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CO₂: The Most Misunderstood Gas in Your Body

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:39:34 GMT

What carbon dioxide really does for your physical and mental health

Everyone learns the same thing about carbon dioxide: it's the waste gas. Oxygen good, CO₂ bad — the stuff you breathe out and want to get rid of. And there's a second layer on top of that now, because CO₂ has become the headline villain of the climate conversation — so the reflex is to treat it as something harmful in any context.

But the carbon dioxide warming the planet and the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream are two completely different questions — what's happening in the atmosphere tells you nothing about what CO₂ does inside your body. And inside your body, the "waste gas" story is one of the most widespread misunderstandings in all of human physiology.

Once you correct it, a huge amount about breathing, stress, and health suddenly makes sense.

Carbon dioxide isn't waste. It's one of the main regulators of how your body delivers oxygen, keeps blood flowing, holds its chemistry stable, and strongly influences how safe or threatened your nervous system feels. For most people, the problem isn't too much CO₂ — it's too little. Here are five things CO₂ actually does for you, plus the medical history almost nobody knows.

First, why we got it so backwards

The confusion comes from our obsession with oxygen. We assume breathing is about getting more oxygen in — so more breathing, deeper breathing, must be better. It feels obvious.

But here's the catch: under normal conditions, your blood is already about 97–99% saturated with oxygen. It's essentially full. You cannot meaningfully add more by breathing harder — there's no room. So the idea that big, heavy breathing floods you with extra oxygen is simply wrong. The gas that actually changes when you alter your breathing is carbon dioxide. That's the lever. And when you understand what that lever does, the whole picture flips.

Benefit 1: CO₂ is what delivers oxygen to your cells

This is the big one, and it's the most counterintuitive fact in breathing physiology.

Oxygen doesn't travel freely in your blood — it rides on haemoglobin, the protein in your red blood cells. And haemoglobin only releases that oxygen into your tissues when the right amount of carbon dioxide is present. This is called the Bohr effect. Where your cells are working hard and producing lots of CO₂, haemoglobin loosens its grip and hands over the oxygen. Where CO₂ is low, it holds on tight.

Follow that through and you get the twist: if you over-breathe and blow off too much CO₂, your blood is still fully saturated with oxygen — but that oxygen stays stuck to the haemoglobin and doesn't get released where it's needed. You can have plenty of oxygen in your blood and still starve your tissues of it. More breathing, less delivery. CO₂ is the key that unlocks the oxygen — without enough of it, the oxygen goes nowhere.

Benefit 2: CO₂ keeps your blood vessels open

Carbon dioxide is a vasodilator — it relaxes and widens your blood vessels, which improves circulation. This is especially true in the brain.

When you over-breathe and CO₂ drops, the opposite happens: blood vessels constrict, and blood flow to the brain falls. That reduced blood flow is what can leave people feeling lightheaded or dizzy when they hyperventilate. It's not lack of oxygen; it's low CO₂ narrowing the pipes.

(If you've read my guide to breathwork, this is the exact mechanism the deep, activating styles use on purpose — driving CO₂ down to quiet the thinking brain and let emotion surface. Same physiology, opposite intent. Here we're talking about it happening by accident, all day, in people who chronically over-breathe.)

Benefit 3: CO₂ helps keep your airways open

CO₂ relaxes smooth muscle — including the smooth muscle lining your airways. Adequate CO₂ helps keep those airways open and relaxed.

Drop it through over-breathing and the airways tighten. This is part of a genuinely strange loop: chronic over-breathers often feel more short of breath, not less, because breathing too much is tightening their airways. So they breathe even harder, and it gets worse. Learning to breathe less — lighter, slower, through the nose — is often what actually relieves the air hunger. This is exactly why breathing methods that deliberately slow the breath and reduce its volume, like Buteyko and the Oxygen Advantage, are used to help manage asthma: less breathing, not more, is often the fix. It sounds backwards until you know what CO₂ is doing.

Benefit 4: CO₂ is what tells you to breathe

Here's something most people have exactly backwards: the urge to breathe is not triggered by a lack of oxygen. It's triggered by rising carbon dioxide.

Your brainstem constantly monitors CO₂, and when it climbs past a certain point, it fires the signal — that building discomfort, the "I need to breathe now" feeling. This is a safety system, and it's a good one. But it also means your urge to breathe is really a measure of your tolerance to CO₂, not your actual oxygen level.

This is territory I know intimately as a freediver. When you hold your breath, the urge to breathe and those involuntary contractions arrive from CO₂ building up — long before you're actually low on oxygen. Training freediving is, in large part, training a calmer relationship with that CO₂ signal: learning that the urge is information, not an emergency. (It's also exactly why hyperventilating before a breath-hold is dangerous — you trick the alarm into staying quiet without adding meaningful oxygen, which is how people black out underwater. The CO₂ alarm is there to protect you.)

Benefit 5: CO₂ and a calmer nervous system

There's a well-documented link between carbon dioxide and anxiety — and it runs the opposite way to what you'd expect.

When you're anxious, you tend to breathe faster and shallower, which drops your CO₂. Low CO₂ produces a specific set of physical symptoms: tingling in the hands and face, dizziness, and a racing heart. The problem is that those symptoms feel like anxiety — so they feed the fear, which drives more over-breathing, which drops CO₂ further. A self-reinforcing loop, and it's a big part of what's happening in a panic attack.

This one is personal for me. Before I found freediving, I suffered from panic attacks. Since I started training — and, with it, slowly building my tolerance to CO₂ — I haven't had a single one. I can't prove to you that the CO₂ training is the reason; I changed a lot in my life around the same time, and I'm one person, not a study. But it fits what the research shows: sensitivity to CO₂ is closely associated with panic, some people's alarm systems are simply more reactive to it, and building a healthier tolerance appears to loosen that loop. My own experience lines up with the science, for whatever that's worth.

I want to be careful here: this isn't a claim that breathing exercises cure anxiety, and if you're dealing with panic attacks, please don't read it as medical advice. But the connection between how you breathe, your CO₂ level, and how safe your nervous system feels is real, physiological, and worth taking seriously.

CO₂ in medicine: a forgotten history, and a modern reality

If all of this sounds fringe, it's worth knowing that medicine has taken carbon dioxide seriously for a very long time — and in some ways forgot it.

By 1905, a New York physician named Achilles Rose had written an entire book, Carbonic Acid in Medicine, documenting CO₂ treatments, and European doctors were debating the effects of carbonated baths at medical congresses.

A lot of that early work was empirical and never tested to modern standards, so it fell out of fashion. But the core observation — that CO₂ dilates blood vessels and improves circulation — was correct, and it survives today in CO₂ balneotherapy (carbonated mineral baths still used for circulation in Germany, Japan, and central Europe) and in carboxytherapy , a modern treatment using CO₂ for circulation and skin, where the evidence is still emerging.

And far from being forgotten, CO₂ is woven through modern medicine in ways most people never realise:

Keyhole surgery runs on it. The gas surgeons use to gently inflate the abdomen during laparoscopic surgery is carbon dioxide — chosen precisely because the body absorbs and clears it so safely.
It's a vital sign. Anaesthetists and intensive-care doctors monitor exhaled CO₂ (capnography) as one of the most important signals of whether a patient is breathing properly. It's standard of care.
Sometimes doctors deliberately let it run high. In certain ventilated patients, physicians allow CO₂ to rise above normal — "permissive hypercapnia" — because it lets them ventilate the lungs more gently and protect them. A real, evidence-based case of more CO₂ being the better option.

Not a waste product. A tool.

The honest caveat: better up to a point

None of this means "CO₂ is good, so breathe as little as possible forever." Too much carbon dioxide is a genuine problem — it makes the blood too acidic and, at high enough levels, becomes dangerous. This is a sweet spot, not a one-way street.

The reason there's a sweet spot at all comes down to pH. Carbon dioxide is the body's primary fast-acting lever for keeping blood acidity inside a very narrow safe band — too little CO₂ tips you toward alkaline, too much toward acidic, and your body works constantly to hold the balance. That's why it guards CO₂ so carefully, and why both extremes cause trouble.

So why do I keep saying "more is often better"? Because in modern life, most people sit chronically on the low side. Stress, mouth-breathing, poor posture, and simple habit push us toward over-breathing, which keeps CO₂ slightly below where it should be. For the average person, "more CO₂" doesn't mean pushing above normal — it means climbing back up to normal. And that's exactly the balance doctors manage deliberately in a hospital. The goal is the right amount, and most of us are running short.

How to raise your CO₂ tolerance

The good news is that CO₂ tolerance is trainable. In broad strokes, it comes down to breathing less and breathing better: nasal breathing instead of mouth breathing, lighter and slower breathing through the day, and specific practices that gently build your body's comfort with rising CO₂.

Two established bodies of work are built around exactly this — Buteyko and the Oxygen Advantage . And, as I've written elsewhere, freediving training is one of the most complete forms of CO₂-tolerance work there is. I won't lay out protocols here, because this kind of training is best done with proper guidance rather than from a paragraph on the internet — but the direction is simple: less air, more often, until it becomes your default.

Where this fits with breathwork

Once you understand carbon dioxide, breathwork stops being mysterious. Every breathing practice on earth is really just doing one of three things with CO₂:

Calming practices let CO₂ rise gently back toward normal — which is part of why slow breathing feels settling.
Activating practices drive CO₂ down deliberately, to shift your state and, at the deep end, unlock emotional release.
Functional practices retrain your baseline tolerance to CO₂, so your everyday breathing improves for good.

That's the whole map. If you want it in full, I've written a simple guide to the three families of breathwork, and a deeper guide to conscious connected breathwork — the practice I focus on most. But it all comes back to this one misunderstood gas. Get CO₂ right, and you get breathing right.

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Breathwork Demystified

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:43:56 GMT

A Simple Guide to Breathwork

If you're here because the word "breathwork" confuses you — because it seems to point at a dozen different things at once and you can't tell which one people actually mean — you're in the right place.

That confusion is fair. The same word gets used for a gentle two-minute exercise before bed and for an intense hour-long session that leaves someone in tears on a mat. Those aren't variations on one thing; they're doing almost opposite things to your body.

My aim here is to explain breathwork as simply as I can, while giving you enough real understanding to pick your own adventure — to see the whole landscape and work out which kind actually fits what you're after.

Here's the simplest way in. Breathwork falls into three families, based on what the breath is doing to your nervous system: calming it down, revving it up, or retraining how you breathe day to day. Once you can see those three, everything else falls into place.

The one thing going on underneath all of it

Before the three families, it's worth knowing the single variable most breathwork is quietly manipulating — and it isn't oxygen.

Most people assume breathing is about getting more oxygen. But under normal conditions your blood is already almost fully saturated with it; you can't meaningfully top it up by breathing harder. The gas that actually changes when you alter your breathing is carbon dioxide (CO₂) — and CO₂ is far more than a waste product. It's one of the main levers controlling your blood's pH, how readily oxygen is released into your tissues, and how your nervous system reads whether you're safe or under threat.

This is the key that unlocks the whole landscape. Almost every breathwork practice, whatever it's called, is really a way of manipulating CO₂ — raising it, lowering it, or retraining how your body responds to it.

And there's a useful distinction hiding in that. Two of the three families change your CO₂ only temporarily — for the length of a session, after which your body returns to its baseline. The third doesn't change CO₂ in the moment so much as slowly shift where that baseline sits — a lasting adaptation rather than a temporary state. Hold onto that difference as we go; it's what separates a breathing practice from breathing retraining .

CO₂ turns out to be the quiet hero of this whole story, and it's genuinely fascinating once you dig in. I've written a full piece on what CO₂ actually does in the body, and why more of it is often better if you want to go deeper. For now, here's how the three families each put it to work.

1. Calming breathwork (down-regulating)

This is the family most people have already met. You deliberately slow the breath — longer exhales, gentle pauses, a steady rhythm — to move out of stress and into rest. A slow breath, especially a long exhale, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" side, which lowers heart rate and settles you. Part of what's happening is that slower breathing lets CO₂ rise gently back toward its natural level — and a touch more CO₂ is, counterintuitively, calming; it signals to the body that nothing's wrong. But it's temporary: the moment you stop, your levels drift back to where they started. You've shifted your state for a while, not changed your baseline.

Examples: box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, coherent or resonance breathing, extended-exhale breathing, and the slower end of pranayama.

What it's for: falling asleep, taking the edge off anxiety, calming down before something stressful, or downshifting after a hard day. It's the most immediately useful family and the easiest to learn — you can do it anywhere, and it works within a few breaths. These are techniques I teach my freediving students — not right before a dive (we deliberately don't manipulate the breath in the final minutes leading up to one), but for the waiting beforehand: staying calm and settled while you wait your turn to get on the line, so you're not burning through energy on nerves. Powerful for what they do — but notice what they do: they settle you down . The next family goes the other way.

2. Activating breathwork (up-regulating)

Here the breath speeds up. You breathe faster and fuller than normal, and — this is the key part — you sustain it, rather than taking a few quick breaths and stopping. That sustained overbreathing drives CO₂ down, well below its normal level, which tips your system toward activation. It's the same direction your breathing moves when you're stressed — fast and hard, CO₂ dropping, stress hormones released — which is precisely why this family energizes rather than calms. You're deliberately tapping a controlled version of that activated state.

What it's for splits into two quite different things, and it's worth separating them.

The first is mild activation — a short burst of faster breathing to sharpen and energize you, not unlike a cup of coffee. It nudges the same stress-arousal system a cold plunge does, in a much smaller way. Practices like Tummo or Kapalabhati (Breath of Fire) sit here, and in this lighter form they're safe to learn from a good app or YouTube — as long as you keep it to no more than a few minutes at a time. Short, energizing, everyday.

The second is deep emotional release — sustained, longer activation that drives CO₂ down far enough to quiet the brain's "executive" regions. Specifically, low CO₂ causes the blood vessels in the brain to narrow, reducing blood flow, particularly to the prefrontal cortex: the region that runs your thinking, filtering, and self-monitoring. As that part of the brain quiets down, the emotional and subconscious material it usually holds in check has room to surface. That's the physiological basis of the release people describe — not magic, just the thinking brain briefly stepping back and letting the rest through. This is a completely different proposition from the mild version, and it's the one that needs a trained facilitator and proper health screening — not a video and a mat. The intensity that makes it work is exactly why it shouldn't be done alone.

Like the calming family, both of these are temporary effects: you drive CO₂ down for the session, and your body rebalances afterward.

Examples: conscious connected breathwork, holotropic breathwork, 9D, somatic breathwork and rebirthing,

This is the family people mean when they call breathwork "life-changing" or "like a psychedelic without the drug" — because at its deeper end, it genuinely can be. Conscious connected breathwork lives right at that deep end. It uses a continuous, circular rhythm with no pause between the inhale and the exhale, sustained for the whole session — which is what makes it more intense and further-reaching than most of the other practices in this group. I've written a full guide to how CCB works and what happens in a session if you want the detail.

3. Functional breathing (everyday)

This one is different from the other two, and most breathwork articles miss it entirely. The first two families are sessions — you change your CO₂ temporarily, have an experience, and return to baseline. Functional breathing works on the baseline itself, and on the machinery of breathing. And it isn't only about CO₂: it's several things at once — retraining nasal breathing, expanding lung capacity, improving the mobility of the chest and ribcage, and strengthening the diaphragm and the other breathing muscles. But one of the most important pieces is raising your tolerance to CO₂, so your body stops over-responding to it.

Because most chronic overbreathing is really CO₂ intolerance : the body panics at a perfectly normal level of it and drives you to breathe more than you need — faster, shallower, through the mouth. Retrain that sensitivity, along with the mechanics, and your whole baseline settles: better sleep, a calmer nervous system, more efficient breathing, all running quietly in the background without you thinking about it. Unlike the other two families, the change is meant to last. If you want to go down this road, the two bodies of work worth looking into are Buteyko and the Oxygen Advantage — both are built around exactly this kind of retraining.

Here's a connection most people never make: freediving training is functional breathwork. When you train to hold your breath, you're doing exactly this work — raising your tolerance to rising CO₂ (that urge to breathe is CO₂, not a lack of oxygen), strengthening the diaphragm and breathing muscles, and improving the flexibility and mobility of the chest and ribcage so each breath is easier. It's never framed as breathwork, but physiologically it's one of the most complete forms of it there is — part of why freedivers tend to be remarkably calm, efficient breathers on dry land too. I teach both, and they feed each other constantly.

A different lens: breathwork by tradition

You'll also see breathwork sorted a completely different way — not by what it does, but by where it came from: yogic pranayama, Sufi and other ecstatic practices, modern Western therapeutic breathwork, breathing techniques out of sports science. That grouping is real and useful too.

But here's the thing worth understanding, because it clears up a lot of confusion: a single tradition can span more than one family. Yoga includes both deeply calming practices and intensely activating ones — pranayama isn't one thing. And some Sufi breathing is, mechanically, essentially hyperventilation used to reach a trance or ecstatic state. The framing around it is spiritual, but the physiology underneath is the same up-regulating, CO₂-lowering mechanism you'd find in holotropic breathwork or CCB. Same engine, different language.

I find that genuinely useful rather than deflating. It means you can look at almost any breathing practice — however it's dressed up — and ask one simple question: is this raising my CO₂, lowering it, or retraining my response to it? Once you can answer that, you're not at the mercy of the marketing.

Which one should you actually do?

It depends entirely on what you're after, and honestly, they're not interchangeable.

If you want to calm down, sleep better, or manage anxiety in the moment — the calming family. Box breathing, extended exhales, resonance breathing. Simple, safe, immediately useful.

If you want deep emotional release, to work with stuck stress or old patterns, or to experience a genuinely altered state — the activating family, and conscious connected breathwork specifically, with proper facilitation.

If you want to breathe better all day, improve your sleep, or perform better physically — functional breathing. Nasal breathing and CO₂-tolerance work, practised until it becomes your default.

Plenty of people use more than one: a calming practice for daily stress, functional breathing as a long-term habit, and the occasional CCB session for the deeper work is a completely sensible combination. They're not competing — they're different tools for different jobs.

Where I fit in

My own work lives at the extremes of CO₂ — and everything in between. At one end, the deep activating work: conscious connected breathwork, where you drive CO₂ right down to reach altered states and emotional release. At the other, the functional end: rebuilding how you breathe and raising CO₂ tolerance for stress and performance. The calming practices sit in the middle, and I teach those too — but the transformative work I care most about is CCB.

If the deep end is what's calling you, the full guide to conscious connected breathwork is here, and you can work with me online from anywhere, or in person in Taiwan — sessions run in Taipei, Kaohsiung, and on Xiaoliuqiu, the small island I'm based on. Wherever you start, the useful first step is just knowing which family you're actually reaching for — and now you do.

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When Is It Acceptable to Cry? What Emotional Suppression Is Really Costing You

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:23:43 GMT

What the Body Holds When the Mind Won't Allow It

What Society Considers Acceptable Grief

At a funeral. Tears of joy at your child's birth. At a wedding. End of a sad movie. Or your underdog team finally winning a championship.

That's the list. That's what our culture gave us.

But here's the real question - what happens to the tears we never shed?

For most of my life - as a man - that list felt even shorter.

The Emotions We Were Never Given Permission to Feel

My mother's passing taught me something about grief. I feel nobody loves me more than my mom. That unconditional love provided me so much comfort throughout my life. I think about her every single day. I miss her every single day. But it doesn't weigh heavy on me the way you might expect - and I think it's because I was allowed to grieve. I cried my eyes out. Society gave me permission. And somehow, that permission made it possible to carry her with me without being crushed by her absence.

Not everything gets that permission.

When my son was diagnosed with autism, I put on a tough face and went to work. I did everything I could to get him help, to understand, to navigate a world that wasn't built for him or for us. There was no time to feel the sadness of knowing your child will not have the same childhood, the same opportunities, the same life that most will have.

You don't cry. You cope. You push. You perform.

And then you wonder why some mornings you wake up and something is just off. Not sad exactly. Not angry exactly. Just - wrong. Grumpy with no logical explanation. The opposite of your usual self. Mean in a way you don't recognize and can't explain. You look at your life and it's objectively good. Beautiful even.

And still. Something underneath.

When Life Looks Beautiful But Something Feels Off

I live on a small beautiful tropical island. I do work I am genuinely passionate about. I have a wonderful wife who shares my values and has a ridiculous sense of humor like me - or at least gets it. I wake up most mornings looking forward to the day ahead.

Freediving gave me so much of this. The joy. The community. The identity. The healing that happened slowly and then all at once.

But there was still something underneath that freediving reached but didn't fully move.

What Conscious Connected Breathwork Unlocked

About two years ago I was introduced to Conscious Connected Breathwork .

One session showed me the potential. Although I did not cry my eyes out like some people did in that room that evening, something shifted in a way that I knew this was the right direction.

Earlier this year I attended a breathwork facilitator training. We had sessions almost every day. At first nothing dramatic happened for me - I watched classmates around me have big cathartic moments while something in me was stirring but hadn't found its way out yet.

My entire body was vibrating.

After four or five sessions it came.

A cry that had been waiting to come out for many decades.

And in other sessions - uncontrollable laughter that lasted fifteen minutes. Joy and grief living in the same body, taking turns.

Not every session had a dramatic moment. But every single one left me with more clarity than I went in with. Because the breathwork was reaching what the mind had carefully, quietly protected for years. The things we suppress don't disappear. They wait. Without language. In the body. And it doesn't just quietly sit there dormant - it wreaks havoc, often in subtle ways. So subtle we just think it's our true self.

That wasn't the end. I kept going. Session after session. Each one peeling back another layer. Some dramatic. Some quiet. All of them necessary.

After those sessions I felt lighter. A heaviness lifted that I had stopped noticing I was carrying.

It may take a lifetime to get it all out. And that's okay - because I know I am on the right path now.

The Breathwork Retreat

Why am I telling you this?

Because I believe one of the most insidious things any of us can carry is the weight of everything we were never given permission to put down.

In September I am holding a Conscious Connected Breathwork retreat. Facilitated alongside someone I deeply trust. For people who are ready to create the conditions for something to move.

No promises about what will happen. These things are different for everyone. But if you have ever sat with a heaviness that has no name, a cry that won't come, or a life that looks right from the outside while something inside feels quietly off -

This might be for you.

Check out the details of the retreat here .

Conscious Connected Breathwork: A Complete, Honest Guide to What It Is and How It Works

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:52:32 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

Conscious connected breathwork is a guided breathing practice in which you breathe in a continuous, circular rhythm — no pause between the inhale and the exhale — sustained for the length of the session. That single change in how you breathe shifts your body's chemistry, your nervous system, and your brain itself: as the thinking, self-monitoring prefrontal cortex quiets, the emotional centres open up, and that's the door to everything else the practice is known for.

It's sometimes called circular breathwork , because the inhale rolls straight into the exhale and back again with no gap — the breath moves in a loop rather than a series of stops and starts.

It's worth knowing up front that "conscious connected breathwork" is also an umbrella term. The continuous-breathing pattern sits at the center of several related practices: rebirthing breathwork , developed by Leonard Orr in the 1970s; holotropic breathwork , developed by Stanislav and Christina Grof (more on that history below); and modern branded formats like 9D breathwork, which layer sound design and guided journeys over the same underlying mechanism. They differ in music, framing, and facilitation style, but the engine is the same: connected breathing, sustained.

How it actually works

Most breathing techniques you've heard of tell you to slow down — longer exhales, box breathing, four-in-four-out. This is the opposite. The pattern here is slightly faster and rhythmic, and you hold it for the whole session rather than a few minutes.

Sustaining that pattern lowers the level of carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) in your blood, which temporarily shifts the balance of gases in your system and nudges your blood chemistry toward a mild alkalosis. That might sound like a side effect, but it's the actual mechanism. That chemical shift is what signals your autonomic nervous system — the part of you that runs stress, rest, heart rate, and threat detection without your conscious input — to change state.

Here's the part that matters, and the part most breathwork marketing skips over. When the nervous system shifts like this, the thinking mind gets quieter. The mental chatter that normally filters and manages everything you feel starts to loosen its grip. And when that filter loosens, material that's been sitting underneath it — emotions, physical tension, old memories, the low-grade hyper vigilance a lot of people carry without noticing — has room to surface. That's the mechanism behind emotional release. It isn't mystical. Your body finally has the space to move something it's been holding, and it takes it.

This is why I'm careful about how the practice gets described. CCB isn't a relaxation technique that happens to be intense. Its whole point is to dig into the subconscious material driving stress, anxiety, and that "wired but tired" state — and to do it through physiology, not belief.

What CCB is NOT

Because "breathwork" has become a catch-all word, it's easy to lump very different practices together. CCB is a specific thing, and it helps to say what it isn't.

It's not box breathing or slow breathing. Techniques like box breathing, physiological sighs, or 4-7-8 breathing are down-regulation tools — you slow the breath to calm the nervous system in the moment. They're genuinely useful; I teach them to my freediving students to lower the stress response and conserve oxygen, and they work well for that. But they work by settling you down . CCB works by ramping the system up into an altered state so that deeper material can surface. Different pattern, different mechanism, different purpose.

It's not the Wim Hof Method. Wim Hof combines cycles of heavy breathing with breath retention (holding the breath out) and cold exposure. It's built around rounds and pauses. CCB has no retention and no pauses — the breath stays continuous the entire time. The felt experience and the goal are different.

It's not meditation. Meditation generally asks you to observe and let thoughts pass. CCB is active and physical; you're driving a state change through the breath itself. They can complement each other, but they're not the same tool.

If you take one thing from this section: CCB is intense and deep, not slow. People sometimes arrive expecting a gentle relaxation class and are surprised by how much happens. That intensity is the feature, not a bug — but it's also why facilitation and screening matter, which I'll come back to.

What happens in a session

The honest answer is that it varies a lot from person to person and session to session. But some things come up often enough to name.

Physically, tingling in the hands, feet, or around the mouth is very common — that's the shift in blood chemistry, and it's harmless. Some people experience tetany , a temporary tightening or cramping in the hands (they can curl up) or the jaw. It looks dramatic and feels strange, but it passes as the breathing settles, and it's a normal part of the process rather than a sign anything's wrong. Temperature shifts, feeling hot or cold in waves, are also common.

Emotionally, this is where the range is widest. Waves of emotion, unexpected tears, laughter, a feeling of release, sometimes memories or images surfacing. Some people feel a profound sense of calm and spaciousness afterward that's genuinely hard to put into words. Others have a quieter session and mostly notice they feel lighter. Both are fine. There's no "right" experience, and forcing one defeats the purpose.

Sessions are structured and guided from start to finish. Even when things get intense, you're not navigating it alone — the setup is designed so that the container feels safe enough for you to let go, which is the whole point.

What the science says

For a long time breathwork sat in the "probably relaxing, largely unstudied" pile. That's changing. A cluster of rigorous studies over the last couple of years has started to map what's actually happening in the body and brain during CCB — measurable drops in cortisol, shifts in blood chemistry, and brain-imaging patterns that overlap, phenomenologically, with what people report on psychedelics.

I've written a full breakdown of that research in a separate piece - The Science Has Caught Up: What New Research Says About Conscious Connected Breathwork — so I won't repeat it all here. The short version: the effects are real, measurable, and increasingly hard to dismiss, and the conversation in the research world has moved from "does this help people relax" to "what are the mechanisms and how large are the effects."

A fair caveat, because I'd rather you trust me than oversell you: this is still early-stage research. CCB is not a cure for anxiety, trauma, or ADHD, and none of the studies claim it is. Where the practice is honestly compared head-to-head against established tools like meditation, it tends to hold its own rather than blow them away. That's still a strong result for something this accessible — but "as good as, through a different door" is the accurate framing, not "better than everything."

Why the body holds stress in the first place

If the idea that emotions get "stored in the body" sounds a bit woo, stay with me, because there's a real physiology underneath it — and you'll probably recognize yourself in it.

Your nervous system is constantly scanning for safety and threat — a process the researcher Stephen Porges called neuroception . When something stressful or overwhelming happens, your body generates a physical charge to deal with it: adrenaline, muscle activation, an impulse to act. In an animal, that charge gets fully discharged — a gazelle that escapes a predator will literally shake the activation off and then carry on grazing as if nothing happened. The stress cycle completes.

Humans usually can't do that, and most of the time for good reason. Something happens at work, you feel a surge of anger, and the body's impulse is to shout, confront, move. But you can't — you're in an office, so you swallow it and answer the next email. Something makes you deeply sad and the body wants to cry, but you learned young that crying isn't okay: a parent told you to toughen up, or you absorbed the message from school, from friends, from a culture that treats tears as weakness. So you hold it in. You feel the wave of grief or rage rise and you clamp down on it, because in that moment clamping down is the socially correct thing to do.

Here's the problem. Suppressing the response in the moment is fine — it's a normal, functional social skill. But the physical charge doesn't vanish just because you didn't express it. The cycle never completed. The body wanted to shake, cry, shout, or move, and it didn't get to — so that activation gets stored, unfinished. Do that a few thousand times over a lifetime, which is roughly what modern life asks of us, and you accumulate a backlog of stress the body never got to discharge. It lives on as muscle tension, as a braced jaw or tight chest, as shallow breathing, as a baseline of alertness that never quite switches off. Peter Levine's work on somatic experiencing and Bessel van der Kolk's *The Body Keeps the Score* both describe exactly this: unprocessed stress doesn't stay purely psychological, it settles into the body.

Talk therapy works on the story. But a lot of this material was never stored as a story — it was stored as an interrupted physical response, below language. That's why you can understand your stress perfectly well and still feel it sitting in your chest. CCB works from the body up: by shifting the nervous system directly, it can reach that held, unfinished activation and let the body finally complete what it couldn't at the time — which is often why the tears or the shaking come in a session, sometimes without any clear story attached. The body isn't being dramatic. It's finishing something it started years ago.

Is it safe? Who should be cautious

Because CCB is genuinely powerful, it's not automatically right for everyone, and I take screening seriously rather than treating it as a formality.

The connected breathing and the shift in blood chemistry mean there are some conditions where CCB isn't appropriate, or where it should only be done with medical clearance and experienced facilitation — for example certain cardiovascular conditions, pregnancy, epilepsy, a history of certain psychiatric conditions, and a few others, — which is why screening is built into every booking, so anything needing medical clearance or extra care gets flagged before we begin.

This isn't me covering myself. The intensity that makes CCB effective is the same intensity that makes proper facilitation and honest screening non-negotiable. If someone's waving you into a deep breathwork session without asking a single question about your health or history, that's a reason to be cautious, not reassured.

What happens afterward — and why integration matters

Straight after a session, people often describe feeling lighter, clearer, and more settled — sometimes a kind of quiet that's rare in ordinary life. That's lovely, but it isn't actually where the value lives. The value lives in integration , and this is the part the wellness world tends to skip.

A session can surface something real — an emotion, a memory, a pattern you've been running, a piece of tension you finally felt let go. But surfacing it isn't the same as making sense of it. Integration is the work of taking what came up and actually weaving it into how you live: noticing it, reflecting on it, letting it change a behavior or a belief, sometimes talking it through with a facilitator or therapist. Without that, a powerful session risks becoming just an intense experience you had once — a good afternoon that fades by Thursday.

Think of the session as the part that loosens things and brings them to the surface. Integration is what turns that into lasting change instead of a temporary high. It's why I build reflection and follow-up into how I work, and why the practice tends to compound over time: each session, properly integrated, builds a more conscious relationship with your breath, your stress response, and the link between your body and your emotions. Done once, it's an experience. Done as a practice with integration, it's how the nervous system actually recalibrates.

Trying it for yourself

Breathwork is roughly where yoga was in the 1990s — clearly doing something, increasingly backed by research, and not yet mainstream enough that everyone's tried it. If you've been curious but waiting for it to feel less fringe, that moment is arriving.

If you want to experience CCB properly guided and safely screened, that's exactly what I do at Nomad Breath Labs — online one-to-one sessions , group sessions , and multi-day retreats . Start wherever feels right; the mechanism is the same, and the point is simply to feel it rather than read about it.

The Science Has Caught Up on Conscious Connected Breathwork

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:50:38 GMT

What Research Says....

For years, breathwork practitioners have said things that sounded, to the scientific

establishment, a bit too mystical. Words like “ego dissolution,” “deep emotional

release,” and “shifted states of consciousness” didn’t exactly fit neatly into a clinical trial.

So the practice got lumped into the broad category of “relaxation techniques” and left

largely unstudied.

That is changing — fast.

A cluster of rigorous new studies published in 2024 and 2025 has fundamentally

repositioned Conscious Connected Breathwork (CCB). Researchers are no longer calling

it simply a relaxation tool. They are calling it a “Non-Pharmacological Psychedelic” and

a “Neuroendocrine Reset.” The science is catching up to what practitioners have long

reported in the room.

Here is a snapshot of what the research has now confirmed:

• Brain-state change comparable to psilocybin. A neuroimaging study

found that CCB reliably induces the same “ego dissolution” seen with

medium-to-high doses of magic mushrooms — a state long associated with

breakthroughs in trauma therapy and anxiety treatment.

• Measurable hormonal reset in a single session. Blood analysis before and

after CCB showed a significant drop in cortisol (the primary stress hormone) and

a rise in prolactin, which supports immune function and recovery.

• Anxiety relief with a “large” clinical effect size. A randomized controlled

trial found CCB reduced anxiety scores by over 10 points on a validated clinical

scale, with an effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.44) that exceeds most pharmaceutical

interventions.

• Brainwave shifts linked to focus and ADHD relief. EEG research showed

that CCB reduces “worry” beta waves while increasing gamma waves — the

frequency associated with peak focus and high-level information processing.

Here is what each of these studies actually found, and why it matters.

1. CCB Induces the Same Brain State as Psilocybin — Without the

Drug

To understand why this finding is significant, it helps to know where CCB came from —

and the surprising role that a banned drug played in its creation.

In the 1950s and 60s, Czech psychiatrist Dr. Stanislav Grof was conducting some of the

most promising research in the history of mental health. He was using LSD-assisted

therapy to treat conditions like depression, anxiety, addiction, and end-of-life fear in

terminally ill patients, with results that were, by the standards of the time,

extraordinary. Patients reported profound shifts in their relationship to trauma, to

identity, and to death. Grof became convinced that the capacity for deep psychological

transformation wasn’t coming from the drug itself — but from the non-ordinary states of

consciousness it was facilitating.

Then, in 1968, LSD was made illegal. The research stopped. Grof’s clinical work was

shut down overnight.

Rather than abandon the inquiry, Grof asked a different question: was there another

way to reliably access those same therapeutic states without a controlled substance?

Working with his wife Christina, he began experimenting with breath.

The result, developed over years of clinical work, was Holotropic Breathwork — a form of Conscious

Connected Breathwork using accelerated breathing, evocative music, and bodywork to

induce non-ordinary states. Grof found that the breath could take people to the same

territory that LSD had opened — not always identical, but in the same neighborhood.

The work continued, legally, without the substance.

That history matters now because of what brain imaging has confirmed.

A landmark study from Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), published in PLOS

ONE in August 2025, used quantitative MRI to map in real time what happens inside

the brain during high-ventilation CCB.

Participants consistently entered a state researchers called “Oceanic Boundlessness” — a

felt sense of unity, bliss, and expanded awareness. This is not a subjective description.

The MRI data showed it had a clear anatomical signature.

The key finding was reduced blood flow in the posterior insula and parietal operculum

— the regions of the brain most associated with the sense of being a bounded, separate

self. In other words, the part of the brain that maintains your everyday sense of “I” was

quieting down. This is what researchers call ego dissolution.

The researchers noted that this pattern closely mirrors what is seen with

medium-to-high doses of psilocybin — validating, neurologically, what Grof had

observed clinically half a century earlier.

Why ego dissolution is therapeutically valuable

Ego dissolution sounds alarming if you’ve never experienced it. In practice, it is more

often described as relief. Here is why it matters therapeutically.

The everyday ego — your sense of being a fixed, bounded self — is also the structure that

maintains your psychological defenses. This is useful for getting through the day. It

becomes a problem when those defenses are what’s keeping you locked inside a trauma

response, a negative self-story, or an anxiety pattern that no longer serves you. The ego

guards the walls, and sometimes the walls are the problem.

When ego dissolution occurs — whether through psychedelics or breathwork — those

defensive walls temporarily soften. The rigid narrative of “who I am” and “what

happened to me” becomes more fluid. This is the window in which deep-seated

emotional patterns can be witnessed, processed, and released in ways that are often

impossible in ordinary waking consciousness. It is why patients in psychedelic-assisted

therapy frequently describe a single session as more transformative than years of

conventional talk therapy.

CCB appears to open the same window. Not for everyone, not in every session — but

reliably enough that it is now showing up in brain scans.

• What it means practically: The therapeutic state that researchers have been

trying to recreate with carefully controlled psychedelic trials can, for many

people, be reached without any substance, in a facilitated breathwork session.

Source: Brighton and Sussex Medical School — Breathwork and the Brain

2. A Single Session Measurably Resets Your Stress Hormones

A study published in MDPI in late 2025 drew blood from participants before and after a

single CCB session and analyzed the results. The physiological changes were significant

enough to prompt the researchers to describe the practice as a potential

“stress-modulatory” switch for the nervous system.

The key findings:

• Cortisol decreased significantly. Cortisol is the body’s primary stress

hormone, and chronically elevated levels are linked to anxiety, immune

suppression, sleep disruption, and accelerated aging. A measurable drop after a

single session is clinically meaningful.

• Prolactin increased. This is perhaps the more surprising finding. Prolactin is

typically associated with lactation, but it also plays an important role in immune

modulation and stress recovery. An increase suggests the body is actively shifting

into a restorative state.

• Respiratory alkalosis occurred. The connected breathing rhythm drives a

temporary shift in blood pH. The researchers believe this mild alkalosis acts as a

biochemical trigger — the mechanism by which CCB signals the nervous system

to shift states.

This study, the first of its kind to analyze blood gas parameters during CCB, found that

the hormonal and biochemical changes are not just subjective — they are measurable in

the blood.

3. A Randomized Controlled Trial Found a “Large Effect Size” for

Anxiety

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard in clinical research — the

kind of study that convinces skeptics. A 2024–2025 RCT published on PubMed tested

CCB specifically for anxiety, with results that were statistically remarkable.

Participants were assessed using the Zung Anxiety Scale (ZAS) at baseline and after the

intervention. The numbers:

• CCB group: anxiety scores dropped by an average of 10.56 points (from 43.87 to

33.31)

• Control group: scores barely moved, dropping only 1.89 points

• Effect size (Cohen’s d): 1.44 — classified as a “large effect”

To put the effect size in context: most antidepressant and anxiolytic medications

produce effect sizes in the range of 0.3 to 0.5. Standard talk therapy for anxiety typically

lands between 0.6 and 0.8. A Cohen’s d of 1.44 is, by conventional research standards, a

very large result.

This does not mean breathwork replaces therapy or medication for everyone. But it does

mean it deserves serious consideration as a primary or adjunct intervention — not a

wellness bonus, but a clinically meaningful tool.

4. EEG Research Points to Enhanced Focus — Particularly Relevant

for ADHD

A 2025 study out of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam analyzed the cortical brain activity of

experienced CCB practitioners using EEG (electroencephalography) before, during, and

after sessions. The findings offer a neurological explanation for one of the most

commonly reported post-session experiences: an unusual clarity and calm focus that can

last for hours.

The EEG data showed two notable shifts:

• Beta waves decreased. Specifically Beta 1 and Beta 2 frequencies — the

brainwave patterns most associated with ordinary waking cognition, rumination,

and worry — showed reduced power. Less mental noise.

• Gamma waves increased. Gamma activity is associated with high-level

information processing, perceptual binding, and peak cognitive states. It is the

brainwave signature of focused, integrative thinking.

For people with ADHD, this pattern is particularly significant. ADHD is frequently

characterized by overactivation of certain beta frequencies alongside underactivation of

the kind of focused, integrative processing that gamma supports. The EEG profile seen

after CCB sessions mirrors the shift that ADHD treatments are designed to facilitate.

This helps explain the anecdotal reports that are common in breathwork communities —

people describing hours of unusual mental clarity after a session, often describing it as

one of the few times their mind feels genuinely quiet.

What This Means

These four studies, taken together, represent something of a shift in how the research

community is positioning Conscious Connected Breathwork. The conversation is

moving from “does breathwork help people relax” to “what are the mechanisms, and

how large are the effects.”

The mechanisms being identified — ego dissolution via posterior insula suppression,

neuroendocrine rebalancing, pH-mediated nervous system shifts, gamma wave

enhancement — are not vague wellness claims. They are measurable, reproducible

physiological events.

This is still early-stage research. CCB is not a cure for anxiety, trauma, or ADHD, and

none of these studies suggest otherwise. But the evidence is growing that the breath,

used intentionally and with proper facilitation, acts on the nervous system in ways that

matter — and that the effects are large enough to take seriously.

If you’ve been curious about breathwork but waiting for the science to catch up, it’s

catching up.

Sources

1. Brighton and Sussex Medical School — Breathwork and the Brain: New Study Reveals

How Controlled Breathing Alters Consciousness

2. MDPI / PMC — Take a Breather: Physiological Correlates of a Conscious Connected

Breathing Session in a Trained Group of Breast Cancer Patients

3. PubMed — Efficacy of Online Conscious Connected Breathwork in Reducing

Symptoms of Anxiety: A Randomized Waitlist Control Trial

4. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — Effects of Conscious Connected Breathing on

Cortical Brain Activity, Mood and State of Consciousness in Healthy Adults