They Put Breathwork in a Brain Scanner. What They Found Changed Everything.

I want to tell you about the worst and best two hours of my life.

I was in a pretty dark place when I first found breathwork. Not rock bottom, but the kind of toxic, grinding existence where you're functioning on the outside and quietly falling apart on the inside. Someone suggested I try a breathwork class. I turned up, lay on a mat, and did what I now call down regulation breathing - slow, gentle, calming.

It felt nice. Fine. Relaxing, even.

But around me, people were crying. Shaking. Letting go of things I couldn't see. And I was just lying there thinking... what on earth is this all about? I'm breathing. They're having some kind of spiritual awakening. What am I missing?

It peaked my interest enough to go looking. And that's when I found an online conscious connected breathing session. Now, I want to be very clear - I know now that this is not the safest way to practice this type of breathwork without proper facilitation. But at the time? I was completely clueless. I just pressed play, lay down on my mattress, and started breathing to the music.

What happened next genuinely changed the trajectory of my life.

About fifteen minutes in, my hands locked up completely. Full T-Rex. Both arms. I was pointing at the ceiling like ET phoning home. My entire body was shaking. I sweated so thoroughly through the mattress that I had to throw a towel down. I cried from the first minute to the last. And when it was over, I lay there completely still, feeling higher than a kite - and immediately raided my kitchen with the worst case of munchies I have ever experienced in my life.

I sat on my kitchen floor eating everything I could find, thinking: what just happened to me?

That one session changed everything. I needed to understand it. I needed to know what had just occurred in my body, in my brain, in my nervous system. That curiosity sent me down a path that eventually became IMD Breathwork.

And now, years later, researchers have put breathwork in a brain scanner.

What they found explains everything I experienced on that mattress.

The study that changed the conversation

In August 2025, researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School published a study that, honestly, made me do a little fist pump when I read it. Not because it told me anything I didn't already know from years of facilitating sessions and from my own experience - but because it finally gave the scientific community something they couldn't ignore.

The study found that high ventilation breathwork, combined with music, can reliably induce altered states of consciousness comparable to psychedelic substances. Not similar in a vague, wishy-washy way. Comparable. Their words, not mine.

And they didn't just ask people how they felt afterwards. They put them in brain scanners.

(Full study linked at the bottom if you want to go down the rabbit hole - and I highly recommend you do.)

What was actually happening inside the brain

Here's where it gets fascinating - and I promise I'll keep this human.

During a 20 to 30 minute session of continuous connected breathing with music, the researchers tracked blood flow changes across the brain in real time. What they found completely reframes how we talk about breathwork.

Globally, blood flow to the brain decreased - which sounds alarming until you understand what was happening in specific regions. Despite that global reduction, blood flow to the right amygdala and anterior hippocampus actually increased progressively as the session continued. And crucially, the more profound that increase, the deeper the experience participants reported.

Why does that matter? Because the amygdala is your brain's emotional processing centre. The hippocampus is where emotional memories are stored and integrated. These are the exact regions involved in fear, trauma, and emotional memory processing.

In other words, breathwork wasn't just relaxing people. It was actively engaging the parts of the brain responsible for processing emotions and healing old wounds.

The lead researcher, Amy Kartar, put it like this: "Our key findings include that breathwork can reliably evoke profound psychedelic states. We believe that these states are linked to changes in the function of specific brain regions involved in self-awareness, and fear and emotional memory processing."

She added something that I think is the most important line in the entire study: "We found that more profound changes in blood flow in specific brain areas were linked to deeper sensations of unity, bliss, and emotional release, collectively known as 'oceanic boundlessness'."

Oceanic boundlessness. I love that they used that phrase in a peer-reviewed journal. Science is finally catching up with what people have been experiencing on the mat for decades. Oceanic boundlessness, a term originally coined by Sigmund Freud to describe a feeling of limitless unity with the universe - the dissolution of the boundary between self and everything else - is now being measured in a laboratory. Let that sink in for a moment.

Here's what makes this genuinely extraordinary. The researchers didn't just measure a vague sense of feeling good. They measured three very specific components of the altered state that participants experienced - and these three components are the exact same markers used to define and measure psychedelic-assisted therapy experiences in clinical research.

The first is unity - that profound dissolution of the boundary between yourself and everything else. The walls between you and the world soften. The sense of separateness that most of us carry around all day quietly disappears.

The second is bliss - not happiness, not relaxation, but a deep, cellular level of positive emotional experience that people consistently struggle to put into words afterwards. If you've ever come out of a session and tried to explain how you feel and just said 'I don't know, I just feel... different' - that's bliss doing its job.

The third is perhaps the most fascinating: noetic quality. The sense that what you just experienced was profoundly, undeniably true. Not imagined. Not manufactured. Real. This is why people come out of breathwork sessions - just as they do with plant medicine ceremonies - with an unshakeable sense that something has genuinely shifted. Not because they talked themselves into it. But because their brain just processed something at a level that goes far beyond rational thought.

Together, these three components are what researchers call oceanic boundlessness. And the fact that breathwork is now reliably producing these same markers - in a laboratory, with brain scans, in a peer reviewed journal - means we can no longer dismiss this as people getting a bit emotional on a mat. We are talking about the same neurological territory that plant based medicines access. The same depth. The same mechanisms. The same potential for profound, lasting change. Just without the ceremony, the preparation, the legal complexity, and frankly, the uncertainty of not knowing how your body is going to respond to a substance.

Now let me tell you something. When I read that - unity, bliss, emotional release, changes in fear and emotional memory processing - I immediately thought back to that mattress. To the T-Rex hands and the ET arms and the tears and the munchies.

That wasn't a breakdown. That was my brain doing something extraordinary.

And here's something that gets overlooked in most of the headlines about this study. The breathwork wasn't done in silence. Music was a fundamental part of the methodology - not background noise, not an optional extra, but an active ingredient in the experience. The researchers used carefully selected, progressively up-tempo music that began ambient and built in intensity as the session deepened. And when they compared participants who practiced at home versus those in a facilitated lab setting with proper musical accompaniment? The in-person, music-led group reported significantly deeper levels of oceanic boundlessness.

The researchers concluded that physical context, facilitation, and music all play a critical role in breathwork outcomes.

This is something I've known instinctively. Every track, spoken word, sound effect and frequency in our sessions is chosen with intention. The music isn't decoration - it's doing neurological work. It's guiding your nervous system through a journey it can't take in silence. The study just gave us the science to explain what we already knew was happening.

"But isn't all that shaking and crying just hyperventilating?"

I knew that question was coming. And it's a fair one.

Yes, the study involved high ventilation breathwork. Yes, the body's stress response was activated during sessions - heart rate variability decreased, which indicates sympathetic nervous system activation. So technically, the body was under a form of controlled stress.

And yet participants consistently reported reduced negative emotions, increased feelings of unity and bliss, and profound emotional release.

This is the paradox that makes breathwork so fascinating from a trauma-informed perspective. We're deliberately activating the stress response in a controlled, safe environment - and through that activation, the nervous system gets to do something it rarely gets to do in everyday life.

It gets to complete the cycle.

Think about it this way. Your nervous system is designed to activate under threat and then discharge that activation once the threat has passed. In modern life, most of us activate constantly - stress at work, difficult relationships, old trauma sitting just below the surface - but we never fully discharge. We just stay in a low-level state of tension, day after day, year after year.

Breathwork creates the conditions for that discharge to actually happen. The activation is intentional. The music supports the nervous system through the process. The continuous connected breathing keeps you in it long enough for something real to shift.

The T-Rex hands, by the way, are called tetany - a temporary muscular response to changes in CO₂ and calcium levels during high ventilation breathing. Completely harmless, completely normal, and in my experience, often a sign that something significant is happening. Your body is not broken. It's processing.

And when that processing completes? That's what the researchers were measuring. That's the oceanic boundlessness. That's what people describe when they come out of a session and say something that sounds almost impossible.

"I feel like I've done ten years of therapy in one hour."

I've heard that more times than I can count. I've said it myself. And now there's brain imaging to explain exactly why.

This isn't just a headline

This is the myth-busting bit I really want you to hear.

When people talk about altered states in a therapeutic context - and there's a lot of conversation about this right now in mental health circles - the discussion is always about the loosening of the brain's default patterns. The reduction of fear responses. The access to emotional memories that are normally locked behind the brain's defence systems.

Breathwork does the same thing. Without a clinical setting. Without a prescription. Without weeks of preparation and integration therapy that typically follow other approaches.

Now, I want to be careful here because I'm not saying breathwork replaces everything. I'm also not saying that every breathwork session is going to send you into an altered state - it depends on the technique, the duration, the facilitation, and crucially, where your nervous system is starting from. What I am saying is that the mechanisms are far more powerful and far more similar to cutting-edge therapeutic approaches than most people realise.

The researchers themselves noted that high ventilation breathwork could offer a non-pharmacological alternative with fewer legal and ethical restrictions to large-scale adoption in clinical treatment.

A peer-reviewed journal said that… Not a breathwork influencer on Instagram!

What this actually means for you

If you've ever walked out of a breathwork session feeling like something shifted that you couldn't quite explain - this is why. Your brain was genuinely doing something different. Blood was flowing differently. Regions responsible for emotional memory and fear processing were activating in a way they rarely do in waking life.

You weren't imagining it. You weren't being dramatic. You weren't just "a bit emotional because of the music" - although the music absolutely matters, which is why we curate every single track in IMD sessions with enormous care.

Your nervous system was processing. Your brain was integrating. Something real was happening at a neurobiological level.

I started this journey lying on a soaking wet mattress with T-Rex hands, crying my eyes out, completely bewildered by what was happening to me. I came out the other side feeling something I hadn't felt in years - like something heavy had quietly left the building.

I didn't have the science then. I just had the experience.

Now we have both.

And if you've never tried breathwork because it sounded a bit too out there, a bit too alternative, a bit too much like something you'd have to explain to your very confused family at Christmas - well.

Brighton and Sussex Medical School would like a word.

Breathing is not just breathing.

It never was.

Study reference: Kartar AA et al. "Neurobiological substrates of altered states of consciousness induced by high ventilation breathwork accompanied by music." PLOS One, August 27, 2025. Full study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0329411