Just take a deep breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Give yourself a chance to breathe. We even stress the importance of focusing on our breathing while practicing meditation and yoga.

We use so many breath-related phrases to make ourselves feel better and calm ourselves down. So, it might not be surprising that people use breathing techniques to help people with a variety of problems, including substance use disorder.

Breathing techniques can be considered holistic because they address physical, emotional, and spiritual parts of a person. These breathing techniques have a number of names, including breathwork and pranayama yoga, and some sources link the techniques to practices such as tai chi.

How does breathwork work? Like other holistic practices, using breathwork is simple, but the results can be profound. Some breathwork encourages people to continuously breathe in and out (circular breathing), while others encourage people to breathe in certain patterns, such as breathing in-and-out breaths four times and one deep breath and repeating this sequence a number of times.

More specific types of breathwork include:

• Rebirthing breathwork. This type of breathwork encourages people to revisit the trauma of their births in the belief that exposing the trauma can help people release it. This technique might encourage people to breathe near water.
• Holotropic breathwork. This type of breathwork encourages participants to breathe increasingly quickly in order to hyperventilate. Hyperventilation deprives the brain of oxygen, a process that some people believe creates altered states of consciousness that could aid in healing.
• Biodynamic breathwork, a type of breathwork that utilizes memories and senses to create balance in the body.
• Clarity breathwork, a type of breathwork that encourages people to breathe more fully.

As you can see, these practices encourage people to focus on their breathing and often encourage them to recognize trauma. This can be so helpful in treating addiction, since people often use drugs and alcohol to deal with such trauma. Breathwork, though, encourages people to confront trauma so they can address it and treat it. Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away, but acknowledging them can help shrink them.