Wellbeing

Breathwork: techniques and benefits

Breathwork could be your newest natural therapy if you’re looking for ways to beat anxiety and improve your health – give these exercises a try!

It’s your body’s most natural function, but is breathing on autopilot compromising your health? Welcome to the world of breathwork – the wellness trend that’s bringing a breath of fresh air.

What is breathwork?

Breathwork is the term applied to any therapeutic intervention into the way we naturally breathe. Bringing awareness to the breath isn’t a new thing; the Chinese ‘qigong’ and Indian ‘pranayama’ are ancient practices that harness the health-supporting power of conscious breathing, uniting breath and spirit. Contemporary breathwork practitioners create breathing exercises that tackle 21st-century ills: stress, anxiety, musculoskeletal problems, insomnia, lethargy and more. Approaches differ, with breathwork encompassing anything from the kind of deep breathing you might encounter in a yoga session to more intense and consciousness-altering ‘holotropic breathing’ or even ‘rebirthing’ breathwork sessions. All, however, aim to maximise the potential of every breath we take. “The aim is to have a fuller breath,” says transformational breath facilitator Aimee Hartley, who runs sessions on breathwork in London. “Basically that means using more of our respiratory system to breathe well, which has a knock-on effect for every system in your body.”

What does breathwork involve?

Group breathwork sessions might follow a similar format to a meditation class: a relaxing mat-based environment where attendees follow an instructor’s guidance through a set of breathing exercises. One-to-one breathing classes will have a more therapeutic feel. “People breathe the way they live, just as they stand and walk the way they live,” says breathwork trainer Nathalia Westmacott-Brown. “As a breathwork therapist, when I embark upon breathwork training I look at the whole person: mainly at their physical situation, but also their psychological and emotional tendencies.”

A strong feature of breathwork involves releasing past traumas or stress, which can be held as tension in the body. “The body stores the anxiety around the breath and sets up a sub-ventilation pattern,” suggests Nathalia, “whereas if one has a deep sense of safety, the breath tends to open through the whole abdomen. The body is really well designed to self-heal under the right conditions, but the breath is an integral part of that process. The breathwork I practise addresses people’s physical requirements – for example, if they’re asthmatic or have sensitivities around breathing fully – but also their emotional needs.”

What are the benefits of breathwork?

Fans of breathwork speak of the crackle of energy it gives them, and a life-affirming sense of physical ease, but the positive effects for the body last beyond this sensory reaction. Studies into physical breathwork benefits include research conducted in 2005, which found slow and deep breathing lowered blood pressure in hypertension patients. Other studies have explored the positive benefits that deep breathing brings to the body’s blood-sugar management and the resilience of the immune system. The cognitive benefits are also well-documented: in 2018, researchers in Dublin proved a link between breath-focused meditation and attention, finding that conscious breathing releases noradrenaline, a brain chemical that sharpens our focus. Previous research suggests that breathwork can lift severe depression, reduce panic or anxiety, and aid memory recall.

Does breathwork need an instructor?

“The most obvious thing people say is ‘Well, I’m breathing already! Why on earth would I want to pay you to help me breathe?’” says Nathalia. “Actually, it’s more about paying someone to help bring a consciousness to your breathing process. You could call it ‘breath observation’. Something changes when you consciously intend to breathe; take a deep breath and it links your breath pattern to your psychological and emotional sense of wellbeing, and that’s a therapeutic breath; a breath with therapeutic benefits.”

Can I try breathwork at home?

While simple breathwork exercises can be practised at home, the more immersive forms require expert guidance. “I’d always recommend you look for a teacher who’s fully certified,” recommends Aimee, speaking about the psychotherapeutic forms. “Becoming a Transformational Breath Worker is quite a rigorous process so you’ll be in safe hands. I wouldn’t recommend you try to practise the breathwork you’ve vaguely heard of, or get someone to teach you what they’ve learnt secondhand.” According to Nathalia, a simple awareness of your breath is a journey we can all take. “There are plenty of simple, mechanical exercises that will have benefits, no matter what you think of the psychotherapeutic elements.”

Try this breathing technique

“Slow down your exhale breath so that it’s longer than your inhale, for just two or three breaths. This switches the central nervous system from an active sympathetic state, to a parasympathetic state of relaxation.”

Breathing therapy

Breathwork is hailed by many as a fixall for health – it is said that the right kind of breathing can boost your energy, focus and mood, help you sleep, calm you down and even balance hormones. So how does it work? “The breath is our interface between the mind and body,” says yoga teacher Dan Peppiat. “It is affected by, and in turn can affect, both the physical body and our mental state. Understanding how to breathe most efficiently and effectively can allow us to work on everything ranging from optimum physical performance through to poor posture.

“Likewise with the mind, the breath is very closely connected to our autonomic nervous system, which controls our involuntary processes such as digestion. Factors such as our breathing volume, rate and the muscles that we are using to breathe send a constant stream of information to the brain about our current environment. Our brain interprets this and makes an informed judgement about whether we should be ready for action (fight or flight) or chilling and relaxing (rest and digest). By understanding the breath and how we can modify our breathing patterns, we are able to influence what state of the autonomic nervous system is dominant, or we can balance them out.”

Breathing techniques for anxiety and stress

Your heart is thumping and you’re gripped by panic – we’ve all been there, and the fight or flight response was useful in the days when we needed to escape predators. Nowadays, very often it just puts us in a state in which we can’t think straight. This is where conscious breathing for anxiety comes in. Try this Navy SEAL-approved box breathing exercise next time you’re feeling anxious:

Start with empty lungs and breathe into your belly through your nose for a count of five seconds
Hold your breath for a count of five
Exhale for a count of five
Hold your breath for a count of five
Repeat this pattern for at least three minutes or until you have felt yourself fully calm down

Breathwork: healing hormones

Our delicate endocrine system can so easily be knocked out of whack. Breathing right can help get things back on track. The Wim Hof Method is ideal for this:

Breathing in and out through your mouth, take 30 deep breaths focusing on breathing deep into your belly and just relaxing that exhale (it will feel like you are breathing in more than you are breathing out).
On your 30th breath exhale out and hold your breath.
Once you feel that you need to breathe, take a deep breath in and then hold your breath again for about 10 seconds.
Exhale and relax for a few seconds.
That completes one round – you will repeat this three times in total.
You may feel a little light headed or maybe even some tingling in your body. This is a totally normal feeling, but just go at your own pace.

Breathwork for sleep

We’ve all been there – tossing and turning, unable to nod off, dreading the impending day of tiredness ahead. Next time, try these exercises: “To encourage a state conducive to sleep, we would generally want to move ourselves into the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest mode),” says Dan. “The simplest way to calm the mind is by working on developing a slower exhalation with a natural pause at the end of that exhalation. I often talk about ‘allowing the breath to trickle away’ on the exhale, with no effort, and then pausing it momentarily until the inhalation occurs naturally and exactly when it needs to. Follow every step of the breath with your attention, allow your body to be totally soft and relaxed, and before you know it you’ll be out like a light.”

“I personally use a counting breathing exercise to help me calm down and get ready to sleep,” says Kat Farrants, founder of Movement for Modern Life. “I inhale for three counts, retain the breath for four counts, use a long, full exhale for seven counts, and then count to three before my next inhale. This is a pattern which I personally find useful, but the most important thing is to exhale for longer than you inhale. I also love the breath retention at the top and bottom of the breath, but again, this is something that comes with practice. So for beginners to breathwork, just start by counting the breath and exhaling consciously for longer than the inhale.”

Get motivated with breathwork

Need to crack on with life but struggling to find the motivation? You guessed it, breathwork’s got your back! “First, you need to become aware of your breathing patterns and notice what they do when you feel most mentally strained,” says Dan. “To get motivated, you need to raise your mental and physical energy levels to feel inspired and energised. For this, I would firstly make sure that you are breathing physically with efficiency, driving the breath with the belly to bring oxygen deep down into the lower part of the lungs. You might then look at levelling the mind by working on a pattern of mindful ‘square breathing’; with equal length inhale, exhale, and pauses in-between the two.

“You might also want to explore the opposite of ‘sleep time breath’ (where we lengthen the exhale). To increase energy and alertness, you might lengthen the inhale slightly with a pause at the top of the in-breath, followed by a natural exhalation without significant pause at its end.”

What conditions does breathwork treat?

Hay fever

Relentless hay fever symptoms affect as many as one in four people in the UK, and occur when tiny particles of pollen come into contact with cells that line the mouth, nose, eyes and throat, irritating them and causing the allergic reaction. You may have already tried herbal remedies to no avail, but simple breathing techniques could help combat these uncomfortable symptoms.

Buteyko breathing for asthma

“The first and possibly most important aspect of the technique is to encourage asthmatic sufferers to breathe exclusively through the nose,” says Gillian Austin, president of the Buteyko Breathing Association. “Nose breathing not only filters and warms the air that we breathe, but also regulates the flow of breathing, ensuring that we do not ‘breathe too much’.”

Try these breathwork tips

Breathe with the mouth closed at rest and during moderate-intensity exercise such as walking.
If you have a dry cough, try to suppress it by swallowing and breathing gently through the nose. Paradoxically, coughing can often make a cough problem worse.
Breathe quietly, as noisy breathing can mean that you are hyperventilating.

What happens during holotropic breathwork?

If you’re looking to boost your personal empowerment, or hoping for a bit of self-exploration, then take a look at this holotropic breathing guide.

The process combines accelerated breathing with calming music in a special setting – each person holds their own breath and uses breathing and music to enter an extraordinary state of consciousness. This activates the natural healing process and brings the breather to uncover a set of internal experiences – so although you can have similar themes, there are no two sessions of holotropic breathwork that are exactly the same.