Just breathe! When you’re gripped by anxiety, hearing this well-intentioned advice can be infuriating. Compared with the power of my body’s fight-or-flight response, the notion that I can find calm by tuning into my breath feels almost fanciful.

But recently I came across a study in Scientific Reports that caught my eye because it showed that slow breathing makes a difference not just to how people feel, but to their brain activity. The results have increased my confidence that breathing can make a meaningful difference.

The researchers set things up so their participants either knew they’d be exposed to horrible images (such as pictures of injuries and scary animals) or they thought there’d be a chance they might be – this latter condition acted as a simulation of ‘anticipatory anxiety’, like when you have a dentist appointment and you’re not sure if you might need a horrible procedure.

Anticipatory anxiety increased the aversive impact of the images – both in terms of how bad the participants felt after looking at them, and in terms of the electrical activity in their brains, specifically in the beta-frequency range that’s known to be amplified when we’re stressed or worried.

Crucially, however, the effects of anticipatory anxiety on subjective feelings and brain activity were dulled if the participants engaged in 30 seconds of slow breathing (six seconds in, six seconds out) before the task. In fact, after slow breathing, the participants had lower beta brain activity in the anxiety condition than they had in the non-anxiety condition after normal breathing (two seconds in, two seconds out).

It’s a small study and it’s long established that neuroscience findings can be seductive, so I’m wary of being overly gullible. But I thought the design was clever. It showed that, while anxiety can intensify our difficult experiences, a simple, slow-breathing technique can mitigate these effects.

I spotted an old beach ball in my shed the other day and I was suddenly transported to a joyful memory of running and splashing with my children on the sand at low tide. Psychologists call this ‘positive involuntary mental imagery’ – and they’re testing out ways to deliberately seed more such images (not least because experiencing them is associated with being more optimistic and less depressed). It’s early days for the research, but there’s no reason why we can’t try out one of the methods for ourselves.

To give it a go, take some photos from your daily life, such as what you see when you first get up in the morning; your trip to work; or from a typical evening out. Next, for each photo, combine it in your mind with a positive word, such as ‘pleasant’, ‘success’ or ‘triumph’, to create a completely new imagined scene. For instance, say you took a photo of your morning coffee cup. You’d look at the photo and, to combine it with the word ‘pleasant’, you could create a mental image of yourself sitting by a campfire with friends, savouring a hot chocolate from the mug. The idea is that when you encounter the real objects in the photos – such as your morning coffee cup – it serves as a trigger for the associated imagined scene while you go about your daily life.

A team led by Mahdi Bagheri at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany – and including the Psyche author Simon Blackwell – enjoyed modest success with this very approach in a recent study published in the journal Memory. They think one trick to boosting the technique’s effectiveness is choosing the right photos – distinct enough to create a memorable association with the positive mental image you created (for the example above, try photographing your mug from an unusual angle), but not so unusual that you never actually encounter the trigger in your daily life.