Why “Getting High” on Your Breath Can Be Good for Your Mental Health

Psychedelic states without psychedelics?

I write a lot about psychedelics.

But many people are scared of psychedelics. On one hand, understandably so. You go into the depths of your own psyche. On the other hand, mistakenly so. If done intentionally and safely, there’s little that can go wrong.

But what if I told you there was another way to access the healing from altered states of consciousness? A way that’s completely safe, doesn’t require the ingestion of any substances, and is completely free?

A way that’s solely reliant on altering the way you breathe?

Enter breathwork.

In recent years, breathwork has spread across conscious communities all over the globe. From yogis to meditation teachers, psychonauts, and sound healers — you’ll find many spiritually-inclined Westerners raving about “the magical power of breathwork”. By some, it’s even dubbed as “the new Yoga”.

And just to clarify: we’re not talking calm breathwork. We’re talking about activating breathwork. It’s not what you’d typically do at a yoga class. It’s more like what shamans do for hours in the middle of the jungle when they self-induce altered states in the context of healing ceremonies.

So what exactly is breathwork and where does it come from?

Breathwork Is an Ancient Holistic Healing Practice

Breathwork has been around for thousands of years.

We can trace the technique back to various cultures and indigenous communities, from Shamanic tribes to ancient Yogic philosophy. In Latin, the word “spiritus” was used for both the spirit as we know it, and also to describe the physical intake of air. In the Yogic Vedas, the breath is the connection between body and life force, “prana”. Shamans have been using breathwork as a tool to connect with the spiritual world, often practicing for multiple hours to reach altered states and receive “downloads from the divine”.

Independent from the tradition, our breath has long been considered a spiritual force. It’s what connects our inner with our outer worlds.

Breathwork Is an Active Meditation With Fast-Paced, Rhythmic Breathing

Similar to meditation, “breathwork” is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different techniques. It’s frequently misunderstood: most people hear it and, if they’re not familiar with the specific practice, think of some type of controlled breathing to relax. But that’s only one form of breathwork.

Breathwork techniques generally fall into two different categories: “calming” and “activating” breathwork.

The specific type of breathwork that we're talking about here falls into the “activating” category. When most people speak about this type of breath, they usually just refer to it as “breathwork”, which is not super telling for what it represents. There are several trademarked names such as “holotropic” or “transformational” breath, but they essentially all refer to the same thing.

So, what exactly is it?

It’s an active meditation during which we manipulate the pace and depth of our breath and with that, increase the oxygen levels in our body. During breathwork, we perform a fast-paced, circular breath for anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. Sometimes it’s split up into distinct three parts (“belly, chest, out”), more advanced practices focus on a circular breath that integrates the three components. Either way, the emphasis is always on breathing deeply into the belly and exhaling through an open mouth.

We Can Have Profound Experiences of Emotional Purging and Bliss by Using Only Our Breath

So you may ask yourself now: we’re breathing fast into our bellies, so what?

What’s so special about that?

Many people have extraordinary experiences they can’t quite describe but openly rave about. To fully understand, you’ll need to experience it yourself, but I’ll try my best to put it into words.

To begin, let’s look at why breathwork is so deeply anchored within the psychedelic community.

If we travel back a few decades in time, we’ll find that there’s a very special man to thank for that. It’s the 1960s, and now-famous psychiatrist Stanislav Grof begins working with altered states of consciousness in his patients using psychedelics like LSD. Then, in 1970, Nixon passes the Controlled Substances Act prohibiting the use of all psychedelics for all purposes by placing them in Schedule I. Grof is suddenly forced to stop his promising research. But instead of stopping altogether, he ventures to find legal ways to induce altered states in his patients and develops “holotropic breathwork” together with his wife.

I’m telling you this story because it illustrates the potential of this practice. Of course, it’s not the same as an LSD trip, especially if practiced only for around 20–60 minutes, as most common in the West. But, it can have similar properties and several people describe having a “psychedelic experience”. Some see colors and geometric shapes. Many experience a feeling of “bliss” with their entire body vibrating and “floating”.

It’s not only the natural high that draws people to breathwork, it can also be a profound healing tool for emotional release. People may find themselves laughing, crying, or screaming throughout an hour-long practice. It’s especially promising for mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and trauma-related conditions like PTSD.

The Effects of Breathwork Can Partially Be Explained by Science, but There Are Plenty of Mysteries

By now you’re probably wondering how just our breath can achieve all this.

There’s some science, but there are also a lot of mysteries, especially with regard to our emotions and altered states of consciousness.

Let’s start with the easier part, the science. By manipulating the depth and pace of our breath, our body’s pH level changes, and we “alkalize” our blood.

As a doctor from Parsley Health describes in more detail:

“The physiologic changes we see during sustained, rhythmic breathing are caused by a shift of the blood pH that follows hyperventilation — a state called “respiratory alkalosis.” Thanks to the field of anesthesiology we know a lot about what the body does during respiratory alkalosis.

You probably remember that we take in oxygen during the inhale breath and get rid of CO2 with every exhale. When we take faster breaths we get rid of more CO2. CO2 is an acidic molecule, so you can think of hyperventilating as getting rid of acid in the blood and shifting to a higher, or more alkaline pH (thus the term respiratory alkalosis).”

This “controlled hyperventilation” usually manifests as tingling sensations, numbness, muscle contractions, and feelings of hot or cold. Those are all common side effects of breathwork, it sounds worse than it is, most people aren’t at all disturbed by them.

Now on to the next piece, which I’d say is half science half mystery.

If you want to understand why breathwork can lead to emotional purging, you need to accept the basic premise that emotions are stored in our bodies.

You would hopefully agree that you feel certain emotions in your body. Whether you have a heartache, butterflies in your stomach, or feel the weight on your shoulders — these terms are the same across cultures for a reason. It’s the physical sensation that precedes and triggers our brain to attach meaning to it which we then identify as an emotion.

Now the trickier part, understanding how and why emotions can be held onto in our bodies.

You might have come across this illustrative equation:

Emotion = Energy in motion

The word emotion originates from the Latin e-movere, “to move out”. Simply said, emotions are intended to move through you. This is evident if you look at a child that will cry one second and laugh the next, or dogs that will bark like crazy at each other and then immediately move on as nothing happened.

Unfortunately, the human mind has the ability to intervene.

When the motion doesn’t happen, our emotions end up being stored in our bodies. Emotions may not move through us and create blockages instead for two reasons: because they’re too overwhelming, or because they’re accumulating.

The former refers to cases such as profound grief, trauma, or heartache. If we think of our emotional body like a river, this is a tree stump that falls and blocks the entire flow. The latter is something we all experience: There’s a certain vulnerability, something we’re sensitive to. Every time we feel a feeling that we associate with that sensitivity, it adds up. It’s like leaves dropping into our river. Every time we don’t speak up for ourselves or don’t deal with it, the pile grows bigger. One day the pile gets so big it blocks our entire river, an event that is usually triggered by just one tiny additional leaf.

But our bodies remember. They’re 70% water, and water has cellular memory. There’s been fascinating research by Japanese author Emoto, who in his book, The Hidden Messages of Water, explores the relationship between consciousness and water molecules.

So when we breathe, we move this stagnant energy around in our body. That’s why for many people memories may come up and emotions resurface to be released. We’re activating our subconscious.

The last piece is the biggest mystery: how is breathwork able to induce altered states of consciousness?

It’s believed that our brain produces DMT, the chemical compound found in psychoactive substances like Ayahuasca dubbed as “the spirit molecule”. The theory is that through breathwork we trigger the release of DMT, which is why some people have “psychedelic” experiences. It hasn’t been scientifically proven yet, even the presence of DMT in our pineal glands is still debated. Here we can only rely on individual accounts and your personal experience.

No Two Breath Journeys Will Be Alike

They say no breathwork session is alike, and I can definitely attest to that from personal experience. I’m not sure how many hours I’ve banked breathing like this at this point, but there definitely isn’t one “typical experience”.

The first time I practiced breathwork it catapulted me right into my childhood bedroom, then into the ocean, and shortly after straight into space. Needless to say, I was pretty blown away — and extremely curious.

I’ve also had deeply emotional experiences. Once a facilitator gently placed a finger on my throat mid-way through, and immediately tears started pouring out. The crying didn’t stop for at least 20 minutes. At the moment I didn’t know why I cried, and while I realized it a few days later, I don’t think we always need to know what we release in order to feel lighter.

Whatever the experience, one thing is guaranteed: you will feel something.

It’s such a simple modality that allows us to so profoundly connect our mind, body, and spirit — I encourage everyone to give it a try at least once.

It’s quite awe-inspiring what we can achieve and experience, just with our breath.

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