there are limited places available until December 1 for a free online course – actually starting this Thursday, 27.
