These are the questions we are asked most often. Some come from people who have never tried breathwork, some from people years into a practice. I have answered them here as I would answer them in a session.
If you are new to this, start at the top and read down. If you came here with one question use the headers as a contents page and go straight to the bit you want. If your question isn’t answered, drop it to us and if it’s relevant we’ll amend the article.
A word before you begin. I am a breathwork facilitator, not a doctor. Nothing here diagnoses anything or tells you what to do about a condition. What it does is tell you what the practice is, what it is like, and where I would be careful.
Starting out
What is breathwork?
Breathwork is what happens when you engage with your breath, and start working with it with intention.
It’s that simple, everything else is detail. You change the rhythm, or the depth, or how long you pause or even hold your breath, and in doing so something shifts in how you feel. Some practices are as simple as breathing slowly in and out through your nose for two minutes. Others run for an hour and may take you somewhere you did not expect to go.
Breathing is the one thing your body does both automatically and on request. You do not have to remember to breathe, but you can take hold of it whenever you like.
People come to it for all sorts or reasons. Stress reduction maybe, or help to sleep. Perhaps wanting to feel something other than what they are feeling. Even looking for a spiritual connection and equally some would run a mile from that word. All of them are welcome.
How is it different from just breathing?
Intention really, and not much else
Your natural breathing is automatic and you don’t need to think about it. Breathwork is the same equipment used deliberately. You decide the pace. You decide whether the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. You notice where the breath is going in your body, and sometimes you send it somewhere it doesn’t usually reach.
It sounds like a small difference. It is not. Try breathing out for twice as long as you breathe in, six times, and see whether you feel the same at the end as you did at the start.
What are the different types?
There are so many, and they all do different things.
- Diaphragmatic breathing. Deep into the belly. The foundation for most of the rest.
- Box breathing. Equal counts in, hold, out, hold. Steadying and supports focus.
- Coherent breathing. Around five breaths a minute, in and out evenly. Supports heart rate variability – your speed of recovery.
- 4-7-8. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. A settler, for the moments anxiety rises.
- Alternate nostril. A balancing breath – our nose does this automatically, this practice brings intention to it.
- Buteyko. Soft nasal breathing, less air rather than more.
- Breath of fire. Rapid and sharp, bringing energy and ‘fire’ to your system.
- Conscious connected breathwork. A high ventilation practice with no pause between inhale and exhale. This style of breath should be supported by a qualified facilitator as it can lead to altered states of consciousness. There are contraindications to this style of breathwork so investigate fully before trying.
- Holotropic. Rapid breathing over a long session, similar to Conscious Connected Breathwork and not something to try alone. There are contraindications to this style of breathwork so investigate fully before trying.
- The Wim Hof method. Rounds of deep breathing with breath holds, usually with cold. Again should be facilitated.
If you are just starting out, start with the first three. They ask nothing of you and you can do them at a bus stop.
How is it different from meditation?
My breathwork ‘grandfather’ describes breathwork as meditating without meditation, which I have never been able to improve on.
Meditation comes from the Latin meditari, to think, to contemplate, to ponder. It began as a practice of focus. Imagine choosing one leaf and spending a long time simply looking at it. Somewhere along the way it came to mean clearing the mind, which I think is both impossible and unnecessary but that is a whole article rather than an answer here, and one day I will write it.
The practical difference is this. In meditation you watch the breath. In breathwork you work with it. Meditation is the observer. Breathwork is the hand on the tiller.
They sit well together. A few minutes of breathing settles you enough to meditate, and plenty of meditation traditions have breath practices sitting inside them anyway.
Do I need to buy anything?
No. You have everything already.
That is one of the things I love about this. No mat, no app, no subscription, nothing to unlock. Box breathing works in a car park.
If you want to make it nicer, a cushion helps for sitting, a blanket helps because you can get cold lying still, and a timer stops you checking the clock. Guided audio is worth it while you are learning the shape of something, and headphones make a real difference. Candles and low light if that is your sort of thing. None of it is the practice. It is just furniture around the practice.
Is it safe?
Is breathwork safe for everyone?
Mostly, and not entirely, and the honest answer needs both halves.
Gentle rhythmic breathing in and out through the nose, at whatever pace feels right to you, is about as safe as anything gets. If you take nothing else from this page, take that. It asks nothing of your body it is not already doing.
The stronger practices are a different matter. Rapid breathing, long holds and anything that alters your state deliberately can be genuinely unsuitable for some people.
Please read our breathwork safety page before you try anything intense. It lists what to be careful of in full rather than just a paragraph here.
Two things I will say here because they matter too much to leave to a link. Never do breath holds in or near water. Not in a pool, not in the sea, not in the bath. It can be fatal. And if you are pregnant, have a heart or lung condition, are being treated for a mental health condition or have anything going on with your eyes, talk to your GP before you start something new.
Feeling light-headed or tingly is common in the faster practices and usually passes. If it concerns you, stop, breathe naturally, and it will settle.
Building a practice
How often should I practise?
Less than you think but more often than you think. Five to ten minutes every day does more than an hour once a fortnight. Consistency is what changes things. A regular short practice becomes a thing your body recognises, and it starts having impact quicker each time because it knows where you are going.
For the stronger practices, once or twice a week is plenty. When our students begin their facilitator training, we ask for a short daily practice and one longer breathwork a week, and that shape works well for most people who are not training too.
Start at five minutes. Really. Five minutes you actually do beats twenty you keep meaning to.
How long does a session last?
Anything from one minute to a weekend.
A minute or two is enough for box breathing or 4-7-8 when you need to regulate yourself quickly. Five to twenty minutes suits a daily practice. A facilitated session usually runs somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, and a good deal of that is settling at the start and lying quietly at the end. The lying quietly is not padding. It is where a lot of it lands.
Morning or evening?
Depends on the practice, and on you.
I am usually alert and quite fired up after conscious connected breathwork, so I do it during the day. Something like yoga nidra or heart coherence breathing is better for me at night, when the point is to come down rather than wake up.
Broadly: energising practices in the morning, settling ones in the evening. Plenty of people do both. But the best time is the time you will actually do it, so if that is ten at night on the sofa, that is the right time.
How do I fit it into a normal day?
Attach it to something you already do.
Five minutes of rhythmic breathing when you wake up. A gentle lung stretch at the traffic lights. A round of 4-7-8 while the kettle boils. A moment of noticing your breath before you eat, just checking in on how you are and how you are breathing. Box breathing when something has gone wrong at work. Something calming before bed.
I started with nothing more than breath awareness at odd points in the day, and built from there.
And a confession, because that’s often more useful that just the theory. Mine fell apart during a difficult stretch and what kept me tethered was the longer weekly breathwork rather than the daily bits. So if the daily practice goes, don’t worry, do what you can when you can. But keep coming back to it.
How long before I notice anything?
Some of it is immediate. Some of it takes months.
You may well feel calmer after one session, most people do. A couple of weeks of daily practice and people start mentioning sleep. Four to six weeks in, the thing I hear most is that they are less reactive, that the gap between something happening and them responding to it got wider.
Although cathartic experiences do happen, in my opinion the deeper changes take longer and arrive quietly. You may not even notice them, and then one day you handle something that would have flattened you a year ago.
We are all different, and “results” is a slippery word anyway. Come to it with patience.
What people come to it for
What is it actually good for?
The quick answer: stress, sleep, focus, regulation, and getting to know yourself better.
Those are the ones I see over and over, in myself and in the people I work with. Calmer under pressure. Sleeping better. Able to hold attention on one thing. More aware of what is going on in the body, which turns out to be the doorway to most of the rest.
Beyond that it gets more individual. Some people find emotions moving that had been stuck a long time. Some find spiritual aspects opening up. Some just like having tools that work when they need it.
What I won’t do is hand you a list of everything that breathwork is supposed to fix. That list exists all over the internet and most of it is unsubstantiated because we are individual complex beings!
Does it help with anxiety and stress?
This is what most people arrive for, and it is where I am most comfortable saying yes.
Slow breathing, particularly with a long out-breath, tends to settle the nervous system. That is not a mystical claim, it is probably the most studied thing in the field. Your breath is one of the few direct handles you have on the part of your body that decides whether you are safe.
Having a tool takes some of the fear out of the feeling for sure as some of the anxiety can be anxiety about the anxiety. Knowing you can do something changes the shape of it.
For the moment itself, and extended exhale or coherence breathing. For the longer game we are back to consistency, something regular.
If anxiety is something you are struggling with rather than something you occasionally feel, please talk to your GP as well. This sits alongside that, not instead of it.
Will it help me sleep?
More people tell me this is the first thing they notice.
Slow breathing with a longer out-breath is the shape to use. Five or ten minutes in bed, nothing strenuous. It works partly on the body and partly because it gives your mind one job instead of forty.
A body scan alongside it helps. Start at the top of your head and move slowly down, bringing your attention to each part and letting it be heavy before you move on. Most people do not reach their knees.
If you have insomnia this is a good thing to add to your routine, rather than the only thing to rely on.
Does it help with focus?
Yes, and this one surprised me.
The traditional ones for focus are box breathing and alternate nostril breathing. That said, early in my own breathwork journey I created a practice specifically for focus, which I call the Genius Genie, and it is the one I still use almost every day.
Some of it is the practice itself, and some of it is that stopping to breathe is two minutes of not looking at a screen. In a day made almost entirely of screens, that is not nothing.
What is it doing to my nervous system?
Giving it a different instruction.
Your autonomic nervous system runs the things you do not think about, and it has two settings that matter here. One is geared for threat response, and one for rest and repair. Breathing is the crossover point. Fast and shallow tends to say danger. Slow and full tends to say you are safe. Just noticing what you are doing periodically is interesting information.
Slow breathing with a long out-breath stimulates the vagus nerve, which is a large part of the feedback loop to the brain. When this picks up safety, we go into rest and repair. That is why a couple of minutes can change how you feel so quickly.
The other half is awareness. The more you pay attention to what is happening inside you, the earlier you notice things. Catching yourself tightening up at three in the afternoon is worth a great deal more than realising it at eleven at night when the tension has intensified.
The harder questions
Is any of this scientifically proven?
Parts of it are well studied. Parts of it are not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something.
The strongest research sits around slow breathing for stress and anxiety, and there is a decent body of it. Sleep and attention have reasonable support. Beyond that the picture thins out quickly, with small studies, short follow-ups and a lot of enthusiasm. I was part of a study looking at the impact of conscious connected breathwork where the impact was tracked on an MRI.
I am not going to overstate it. Breathwork is not a treatment, and yet it works. What I can tell you is what happens in the room, week after week, with people I know. What I can tell you is what happened to me and to our students. That is real evidence of a different kind, and I would rather offer you that in articles they have written, than dress up a handful of studies as proof.
If the research side interests you and you have data, write about it for us. We would publish it gladly.
Does it boost my immune system?
I wouldn’t put it that way, and I would be wary of anyone who does.
There is early research, some of it around cold exposure practices, and it is genuinely interesting. It is also small and preliminary, and a long way from anything I would tell you to expect.
Here’s my take. Long-term stress and poor sleep are not kind to your body. If breathwork helps with those two, and it often does, then it is helping in a roundabout way. That is a much smaller claim than the one you might see elsewhere.
Can it help with chronic pain?
Some people find it helps them cope. It does not treat what is causing the pain. That distinction matters. What people describe to me is that the breath gives them somewhere else to put their attention, that the tension around the pain eases, and that sleeping a bit better makes the whole thing more bearable. Those are real and they are worth knowing. Lamaze is built around breathing through pain, and people have leaned on it for decades. But I would suggest the bold claims we can see on social media need to be tempered.
What it is not is a substitute for whatever your medical team has you doing. If you live with chronic pain, this belongs alongside that, and it is worth mentioning to whoever is treating you before you take up anything strenuous.
Will it help me lose weight?
Not directly, and I say that as somebody whose weight has come down.
Breathwork does not burn anything worth counting. What it did for me was reduce the stress I was eating on top of, and improve my sleep, and both of those made everything else easier. Alongside changes to how and what I eat, it has been part of the picture. It was not the mechanism.
If you are making changes to how you live, do it with support and go gently, and take proper advice if there is anything else going on.
Does it help athletes?
Plenty of athletes use it, and mostly not for the reason people assume.
The interesting part is not more oxygen. It is breathing more efficiently, keeping composure when your heart rate is climbing, and being able to settle yourself before a start. Diaphragmatic breathing also works the core, which is always a good thing.
Nasal breathing practices such as Buteyko and Oxygen Advantage have a following in endurance sport. If you are training seriously, work with somebody who knows both the breathing and your event.
If your question is not here, send it to me. Genuinely. Most of the answers on this page started as something somebody asked me in a session, with the ones I get asked twice tending to become articles.
