How Breathwork Works? Effective Practice or Just Woo Woo

Breathwork is one of the most valuable and powerful tools that you should be taking advantage of! Breathwork offers many of the same benefits as meditation, but it’s easier to learn, can be practiced anywhere, and the results are very predictable. But you’re probably wondering how breathwork works?

If you’re curious about starting a breathwork practice but not sure if breathwork is legit, I’ll fill you in on the basics.

Breathwork, also known as yoga breathing or pranayama, is simply learning techniques to control our breathing. We control the depth at which we’re breathing, how frequently we’re breathing, and our breathing patterns. Some of the benefits that we can gain from this are reducing our stress levels, reducing anxiety, improving our focus, boosting digestion, improving sleep, and overall regulating our energy levels. The really cool thing about breathwork is that we can do this completely free anytime anywhere without the need for medications. It’s completely safe, easy to learn, and we can get reproducible predictable results every time.

How breathwork works is by allowing us to hack our own nervous system. When most people think about the nervous system they think about physically feeling sensations and our sense of touch. The portion of our nervous nervous system that we’re taking advantage of when we do breathwork is our autonomic nervous system, the part of our nervous system that is responsible for all the things that we’re not conscious of. All those things happen naturally in our body that we don’t have to think about and put forth the effort to do. For example our heartbeat, breathing, swallowing, our pupil response, perspiration, salivation, and digestion. All those things that we don’t ever think about, but that happen naturally throughout the day.

The really interesting thing you might notice is that some of those functions controlled automatically by our nervous system can also be consciously controlled as well. You can control your heart rate, it’s difficult to learn but you can do it over time, you can control swallowing, and you can of course control your breath.

Breathing is something that you can very very easily control. We can use controlling our breathing like a key to unlock the door of our nervous system in