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In the 2012 film adaptation of the Dr Seuss book The Lorax, a fable about capitalist greed, air is a commodity.
The mayor of Thneedville deprives the city’s residents of trees so a company he heads can sells bottles of air. He has, as one advertising lackey puts it, “gotten rich selling people air that’s ‘fresher’ than the stinky stuff outside”.
If a recent proliferation of real-life courses, books and online search interest is anything to go by, the act of getting that air into one’s lungs is also now commodified.
Online and in-person breathwork sessions now abound, some charging hundreds of dollars to teach participants a skill most have already acquired as a prerequisite for life: how to breathe.
The claimed advantages vary from benefits for which there is solid evidence, such as stress relief, to more dubious ones: advertising copy for various courses includes promises participants will “access states of healing most people never touch”, “unlock your fullest human potential”, and “foster … deep personal growth”.
Is there truly a better way to breathe? Is there any evidence for breathwork’s purported benefits – or are the claims just full of hot air?
What is breathwork?
Breathwork as a wellness trend is difficult to precisely define, because there are “all sorts of different breathwork techniques and protocols that get popularised,” says Dr Vince Polito, a senior lecturer in the school of psychological sciences at Macquarie University.
“There genuinely are some physiological effects of changing your breathing,” Polito says, describing it as a means to influence the autonomic nervous system, which regulates unconscious measures like heart rate and blood pressure. “It certainly can change your mood and affect as well.”
“Some breathwork is about slowing down your breathing and having more of a relaxing effect,” he says, whereas other techniques “involve quite rapid breathing to the point where you really changing the levels of oxygen that are available to … your brain and body”.
Some techniques have well established effects on the body. For example, diaphragmatic breathing – also called abdominal breathing or belly breathing – encourages deeper lungfuls of air and has been found to reduce physiological markers of stress such as cortisol levels.
There’s resistance breathwork, in which the diaphragm is strengthened “to be able to breathe in … and breathe out under resistance,” Prof Mark Hutchinson, dean of health research at Adelaide University, says. “That’s … literally a muscle growing and strengthening exercise to be able to increase your lung capacity.”
One meta-analysis – which synthesises results from multiple studies – found that “breathwork may be effective for improving stress and mental health”, but cautioned about a need to “avoid a miscalibration between hype and evidence”.
“It is important that hype around breathwork is grounded in evidence for efficacy – and effects are not overstated to the public,” its authors wrote.
What are the risks and benefits?
What fascinates Hutchinson about the process is that our body’s instinct to breathe – known as respiratory drive – is “not actually … because we want oxygen. It’s because we need to get rid of carbon dioxide”.
That drive is central to the Wim Hof breathing method, which involves rapid breathing and breath holds. “You breathe off carbon dioxide by hyperventilating, which creates a hypoxic [low oxygen] state for your body … your breath systems do not kick in, and so you can hold your breath for minutes,” Hutchinson says.
Research suggests that Hof’s techniques – which combine breathing exercises, cold exposure training and meditation – may reduce levels of inflammation in the body, and that cold immersion training and breathing exercises may also increase people’s pain thresholds.
Hutchinson is now conducting a clinical trial on whether the Wim Hof method could help control pain in women with endometriosis.
Experts have pointed out that techniques such as the Wim Hof method are not without risk. “All of these things should be … [done] under constant supervision and guidance by medical practitioners,” Hutchinson says, especially those in at-risk groups, such as people with respiratory conditions. He points to the need for further research to be able to create evidence-based guidelines for certain breathwork techniques.
‘Breathing is free’
“Particular breathing exercises that often get very popular can also … lead to some sort of alteration in consciousness,” Polito says. “That’s why I think you see all sorts of remarkable claims about breathworking.”
“The complication of having altered states involved is that … sometimes people in those settings genuinely have transformative experiences,” he says. “But it’s so uncontrolled a lot of the time,” he says, and others “can have destabilising experiences”.
“There’s also a business motive sometimes as well,” he says. “You can end up with these promotions of breathwork that are claiming more about what it’s able to do than what has been rigorously empirically demonstrated at this point.”
Ultimately, Hutchinson says, “breathing is free”. And while “there is an opportunity here to harness other parts of our physiology” through specific techniques if people are interested, “that is not a complex, hundreds-of-dollars activity”.
“When I … see people charging large amounts of money for very expensive things that are not actually grounded in any evidence, my alarm bells go off,” he says.
As an advertisement for the fictional bottled air company in The Lorax advises: “Please breathe responsibly.”
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Donna Lu is an assistant editor, climate, environment and science at Guardian Australia
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Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims
