Arterial baroreflex is one of the key mechanisms responsible for the homeostasis maintenance within the cardiovascular system. Through the modulation of sympathetic and parasympathetic drive within the autonomic nervous system, baroreflex enables to stabilize arterial blood pressure and maintain perfusion within critical organs (e.g. brain, heart). This review provides the physiological background of the baroreflex functioning and describes the methodology for assessing the arterial baroreflex sensitivity (BRS). Decreased BRS reflects autonomic imbalance and predicts unfavorable outcome in cardiovascular diseases accompanied by the autonomic dysfunction, such as arterial hypertension and heart failure. BRS assessment methods can be divided into those that are performed in resting conditions (the measurements of spontaneous BRS, e.g. the sequence or spectral analysis method) and methods with the application of the external stimuli, which may be either non-invasive (e.g. the controlled breathing method) or invasive (e.g. the phenylephrine method).