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Breathwork techniques and therapies offer a set of practical interventions for clinical mental health counselors (CMHCs) and are viable methods for integrating physiological sensitivities in treatment by way of the relaxation response. We discuss an organizing framework of breathwork practices and identify three broad categories of breathwork within the field: deep relaxation breathing, mindfulness breathwork, and yogic breathing. Each style is distinct in how it is applied and in the specific respiratory patterns that users are instructed to use. We also aim to elaborate the physiological effects, clinical research outcomes, and applicability of breathwork for treating mental illness. Overall, research findings indicate that breathwork may be efficacious for treating anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Despite preliminary evidence for breathwork's efficacy for treating common psychological distress, more research is needed to evaluate its utility for treating a wider range of mental illness. CMHCs are encouraged to incorporate breathwork techniques in their clinical treatment programs but must appraise the value of each technique individually.
Breathing, an essential function to sustain life, is an automatic behavior that is regulated by the primitive centers of the brain and is critical to human development and wellness. Dysfunctional breathing can lead to challenges in emotion, thought, physiology, and behavior (Crockett, Cashwell, Tangen, Hall, & Young, 2016). The intentional control of breathing patterns has emerged as a therapeutic intervention employed by many clinical mental health counselors (CMHCs). The therapeutic use of breathing techniques appeared in counseling literature decades ago, with a focus on educational settings (e.g., Rossman & Kahnweiler, 1977; Wilkinson, Buboltz, & Seemann, 2001; Zaichkowsky, Zaichkowsky, & Yeager, 1986). Since then, breathing interventions have been applied to various elements of the human experience (Crockett et al., 2016; Young, Cashwell, & Giordano, 2010), including clinical mental health counseling (Crockett, Gill, Cashwell, & Myers, 2017).
Breathwork is a self-regulated process that connects conscious with unconscious, allowing the individual to work through physiological resistance to emotional processing typically not accessible in traditional talk therapy (Young et al., 2010). Mental health professionals have called for bottom-up approaches (e.g., Dahlitz, 2015; Field, Beeson, & Jones, 2015) that calm the subcortical regions of the brain prior to using top-down approaches that focus on the cortical regions of the brain responsible for executive functioning. Breathwork is...