Yes, Breathwork Works—Especially for Trauma

After living through 9/11 in New York City, the surprising thing that ended up helping me with my anxiety was a structured breathing practice. Years later, as a research scientist at Stanford and then Yale, I devoted much of my research career to investigating how breathwork helps heal trauma and fosters emotional resilience in adult populations ranging from college students to military veterans with post-traumatic stress. A new study out of UCLA shows that the same practice is equally beneficial for teens, especially those with high trauma exposure. As a research scientist (and parent!), I find this particularly encouraging: breathwork can support mental health and well-being no matter how old you are. Here's what we know:

A Breathing Practice for Adults

We first worked with combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan struggling with posttraumatic stress. I remember sitting in front of veterans who hadn't slept more than a few hours a night since coming back from deployment, who'd bunkered themselves in their basements, self-medicating with weed or alcohol because therapy and medication hadn't worked for them, or who were just tired of the side effects and had given up hope. Their marriages were falling apart. Some couldn't finish school or hold down a job because of how much trauma they were carrying.

My colleagues were trying different meditation interventions with them, but the veterans were dropping out (if you have high anxiety, sitting still with your anxiety can feel like torture — I know from experience!). That's when we thought of using the same protocol that I had learned after 9/11: SKY Breath Meditation, a 20-minute structured breathing practice. After just one week of the practice, their anxiety levels had normalized. What most surprised us was that when we checked back a month, and then a full year later, the benefits had held.

Years later, at the Palo Alto Veterans' Hospital, we tested this breathing practice head-to-head against cognitive processing therapy, the gold-standard treatment for PTSD. It performed just as well, not only on self-reported symptoms but also on a physiological marker of emotion regulation called heart rate variability. We've seen the resilience piece play out directly, too: in a study out of the University of Arizona and Harvard, people who'd practiced this breathing technique showed a smaller fight-or-flight response under stress than people who'd done more cognitive-based training. Their bodies, quite literally, stayed calmer under pressure.

If we can train our muscles to be stronger by working out, could this practice be a way to train the nervous system for better mental health and well-being? If so, could it help teens heal childhood trauma so we can prepare them to be happier and more resilient adults?

The New Finding: Teen Girls

A new UCLA study randomly assigned 174 at-risk teenage girls at two Southern California high schools to a program (called SKY Schools) combining social-emotional learning with this same breathing practice, delivered through daily sessions over several weeks. Among girls who'd experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs (a threshold linked to significantly elevated risk for anxiety, depression, and long-term health problems), the program produced a real, measurable increase in how connected they felt to the people around them. Girls with lower adversity exposure didn't show the same shift.

That's notable because it's usually the opposite: in most school mental health programs, kids with the heaviest histories tend to benefit the least. They're harder to reach, slower to trust others, and even less likely to fully engage.

"What's striking is that the girls who needed help the most benefited the most," said the study's senior author, Dr. Dara Ghahremani, a senior scientist and research professor at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "These are adolescents who have already faced significant adversity, and we found that a relatively simple, scalable approach can help them feel more connected and develop a greater sense of belonging."

It echoes something we found years earlier in a randomized trial at Yale with stressed university students: the group practicing this same breathing meditation saw the largest gains not just in mental health and mindfulness, but specifically in social connectedness, compared to two other well-being programs and a no-intervention control.

Social isolation is one of the strongest known predictors of poor mental health in adolescence, and this is a moment when kids are more isolated, and more online in search of connection, than any generation before them. That's part of why this particular finding matters: a low-cost, school-based tool that reaches the students who are usually hardest to reach.

Why Would Breathing Do This?

Trauma keeps the nervous system on high alert. When your body is bracing for threat and fearing for its safety, connection can feel risky. You can hand a traumatized teenager, or an adult, every conflict-resolution script in the world, but if her body doesn't feel safe, they're useless. A combat veteran with trauma once shared with me that although he knows there's no danger in the mall, he still needs to brace himself for twenty minutes before mustering up the nerve to enter a crowded enclosed space that his body long ago associated with danger.

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Why Mind-Body Approaches Matter in Trauma Therapy

What Trauma Healing Looks Like

Because memory and trauma aren't just mental, they're physiological. Heal the nervous system, and you may suddenly give someone their life back. The SKY Breathing seems to regulate the nervous system in such a way that the memory stays as it should be: a recollection of the past. Not an interruption of the present.

Imagine a world where teens can heal their childhood trauma rather than dragging it into their adulthood? You're giving them their life back.

A Simple Technique to Start With

To get a feel for the power of breathwork right now, in just a few minutes, try this: breathe in through your nose for a count of four, and out for a count of eight. The longer exhale is what triggers relaxation. Do this with your eyes closed and your hands open on your lap, for about five minutes, and notice how you feel afterward.

This meditation we researched is a more comprehensive 20-minute structured practice that includes a series of different breathing exercises and is taught by trained instructors through various nonprofit organizations.

If you're anything like me, you may have been annoyed when someone told you to just "take a deep breath" during a moment of upset, but after two decades of trauma research, I have to say: it works. We train our muscles at the gym to keep our body healthy and strong. Turns out we can do the same thing for our mental health and well-being through our breath.