During a session of fitness phenom Taryn Toomey’s The Class workout, after a grueling series of jumping jacks and squats, participants are instructed to take a moment and focus intently on their breathing. The directive is intended not to help them catch their breath—they’re generally panting—but to make them conscious of it. In the face of a challenge, the mind often gets loud with complaints, excuses and judgements, thereby limiting us, says Natalie Kuhn, a founding teacher and the vice president of programming at The Class. “Becoming aware of your breath and slowing it down actually slows down the thoughts,” she says....

During a session of fitness phenom Taryn Toomey’s The Class workout, after a grueling series of jumping jacks and squats, participants are instructed to take a moment and focus intently on their breathing. The directive is intended not to help them catch their breath—they’re generally panting—but to make them conscious of it. In the face of a challenge, the mind often gets loud with complaints, excuses and judgements, thereby limiting us, says Natalie Kuhn, a founding teacher and the vice president of programming at The Class. “Becoming aware of your breath and slowing it down actually slows down the thoughts,” she says. “The practice of returning our attention to the breath is what helps us self-regulate.”

“A general rule of thumb is that humans can go for about three weeks without food, three days without water and only three minutes without oxygen,” says Ashley Neese, a California-based author and breathwork teacher. Yet, as vital as it is for our health, breath is not something that many of us think about; it’s simply a physical inevitability. “We assume, at our peril, that breathing is a passive action, just something that we do: breathe, live; stop breathing, die,” James Nestor writes in his recent book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. “But breathing is not binary.” 

Breathwork is the practice of being more intentional and mindful about breathing. Nick Kislinger, co-founder of health-coaching service Tummo Health and a longtime breathwork teacher, likens it to a remote control for the nervous system. “[Breathwork] helps you choose how you want to feel,” he says, adding that the practice helps to manipulate both our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. (The former regulates our “fight or flight” response, while the latter promotes our “rest and digest” response.) “When you activate your sympathetic nervous system, it helps make you alert and full of energy, like pumping gas in the car,” says Kislinger. “Conversely, we can tap into our parasympathetic nervous system to calm down, rest and recharge.” 

““Becoming aware of your breath and slowing it down actually slows down the thoughts.””

— Natalie Kuhn

Though loosely related to meditation, breathwork takes a slightly different tack. “Rather than simply observing our natural breathing patterns, [as we would] during meditation, we are intentionally manipulating our breathing patterns for an extended period of time,” says Eget Martyr, divemaster and co-creator of the breathwork program at St. Lucia’s Windjammer Landing Villa Beach Resort. Neese suggests to her clients that they begin with 10 to 15 minutes a day. “Most of us haven’t spent that much time paying attention to our breath, so it can feel unsettling to start a breathwork practice,” she says. Consistency is the most important factor. One exercise Neese recommends to help settle a racing mind: Take a deep inhale while counting to five, then exhale through the nose while counting down from five to one, and repeat five times. 

Kislinger, who is also part of the team at breathing exercise app company Breathwrk, has two go-tos for sleep and recharging. For the former, start by finding a comfortable position, breathe in through the nose for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, slowly breathe out through the mouth and repeat for three minutes or longer until the deep diaphragmatic breaths bring on sleep. To recharge, Kislinger is a fan of box breaths, a method popularized by the U.S. Navy Seals: Breathe in through the nose for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out through the mouth for four seconds, hold for four seconds, and repeat for three minutes.

Breathwork is also being used to treat issues like depression and anxiety stemming from grief or trauma. “The breath can be a key component in trauma healing,” says Neese. A small, preliminary 2014 study conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on 21 soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts reported that subjects who practiced breathing-based meditation experienced decreased symptoms of PTSD. Jasmine Marie, the Atlanta-based CEO and founder of Black Girls Breathing, centers much of her work specifically around trauma healing, bringing breathwork to what she describes as underserved and under-resourced demographics dealing with the effects of racism and generational trauma. One of the techniques she regularly teaches is ocean breath, which, she says, incorporates one of the body’s natural responses to stress or frustration: sighing. It involves repeated inhales and exhales through the mouth, slowly elongating and deepening the breaths as you go. “We’ve seen firsthand how [breathwork] has helped how they work through daily challenges,” she says of her clients.  

““Most of us haven’t spent that much time paying attention to our breath, so it can feel unsettling to start a breathwork practice.””

— Ashley Neese

The challenges of the pandemic have coincided with an increasing interest in breathwork. Released in May of last year, Nestor’s book became a bestseller—a sign of the times. Wim Hof, a Dutch extreme athlete and longtime proponent of breathwork, found an entirely new audience when he was featured in a January 2020 episode of The goop Lab, the Netflix show born of Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire. The Wim Hof method, which is taught at wellness studios like Pause in L.A., combines breathing exercises and cold exposure. Last year, St. Lucia’s Windjammer Landing Villa Beach Resort began to offer a first-of-its-kind underwater breathwork program, which, Martyr says, combines the calming benefits of underwater diving with the healing nature of breathwork. And Max Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Breathwrk, says his company’s app experienced a surge of pandemic-fueled popularity that accelerated the company’s growth: It’s raised more than $7.5 million since August 2020, and Gomez says the app has been downloaded more than a million times.

Marie thinks that the discussions of mental health amid the pandemic have led more people to breathwork. It’s easy to incorporate into daily life, which furthers the appeal, she adds. “Learning how our awareness and our breath can work together to create stability is a skill that can be used anytime, anywhere,” Kuhn says.