Breathwork

Gentle sessions look like a meditation class: seated or lying, a teacher counting rhythms, thirty to sixty minutes, and you leave calmer than you arrived.

Journey-style sessions run longer. You lie on a mat with loud evocative music and breathe in a continuous circular rhythm without pausing, for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour or more. Tingling in the hands and face, temperature changes, muscle tightening, tears and laughter are all common. Facilitators stay in the room throughout, and there is usually time to sit, draw or talk afterwards.

Controlled breathing is old and widely distributed — pranayama in Indian practice, related methods in Chinese traditions.

The Western journey formats are recent and have a specific origin: Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist who had run legal LSD research programmes in Prague and then in Maryland, developed Holotropic Breathwork with his wife Christina in the 1970s at the Esalen Institute, explicitly as a drug-free way to reach the states his research had lost access to. Nearly every intense breathwork format on offer today traces back to that work in some fashion.

The Wim Hof Method is a separate modern strand: rounds of thirty to forty fast breaths followed by a breath hold, paired with cold exposure.

Never do breath-hold practices in or near water, or while driving. The Wim Hof Method's own guidance says exactly this. The breathing drives carbon dioxide down, and it is carbon dioxide — not a lack of oxygen — that produces the urge to breathe. You can lose consciousness in a pool without any warning that anything is wrong. People have drowned this way.

For intense, hyperventilation-based sessions, Cleveland Clinic lists cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, recent surgery or injury, panic attacks, psychosis, seizure disorders and pregnancy as reasons to check with a doctor first. Gentle slow-breathing classes carry none of this weight.

The evidence for the dramatic claims is weak. A 2023 systematic review of the Wim Hof Method found a possible short-term effect on inflammatory markers and rated the quality of the underlying studies as very low.