Breathing rate during sleep: what your pace of breathing tells you

Why breathing at night is so telling

Breathing rate is one of the classic vital signs. It reacts sensitively to illness and to strain on the body¹.

It is especially easy to read in sleep: at rest you need about the same amount of oxygen, so your pace of breathing changes only a little from night to night². When it suddenly deviates, you notice.

What is normal: your own range

In adults, the normal breathing rate at rest is between 12 and 20 breaths per minute¹. Oura names the same range for healthy adults and stresses that the value is highly individual².

In one person, according to Oura, it usually varies by only 1 to 2 breaths per minute from night to night². That is why the comparison with your own last weeks counts for more than a general normal value. A 16 can be unremarkable for you and unusually high for someone else.

What affects your breathing rate

• ↑raises: an infection starting^{3, 4}
• ↑raises: heat, even at rest¹
• ↑raises: stress and tension¹

The infection is the best studied. In data from a WHOOP wrist strap, a model that analysed changes in nocturnal breathing rate identified 20 % of those who tested positive in the two days before the first symptoms and 80 % by the third day of symptoms³. In another analysis, breathing rate and heart rate were typically elevated in people who were ill, and HRV was lower⁴.

Heat and emotional stress also make breathing faster¹. A higher value is therefore a hint, not a diagnosis: it says that your body has more to do right now, not why.

How your watch measures breathing rate

Watches and rings do not count your breaths directly, they estimate them. Oura uses the fact that your pulse gets slightly faster when you breathe in and slower when you breathe out: from the intervals between heartbeats over the night, the ring counts the breaths². WHOOP estimates breathing rate with a strap on the wrist³.

What Salvor does with it

Salvor compares each night’s breathing rate with your own range over the last 28 nights. Very small deviations, below about 0.3 breaths per minute, count as measurement noise. A higher value than usual lowers your daily form, small decreases are not penalised and are rewarded slightly.

Breathing rate makes up 15 % of the body signals, next to HRV, resting heart rate and temperature. In the second half of the cycle, Salvor allows for a typical shift of about 0.4 breaths per minute, so the cycle does not look like an infection.

When to see a doctor

A higher breathing rate on one night is not a diagnosis. If you have symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain or pauses in your breathing during sleep that others describe to you, talk to a doctor, whatever a watch shows. In an emergency, call 112.