What Can Transformational Breathwork Actually Offer?
Did it release something?
Did I have a breakthrough?
Did it change me?
Transformational breathwork tends to get judged through these types of questions. And I understand why. The faster, deeper end of the breathwork spectrum is often talked about in terms of emotional release, healing, breakthroughs and personal transformation.
While those things could be part of someone’s experience, they’re a fairly narrow set of criteria for judging its impact.
What if the benefits of transformational breathwork are broader than those outcomes?
By transformational breathwork, I’m referring here to approaches such as Conscious Connected Breathwork, Holotropic-style breathwork and other guided practices that deliberately use faster, deeper breathing to produce a marked shift in physiology and subjective experience.
So what else could transformational breathwork offer?
TL;DR
Transformational breathwork changes physiology and the wider conditions in which experience unfolds.
Those changes can alter what receives attention, what becomes available to explore and how familiar material is experienced.
An experience can feel important without its first explanation necessarily being correct.
A different experience can provide new information or a new possibility, but that is not the same as lasting change.
Some experiences may also be worth having for their strangeness, wonder or intensity alone.
Change the Conditions
On any regular day your brain is being given a fairly predictable stream of information. You’re moving through familiar surroundings, responding to familiar demands and filtering an enormous amount of sensory information according to what seems relevant.
Transformational breathwork changes several of those conditions at once and can produce a temporary shift in awareness, perception and subjective experience, what’s often referred to as an altered state.
The breathing itself changes blood chemistry. Sustained high ventilation lowers carbon dioxide, resulting in a state known as hypocapnia, which reduces blood flow through the brain and contributes to a range of sensations that can feel unfamiliar. At the same time, a guided session usually changes the wider environmental context too. You may be lying down for an extended period, moving less, listening to evocative music, with your eyes closed and directing more attention towards your internal experience than you would during everyday life. (1)
Recent breathwork research is beginning to connect that physiological shift with the subjective one. In a 2025 study of 61 experienced practitioners using Holotropic and Conscious Connected Breathwork, greater reductions in end-tidal CO2 (the amount of carbon dioxide measured at the very end of an exhale) were associated with greater reported depth of altered state. However, the researchers were careful not to claim that low CO2 explains the whole experience. Psychological context and the wider setting appear to contribute too. (2)
There isn’t one neat mechanism producing the experience, and there isn’t one predictable response to the conditions we’ve changed.
What Becomes Available?
Our bodies are constantly producing information. Breathing, heartbeat, pressure, temperature, muscle tension, movement, visceral sensations and countless other signals are being monitored whether they reach conscious awareness or not.
Respiratory interoception is the broad term for sensing and interpreting information related to breathing from inside the body. It isn’t a single signal coming from one place. It involves multiple streams of sensory information that contribute to how breathing feels and how that feeling is interpreted. (3)
During transformational breathwork, some of those signals become unusually strong while the environment is simultaneously encouraging us to pay attention to them.
That doesn’t necessarily make us more accurate observers of the body. It can make some internal signals much harder to ignore.
What we do with that information is another question.
Meditation research offers an interesting adjacent comparison. Focused-attention practices deliberately narrow attention onto a chosen object, while open-monitoring practices allow a wider range of thoughts, sensations and experiences to enter awareness without selecting one in advance. Research suggests those modes of attention can produce different cognitive effects. (4)
While transformational breathwork isn’t identical to open-monitoring meditation, the distinction offers a useful way of thinking about exploration.
Sometimes we arrive at an inner practice with a very specific task: calm down, understand this problem, work through that emotion, find an answer. At other times there may be value in allowing an experience to unfold before deciding which part deserves our attention.
Curiosity research describes something similar from another direction. Curiosity involves seeking information in situations where uncertainty itself creates a reason to explore. We do not always need to know exactly what we are looking for before exploration becomes useful. (5)
That leaves room for a thought, image, sensation, emotion or memory to be noticed without immediately turning it into a project (or projection!)
There is also a useful concept from mindfulness research called decentering: the ability to notice internal experiences with some separation from them. A thought can be noticed as a thought. A sensation can be experienced as a sensation. An emotion can be present without immediately becoming a verdict about who we are or what something means. (6)
That becomes especially relevant when an experience feels powerful.
Experience, Meaning and Perspective
An explanation for what we’re experiencing during a breathwork session can arrive incredibly quickly, sometimes while the experience is still happening.
A strong sensation might be interpreted as an emotion being released. A memory appearing during bodywork might become evidence that the memory was stored in that body part. An altered state might be attributed to endogenous DMT. A sudden feeling of certainty might be treated as proof that an insight is true.
But having an experience and deciding what that experience means are different processes.
This is part of the argument I explored in Does the Body Really Keep the Score? The sensation, memory or emotional response does not need to be dismissed simply because a literal explanation about where it came from may be shaky.
Adjacent psychedelic research provides a useful caution here. A 2024 perspective paper specifically examined how psychedelics might contribute to false insights and beliefs. Psychedelic experiences can generate intense feelings of insight and certainty, but that subjective feeling of “I suddenly understand this” is not an infallible truth detector. (7)
We do not yet have evidence showing that transformational breathwork produces the same belief-forming mechanisms. However, the comparison is useful because both can involve unusual altered states in which experiences feel highly salient and personally important.
That suggests a different relationship with meaning: take the experience seriously without rushing to make the first explanation permanent.
The same caution applies to perspective.
Changing conditions can alter what is remembered, noticed or given weight. Research on context-dependent memory shows that retrieval can be influenced by the conditions in which information was learned and recalled. Expectations also shape perception by helping the brain interpret incoming information using what it already knows. (8,9)
Put someone into an unusual physiological state, change the sensory environment, alter what receives attention and reduce many of the normal demands competing for awareness, and familiar material may be encountered differently.
That does not mean the altered-state version is the true version. It may simply give us another perspective to compare with the one we usually inhabit. To me, that is one of the more interesting possibilities in transformational breathwork.
Possibility Is Not the Same as Outcome
Our learning process depends partly on discrepancies between what is expected and what actually happens.
Prediction errors are one way neuroscience describes these mismatches. Research across learning and memory suggests unexpected information can influence what gets encoded and remembered. The exact effects are complex, and prediction error is not a magic reset button for beliefs (10), but the basic principle gives us a useful way to think about possibility.
If I expect a certain situation, memory or emotion to always produce the same response, then experiencing something different gives me information that wasn’t there before.
Perhaps I can stay with a sensation I normally avoid. Perhaps an old memory appears without the emotional response I expected. Perhaps I discover I can move into an intense physiological state and remain present. Perhaps I experience a part of myself that doesn’t fit particularly neatly with the story I usually tell about who I am.
None of that guarantees lasting change, but it can be a starting point.
A small exploratory trial published in 2026 gives us a reason to keep investigating. Twenty-four adults who had practised Conscious Connected Breathwork (CCB) before were randomised to either high-ventilation CCB or body-scan meditation. Around a week later, the breathwork group reported greater psychological insight and self-reported behavioural change. It is important to acknowledge that the study was small, open-label and involved people with prior breathwork experience, so it should be treated as preliminary rather than evidence of durable transformation. (11)
But it raises a worthwhile possibility: an unusual experience may give us material that can be tested, practised and explored after the session ends.
This is where integration starts to matter, although the word itself can be frustratingly vague. In practical terms, it’s what happens when we take something from the experience and begin testing it against ordinary life.
If an experience suggests that another way of responding might be available, ordinary life is where we find out whether that possibility holds up. Repetition, context and what happens next shape whether it remains an interesting moment or begins to influence how we actually live.
I explore that side more deeply in Why Change Doesn’t Always Last.
The Case for the Extraordinary
There is another possibility, one that gets lost when every breathwork experience has to justify itself against the criteria of healing, behaviour change or personal development.
The experience may simply be extraordinary.
Together, the 2025 study and the 2026 A2A trial document psychedelic-like experiences during high-ventilation breathwork. Across the two studies, participants reported altered perception, emotional breakthrough, mystical-type experiences and changes in the ordinary sense of self. (2,11)
We’re getting better at measuring parts of this. We are nowhere near explaining all of it.
… And maybe we don’t need to before acknowledging that ‘the extraordinary’ has value of its own.
Awe, novelty, strangeness and encountering consciousness outside its familiar range are all part of the human experience. We happily travel, listen to music, climb mountains, watch sunsets and enter all sorts of unusual environments without demanding that every experience make us a better person afterwards.
Some experiences don’t need to improve us to be worth having.
Which brings me back to the questions we started with.
Did it release something? Did I have a breakthrough? Did it change me?
Maybe.
But now we can also ask: What changed in my attention? What became available to explore? What meaning did I give the experience? Did I encounter something familiar from another perspective? Did anything challenge what I expected? Is there a possibility here worth testing afterwards? Or was it simply an extraordinary experience?
Broadening what we consider the benefits doesn’t make transformational breathwork less transformational.
Instead it provides more ways to understand what the experience may actually offer us.
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References
Immink RV, Pott FC, Secher NH & van Lieshout JJ (2014). Hyperventilation, cerebral perfusion, and syncope. Journal of Applied Physiology. (PubMed)
Havenith MN et al. (2025). Decreased CO2 saturation during circular breathwork supports emergence of altered states of consciousness. Communications Psychology. (Nature)
Chan PYS, Lee LY & Davenport PW (2024). Neural mechanisms of respiratory interoception. Autonomic Neuroscience. (PubMed)
Lippelt DP, Hommel B & Colzato LS (2014). Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity – A review. Frontiers in Psychology. (PubMed Central (PMC))
Monosov IE (2024). Curiosity: primate neural circuits for novelty and information seeking. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. (Nature)
Bernstein A et al. (2015). Decentering and Related Constructs: A Critical Review and Metacognitive Processes Model. Perspectives on Psychological Science. (PubMed)
McGovern HT et al. (2024). An Integrated Theory of False Insights and Beliefs Under Psychedelics. Communications Psychology. (Nature)
Smith SM & Vela E (2001). Environmental context-dependent memory: a review and meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. (PubMed)
de Lange FP, Heilbron M & Kok P (2018). How Do Expectations Shape Perception? Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (PubMed)
Shing YL, Brod G & Greve A (2023). Prediction error and memory across the lifespan. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. (PubMed)
Fincham GW et al. (2026). An exploratory study of breathwork-induced altered states of consciousness in experienced practitioners: the airways to alteration (A2A) trial. Frontiers in Psychology. (Frontiers)
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