I read a lot of papers that never make it into a newsletter. Most are incremental, narrow, built for other researchers rather than for the person trying to feel better in their own body. But every so often one crosses my desk that makes me want to stop and talk about it, not because it proves something definitive, but because it gives physiological shape to something people have been doing with their breath for thousands of years.
This one, presented at the ECNP Congress in Munich by researchers at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, led by Dr. Christian Schmitz, looked at a small group of healthy, experienced breathwork practitioners while they did intensive, high-ventilation breathing inside an MRI scanner. The researchers were watching two things: blood flow to the brain’s gray matter, and the pattern of communication inside what’s called the default mode network, the set of brain regions tied to self-referential thought, rumination, and the sense of being a separate self looking out at the world.
What the scan showed
During the breathing sessions, blood flow to the gray matter dropped sharply and consistently across participants. At the same time, the normal chatter inside the default mode network changed, and the people who reported the strongest shifts in their subjective state, the sense of dissolving boundaries, of unity, of something bigger than the usual self-talk, showed the largest changes in that network’s communication. Several participants described experiences that echoed what’s reported in research on moderate to high doses of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, minus the same intensity of visual effects.
The researchers were careful, and I want to be careful too. This was a small, uncontrolled study of people who already had years of breathwork experience, not a cross-section of beginners, and not a clinical trial testing breathwork against a condition. Outside reviewers made a point of saying the findings are preliminary and that we don’t yet know what, if any, clinical benefit follows from these brain changes. I’m not telling you this study proves breathwork treats anxiety or depression or anything else. I’m telling you it is remarkable that we can now watch, in real time, a voluntary change in how you breathe produce a measurable, reproducible shift in brain blood flow and brain network communication, using nothing but air and attention.
Why this matters to me
I did not come to medicine through meditation. I came to meditation through medicine, treating people for obesity and metabolic disease and noticing, over and over, that the physiology never existed in isolation from the nervous system. Stress physiology and metabolic physiology share wiring. So when I see a study that puts numbers, however preliminary, on what contemplative practitioners have described for centuries in different language, I pay attention. It’s one more thread connecting ancient technique to modern measurement, and I think that connection matters, because it gives people who are skeptical of anything that sounds like wellness language a reason to take a practice seriously.
One of the teachers I’ve come to trust on breathwork specifically is Dave Giesselman, who has worked with members of our practice community directly. I don’t say that to sell you anything. I say it because when I write about a practice like this, I want you to know it isn’t theoretical for me, there is a real person I’d point you toward if you wanted to go learn it properly, the way you’d want a real teacher for anything that touches your physiology this directly.
Connection, and the long list of paths
I believe, though I’ll say plainly this is more my own observation than something I can hand you a citation for, that a sense of connection, to other people, to something larger than the day’s to-do list, to your own interior experience, is part of what the people who age unusually well seem to share. I haven’t gone and verified that claim the way I’d verify a drug’s side effect profile, so take it as the working belief of someone who has spent years watching patients, not as settled science. But it’s why a study like this one interests me beyond the neuroscience. Breathwork, in the hands of these practitioners, seemed to produce exactly that kind of felt connection, to self, to something beyond self, measured not in a questionnaire but in a scanner.
I want to be honest about something else too. Meditation and mindfulness changed my life. I am a certified MBSR teacher because the practice did something for me that I didn’t expect and still don’t fully understand. But I would be doing you a disservice if I acted like that’s the only door into this kind of well-being. For someone else it might be breathwork. For someone else it might be cold water, or long walks without a phone, or singing in a group, or gardening. I plan to write about several of these over time, not because I think you need to collect them all, but because I think the research keeps handing us more evidence that there are many legitimate paths to the same physiological and psychological territory, and the goal was never to find the single correct one.
The easiest habit is the one you like
If there’s a single practical thing I want to leave you with, it’s this: longevity and well-being research keeps expanding the list of things that genuinely help, and that is good news, because it means you get to go looking for the one that fits you rather than forcing yourself into a practice that feels like a chore. The easiest way to sustain any habit, breath-based or otherwise, is to actually enjoy doing it. That’s not a lack of discipline. That’s just how adherence works in real life, in real bodies, over real years. The practice doesn’t have to be hard to be legitimate. It just has to be yours.
