Why Do People Cry During Breathwork? (And What's Actually Happening When They Do)

"Prove me wrong."

That's what I told him.

He'd shown up to one of my sessions with the energy of someone who'd clearly been dragged there against his will. Arms folded. Jaw tight. The kind of scepticism that radiates across a room. I could tell someone - probably his wife - had strongly suggested he give this a try.

So I leaned into it.

"Do everything I tell you to do. Follow the breath. Don't stop. And at the end, if you feel absolutely nothing, you can walk out of here and say 'See? Told you it was nonsense.'"

He agreed. Fair deal.

Two hours later, this man - this deeply sceptical, arms-folded, prove-it-to-me man - cried his heart out. Not a polite tear or two. Properly sobbed. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere you didn't know you had access to.

When the session ended, he sat up. Wide-eyed. Silent. I gave him space. Eventually, all he could manage was: "What just happened to me?"

I didn't have a neat answer for him then. I still don't, really. But I know what his body just did.

The following week, he came back. Big smile on his face this time. I asked how he was.

He said, "I don't know what you did to me. But my wife said I had to come back. Apparently I'm a nice person now."

He'd stopped reacting to everything in his life. The small annoyances. The triggers. The constant low-level irritation that had been running in the background for years. Gone. Not suppressed. Not managed. Just... gone.

His nervous system had finally discharged something it had been holding onto. And his wife noticed before he did.

The question everyone asks

Why do people cry during breathwork?

It's one of the most searched questions about this practice. And I get it. Because if you've never experienced it - or if you've experienced it and have absolutely no idea what just happened - it can feel baffling. Confronting. Even a bit embarrassing.

I cried through my entire first session. Start to finish. I had no idea why. I wasn't thinking about anything sad. I wasn't processing a specific memory. I was just... breathing. And crying. A lot.

Afterwards, I felt lighter. But I also felt confused. What was that? Where did it come from? And why did my body decide now was the time to fall apart?

Here's the myth-bust I need you to hear first.

People often say you're "releasing trauma" during breathwork. That's not wrong. But it's not the whole story either. And if we oversimplify it, we miss what's actually happening - which is far more fascinating and far more important than a vague idea of emotional release.

What's actually happening in your nervous system

Let me take you into the science for a moment. I promise I'll keep it human.

Your nervous system is designed to respond to threat. When something stressful or dangerous happens, your body activates. Fight. Flight. Freeze. This is basic survival biology, and it works beautifully when the threat is immediate and time-limited.

Here's the problem. In modern life - and especially if you've experienced trauma, chronic stress, or prolonged difficult circumstances - your nervous system activates constantly. But it rarely gets to complete the cycle. You don't fight. You don't run. You just hold it. You sit in the meeting. You smile through the dinner. You keep functioning. And all that activation? It doesn't just disappear. It gets stored.

In your muscles. In your fascia. In your breath. In the parts of your nervous system that don't need your conscious mind to hold onto things.

This is where polyvagal theory becomes really useful. When your nervous system can't fight or flee, it can move into what's called a dorsal vagal state - a kind of shutdown, a collapse, a conservation of energy. It's not rest. It's freeze. And in that freeze, incomplete stress responses get locked in. Your body wanted to scream, to run, to push back - but it couldn't. So it filed it away.

Breathwork - particularly the kind of high ventilation, continuous connected breathing we're talking about - does something very specific. It deliberately activates your sympathetic nervous system. It creates a controlled stress response in your body. Heart rate increases. CO₂ levels shift. Your system moves into activation.

And here's the paradox. By intentionally activating that stress response in a safe, facilitated environment, you give your nervous system permission to complete what it couldn't complete before.

The crying isn't just emotion. It's discharge. It's your body finally getting to finish something it started years ago. The shaking, the laughing, the sobbing - these are all ways your nervous system moves energy that's been stuck.

You're not broken. You're completing.

Why breathwork? Why now?

This is the question I get asked constantly. "I've been to therapy. I've talked about my past. I've done the work. Why is breathwork the thing that makes me fall apart?"

Here's why.

Breathwork bypasses the thinking brain. You can talk about trauma for years - and that's valuable, genuinely - but talking engages your prefrontal cortex. It keeps you in the realm of story, narrative, understanding. What happened. Why it happened. How you feel about it.

Breathwork doesn't care about the story. It goes straight to the body. It accesses the parts of your nervous system that don't speak in words. The implicit memory. The somatic holding patterns. The things your body knows that your mind has never been able to articulate.

And because the breath is continuous - no pause, no break, no opportunity to stop and think your way out of it - you stay in the process long enough for something real to shift. You can't think your way out of a breath cycle. You can only breathe through it.

The other reason? Safety.

Your nervous system is extraordinarily intelligent. It won't take you anywhere you're not ready to go. It won't release something if it doesn't feel safe enough to do so. For a lot of people, breathwork is the first time their body has felt resourced enough, held enough, safe enough to finally let go.

The music matters. The facilitation matters. The environment matters. These aren't just nice additions. They're creating the conditions for your nervous system to trust the process.

There's something else that matters too. Privacy. We don't sit in a circle and share our experiences afterwards. We don't ask you to explain what came up or what you felt. You're given eye masks and headphones. The person next to you can't hear you. Can't see you. Can't witness your process unless you want them to.

Because your nervous system needs to know that whatever comes up is yours alone. That you won't have to perform it, explain it, or make it coherent for anyone else. That level of privacy isn't a luxury. It's a requirement for deep work to happen safely.

Not all crying is the same

Here's my trauma-informed take on this, and it's important.

Not all emotional release during breathwork is the same. And not all of it is healing.

Sometimes crying is grief. Deep, old grief that's been waiting for permission to be felt. Sometimes it's rage that never got to be expressed. Sometimes it's relief - the kind of cellular exhale that happens when your body finally realises the threat is over. Sometimes it's your nervous system completing a stress response that got interrupted years ago, and the emotion attached to it is secondary to the physiological discharge that needs to happen.

Here's something else that's important to understand. Your body will only release what you're capable of handling in that moment. Not what you think you can handle. Not what the facilitator thinks you should process. What your nervous system genuinely has the capacity to integrate.

We're far more capable than we realise. But the nervous system is also extraordinarily intelligent about pacing. It won't flood you with more than you can hold. This is why the structure of the session matters so much - the music, the pacing, the build - it's all designed to work with your system's natural intelligence, not override it.

And sometimes - and this is where skilled facilitation becomes crucial - crying can be retraumatising. If someone is pushed too hard, too fast, without the right support, the nervous system can flood. That's not release. That's overwhelm. And it doesn't heal anything. It just reinforces the original pattern.

This is why I'm so particular about how sessions are structured. The music is curated with intention. The pacing builds gradually. The facilitation is trauma-informed. Because I'm not interested in people having a big cathartic cry if their nervous system isn't actually ready to integrate it.

The goal isn't to make you cry. The goal is to create the conditions where, if your body needs to release something, it can do so safely. And if it doesn't? That's also fine. Not every session is a breakdown. Sometimes the most powerful sessions are the quiet ones.

What your body knows that your mind doesn't

That man who came back the following week and said his wife noticed the change? He didn't leave the session with a clear memory or a specific insight. He didn't suddenly understand why he'd been irritable for years. He just... wasn't anymore.

His body had processed something his mind didn't need to narrate.

This is what I think people miss when they ask why breathwork makes you cry. They're looking for a reason. A story. A thing that got released. And sometimes there is one. Sometimes you cry and you know exactly why - you're grieving something specific, you're feeling something you've been avoiding, you're finally letting yourself be angry about something that happened twenty years ago.

But a lot of the time? You have no idea. You just cry. And afterwards, something feels different. Lighter. Quieter. Less reactive.

Your body knows things your mind hasn't caught up to yet. That's not mystical. That's neuroscience. Your implicit memory - the kind stored in your body, not your conscious recall - doesn't need a story to heal. It just needs to complete.

So if you've ever walked out of a breathwork session thinking "I don't even know what that was about" - good. That means your body just did something your thinking brain didn't need to supervise.

The truth about emotional release

I've facilitated hundreds of sessions. I've seen every variation of release you can imagine. I've seen people laugh hysterically. Shake. Scream into the mat. Sob quietly. Lie completely still while tears just roll down their faces. I've seen people have huge cathartic releases and wake up the next day feeling like they've been hit by a truck. I've seen people have subtle, quiet sessions and report that their anxiety disappeared for the first time in a decade.

There's no one way this works. And anyone who tells you there is - anyone who says you need to have a big cry to heal, or that emotional release is the point - doesn't understand the nervous system as well as they think they do.

The point is regulation. The point is completion. The point is giving your body the space and safety to do what it's been trying to do all along.

Sometimes that looks like crying. Sometimes it doesn't.

But when it does? Let it. Your nervous system knows what it's doing. Even if you don't.