What happens to your brain after breathwork?

After a big journey, we can feel tender, raw, and open. It can sometimes feel hard to make sense of what you experienced and it may feel difficult to “come back to reality” and go about your day to day. I believe that psycho-education (understanding the psychology and neuroscience of what is happening) is a powerful tool for integration, empowerment, and sovereignty, so I want to teach you a bit about what happens to your brain after breathwork and psychedelic experiences:

After a big breathwork or psychedelic experience, your brain experiences a temporary window of heightened neuroplasticity—a period where the brain becomes unusually more open, flexible, and impressionable—particularly immediately after and in the hours, days, even weeks following. You are more able to think in novel ways, connect dots you couldn’t before, habits start to loosen their grip, and old stories start to shift. Your brain becomes more adaptable and receptive to change. In this window, new neural pathways are ignited, change becomes more accessible, and whatever inputs, meanings, beliefs, and emotional states are introduced can wire very deeply. 

This is a window of opportunity.

You can leverage this time period and strengthen new neural pathways in your brain through mindful, intentional action toward the ways of being you want embody by making decisions and choosing experiences that are in alignment with the future you desire to create. This is what integration is all about. It’s about leveraging this window of plasticity to create the changes you want.

This can look like gently creating new habits, pursuing new hobbies, setting new routines, exercising new boundaries, or practicing different, more loving self-talk. This window is about trying new ways of living, working, loving, playing, and being. You can experiment within this window. You can use it as a springboard to explore what could be. To choose something new. 

Remember: the journey opens the door, but how you integrate the experience in the days and weeks afterward is what cements the new pathways.

One way to support your integration process and take advantage of this window of opportunity is to journal. I highly encourage it. Journaling helps to “close the loop” after a big journey. It can help create the space for you to land gently and help you translate your experience and make sense of it.

Integration is about anchoring your insights and turning those insights into action. Without actively reflecting, the brain will tend to revert back to what is familiar: old stories, narratives, and habits; the well-worn neural pathways. Journaling helps to interrupt those old pathways and habits and explore new ways of thinking and being.