Breathing as an Act of Remembering
In an age of wearables and optimisation dashboards, it’s easy to forget that one of the most powerful levers for our health is the simplest: the breath.
Yogic breathwork, or pranayama, is an ancient set of breathing practices from the Indian subcontinent that work on body, mind, and what many traditions call life-force or prana.
This post is not about “hacking” your nervous system or squeezing more productivity out of an exhausted body. It’s an invitation to meet a very old practice with humility, engage with emerging science thoughtfully, and honour the cultures that developed these methods long before wellness became an industry.
What Is Yogic Breathwork?
In classical yoga texts like Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, pranayama is described as the regulated flow and, at times, suspension of inhalation and exhalation, practiced after a steady posture is established.
Etymologically, prana is often translated as “breath” or “vital energy,” and ayama as extension, regulation, or expansion, so pranayama can be understood as extending and refining the life-force through conscious breathing.
In contemporary practice, pranayama usually includes techniques such as:
- Slow diaphragmatic breathing
- Alternate nostril breathing (nadi shodhana)
- Bee-humming breath (bhramari)
- Cooling breaths like sheetali
These are practiced not as tricks, but as part of a broader path that includes ethics, postures, meditation, and a long-term orientation toward liberation and self-knowledge.
Mental Health: Anxiety, Mood, and Emotional Regulation
The mental health benefits of pranayama are perhaps what many people notice first, which is why they’re increasingly being explored in clinical research.
A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials in patients with diagnosed mental disorders (including PTSD and depression) found that pranayama, used as an adjunct to usual care or compared to passive controls, produced small-to-moderate short-term reductions in overall symptom severity and improvements in quality of life, though effects on depression scores alone were less clear and study quality was often low.
Another meta-analysis focusing on adolescents concluded that integrating pranayama into daily life can help reduce stress and anxiety levels, while also calling for more rigorous research to strengthen the evidence base.
In female medical students, a study comparing meditation, pranayama, and yoga programmes over 12 weeks found significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and anger in all three practice groups, with the yoga group (including postures, breathing, and meditation) showing the largest reductions by the end of the programme.
Umbrella reviews of yoga for anxiety and depression report moderate benefits for depressive symptoms and variable effects for anxiety, with excellent safety and acceptability. However, evidence is unfortunately still limited and therefore yoga should be considered an adjunct, not a replacement, for evidence-based psychological and pharmacological treatments.
Breathing for Living, not ‘Longevity’
The current wellness landscape includes a kind of “biohacking” discourse that treats every practice as an optimisation trick to squeeze more years, output, or metric improvements out of the body. This reinforces individualism, class privilege, and ableism, while erasing the social, ethical, and liberatory dimensions of yoga.
Instead of promising immortality or perfect health, we need to talk honestly about modest, evidence-supported benefits, the importance of rest and care, and the fact that all bodies age and die, and are still worthy of dignity.
In this framing, pranayama is not a tool to become superhuman; it is a practice of becoming more fully and gently human within the realities of our nervous systems, histories, and interdependence.
Where to go from here. If you’d like to read the peer-reviewed research behind these practices, each study is summarised — with a link to the original paper — on my Evidence page. To practise yogic breathwork with guidance, you’re welcome to explore the studio classes or individual sessions, or simply get in touch with a question.