The Benefits of Breathwork

Breathwork is the number one most powerful self-healing tool available to us. It allows us to access our innate wisdom for the body to heal itself, all through the conscious awareness of the breath. In my blog post What Exactly is Breathwork? I take a deeper dive into how breathwork can help you transform your life. 

In that post, I mentioned some of the benefits of breathwork. Here, I want to provide you with a greater understanding of what’s truly possible for you through a breathwork practice.

Immediate stress reduction and anxiety relief

In this day and age, we are all stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed. Constantly on the go, the collective trauma of the pandemic, remote learning for the kiddos, all while you’re trying to continue to work and provide a sense of normalcy for yourself and your family. It is a lot! Without a pandemic, life is still a lot to handle, and stress, anxiety, or overwhelm are totally natural responses. 

Our breath though can indicate to us how we are feeling. Typically, when we breathe in a shallow, rapid pattern we are in more of that anxious or stressed state. The flip side is, when we take that really deep, elongated belly breath (think of how a baby breathes), we tend to feel more calm and grounded. 

What’s happening here is those short rapid breaths activate our fight or flight response (the sympathetic nervous system), which is a stress response. You know the pre-presentation nerves where you want to tell your boss you’re sick? That’s the body’s fight or flight response kicking in. When we are feeling that anxiety before a presentation (or another stressor) and we begin to take deep breaths, we start to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This takes us out of fight or flight and moves us into what is known as the “rest and digest” state. That rest or digest state, the parasympathetic nervous system, is how you feel after Thanksgiving dinner. Your heart rate slows, your blood pressure lowers, and you begin to feel a sense of calm (post-dinner nap anyone?) and you have a reduced overall sense of anxiety. 

Now, you don’t have to go binging on turkey to induce that calmer state. We can activate it through the breath and that’s what breathwork allows us to do and see immediate results with.

Connecting with your emotions and your response to them

In breathwork we are getting out of our mind, the ego is taking a step back. This allows us to experience deep presence and self-awareness, where you’re able to go deep within yourself. You have nowhere else to go, except the present moment, creating the time and space to feel into emotions you maybe have been “too busy” to feel. Without judgment, you are able to feel deeper into your emotional state, sometimes through crying, screaming, or laughing. When the ego takes a back seat and we are able to experience without the need to filter, control, or judge our experience, we release energy and change our perspective on our emotional experience, while also realizing how our breath can shift our response to our emotional state. 

Release trauma that may be stuck in your nervous system

The nervous system is a bit like plumbing. Similar to how hair clogs the drain and we need to remove the blockage for water to flow freely, unprocessed traumatic events get stuck in the nervous system, causing us to think and behave in certain ways.

When trauma is unprocessed, it becomes trapped in the body, causing blockages, and this takes a physical and emotional toll on the body. While talking through these traumatic experience is beneficial, the body also holds onto the memory and needs help processing. This is why you may feel like you’ve processed something, yet it continues to appear in your life causing you to not lie the life you desire.

Breathwork is so powerful that it helps us to regain safety in our body by unraveling and releasing fear, traumas, limiting beliefs, and negative emotions.

Revitalize your organs and release toxins

Over 50% of our body’s toxins are meant to be released through our lungs, so when we practice deep breathing, it helps with detoxifying the body. Our lymphatic system (where toxins are filtered) doesn’t work a pump system like our circulatory system does. Which means our lymphatic system needs regular movement, like exercise and deep breathing, to help the lymphatic fluid travel through our body. So, when we have a regular breathwork practice, we are not only helping to thoroughly expel carbon dioxide (and other toxins), we are training the diaphragm muscle to expand, which relaxes the body and massages the lymphatic system, helping to eliminate toxins. 

Through conscious and continual breathing, we are bringing more oxygen to the system, allowing the cells to take in more oxygen-rich blood. This allows each of our cells to work at their optimum levels as they are getting the nutrients they need to work effectively and efficiently.

More energy and mental clarity 

When you breathe in your day to day life, your most likely breathing in a shallow pattern and chest breathing. While you’re able to survive with this breathing, you aren’t allowing your blood cells (and the rest of your body) to get enough oxygen, which can lead to mental (and physical) fatigue. This is because the amount of oxygen we breathe in influences the amount of energy released into our cells. 

When you practice breathwork, you are taking deep breaths, bringing in more oxygen to the blood and body, which improves your energy levels. This means, a few short minutes of a breathwork practice, can actually be more effective than an afternoon coffee. And, the extra energy that you obtain from a breathwork practice, isn’t only about adding a little extra pep in your step. When life becomes overwhelming from driving kids around, or you’re extra stressed at work because there is a big deadline, or you are experiencing a lot of anxiety with an upcoming presentation, your body becomes drained of energy, meaning other systems, like your immune system begin to take a toll. The extra energy that we provide to the body with a breathwork practice, allows us to not only bring us mental clarity and energy to tackle what life throws at us, but it also allows overall well-being to our entire body. 

Improved sleep

There are so many things today that impact our sleep. The constant overstimulation of our phones and social media, the caffeine and sugar we consume, and the stress, anxiety, and overwhelm we experience each day, are all factors that negatively impact our sleep. Breathwork so effectively quiets the mind, which allows us to fall asleep faster since we are not worrying about what we didn’t get done or need to do tomorrow. Not only does breathwork help to quiet the mind, it also helps to calm the nervous system, through the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve. When these are activated, it helps to reduce the impact of the stimulation from our day, calming the stress in our lives, which in return welcomes in a better night’s sleep. Best part is, because we are using out breath to do this work, if you wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble going back to sleep, focusing on taking long deep breaths will help bring us back into that calm, restful state, allowing you to get back to sleep faster.

Better digestion

When the nervous system is in a constant state of stress, our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is activated. This tells the body we are in danger, pumping adrenaline and cortisol into the system, preparing us to fight or run from the situation. Because of this response, systems in our body, like digestion, are put on the backburner since digesting the lunch you ate isn’t as important as surviving the threat at hand.

Breathwork helps to calm and regulate the nervous system, activating the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest), bringing the body back to a state of ease. This means, the body feels safe to bring digestion back online and process the food you’re eating. Not only does breathwork regulate the nervous system, it also helps with stimulating and increasing blood flow throughout the body, including the digestive system, improving intestinal activity.

Reduction in pain

At one point or another, you’ve experienced pain. Anywhere from mild to severe and maybe short lived or chronic. No matter your experience with pain, you’ve most likely tried to detach yourself from your body as a way to ignore the pain and continue on with the day to day. However, when distancing yourself from your body to tune out the pain, you also tune out cues from your body and even block your body’s ability to heal itself. 

This is where breathwork comes in, because it reconnects us to our body. It gives you an opportunity to slow down, connect with your body, and relax tense muscles that may be aggravating the pain you are experiencing. Not only does a breathwork practice bring your mind and body back into sync, it also releases endorphins, which can help reduce your overall pain levels. It also helps with decreasing our cortisol levels, which reduces our state of stress, helping us not only ease pain, but ease the irritability that can come with physical pain.