Breathwork course most improved social connection among teen girls facing greatest adversity

School-based mental-health programs are often expected to reach students whose lives have been shaped by the greatest adversity, yet those students can be the hardest to help. A new study from UCLA suggests that a classroom-based intervention may reverse that pattern. Teenage girls with the highest levels of childhood trauma showed the largest gains in social connectedness after completing a program that combined social-emotional learning with structured breathing exercises. The findings, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, point to a potentially scalable way for schools to address isolation and stress among adolescents, particularly in communities where access to specialist mental-health care remains limited.

The study examined 174 female high-school students at two Southern California schools. More than 93% of the participants identified as Latinx, and the schools were similar at the beginning of the trial in both students’ exposure to childhood adversity and their reported sense of social connectedness. One school was randomly assigned to receive the SKY Schools program during the study, while students at the other school completed assessments during the same period and received the program afterward. Because the randomization occurred at the school level rather than separately for each student, the results provide promising early evidence but should be confirmed in larger trials involving more schools and more diverse populations.

SKY Schools combines a social-emotional learning curriculum with SKY Breathing, short for Sudarshan Kriya Yoga. The breathing component uses deliberately paced patterns, including brief exercises performed on most school days and a longer session once a week. The approach is designed to influence autonomic regulation, the body’s system for automatically controlling functions such as heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and digestion. When people experience persistent stress, the autonomic nervous system can remain biased toward heightened alertness, making it harder to calm down, concentrate or respond flexibly during social interactions. Structured breathing may help shift that physiological balance, although the biological pathways involved remain an active area of research.

Students assigned to the intervention completed four weeks of social-emotional learning followed by eight weeks of collective breathing practice during physical-education classes. Across the eight-week practice period, they performed short breathing exercises for approximately five minutes on four days each week and completed a 25-minute SKY Breathing session on the fifth day. In total, participants took part in 40 sessions. The curriculum also included activities intended to develop self-regulation, leadership, conflict-management skills and emotional awareness, as well as stretching, games and other forms of physical activity. Practicing in groups may have added a social element beyond the effects of breathing itself, giving students a regular shared routine and an opportunity to experience regulation alongside classmates.

Researchers assessed students’ adverse childhood experiences, commonly known as ACEs, and measured social connectedness before and after the program. ACEs can include experiences such as abuse, neglect, household instability or exposure to violence. Four or more ACEs is generally regarded as a high level of childhood adversity and is associated with elevated risks of depression, anxiety, substance misuse, chronic disease and difficulties in school. These associations do not determine an individual’s future, but they demonstrate how prolonged or repeated stress during development can affect emotional health, relationships and physiological regulation.

The most pronounced change appeared among girls in the intervention group who had experienced four or more ACEs. They reported a 7% increase in social connectedness, an improvement significantly larger than that reported by students with lower ACE scores in the intervention school and by both high- and low-ACE students at the wait-list school. Social connectedness refers to the perceived quality of a person’s relationships and sense of belonging within a community. It is not simply the number of friends someone has; it also involves feeling understood, supported and meaningfully linked to other people. For adolescents, that sense of belonging is associated with better emotional wellbeing and may help protect against the effects of loneliness and social withdrawal.

The researchers suggest that the program may have helped students manage stress in ways that made social engagement easier. Trauma and chronic adversity can heighten sensitivity to threat, causing ordinary interactions to feel unpredictable or unsafe. A student who is physiologically tense may be more likely to withdraw, react defensively or struggle to interpret social cues. Breathing exercises cannot erase traumatic experiences, and the study did not establish that they directly changed the participants’ autonomic nervous systems. However, repeated practice may give students a simple strategy for reducing acute arousal, while the social-emotional curriculum provides language and skills for recognizing emotions, resolving conflict and seeking support. Together, those elements could create conditions that make connection more attainable.

“What’s striking is that the girls who needed help the most benefited the most,” said Dara Ghahremani, a research professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the study’s senior author. He said that adolescents who had faced substantial adversity appeared to gain a stronger sense of connection and belonging from a relatively simple combination of social-emotional skills training and breathing techniques. Ghahremani also emphasized the possible relationship between stress regulation and social behavior: when students become better able to regulate their own stress, they may be better positioned to connect with the people around them. The study measured social connectedness, however, rather than diagnosing or treating mental-health disorders, so the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that the program prevents depression, anxiety or trauma-related illness.

The results arrive as adolescents report increasing loneliness and spend more time turning to digital platforms for companionship, information and emotional support. Girls with extensive childhood adversity face particularly high risks for anxiety, depression, substance misuse and academic difficulties, while many schools struggle to provide timely access to counselors, psychologists and trauma specialists. A program delivered during existing physical-education classes could be less expensive and easier to implement than one-to-one treatment, especially if instructors can be trained to lead the sessions. At the same time, the study’s limited design, reliance on self-reported outcomes, short follow-up period and concentration in two predominantly Latinx schools make it too early to conclude that SKY Schools will produce the same results elsewhere. Larger, independently replicated studies will need to determine how long the gains last, whether they extend to boys and gender-diverse students, and whether improvements in connectedness translate into measurable changes in stress biology, academic performance or clinical symptoms. For now, the findings offer an intriguing signal: in a school setting, a brief daily practice that links breathing, emotional skills and group participation may be especially valuable for adolescents carrying the heaviest burden of early-life adversity.

News Publication Date: 10-Aug-2026

Web References: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jora.70228; http://skyschools.org/

References: Journal of Research on Adolescence, DOI: 10.1111/jora.70228