The Neuroscience of Circular Breathing

It is fascinating how a slight change in the rhythm of your breath can cause a profound change in consciousness. This article will explore how the neuroscience of circular breathing works.

I began my own healing journey through breathwork a few years ago, and through this I have had sensations, visions, insights, and changes in perspective. I have experienced deep, profound emotional release, reorientation of my relationship to childhood memories, traumatic experiences, relationships, and my view of self and life. I am now a facilitator for others to have their breathwork journeys. I fully believe in breathwork as an effective healing tool.

During a breathwork journey, we are in an altered state of conscious. This means that we go inward, shifting our awareness from our outer surroundings. We connect back to the body, bodily sensations, emotions, and our inner world.

Breathwork often leads to processing deep emotional experiences, and then coming to a place of calm and clarity after moving through the deep intensity. It can be an emotional experience, we can receive inner guidance, feelings of “truth”, shifts in perspective, meaning-making, and lasting change.

Breathwork is a variety of techniques, from yogic practices & spiritual practices, and newer techniques based in the old traditions (ie. Holotropic, Conscious Connected Breathing). Conscious Connected Breathing is also called ‘Circular Breathing’ – taking a deeper & quicker breath, with no pauses in between.

Benefits:

Breathwork supports processing and healing trauma and grief, decreases anxiety, addiction, PTSD, depression, stress. It has a positive impact on well-being, self awareness, life satisfaction, and self expression. It increases heart-rate variability, which has a beneficial impact on our ability to handle emotional stress and overwhelming experiences.

Breathwork evokes safety (you control your breath), supportand connection (supported by a facilitator), and embodiment (connection to your autonomic nervous system through breath).

How Does it Work?

Nobody really knows exactly how breathwork works. What happens in the brain is basically that oxygen increases, blood vessels constrict, cortisol levels go up, hyperventilation leads to CO2 decrease, restricts blood flow to the brain, leading to decrease in conscious control.

From the few studies on the subject, it is speculated that the physiological effects of the breathing pattern changes neuronal activity, and leads to release of DMT in the brain, and an increased ability to encode memories.

According to Dr. Martha N. Navenith (2024), there are two theories on how breathwork works:

1. Embodiment - mental resources and traumatic material are experienced in an embodied way (physical responses through the autonomic nervous system, without conscious control). Breathing is typically automatic and unconscious, but can be done consciously. This functions as a bridge between conscious mind and automatic responses, so you are able to control the responses. Ex, the stress response increases breath rate (autonomic nervous system). Embodied practices help to modulate these responses.

2. Pivotal Mental States – when the brain encounters a challenge, serotonin system goes into overdrive, and we may experience less-filtered perception (the brain takes in much more information and retains it). Depending on your perspective, you may come out of this challenge with PTSD or Post Traumatic Growth. These challenges happen involuntarily in life, or can voluntarily encounter this experience in a supportive environment and re-write past experiences, reshape mental habits, retrieve suppressed information.

Harnessing pivotal states is a practice that seems to have been known and used by many cultures throughout history (sweat lodges, vision quests, chanting, sleep deprivation, night hunting, etc.)