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Cultures independently found the same breaths
Breathing that builds stress
Some methods create stress in the body so it can blow the gasket and start anew. The Wim Hof method works this way: vigorous breathing meant to stress you out, followed by a hold meant to calm you down, which flips the body between sympathetic and parasympathetic states. The stress is bottled into a short practice, and the rest of the day goes more chill.
Holotropic breathwork
Holotropic breathwork pushes it further. It used to run three hours and is meant to be done every year or every decade. All that vigorous breathing blows off so much CO2 that the body becomes extremely alkaline, and in the deep stages around 40% of the blood flow to the brain is cut off, which causes hallucinations and a different reflection on life.
Breathing that calms
Other methods create extreme calm through slow, rhythmic breathing. They go by hundreds of names in Hindu, ancient Chinese, Native American, and many other cultures, and each discovered the same thing at a different time, independent of the others, because it worked. Wim Hof did not invent the modality; the yogis were doing the same thing forever. Today instruments can measure what it does to the blood and the brain.
Where did holotropic breathwork come from?
The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina developed it in the 1970s at the Esalen Institute in California. Grof had studied LSD in therapy until legal research on the drug ended, and he sought a way to reach similar states without it. Participants breathe fast for an extended period, usually with evocative music. Grof coined the name from Greek roots meaning moving toward wholeness.
What did the Wim Hof studies show?
In a 2014 study in PNAS from Radboud University in the Netherlands, volunteers trained in the Wim Hof method were injected with bacterial endotoxin, a substance that triggers a flu-like response. Compared with untrained volunteers, the trained group showed higher adrenaline, lower levels of inflammatory proteins, and fewer symptoms. Before that study, the autonomic nervous system was widely assumed to be beyond voluntary control. Twelve people were in each group.
Why does slow breathing calm the body?
Research on heart rate variability biofeedback has found that breathing near six breaths per minute produces the largest swings in heart rate. At that pace, the breathing rhythm lines up with the natural rhythm of blood pressure regulation, called the baroreflex, and the vagus nerve is engaged. The rhythm corresponds to a frequency of about 0.1 hertz.
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