Investigations of autonomic nervous system activity using spectral analysis of heart rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP) variability is very popular in many scientific disciplines, and yet only half of all studies involving spectral analysis control for respiration. Because respiration modulates HR and BP variability, knowledge of the respiratory rate is necessary for the proper interpretation of HR and BP power spectra. We devised and validated a new signal-processing technique to derive respiration from the blood pressure wave. This technique is based on the relationship between oscillations in the area under the dicrotic notch of the pulse wave and respiration. The results of our view signal-processing technique yielded significant correlations between protocols of the actual number of respiratory cycles and our blood pressure-derived respiratory cycles and their respective spectra for a number of standard autonomic tests (P < 0.05). Our method will allow retrospective extraction of the respiratory wave and as such afford a more precise interpretation of HR and BP spectra.