We’ve said it before and we’ll likely say it several thousand more times: Stress is evil and your breath can help beat it. And good news on the technology front – now Stanford University’s Institute of Design offers a class called “Designing Calm,” a graduate-level course that’s part of an emerging field that seeks to “alleviate stress by embedding mindfulness into the devices that pervade contemporary life.”

Good call. Being dubbed “calming tech,” these kind of apps are the opposite of more conventional “distracting” Silicon Valley tech, said Gus Tai, a venture capitalist who co-teaches the class. “[W]ith calming tech, ” he asserts, “we’re asking how can we bring more balance to the world.”

Neema Moraveji, who orchestrates the new Calming Technology Lab at Stanford, offers, “Chronic stress primes the body for all kinds of disease and dysfunction. Here, we are focused on calmers, which trigger the opposite of stress: a state of calm, or flow, for the user.”

This bodes well for the future of stress relief. Dr. Moraveji bases his work on studies demonsrating that “slow, steady breathing, along with cultivating gratitude and savoraing pleasurable experiences, can improve productivity and well-being.

His work has lead to an invention, the “breathwear,” which is a belt rigged with a sensor that detects respiratory rate that’s tied to an iPhone app that provides an exercise that can restore optimal respiration.

Read the full New York Times article here. And try a few Six-Second Breaths while you read!