Breathwork is the intentional use of conscious breathing patterns to change your physiological, emotional, and mental state. Slow patterns calm you down. Fast, connected patterns shift blood chemistry and blood flow enough to produce an altered state.
I have guided Breathwork since 2018, and in the video I use a narrower definition: conscious hyperventilation, the circular breathing Leonard Orr's Rebirthing community first named Breathwork. Box breathing and meditation fall outside it.
How Does Breathwork Work?
You breathe automatically, but you can also take over. Slow breathing with a long exhale drops your heart rate through the vagus nerve. Fast, connected breathing blows off carbon dioxide, which produces the altered state described below.
A hold on full lungs slows the heart and contracts the spleen, releasing extra red blood cells. That phase feels still and spacious.
Is Breathwork Just Hyperventilation?
The fast phase is controlled hyperventilation. Unlike a panic attack, you chose it, and slowing the breath brings you back down fairly quickly.
Many explanations get the oxygen part wrong. The CO2 you blow off the lungs is replaced by oxygen, so the oxygen pressure in your arteries climbs about 25 percent. Your blood was already about 97 percent saturated, though, so total oxygen content rises only about 2 percent.
Delivery to the brain goes down. The alkaline shift makes hemoglobin grip oxygen tighter. Low CO2 also narrows the vessels feeding your brain, by roughly 3 percent per 1 mmHg of CO2 lost, or 40 to 50 percent over a full round. That lost flow outweighs the 2 percent gain and causes the floaty, tunnel-vision feeling.
The tingling and cramping hands come from the same alkaline shift, which lowers the calcium available to your nerves. They are not toxins leaving.
The real oxygen gain comes from the holds, when the spleen releases its reserve, so Liquid Breathwork leans on surrender and holds instead of breathing harder.
Why Emotions Come Up
Your prefrontal lobe handles rational thought, planning, attention, and inhibiting impulses from the lower brain. The limbic system is the emotional brain: reward, fear, and memory with feeling attached.
Sustained low CO2 appears to make the prefrontal lobe less active, so that inhibition loosens and the emotional brain gets more say. That is why old memories surface and why many people cry, usually followed by relief.
Treat this as our working model. The drop in brain blood flow is measured, but it is largely global rather than aimed at the prefrontal lobe, and nobody has imaged a person mid-session.
Types of Breathwork
Some are short techniques you can do at a desk. Others are full sessions done lying down with a guide.
- Conscious connected Breathwork. Continuous circular breathing for 20 to 40 minutes, often with holds. Rebirthing and Liquid Breathwork live here. Start with our guide to somatic Breathwork.
- Holotropic Breathwork. Stanislav Grof's method: hours of accelerated breathing with evocative music, in pairs. What Holotropic Breathwork is like.
- Wim Hof Method. Thirty to forty deep breaths, a hold, then cold. Our honest review.
- Box breathing. Four in, four hold, four out, four hold. Box breathing, step by step.
- 4-7-8 breathing. A long-exhale pattern for sleep. How to do 4-7-8 breathing.
- Diaphragmatic breathing. Belly breathing, the foundation. Diaphragmatic breathing exercises.
- Pranayama. The yogic root system: alternate nostril, kapalabhati, ujjayi, and dozens more.
Where Did Breathwork Come From?
Pranayama in India and Taoist breathing in China go back thousands of years. The modern Western wave started in the 1970s with Leonard Orr's Rebirthing and Stanislav Grof's Holotropic Breathwork.
Benefits of Breathwork
The common reasons people come are stress, sleep, and emotional release. See our full guide to the benefits of Breathwork and Breathwork for anxiety.
Breathwork vs Meditation
Meditation works top-down, watching the mind until it settles. Breathwork works bottom-up, changing the body first. The full Breathwork vs meditation comparison covers which to reach for when.
What a Session Actually Feels Like
You might feel tingling, warmth, tears, laughter, or almost nothing the first time. The whole arc is in what to expect at your first Breathwork class. Also see why there is no screaming in a Liquid Breathwork session.
Is Breathwork Dangerous?
For most healthy adults, fast connected Breathwork is safe lying down with a facilitator who screens you first.
Get medical clearance first if you are pregnant, or if you have epilepsy, serious heart conditions, uncontrolled high blood pressure, recent surgery, glaucoma, or a history of psychosis. Bring your inhaler if you have asthma.
Slow techniques like box breathing suit nearly everyone, and nobody should practice in water or while driving. Full list: our Breathwork side effects and safety guide.
How to Try Breathwork
- Go to a class. We teach in Phoenix, Flagstaff, Prescott, Tucson, and Lake Tahoe, plus virtual. Anywhere else, use the free Breathwork near me finder.
- Start at home. A few minutes of box breathing or 4-7-8, lying down, never in water.
- Learn to guide it. Shelby Von Oepen, RN, BSN, and I co-teach our Breathwork certification training. Compare it against the best Breathwork certifications.
Feel our style first
Get a free recording of one of our live Breathwork classes.
Get My Free RecordingFrequently Asked Questions
Can I teach myself Breathwork?
Slow techniques, yes: box breathing, 4-7-8, and diaphragmatic breathing are safe to learn online. Learn fast connected Breathwork with holds in a guided class first, so you know how your body responds. Solo, always lie down, never in water.
How long does it take to practice Breathwork?
Box breathing works within a few minutes. A full guided Breathwork session runs 60 to 90 minutes, most of it active breathing. Most people feel a shift in their first session.
What are the potential downsides of Breathwork?
Tingling, cramping hands, and lightheadedness are expected and pass once you slow down. Rarely someone faints, which is why you lie down. Emotion can surface faster than you wanted, so pick a facilitator who screens for health conditions and never pushes intensity.
Can Breathwork bring up trauma?
Yes, and that is often why people come. Old emotion can surface once the thinking mind quiets. A trauma-informed facilitator lets you slow the breath at any point and never forces a release, so tell yours about your history beforehand.
Can Breathwork trigger psychosis?
Every major Breathwork school lists a history of psychosis, bipolar disorder, or severe dissociation as a contraindication for fast connected breathing, because an altered state can destabilize someone already prone to one. For most people it ends within minutes of breathing normally.
What happens when you do Breathwork every day?
A few minutes of box or 4-7-8 breathing each day trains a calmer baseline and raises heart rate variability. Daily fast connected sessions are more than most people need; full sessions land deeper with space between them.
Full Video Transcript
Read the full transcript (edited for length and readability)
0:00 What Is Breathwork?
Google Breathwork or ask ChatGPT and you'll get something like: the intentional use of breathing patterns to shift your physiological, mental, and emotional state. Breathing techniques do that, but they are not Breathwork.
After eight plus years and several programs, my answer is conscious hyperventilation: breathing more than your body needs. Leonard Orr's Rebirthing community (conscious connected breathing) coined the term for this circular breathing.
Students who thought they'd done Breathwork often tell me after class it was nothing like what they'd tried.
2:22 What Breathwork Is NOT
Box breathing, the triangle breath, and heart coherent breathing from the HeartMath Institute don't count. My friend Kasper calls them strategic tools for a specific moment, like calming down or falling asleep. Meditating on the breath doesn't count either.
Neither does hypoventilation, which free divers and athletes use to train longer holds. Same for Huberman's physiological sigh (a double inhale, then a sigh), diaphragmatic and belly breathing (two different things), and the thousand pranayama techniques.
4:16 How Does Breathwork Work?
It started as 20 to 45 minutes or more of hyperventilation with no holds. Most Breathwork today runs 30, 50, or 100 breaths, or one to 10 minutes, then a hold.
We usually do two holds. First, breathe all the way in and hold at the top for about a minute. After another round, breathe all the way out and pause. With the CO2 offloaded, people often go one to three minutes on empty lungs.
Hyperventilating pushes the nervous system toward fight or flight, and inhales drive that. A one to three minute pause with no inhales swings you to the parasympathetic, rest side. You add a little stress, then learn you can regulate it with the breath.
Do one round or 10, through the nose or mouth. There's no right or wrong.
8:40 Is It Just Hyperventilation?
A panic attack is involuntary and feels unsafe. In a session you choose it.
9:29 Why Stress You Control Is Good For You
Small doses of stress, eustress, create a hormetic response. Lifting weights tears muscle fibers and they grow back bigger. Breathwork stresses the systems that regulate hormones, blood gases, and pH the same way. The out breath holds add intermittent hypoxia, short periods of low oxygen, which is good for the heart.
10:52 Emotions, Trauma, and the Nervous System
Say something happens when I'm 10, and now a specific trigger sets off fear and anxiety. Breathwork can help recondition that response.
12:02 The Letting Go Method and Surrender
Letting Go by David Hawkins, who created the Map of Consciousness, describes what Liquid Breathwork is about. His modes of coping are suppression (conscious), repression (unconscious), avoidance and escapism, and expression. The advanced one is letting go: notice what comes up, accept it without judging it, feel it fully, and release it through surrender.
Surrender takes practice, and it's what most separates Liquid Breathwork from other styles.
13:28 Types of Breathwork and How Intense They Get
Some styles push you until you scream, yell, and pound the floor. That releases stuffed emotion, but screaming becomes the coping mechanism every time pressure builds.
I don't want that every week. Ours goes inward, built on relaxation and surrender: the breathing stirs up suppressed emotion until you stop holding it down. We also build the sigh of relief into the hyperventilation.
16:03 Give Breathwork an Honest Try
For guided audios, try Breathwork Beats on YouTube by my friend Dan Vadney. Some tracks are fast, so go at your own pace. Breathwork changed my life, and my fiancee Shelby, who guides with me, says the same.
17:30 What a Session Actually Feels Like
The longer the hyperventilation goes, the less oxygen gets delivered and the less the emotional brain is held back. Some people cry, get angry, or laugh. I've laughed hysterically, unsure if I was crying.
You may feel tingly, lightheaded, floating, hot, cold, or sweaty. Some people have out of body experiences. Hands may cramp (tetany). It's safe and fades once you slow the breath; tetany or respiratory alkalosis in a hospital has other causes.
19:18 How to Try Breathwork
Try a Breathwork audio on YouTube with headphones, ideally lying down. Or go to an in person class, after checking whether it's the screaming kind. In a group, people often report feeling connected to loved ones who have passed.
21:04 Is Breathwork Dangerous? Who Should Not Do It
Stay off the intense end if you have a history of heart disease, heart attacks, or strokes, a pacemaker, high blood pressure not controlled by medication, or you are pregnant. If you're pregnant, skip the out breath holds: we don't know what intermittent hypoxia would do to the baby. With asthma, keep your inhaler with you. For anything else, check with your doctor, or use slower nasal breathing, which gets you there more slowly.
For my first six months to a year I chased the wildest peak experience, breathing as hard as I could, and hit a brick wall. Surrender is what works. You stay in control: slow your exhales and you come down fairly quickly, unlike a four to 10 hour psychedelic ride.
Peace, love, and breath.
Find a Breathwork Class Near You
Search Breathwork classes by city.
To guide it yourself, see the training.