Approaches that can help can also harm
A conversation has been opening up across meditation and mind-body practices that is long overdue.
Reporting in The Atlantic highlights the work of Willoughby Britton, who has documented how practices often promoted as harmless cure-alls can sometimes cause severe and lasting distress. The core of that discussion is straightforward: approaches that can help can also potentially harm. That is fundamentally true for most effective medical treatments, and it equally applies to breathwork.
Because breathwork acts directly on your nervous system, it isn't neutral. Changing the pattern, depth, or rhythm of your breath changes blood chemistry, heart-rate variability, and patterns of physiological holding.
When breathwork is treated purely as a 'wellness product', safety often gets overlooked. Discomfort may be misread as progress, or the responsibility gets pushed back onto you.
Ensuring breathwork is safe requires careful medical screening and a trauma-informed practice.
That work starts before the first breath. Certain conditions – including cardiovascular issues, severe asthma, epilepsy, and acute psychiatric conditions – require adapted approaches or health checks. Checking your medical history isn't a formality. It’s simply about understanding the baseline of your system and meeting it where it is.
Much of the wider discussion around adverse effects in breathwork centres on active, fast-paced techniques that can rapidly elevate arousal and bring unresolved patterns forward before you have the capacity to hold them. My work at Second Wind centres on balanced, coherent breathing – a slower, steady rhythm that supports nervous system regulation without forcing an intensity your system isn't ready for.
Trauma often involves an experience of having control taken away. Therefore, trauma-informed breathwork must return complete agency to you. You remain in control of the pace, depth, and duration of every session. There’s no requirement to push through distress or meet an expectation of what the experience should look like. Stepping back, slowing down, or opening your eyes is always an option.
The intention isn't to force a breakthrough. It’s to create enough physiological safety that patterns of tension can soften at their own pace. Working with smaller, manageable amounts of experience – titration – allows your nervous system to stay within its window of tolerance. If activation rises, the emphasis moves straight to grounding and orienting back to the room.
My role as a facilitator isn't to direct, interpret, or push. It’s to hold a steady, regulated space, offering plain-language guidance without imposing emotional frameworks. It’s about respecting your body’s innate timing rather than driving an outcome.
Breathwork doesn't need to be intense to be effective. When screening is clear and agency is protected, safety isn't an added extra – it’s the condition that allows your system to stand down without force.