Releasing Breathing Inhibition
What it is, how it develops, and why it matters
Lloyd Lalande, PhD
A central focus of Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy is the recognition and gradual removal of breathing inhibition. When we encounter experience that is difficult, threatening, or emotionally challenging, the natural impulse may be to tighten, hold, withdraw, or otherwise restrict our breathing. Over time, these responses can become habitual, so that breathing itself becomes part of the way we distance ourselves from the moment-to-moment flow of experiencing. GRMT works directly with this process by helping the person develop a more continuous, uninhibited breathing pattern while remaining aware of whatever is arising moment by moment.
Most people are unaware that their breathing may be habitually inhibited, or that they subtly change the way they breathe when they encounter challenge. A difficult thought, feeling, memory, bodily sensation, interpersonal situation, or perceived threat can be accompanied by an almost imperceptible tightening or holding of the breath. At other times, a restriction in breathing might be clearly experienced and worrying. Because these responses often occur automatically, they can become part of a person’s ordinary way of being without ever being recognised as a form of defence. GRMT brings this usually unnoticed relationship between breathing and experience into awareness, creating an opportunity to discover what happens when the person learns to breath freely, rather than instinctively restrict, their breathing in the presence of what is difficult. The research reviewed in the original GRMT model indicates that stressful and demanding circumstances can contribute to sustained inhibitory changes in breathing, which may subsequently become habitual.
The Conditioning of Breathing
Over time, breathing itself can become associated with discomfort. When fuller breathing repeatedly brings a person into contact with anxiety, tension, grief, fear, or other difficult bodily sensations, the experience of breathing more fully may begin to function as a conditioned stimulus for discomfort. The person does not necessarily make a conscious decision to avoid breathing; instead, breathing may be subtly restricted or inhibited as an acquired form of avoidance. In behavioural terms, the individual has learned that breathing more fully can lead to an unwanted experience, and the reduction of breathing consequently provides momentary relief. What began as an adaptive response to difficult experience can therefore become a habitual pattern in which breathing is itself constrained whenever challenging experience begins to arise. This helps explain why inhibited breathing can be so persistent—and why restoring the capacity to breathe freely may involve encountering, rather than continuing to avoid, the experience that the inhibited breathing has helped keep at a distance.
Importantly, this is not about forcing feelings out or producing cathartic release. When challenging sensations, emotions, memories, or inner conflicts emerge, the emphasis is on continuing to breathe rather than tightening around the experience. The person learns to notice subtle forms of holding and, with the support of the GRMT practitioner, allow the breath to remain open while the experience is observed, accepted and allowed to change in its own time. In this way, breathing becomes a means of moving around habitual defensive inhibition, allowing previously restricted experience to enter awareness without requiring emotional enactment or drama.