Ageing well is often framed as adding years to our life. I see it from a different vantage point: adding life to your years. A life where energy doesn’t spike and crash, clarity doesn’t come exclusively when on holiday, a focus on our wellness isn’t rooted in dis-ease (driven from fear) and the body feels more like a home than a project.
Many of us are trying to “age well” whilst living in ways that deplete us: striving for relentless output, shallow breathing, rushing meals, constant stimulation and very little space for integration.
When I speak about a more conscious relationship with breath as a prerequisite for ageing well, I am speaking about something far more fundamental: the most accessible way we have to influence our internal state – the bridge between body, mind, emotion and spirit.
James Nestor writes beautifully about how modern life has reshaped the way we breathe and how returning to healthier breathing patterns can change how we feel, sleep, move and cope. That’s been my lived experience too, both personally and professionally.
A four-part framework for ageing well through breath
This is the lens I come back to again and again. The same lens that increasingly underpins so much of my work, including the journey I teach in The Awakening Path: we don’t transform through one doorway alone. We transform when the whole system begins to come back into coherence.
- The Physical: breath as terrain
Breath is chemistry and biomechanics.
It shapes the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide, influences ventilation efficiency, and affects cardiovascular rhythms through mechanisms linked to heart-rate variability and baroreflex sensitivity – a key part of how the body adapts to stress and recovers.
It also changes pressure gradients through the trunk: the diaphragm doesn’t only draw air in; it acts as a respiratory pump, supporting venous (and even lymph) return, which matters for circulation, fluid movement and overall resilience.
And quite literally, breathing is one of the body’s major routes for clearing metabolic by-products. One striking example is when fat is metabolised, much of its mass leaves the body as carbon dioxide through the breath.
One of the simplest truths I’ve learned, and one my teacher R. Christian Minson (Breathflow Wellness) articulates is this: “your breathing habits become your baseline physiology”. Importantly this does not occur in a sudden or acute way, it happens incrementally and cumulatively.
If your baseline is tight, shallow, and held, your body can start to feel like it’s ageing faster than it needs to. If your baseline becomes slower, fuller, softer and more efficient, you build capacity: the kind that supports energy, recovery and vitality over time.
I see this with high-performing clients: when we shift from chest-dominant, held breathing into steadier diaphragmatic patterns, sleep quality and day-to-day energy are often the first things to change.
How would your life feel if your body wasn’t quietly holding its breath?
This is why breath is foundational: it’s the simplest daily lever for energy, recovery and graceful resilience over time.
- The Emotional: breath as processing
Most of us were never taught how to feel an emotion all the way through. We were taught to manage it, hide it, intellectualise it, suppress it or outperform it.
And the cost isn’t only psychological. Research consistently suggests that certain emotion regulation strategies – particularly suppression – are associated with higher levels of systemic inflammation (including elevated C-reactive protein, CRP). In other words: what we repeatedly push down doesn’t simply vanish; it can become part of the body’s background load.
This is one reason breathwork can be such a powerful support as we age. We are not only carrying our present-day stressors; we’re carrying the accumulated load of our life stories, the moments we never had space to feel, the roles we outgrew, the grief we kept moving through, the adaptations that once protected us and now cost us.
Breathing consciously using effective techniques offers a gentle, direct way of meeting what’s held, not by “going into the story”, but by connecting with the body underneath the story: sensation, tightness, heat, tremor, tears, breathlessness and even stillness (which can feel uncomfortable). This is aligned with what I value in Embodied Processing: we learn to stay with the lived, somatic experience long enough for the system to reorganise, through presence and completion – rather than force.
There’s also a biochemical dimension here. As Candace Pert described, neuropeptides and their receptors form a communication network linking brain, glands and immune system – often described as part of the biochemical substrate of emotion. When emotional states are chronic or unprocessed, the signalling doesn’t just stay “in the head”; it can influence the whole body, including inflammatory pathways.
Breath gives the nervous system and the emotional body a pathway back towards release and regulation, in a way that words alone often can’t. And because suppression carries a measurable physiological cost in the moment, learning to process rather than clamp down can reduce that load over time.
Practically, this is what it can look like: A leader tells me they’re “fine”, but their jaw is locked, their shoulders are high, their breath is barely moving. When we slow the breathing and create safety, the body often does what it’s been trying to do for months. A brief shake, a sigh, a spontaneous exhale, a wave of grief or anger, and afterwards they describe feeling lighter, clearer, less reactive; an ability to respond with agency.
Unprocessed emotion often shows up as tension, bracing, control, fatigue, irritability or that subtle sense of being “fine” but not really free. Breathwork helps the body complete what it’s been holding, so your baseline becomes more spacious, more resilient and less inflammatory over time.
How much of your energy is spent holding yourself together?
Ageing well requires more than coping – it requires completion and breath is one of the most direct pathways back to emotional freedom in the body.
- The Mental: breath as clarity
Ageing can sometimes feel like a mental narrowing: more noise and less spaciousness.
Breathwork creates mental room because it changes your relationship to what’s happening inside you, and there’s research to support this. In a randomised study, diaphragmatic breathing training improved attention and reduced negative affect; it also moderated stress physiology (cortisol response). Other controlled studies show deep, slow breathing can improve cognitive performance and reviews suggest slow breathing supports “autonomic and cerebral flexibility” – shifting patterns linked to emotional control and mental steadiness.
When the breath slows, the mind often stops gripping so tightly. You start to notice the difference between:
- a thought that’s true vs one that’s simply loud
- a thought that feels urgent vs one that is important but can be dealt with in time
This is one of the most practical gifts breathwork gives: a bigger-picture perspective, clearer choices, fewer stress loops, better decision-making and a stronger ability to navigate uncertainty without spiralling.
As you age, do you want your inner world to contract — or to open?
Breathwork keeps the mind supple, restoring perspective and flow when life gets louder.
- The Spiritual: breath as reconnection
I’m not speaking about spirituality as ideology. I’m speaking about spirituality as ‘contact’, the felt sense of being connected to something larger than your to-do list, your roles, your performance and even your history. Many people experience this through breath: presence becomes more available, the body softens into trust and there’s a quiet remembrance that they are more than what they’re carrying.
Dr Joe Dispenza describes the doorway as staying open, present and surrendering by relaxing into whatever happens. Others feel it as nature, energy, love, prayer or simply deep stillness. However you name it, the impact is often the same: you stop living as if you’re only a finite body racing time and start living as if you’re also something timeless moving through time.
There’s evidence that this “something larger” orientation matters as we age. Large bodies of research link religious/spiritual involvement (often measured via service attendance/community belonging) with lower all-cause mortality in longitudinal studies and meta-analyses. And this matches what longevity researchers often observe in “Blue Zones”: a sense of belonging, meaning and spiritual community is common among many centenarians.
Just as importantly, it can change how we meet mortality. A study on contemplative practices found both mindfulness and related contemplative approaches reduced fear related to dying and death in several domains. And research more broadly links meaning in life with lower distress and shows how meaning relates to death anxiety.
So breathwork isn’t only about calming our nervous systems or creating conditions for release and clarity. At its deepest, it can become a practice of making peace with change, with impermanence and with the natural arc of a life fully lived.
As the years pass, do you want to meet life and death from contraction or connection?
Breathwork helps you age with grace by restoring contact with what’s bigger than fear, and letting you live in flow with time, not against it.
The 5-minute daily “Joy Jumpstart”
A short practice for you to try.
Minute 1 – Arrive
Sit comfortably. Hand on chest, hand on belly.
Breathe through the nose. Let the shoulders drop.
Minutes 2–3 – Coherent breathing
Inhale 5… exhale 5.
Smooth and unforced.
Minute 4 – Soften the hold
Inhale 4, exhale 6.
Let the exhale be the cue for release.
Minute 5 – Joy cue
Bring to mind one genuinely good thing, something small is fine.
On the inhale: “I let life in.”
On the exhale: “I soften what I’m carrying.”
This signals safety through attention: the body learns what safety feels like. If you try the Joy Jumpstart for seven days, notice what changes. It doesn’t have to be dramatic.
A note on claims and credibility
Breathwork is not a substitute for medical care and I’m careful about over-claiming what it can do. If you have a medical condition or are under treatment, consult a clinician.
What I can say with confidence is this: breathwork supports the conditions for health: better regulation, better sleep, more emotional processing, clearer choices and a deeper relationship with self.
These conditions matter. Especially as we age. Ageing well involves meeting time with more presence, more capacity and more ease.
Further Reading
Appleton, A. A., Buka, S. L., Loucks, E. B., Gilman, S. E., & Kubzansky, L. D. (2013). Health Psychology, 32(7), 748–756. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030068
Buettner, D. (2016). Blue Zones: Lessons From the World’s Longest Lived. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1177/1559827616637066
Li, S., Stampfer, M. J., Williams, D. R., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2016). JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(6), 777–785. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.1615
Ma, X., et al. (2017). Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 874. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874
Salah, H. M., et al. (2022). Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 80(17), 1647–1659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2022.08.760
Zaccaro, A., et al. (2018). Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12,353. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353
Samreen McGregor is a Breathwork Practitioner and Integrative Coach located in Berkhamsted, Herts, offering trauma-informed 1:1 breathwork sessions, small group experiences and integrative coaching.
If you’d like guidance, explore breathwork sessions with Samreen, visit https://seedwellness.co.uk/samreenmcgregor/
To find a breathwork practitioner near you, visit www.seedwellness.co.uk/breathwork
