The magic of breathwork: I started releasing tension and stress – it felt like years of worry left my body

Her doctorate is from the Royal College of Surgeons, her postdoc, the University of California, San Francisco. She has held lecturer/research scientist roles at NUIG and King’s College, London.

Her research looked for patterns in the brain structure to help predict patient outcome in neurological disorders. “We would analyse millions of data points in the brain and create beautiful images,” she recalls. She describes herself as an “accidental research scientist”.

“I was good at maths, physics and science-y subjects, so you drift towards certain areas. I did engineering initially and then moved to neuroscience. Neuroscience is fascinating, and I did love it for many years, until I didn’t.

“There’s a lot of external validation that comes with being a research scientist, but it was a very stressful time. It just happened that when I was finishing my PhD and doing corrections, I had moved to San Francisco and started a new job. I got through it, but my nerves were shot.”

She was in her early 30s, lecturing and researching in NUIG, when she took up a job offer at King’s in London. However, it wasn’t the fit she hoped it would be.

Dr Scanlon adds: “I felt stuck. I didn’t know what to do. I was aware that my nervous system was suffering. I started reading meditation and mindfulness books to calm my mind. Some days were fine, some days were not, but that became my normal. That’s not hugely helpful either.”

And so, she made a radical decision. “My sister was living in London at the time, and I was seeing her a lot. I went over one nigh, and I was crying. I was stressed. I felt overwhelmed.

“My research wasn’t going that well. Looking back I can see that it was a stupid project and s****y data. My sister just said, ‘You’re over this.’ And I was.

“I quit a week or two later and I felt so good about it.” After academia, she tried different things before starting her own consultancy, helping tech start-ups hire their engineers. Then, an intriguing offer came along. A friend was moving to Costa Rica to start work in a new wellness centre that would also offer some medical treatments.

Dr Scanlon says: “It was a clinic for super-rich people.” Initially, the idea was for her to visit and work from there. She ended up staying for two months, working for her clients in the mornings and then helping out in the clinic during the afternoon.

“It was a stunning place. The food was beautiful. There was a pool. It was ridiculous,” she says. The wellness centre offered a wide range of therapies and treatments. Among them was breathwork, so Dr Scanlon decided to give it a try.

“I started releasing so much tension and stress. It felt like years and years of worry left my body.” And so the research scientist became a student of breathwork. She says: “The problem is that the term ‘breathwork’ incorporates too many things. It can confuse people.

“There are breathing techniques which slow down the breath, slow down the heart rate, and can be helpful for people struggling with anxiety or getting to sleep.

“There’s also active breathwork which activates your body and increases your heart rate and energises your nervous system. There are two different things. When I talk about breathwork, I refer to this active breathwork, open-mouth breathing at a higher rate. It’s a gentle, powerful practice.”

Dr Scanlon adds that there are other types of breathwork, including holotropic and transformational.

“I practise something in the middle that makes you feel calm, but we can still have a little transformation,” she says reassuringly.

“It’s the opposite of a lot of other techniques which are calming. We’re activating the body and changing the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

“Our heart rate goes up and we start to have sensations like tingling. We might feel a little light-headed.”

Breathing exercises can bring about physiological changes and improvements. Meditation and yoga are often prescribed for some mental health conditions. Physical performance is improved by better breathing technique. So what sets breathwork apart from other practices? A few weeks later I join one of Dr Scanlon’s Zoom classes to find out.

We’re advised to lie flat with the screen facing our midsection and have headphones, a cushion and blanket to hand. Eye mask optional. Dr Scanlon talks us through what’s involved, how to breath and the range of sensations we could feel — from a heavy body, tingling muscles or feeling suddenly cold or warm. Some people cry. The technique is a triangle of breaths.

In, in, out.

In, in, out.

In, in. out.

The first breath should fill the belly, the second the chest. The third exhales. I find it quite uncomfortable, mainly keeping my mouth open. Eventually, my shoulders start to unclench, and I find a rhythm. My fingers start tingling slightly. Then I feel a chill. I pull on the blanket. That’s better.

In. In. Out.

In. In. Out.

In. In. Out.

This isn’t half bad. I feel heavy, like before you fall into a deep sleep. The tingling runs up my arms and down my legs. It’s quite pleasant and very strange.

Then Dr Scanlon says that we’re about to normalise our breathing, but I’ve literally just got the hang of it, and I’m still trying to process these sensations so I can describe them later.

Somewhat unhelpfully, I fall asleep before I can update my mental notebook. The following day I messaged her under the pretext of an apology for falling asleep before the class finished, but really to ask, is this normal?

She says to me: “From a purely physical point of view, those sensations are caused by changing the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the body.

“We’re getting light-headed. We’re getting tingly. We think we’re getting more oxygen because we’re breathing more, but that’s not entirely accurate.

“It’s a bit like going for a run — you’re breathing in more than you’re used to, but your muscles are expecting to do something because they’re running. Except you’re lying down, so it’s a different experience. It is a muscle reaction to the extra carbon dioxide.

“It’s not necessarily bad for you, but it’s not something you want all the time.”

In fact, what can sound — and feel — like a chapter straight from the book of woo owes more to manipulating oxygen and carbon dioxide and how that affects our cardiovascular system.

Scientists have studied different forms of breathing to understand more about this relationship and how it affects brain chemistry.

“What our research shows is that the levels of a critical chemical messenger in the brain neurotransmitters called noradrenaline to fluctuate rhythmically with the breath,” explains Professor Ian Robertson, clinical psychologist and psychiatrist and author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self Belief.

“Noradrenaline is a key neurotransmitter for attention, but it’s also part of the brain’s flight or fight system.

“It’s very important for a number of emotional states, including anxiety, excitement and anger. It profoundly affects how the brain is working and therefore how people feel and their emotional state.”

Noradrenaline is synthesised in a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus.

“The locus is influenced by the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood, so as we breathe in and out the levels of CO2 in the blood go up and down, and so the activity of the locus coeruleus goes up and down,” Professor Robertson adds.

“We’ve published a couple of papers showing how brain function can alternate with breathing.

“For example, if you breathe out for slightly longer than you breathe in — in for four and out for six, for example, you can change your state of emotional arousal very significantly because of this chemical effect of the carbon dioxide levels.”

There is a noradrenaline Goldilocks zone — too little noradrenaline might occur during drowsiness, too much and you’re stressed.

A “just right” amount of noradrenaline “allows the different parts of the brain to communicate with each other more sweetly, by resonating together in phases of about 40 cycles per second”.

That’s not to say any of the sensations I feel have been caused by noradrenaline. I might have noticed them simply because I was looking for them. Attention is an action in itself. It refers to the “selection of stimuli from billions of potential perceptual events in the outside and inside world — sensations in the body, memories. Attention is the act of selecting a subset of them for conscious processing,” adds Professor Robertson.

“If you’re doing a meditative-type exercise, that changes your attention. You can start noticing things in your body you wouldn’t usually notice because your attention is usually focussed elsewhere.”

While most meditative exercises are safe and healthy, Professor Robertson sounds a note of caution with extreme forms of breathing manipulation.

He says: “Anything that has very strong effects could potentially have very strong negative effects as well.

“There is no side effect-free drug in the world. All drugs have side effects. And extreme breathing is a kind of drug you’re administering to yourself. So yes, almost certainly there are potential side effects for some people.”

Mortified by my somnolent showing in front of the class the previous week, I return to breathwork to rescue my dignity. This time I follow her instructions and return to normal breathing when directed. I remain lucid.

When I get up, my body feels so heavy that I have to continue lying down until my muscles regain their strength. After, I feel clear-headed and energetic.

Breathwork is not a one-size-fits-all. Clearly some forms are more extreme than others and provoke stronger reactions, but it can be tailored for specific uses.

“Some people use breathwork to fall asleep. Some use it to clear their mind. Some focus on a particular problem,” Dr Scanlon says.

“It’s not particularly prescriptive as to an outcome. Most people find it hard or awkward at the beginning and then get the hang of it. But I think it’s beneficial in allowing people who overthink to relax.”

For more information you can check out breathworkcoaching.com