The study recruited 30 healthy, experienced breathwork practitioners who performed high-ventilation breathwork while lying inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This design allowed the researchers to capture both physiological and subjective changes in real time, combining continuous measurement of cerebral blood flow with retrospective reports of the participants’ conscious experiences. Such a combination is rare in consciousness research, where altered states are often studied either through pharmacological manipulation with controlled substances or through meditation and sensory deprivation protocols that produce subtler shifts in awareness. Breathwork, by contrast, is legal, inexpensive, and free of the regulatory constraints that complicate psychedelic research, making it an attractive model system for scientists seeking to understand how consciousness can be systematically altered without drugs.

Participants reported experiencing strong altered states of consciousness during the scanning sessions. The dominant quality of these experiences was what the researchers describe as an oceanic state, a deep and pervasive feeling of connection to the universe and to other people. Many participants also reported altered perception, vivid mental imagery, a diminished or transformed sense of self, and a subjective sense of unity. When these reports were compared against established characterizations of psychedelic experiences, the researchers found that they resembled those produced by a moderate to high dose of LSD or psilocybin, although the breathwork-induced states involved less pronounced visual effects than are typically associated with classical psychedelics. This convergence between a breathing practice and a serotonergic drug state is one of the most intriguing aspects of the work, because the two interventions reach the brain through entirely different physiological pathways.

The imaging data revealed a substantial physiological effect. Global grey-matter cerebral blood flow fell by approximately 45 percent during the breathwork sessions, dropping on average from 16.24 to 9.81 milliliters per 100 grams of tissue per minute, a difference that was highly statistically significant across the 30 participants. This magnitude of reduction is remarkable for a voluntary behavioral intervention and reflects the intense hyperventilation that characterizes high-ventilation breathwork, which alters blood carbon dioxide levels and thereby constricts cerebral vessels. Yet the researchers emphasize that this dramatic reduction in blood supply does not by itself explain the intensity of the experiences participants reported. The brain, it appears, continues to function and to generate extraordinary states of consciousness even while its overall blood supply is sharply curtailed.

Instead, the key to understanding the altered states may lie in how the brain’s networks communicate with one another during the practice. The researchers found that participants who reported stronger and more profound altered states also showed greater changes in the default mode network, a set of interconnected brain regions involved in self-reflection, autobiographical thinking, and the construction of the sense of self. The default mode network has long been a focal point of psychedelic research, because drugs such as psilocybin and LSD are known to disrupt its normally synchronized activity, and the degree of this disruption correlates with experiences of ego dissolution. The new findings suggest that intensive breathing may converge on the same neural target through a fundamentally different mechanism, one driven by blood gas changes and vascular dynamics rather than by receptor pharmacology.

Lead researcher Dr Christian Schmitz of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim noted that although many practitioners of intensive breathwork report profound changes in perception and self-experience, the underlying brain mechanisms have remained poorly understood. According to Schmitz, the study indicates that these experiences are linked not only to marked changes in cerebral blood flow but also to alterations in how key brain networks communicate. This distinction matters because it reframes the question of how breathwork works. If reduced blood flow alone were responsible, one might expect any condition that lowers cerebral perfusion to produce similar states, which does not appear to be the case. The specificity of the network-level changes suggests that the pattern of reorganization, not the reduction in supply, carries the experiential signature.

Hana Adolphi, co-coordinator of the research, highlighted the practical implications of the work. Breathwork, she noted, is a legal, inexpensive, and non-pharmacological intervention that may provide a valuable tool for studying altered states of consciousness in laboratory settings. Understanding the mechanisms through which voluntary breathing patterns reshape brain communication could also inform future research into novel approaches for mental health treatment. This is a significant point given the current surge of interest in psychedelic-assisted therapies for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. If breathwork can reliably induce states that overlap with those produced by psychedelics, and if those states can be harnessed therapeutically, an accessible and drug-free route to similar benefits may become available to a much broader population than psychedelic medicine can currently reach.

Independent commentators welcomed the study while cautioning that its conclusions remain preliminary. Dr Guy Fincham of Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the research, described the work as intriguing because it extends recent breathwork research suggesting that intensive breathing practices can yield altered states of consciousness that individuals describe in ways analogous to psychedelic compounds, and it does so under controlled brain-imaging conditions. He emphasized that such altered subjective experiences may be harnessed for the improvement of mental health, and that an accessible non-pharmacological route such as breathwork could prove invaluable for many people. At the same time, he pointed out that the study was uncontrolled and that its sample consisted entirely of experienced practitioners, so replication in breathwork-naive participants using a randomized controlled design will be needed to determine whether the findings translate more widely and produce genuine therapeutic benefit.

Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London, also commenting independently, framed the work in the context of the broader psychedelic research program. Breathwork, in his view, represents a non-pharmacological bridge to research into psychedelics, and studies that help clarify how it functions are a welcome addition to the field. The bridge metaphor captures an important scientific opportunity: because breathwork does not require controlled substances, special licensing, or supervised dosing of psychoactive drugs, it allows researchers to probe altered states of consciousness in settings that would otherwise be difficult to approve. Comparing the neural signatures of breathwork-induced states with those of psychedelic states could help isolate which aspects of network reorganization are essential to the therapeutic and experiential effects, and which are incidental to a particular method of induction.

The researchers themselves acknowledge the limitations of the current work. With 30 participants, all of them experienced practitioners, and no control condition, the study cannot yet establish whether the observed brain changes have clinical relevance or whether they would appear in people attempting intensive breathwork for the first time. Larger studies with controlled designs will be required to answer those questions. Nevertheless, the study marks a meaningful step forward in the science of consciousness. It demonstrates that a voluntary, drug-free behavioral practice can produce measurable reductions in cerebral blood flow alongside network-level reorganization that tracks with the intensity of subjective experience, and it points researchers toward a specific neural mechanism, altered communication within the default mode network, as the likely key to understanding how breathwork transforms the mind. For a field increasingly interested in non-pharmacological routes to altered states and mental health, the message is clear: the breath may be a more powerful instrument for probing and shaping consciousness than previously appreciated.

Subject of Research: Effects of intensive breathwork on cerebral blood flow, brain network communication, and altered states of consciousness

Article Title: Intensive breathing alters consciousness by changing brain communication

Article References: Intensive breathing alters consciousness by changing brain communication. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: breathwork, consciousness, default mode network, cerebral blood flow, psychedelics, MRI, altered states, mental health, ECNP Congress, neuroscience, non-pharmacological intervention, self-experience

The research team, led by Carina Berglund of Nantes Université’s Movement – Interactions – Performance laboratory, together with colleagues from Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Université d’Angers, focused on the Festival du Froid, held in France in 2024. Unlike controlled intervention trials, this was a field study embedded in a genuine community event, capturing the full context in which people actually engage with breathwork and cold exposure: outdoors, in groups, over consecutive days, and amid the social energy of a festival. This ecological realism is precisely what most existing evidence lacks, since the bulk of research on cold exposure and breathwork has examined acute physiological responses or momentary mood shifts in single sessions.

The investigators distributed surveys before and after the festival and received 85 responses in total. Of these, 19 participants, or 22 percent, provided complete paired data from both time points, forming the analytical sample. The primary outcome was trait anxiety, measured with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory’s trait subscale, a widely used instrument that assesses the tendency to experience anxiety as a relatively stable characteristic. The researchers also tracked resilience and cognitive emotion regulation, expecting that these psychological resources might shift alongside anxiety, though that is not what the data ultimately showed.

The headline finding was a statistically significant drop in trait anxiety scores. Before the festival, participants averaged 42.6 points with a standard deviation of 7.8; afterward, the average fell to 39.8 with a standard deviation of 8.3, a reduction of 6.6 percent. The mean difference was 2.79 points, with a 95 percent confidence interval ranging from 0.91 to 4.67. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test, appropriate for non-normally distributed paired data, yielded a p-value of .002, and the standardized effect size, Hedges’ g, came out at 0.68 with a confidence interval of 0.19 to 1.16, which by conventional benchmarks represents a moderate-to-large effect. Importantly, 16 of the 19 participants showed reduced or stable scores, suggesting the change was not driven by a handful of dramatic responders.

What makes this result conceptually interesting is the target of the measurement. Trait anxiety has traditionally been treated as a fixed disposition, something stable across situations and resistant to brief interventions. The authors instead interpret the STAI-Trait score as a marker of negative affectivity, a vulnerability to experiencing negative emotions that may be more malleable than the label trait implies. Viewed through this lens, a multi-day immersive experience combining physiological stressors with communal practices could plausibly shift this vulnerability in the short term, even if longer-lasting change remains an open question that the study was not designed to answer.

The physiological rationale for such an effect is grounded in plausible mechanisms, even though the study did not measure them directly. Cold-water immersion triggers a robust stress response, acutely elevating catecholamines and activating the sympathetic nervous system, and repeated controlled exposure has been hypothesized to improve top-down regulation of autonomic arousal. Deliberate breathwork practices, particularly those involving slow or patterned breathing, are associated with increased vagal tone and reduced subjective tension, while some intense hyperventilation-based protocols produce transient states of altered arousal that participants often describe as cathartic. Group movement and shared physical challenge add further layers, including social bonding, collective efficacy and the mood effects of sustained outdoor activity. A festival format stacks all of these elements together, which makes it impossible to isolate which ingredient, or which combination, produced the observed change.

Indeed, the authors are explicit that the study is exploratory and that no causal claims can be made. The design lacked a control group, so regression to the mean, expectancy effects, the simple passage of time, or the general experience of attending a restorative social event could all account for part of the improvement. The completion rate was low, with only 22 percent of respondents providing paired data, and the sample was small and self-selected, composed of people motivated enough to attend a cold-exposure festival and diligent enough to complete both surveys. Such participants may differ systematically from the general population in baseline anxiety, openness to experience and enthusiasm for the practices involved, all of which limit generalizability.

Two secondary findings add nuance to the picture. First, satisfaction with the festival was uniformly high, indicating strong acceptability of the format; this matters for any future intervention research, since adherence and enjoyment are prerequisites for scaling such programs. Second, and perhaps more surprising, neither resilience nor cognitive emotion regulation changed from before to after the event. If the anxiety reduction had been driven by a genuine strengthening of coping resources, one might expect these measures to move in parallel. Their stability suggests instead that the effect may be closer to an acute reduction in negative affective vulnerability, a temporary recalibration of emotional baseline, rather than a durable upgrade in psychological skills. The authors themselves characterize the finding as preliminary evidence that the festival format is associated with an acute reduction in negative affective vulnerability alongside high acceptability.

The study was conducted within the CNRS Collab Inspire research collaboration agreement between CNRS UMR 6590 ESO and Inspire Potential, with Mathilde Plard serving as scientific lead, and Berglund’s doctoral research is supported by the Horizon Europe Breath program. The protocol received approval from the Ethics Committee for Research of Nantes Université, and the study was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, with responses linked only by a self-chosen four-digit code, and participants could withdraw at any time without consequence. The sponsors had no role in data collection, analysis or manuscript preparation, and the authors declare no competing interests.

For the growing audience drawn to breathwork circles, ice baths and cold-water plunges, the study offers a cautiously encouraging signal rather than a prescription. It suggests that a multi-day, community-based format combining these practices is safe enough, enjoyable enough and potentially effective enough to justify more rigorous investigation, ideally with randomized or matched control conditions, larger samples, longer follow-up periods and physiological monitoring to identify mechanisms. Until such trials arrive, the Festival du Froid data stand as an intriguing naturalistic data point: a modest but consistent drop in anxiety vulnerability among ordinary people who spent three days breathing, moving and shivering together in the French outdoors, and a reminder that some of the most popular wellness practices of the moment are only now beginning to meet the standards of careful psychological science.

Subject of Research: Psychological effects of a multiday breathwork and cold-water immersion festival on trait anxiety

Article Title: A multiday outdoor festival combining breathwork and cold water immersion is associated with reduced trait anxiety in a naturalistic pre-post study

Article References: Berglund, C., Hallez, Q., Deschamps, T., & Plard, M. (2026). A multiday outdoor festival combining breathwork and cold water immersion is associated with reduced trait anxiety in a naturalistic pre-post study. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00914-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00914-1

Keywords: breathwork, cold-water immersion, trait anxiety, negative affectivity, naturalistic pre-post study, festival, mental health, emotion regulation, resilience, well-being, stress response, Discover Psychology