Breathwork Is The New Yoga: How Breath Therapy Helps With Addiction Recovery With Dan BruléBreathwork Is The New Yoga: How Breath Therapy Helps With Addiction Recovery With Dan Brulé
I Love Being Sober
Tim Westbrook talks with breathwork veteran Dan Brulé about how specific breathing practices can influence stress, cravings and emotional health. The conversation focuses on practical, everyday ways people in recovery might use their breath to support change.
51:32•19 Oct 2021
Breathwork Instead of Booze: Dan Brulé on Breathing Your Way Through Addiction
Episode Overview
- Breathwork can directly influence heart rate, stress and anxiety, offering a practical support tool in recovery.
- Every emotional and psychological state has a matching breathing pattern, so changing breath can shift how you feel.
- Starting with simple breath awareness each day builds mindfulness and lays the groundwork for more active techniques.
- Using a long, conscious sigh of relief at the first sign of a negative impulse can interrupt addictive behaviours.
- Nose-based, diaphragmatic breathing is best as an everyday habit, while mouth and circular breathing are useful targeted practices.
“If I get a handle on my breath, I got a handle on my heart rate. I got a handle on my stress. I got a handle on my anxiety.”
How do people cope with the challenges of staying sober? This conversation between Tim Westbrook and breathwork pioneer Dan Brulé looks at a surprisingly simple tool: the way you breathe. The episode kicks off with Tim explaining why recovery needs more than just detox and meetings; it needs new lifestyle habits. That’s where Dan, often called the "Bruce Lee of breathwork", comes in.
With over 50 years’ experience and hundreds of thousands of people trained, he talks about breathwork as a practical method for managing stress, anxiety and addictive urges. As he puts it, "If I get a handle on my breath, I got a handle on my heart rate. I got a handle on my stress.
I got a handle on my anxiety." You’ll hear how Dan’s work with deep-sea divers, special forces and Olympic athletes led him to realise that every emotional and psychological state has a matching breathing pattern – and that changing your breath can change your state. For people in addiction recovery, this becomes a way to interrupt the automatic loop between painful feelings and destructive reactions.
Dan explains why shallow, held breath is often an unconscious way to avoid uncomfortable emotions, using a vivid "glass of water with muck at the bottom" analogy to show how fuller breathing brings buried feelings to the surface so they can finally clear. He also breaks down simple starting steps: breath awareness on waking, conscious breathing with intention, and using a long, exaggerated sigh of relief as a quick intervention when cravings, anger or anxiety start to build.
There’s plenty on nose versus mouth breathing, box breathing used by elite teams, circular breathing, and why readiness and "hunger" for change matter just as much as technique. If breathing could be the small action that closes the gap between wanting to change and actually doing it, isn’t it worth giving a few conscious breaths a try?
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