The short answer is yes. The longer answer is more interesting.
Breathwork has been used for thousands of years in traditions around the world. What changed is that Western science finally started paying attention around 50 years ago, running proper studies, tracking what happens in the body when people breathe in specific patterns.
The research now backs what those traditions already knew. Changing your breath changes your body. It changes your nervous system. It changes what your brain can and cannot access. And when you use the right pattern for long enough, it can help the body release emotions it has been holding.
What the science says about conscious connected breathing
Conscious connected breathing is the pattern used in IMD sessions. You breathe in and out continuously with no pause between the inhale and the exhale. This does two things.
First, it shifts the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. The technical term is hypocapnia, a temporary drop in CO2. This changes your blood pH slightly towards alkaline. That shift quiets the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for thinking, planning and controlling.
When that part of the brain quiets, the limbic system, the emotional brain, becomes more active. Emotions that have been stored in the body without conscious awareness can surface.
Second, the continuous breath activates the sympathetic nervous system. This is the part of your nervous system that handles stress and activation. Heart rate increases. Blood pressure rises slightly. The body moves into a heightened state.
This is not stress in the harmful sense. It is deliberate, controlled activation. And what happens next is where the real work lives.
The body completes what it could not finish
When something difficult happens and the natural response is shut down, the emotion does not disappear. The grief you were not allowed to cry. The anger you had to swallow. The fear you had to keep quiet. The body holds it.
Trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine have spent decades showing this. Emotions that are not processed stay in the body as incomplete survival responses. They show up as tension, numbness, chronic pain, digestive problems, panic, or a nervous system stuck in overdrive.
Conscious connected breathing creates the conditions for those incomplete responses to finish. The breath brings the body into a heightened state, the thinking mind steps back, and the emotion gets a route out. The body shakes, cries, laughs, holds tension and releases it. Whatever needs to move, moves.
This is not abstract. Studies using brain imaging show that breathwork reduces activity in the default mode network, the part of the brain responsible for rumination and self-referential thinking. At the same time, it increases activity in areas linked to emotion and bodily sensation.
The body is doing what it was always designed to do. Feel, process, complete, move on.
The polyvagal theory connection
Stephen Porges developed polyvagal theory to explain how the vagus nerve regulates the nervous system. The vagus nerve connects the brain to the heart, lungs, gut and other organs. It is the main pathway for calming the body down after stress.
The theory describes three states. Safe and social. Fight or flight. Shutdown and freeze.
Most people who come to breathwork are stuck in one of the latter two. Either running hot, on edge, braced for the next thing. Or running cold, numb, disconnected, shut down.
Conscious connected breathing moves the body through these states in a controlled way. It activates the sympathetic system first, the fight or flight response. Then, when the breath softens and the session moves into the landing, the parasympathetic system kicks in. Heart rate slows. The body returns to baseline. The vagus nerve does its job.
This is not relaxation in the sense of lying still and thinking calm thoughts. This is the body completing a full cycle of activation and recovery. That is what makes the nervous system more resilient over time.
What happens during integration
The release itself is only part of the work. What happens after the release is what makes the change last.
During the IMD Landing, the last 20 minutes of a session, the breath shifts back to natural breathing. The music softens. Two guided visualisations help the body integrate what came up.
This is when the brain consolidates the experience. The hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory, takes what just happened and files it as processed. The nervous system learns, on a felt level, that it is safe to feel what it just felt.
Without this integration phase, the release can feel dramatic in the moment but not stick. The IMD Landing is built around making sure the work lands properly.
The research on outcomes
Multiple studies now show measurable effects from breathwork. Reductions in anxiety and depression. Lower cortisol, the body's main stress hormone. Improved heart rate variability, a marker of nervous system flexibility.
A 2023 study published in Cell Reports Medicine found that cyclic breathing patterns, including conscious connected breathing, reduced anxiety more effectively than mindfulness meditation in the same timeframe.
Another study from Stanford showed that deliberate breathing practices shift the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system, improving emotional regulation and stress resilience.
These are not fringe claims. This is peer-reviewed research from respected institutions.
What science cannot measure
Not everything that matters in a breathwork session shows up in a brain scan or a cortisol reading.
The grief that moves through someone who has been holding it for 20 years. The moment a person realises they have been bracing since childhood and their shoulders finally drop. The quiet that comes after anger finishes its arc. The shift from feeling disconnected to feeling like themselves again.
Science can measure the physiology underneath those moments. It cannot measure the meaning they carry for the person experiencing them.
That does not make them less real. It makes them harder to reduce to data.
Not all breathwork is the same
The research applies to specific patterns done in specific ways. Conscious connected breathing, done for long enough, in a safe and held environment, produces the effects described above.
A 90-second box breath on your lunch break is helpful for calming the nervous system in the moment. It is not the same work. The pattern is different. The goal is different. The depth is different.
This is not to say one is better than the other. They serve different purposes. But when someone asks if breathwork is backed by science, the answer depends on which kind of breathwork and which outcome you are measuring.
The short version
Breathwork works because it works with the body directly. It shifts your nervous system. It quiets the thinking brain and activates the emotional brain. It gives stuck emotion a route out. And when done properly, with the right pattern and the right support, the body releases what it has been holding and settles into a calmer baseline.
The science backs this. Decades of research from neuroscience, psychology and physiology all point in the same direction.
What the research cannot capture is what it feels like to leave a session lighter than you walked in. To sleep properly for the first time in months. To sit through a family dinner without that tight knot in your chest. To feel like yourself again.
That part, you have to feel for yourself.
