Breathwork has its uses – but when it comes to ‘unlocking your fullest human potential’, beware the puffery | Donna Lu

In the 2012 film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s book The Lorax, a fable about capitalist greed, air is a commodity.

The mayor of Thneedville deprives the town’s residents of trees to allow the company he runs to sell air bottles. He has, as one advertising stooge put it, “become rich by selling people air that is ‘fresher’ than the stinking substances outside.”

If the recent proliferation of real-world courses, books, and online research is anything to go by, getting that air into one’s lungs is now a commodity, too.

Online and in-person breathing sessions now abound, some charging hundreds of dollars to teach participants a skill that most have already learned as a prerequisite for life: how to breathe.

Claimed benefits vary from benefits for which there is solid evidence, such as stress reduction, to more dubious ones: Advertising copy for various courses includes promises that participants will “access healing states that most people never touch,” “unleash your full human potential,” and “promote… deep personal growth.”

Is there really a better way to breathe? Is there any evidence for the purported benefits of breathing – or are these claims just hot air?

What is breathing?

Breathing as a wellness trend is difficult to define precisely, as there are “all sorts of breathing techniques and protocols that are being popularized”, says Dr Vince Polito, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University’s School of Psychological Sciences.

“Changing your breathing actually has physiological effects,” Polito says, describing it as a way to influence the autonomic nervous system, which regulates unconscious measures such as heart rate and blood pressure. “It can definitely change your mood and your impact as well.”

“Some breathing techniques involve slowing your breathing and having a more relaxing effect,” he says, while other techniques “involve breathing quite quickly to the point where it actually changes the oxygen levels available to… your brain and your body.”

Certain techniques have well-established effects on the body. For example, diaphragmatic breathing – also called abdominal breathing or abdominal breathing – encourages deeper breaths of air and has been shown to reduce physiological markers of stress such as cortisol levels.

There is resistance breathing, in which the diaphragm is strengthened “so that it can inhale… and exhale under resistance”, explains Professor Mark Hutchinson, dean of health research at the University of Adelaide. “It’s…literally a muscle growth and strengthening exercise to be able to increase your lung capacity.”

A meta-analysis – which synthesized the results of several studies – found that “breathing exercise can be effective in improving stress and mental health”, but warned of the need to “avoid miscalibration between hype and evidence”.

“It is important that the hype around breathing is based on evidence of its effectiveness – and that its effects are not overstated to the public,” its authors wrote.

What are the risks and benefits?

What fascinates Hutchinson about this process is that our body’s instinct to breathe – known as the respiratory drive – “is not actually… because we want oxygen. This is because we need to get rid of carbon dioxide.”

This motivation is at the heart of the Wim Hof ​​breathing method, which involves rapid breathing and breath-holds. “You breathe in carbon dioxide while hyperventilating, which creates a hypoxic state. [low oxygen] condition for your body… your respiratory system doesn’t intervene so you can hold your breath for minutes,” says Hutchinson.

Research suggests that Hof’s techniques – which combine breathing exercises, cold training and meditation – can reduce levels of inflammation in the body, and that cold immersion training and breathing exercises can also increase pain thresholds.

Hutchinson is currently conducting a clinical trial to determine whether the Wim Hof ​​method could help control pain in women with endometriosis.

Experts emphasize that techniques such as the Wim Hof ​​method are not without risk. “All these things should be… [done] under the constant supervision and guidance of doctors,” says Hutchinson, especially those in at-risk groups, such as people with respiratory problems. He highlights the need for further research to be able to create evidence-based guidelines for certain breathing techniques.

“Breathing is free”

“Certain breathing exercises that often become very popular can also… lead to some kind of altered consciousness,” Polito says. “That’s why I think you see all sorts of remarkable claims about breathing.”

“The complication with involving altered states is that…sometimes people living in these contexts are truly having transformative experiences,” he says. “But it’s very often uncontrolled,” he says, and others “can have destabilizing experiences.”

“There are also sometimes commercial motivations,” he says. “You may end up with these promotions of breathwork that make more claims about what it is capable of than what has been rigorously demonstrated empirically 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, “it’s not a complex activity, costing hundreds of dollars.”

“When I see people charging large sums of money for very expensive things that are not based on 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. »

• Donna Lu is deputy editor, climate, environment and science at Guardian Australia

• Antiviral is a biweekly column that interrogates the evidence behind health headlines and fact-checks popular wellness claims.