1255: When Breathwork Backfires: Why Trying To Calm Anxiety Can Make It Worse

Gina Ryan (0:00): Starting something new isn't just hard. It's vulnerable. When I started hosting this podcast, I had all the classic fears. What if no one listens? What if I fail?

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Unknown Speaker (1:19): When I started hosting this podcast, I had all the classic fears. What if no one listens? What if I fail? What if I'm just talking into the void? But here's what I know now.

Gina Ryan (1:31): Growth doesn't come from certainty. It comes from support, and that's what I love about platforms like Shopify. They're built for people who have an idea but don't want to get lost in the tech. Shopify helps you create a store that actually reflects your brand even if design isn't your thing. They help you reach the right people with email and social tools that don't feel overwhelming.

Gina Ryan (1:56): And if you hit a wall, their award winning customer support is there twenty four seven. Because building something meaningful is hard enough, you shouldn't have to do it without backup. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/coaches. Go to shopify.com/coaches. That's shopify.com/coaches.

Unknown Speaker (2:38): Welcome to the anxiety coaches podcast, a relaxing and informative show where we explore anxiety, panic, and PTSD, sharing how you can overcome them for life.

Gina Ryan (2:54): Aloha. Welcome back to the anxiety coaches podcast. I'm your host and coach, Gina Ryan, and I am so happy to be with you again today as together we can consider the many ways to bring your mind and body back to its natural peace and calm. In today's episode, I wanna talk about when breath work backfires and why trying to calm anxiety with your breath sometimes can make it worse. Now there's been a huge surge in breath work practices over, I would say, over the last decade.

Gina Ryan (3:35): And nothing wrong with breath work. It's ancient. It can do all kinds of marvelous things for you. I remember my first time when I took conscious awareness of my breathing was in my first yoga class, which was in either 1980 or 1981. And we were taught to pay attention to our breath.

Gina Ryan (3:59): I was like, oh, the only time I had paid attention to my breath before that was when I was having a panic attack, and I felt like I couldn't catch my breath. That was the sensation I would get. Like, I couldn't get a real breath, and that's because I was breathing very fast and very shallow. But let's get on with why the breath work backfires here. Like I said, nothing wrong with having awareness around your breathing.

Gina Ryan (4:26): I talk about it here on the show. And over the last several years, social media has really taken off with things like telling people about box breathing and four-four-four-four. I will have clients be very proud and tell me they're practicing four-four-four-four box breathing or four-seven-eight breathing or Wim Hof methods or guided breathing apps that actually are showing you the line going up, breathing in and then holding and then breathing out, and you are breathing on their cadence or counted inhale, exhale techniques. These are everywhere that you look online. And you know I am saying this right here at the start that there's nothing wrong with these practices.

Gina Ryan (5:13): Like I said, I talk about different ways of breathing here on the show. But for many people, they are not helpful. For many people, they are incredibly helpful. There's something that we don't talk about nearly enough, though, and that is that for some people who are truly anxious, these techniques don't just fail to help. They can actually make things worse and not in an obvious way at first.

Gina Ryan (5:43): It starts subtly, a little discomfort, a feeling of I'm not doing this right, a sense of pressure to perform relaxation correctly. Did you hear me say that? To perform relaxation correctly. There's no way to do it correctly. Okay?

Gina Ryan (6:02): And then instead of calming down, the nervous system becomes more activated, more self aware, more self monitoring, and even more tense. And then comes the second wave, the thinking. I can't even relax properly. What a loser. Why is this not working for me?

Gina Ryan (6:25): There must be something really wrong with me. Everyone says this should help. What's wrong with me? And suddenly, what was meant to be a calming practice becomes another source of stress and sometimes even shame. So let's talk about why this happens and more importantly, what actually can help instead.

Gina Ryan (6:53): So first up, I wanna talk about why controlled breathing can backfire. Most structured breath work relies on one core idea. If you control the breath, you can control the nervous system, and physiologically, that is partly true. Slower breathing can signal safety. It absolutely does.

Gina Ryan (7:18): Longer exhalation can activate calming pathways. Rhythmic breathing can reduce physiological arousal. But here's the missing piece. The nervous system doesn't just respond to breath mechanics. It responds to the way we relate to this experience.

Gina Ryan (7:42): And for many anxious people, especially those with heightened bodily awareness, the act of controlling breathing introduces something else entirely. Monitoring, evaluating, checking, correcting, trying to get it right. And that shifts the internal experience from my body is settling to I need to manage my body properly. And that subtle shift really matters because anxiety is already a state of heightened internal surveillance. Right?

Gina Ryan (8:27): So now instead of stepping out of that loop, the person is actually deepening it. Before we begin, let's hear from the sponsors that support the show.

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Gina Ryan (13:32): One of the most common patterns that I see is a person tries box breathing. They follow the count. They focus hard. They try to stay consistent. But instead of relaxation, what they notice is I feel air hunger.

Gina Ryan (13:49): Right? That feeling of I can't get a breath. I can't hold it comfortably, or I'm thinking about my breathing too much, or I feel trapped in the pattern. And then the mind adds pressure. This should be working.

Gina Ryan (14:07): That word should, right, is often where things start to unravel. Because now it's not just a breathing exercise. It's a test. And when anxiety is already present, turning anything internal into a test tends to increase stress, not reduce it. And so why anxious systems react differently is important to understand.

Gina Ryan (14:37): An anxious system is often already highly sensitive to internal sensations. So when attention is directed toward the breathing, especially in a structured way, it can amplify awareness of your heartbeat. Right? Your chest tightness, the air hunger feeling again, dizziness, your swallowing, or muscle tension. And those are all places that anxious people can get sucked into and be very uncomfortable.

Gina Ryan (15:13): This is called heightened interoceptive awareness. Basically, the brain becomes very highly tuned into bodily sensations. So instead of soothing the system, breath focus can sometimes do the opposite. It turns up the volume on those sensations that were already being interpreted as threatening. And so then the cycle continues.

Gina Ryan (15:43): More sensation, more monitoring, more interpretation, more anxiety. And now I wanna talk about the shame loop that no one really talks much about. And there's something even more painful, right, than just those sensations. It's not just anxiety. It's discouragement because people assume if this works for others, why doesn't it work for me?

Gina Ryan (16:13): Something is wrong with me. And so the shame comes in. So now we get the emotional layer, anxiety about anxiety, stress about not improving, and then shame about not responding correctly. Why doesn't this work for me? And this is where many people quietly give up on self help.

Gina Ryan (16:38): They stop doing any kinds of practices, and I don't blame them really, not because they don't wanna feel better, but because the tools themselves started to feel like pressure, like a performance. So let's talk about what actually helps, and that would be less control, not more. What can we do? This is where things get surprisingly simple, and I mean genuinely simple, almost uncomfortably simple at first. For many anxious people, the most regulating shift is not a better technique or more precision or stronger control.

Gina Ryan (17:19): Now there's a place for all of that, especially when you're doing breath work for other things. This is not for the highly anxious person. Those things are for different purposes. When you are anxious, you are going to want to be getting into less effort, less monitoring, less trying to fix the breath. Yes.

Gina Ryan (17:46): What you want is a gentle return to something that the body already knows how to do, a slightly longer, softer exhale. Not measured, not counted, and not optimized. Just a little more space on the out breath. I know you've heard me say it in so many of the episodes, a longer, slower exhale. No numbers.

Gina Ryan (18:15): No pressure, just a little more space on the out breath. And that's easy enough to remember. Why, you might say, does the exhale matter? The exhale is naturally associated with the downregulation in our nervous system. And here's the key difference.

Gina Ryan (18:36): We are not forcing the pattern. We are not engineering a state. We are simply allowing. Let the out breath be a little longer than the in breath. That's it.

Gina Ryan (18:48): No numbers, no structure, no performance, and importantly, no expectation that it will immediately erase anxiety. No. Now the out breath is part of cluing us into our parasympathetic side of our nervous system. Yes. And that's why it can begin to be a great way for us to breathe naturally.

Gina Ryan (19:17): And the more you practice this, the more it will become natural to you. Believe me. You will. But you don't wanna have an expectation that this is going to do something immediately and erase your anxiety because even just that expectation can become pressure. No.

Gina Ryan (19:37): Instead, the exhale just becomes a signal of permission of us visiting our parasympathetic nervous system. Not I must calm down, but it's okay to soften slightly. And that distinction changes everything. The most important shift is to stop trying to fix yourself. This is the deeper layer underneath all of this.

Gina Ryan (20:04): For many anxious people, the real struggle isn't just anxiety. It's the relationship with our anxiety and our stress. The constant inner message of this shouldn't be here. I shouldn't feel like this anymore. I need to get rid of this.

Gina Ryan (20:23): I need to do something to fix this right now. And ironically, that fixing energy often keeps the system activated. You almost have to get to the point where it's like, okay, it's here. Who cares? Because the body reads urgency as potential threat.

Gina Ryan (20:45): So even well intentioned tools can become part of the activation cycle if they're used with too much force. This is why approaches that emphasize acceptance, gentleness, and reduced struggle tend to be so powerful over time, not because they do nothing, but because they stop adding extra layers of tension. So you might be thinking, well, where are you getting all this? So there is clinical wisdom that supports this. A lot of this aligns with long standing therapeutic wisdom.

Gina Ryan (21:25): Clinicians working with anxiety for decades have noticed a consistent pattern. The more someone tries to eliminate anxiety immediately, the more persistent it can become. Claire Weeks wrote extensively about how fear of bodily sensations creates a secondary layer of distress and how recovery often becomes not with control but with allowing sensations to be present without resistance. Modern approaches like ACT therapy and somatic based therapies echo the same idea. You don't always need to change the sensation first.

Gina Ryan (22:11): You often need to change the struggle with the sensation. So what can this look like in real life? Right? So instead of saying, I'm going to do four four four four box breathing perfectly, It might look more like, oh, I notice I'm tense. And then without trying to fix it, I'll just let the next exhale be a little slower and then moving on.

Gina Ryan (22:40): No tracking, no repetition, no correcting, just a small softening. And then letting the body do what it does next because the body already knows how to regulate when it is not being interrupted by constant correction. Experiment with this because the goal is not perfect calm. The goal is not to achieve a perfectly calm state. That's actually a trap that many anxious people fall into because then calm becomes something that you must produce correctly.

Gina Ryan (23:18): Instead, the goal should be much more realistic, less struggle, less self judgment, less internal pressure. And over time, that alone changes the system, but not dramatically in a single moment, but steadily, quietly in the background. So if breath work has ever made you feel worse instead of better, you're not doing it wrong. You may simply be responding to a system that doesn't need more control right now. It may need less, a little less effort, a little less checking, a little less fixing, and a little more permission to let the breath be what it is.

Gina Ryan (24:03): Because sometimes the most regulating thing you can do is stop trying so hard to regulate. If this resonates with you, you might experiment with something very simple today. Just notice your next exhale. And instead of changing it, just allow it to be a little softer than the inhale. Nothing more than that.

Gina Ryan (24:28): No technique to master. No goal to achieve. Just a small reminder to your nervous system. You don't have to work so hard right now. If today's episode was helpful, I hope that you will take the time to share it with someone that you think might find it helpful.

Gina Ryan (24:51): I'm looking forward to seeing you in a little while. And now for today's quote. The soft overcomes the hard, The gentle overcomes the rigid, and that's from the Tao Te Ching. I'll be back in a few more days with another podcast. Until then, be well, and aloha.

Unknown Speaker (25:19): Thanks so much for joining us for today's episode of the anxiety coaches podcast. Find more information at the anxietycoachespodcast.com.

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