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Relapse prevention is an important conversation for anyone in recovery. Ideally, it starts during treatment. The goal is to learn and practice new coping skills for managing stress and other triggers in life after rehab.
Many of these tools, (exercise, therapy, support groups, etc.), are well-known for their benefits in the prevention of relapse. Integral Breathwork Therapy (IBT) on the other hand? Not so much, yet this cutting-edge approach to healing from trauma and other issues has multiple benefits for relapse prevention.
Only a small number of providers nationwide offer IBT, and FHE Health is one of them. Our full-time, master-level therapist, Lisalee Loew, facilitates group and individual sessions. Loew is a veteran practitioner of the integral breathing method, which focuses on the interconnection and unification of the breath and the body. She also gives IBT-related trainings to healthcare professionals and the wider public on themes like personal growth, stress management, and self-empowerment.
We reached out to Loew for her insights into how IBT and its distinctive breathing technique can aid in preventing relapse. What follow are highlights from that conversation.
Integral Breathing for Managing Traumatic and Other Stress
Effective stress management is key to preventing an addiction relapse, but stress can have different causes:
- Unaddressed trauma and traumatic stress are common causes and triggers of substance abuse, and this is where guided IBT with a professional can help the patient safely access and release these distressing memories. Loew works with many first responders in our specialized treatment program Shatterproof FHE Health. Many of them have dealt with extensive trauma and may need as many as 10-12 individual sessions of IBT to “breathe” through the pain and finally let it go.
Here, Loew offered some words of caution: “If you’re a first responder or someone with a significant trauma history and have not tried Integral Breathwork Therapy before, don’t do this on your own until the trauma portion has been released with a facilitator or someone who has trained in IBT.”
- Chronic or acute stress from daily life is also a relapse trigger. How might integral breathing help to relieve it? we asked. Loew referred to her personal experience. She said the technique has helped her feel calmer and more grounded in tense or triggering situations.
“Any time I find myself in family drama, I breathe before I make that call, because I know that my emotional state is going to be much more balanced and regulated after I breathe, and my choices and thinking are clearer,” she said.
How Integral Breathing Reduces the Stress Response
Loew went on to cite some of the science that supports the use of integral breathing for stress reduction. She recalled an exercise that she and fellow student practitioners were asked to do as part of their training in IBT. It happened one day in class. Here is how Loew recalled it:
Prior to breathing, we were instructed to pee on a pH stick and then after the breathwork was completed, to pee again on a pH stick and see the difference in the levels. For more than 75 percent of the class, there was a difference, and our pH levels were down.
(A person’s pH level, which can also be measured in saliva and via other methods, is widely recognized as a biomarker of stress. Higher pH levels mean a perceived threat or stressful experience has activated the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates pH levels.)
How to Use Integral Breathing for Cravings
What about cravings in early recovery? Can integral breathing help there, too, and if so, how?
“With cravings, you move a muscle—you change a thought,” Loew said. “Usually if someone is craving [a substance], they’re incessantly thinking about it and glorifying their using. They’re not taking into account that they just burned their life to the ground. That ‘romancing’ is part of addiction.”
Loew’s recommendation: “If you start to romance using, drink a lot of water, take a hot shower, get in a chair and start breathing, because when you change physiology, you’ll change the thinking.”
“After 3-4 minutes of breathing, the breath and lungs take over and the body starts breathing on its own. Then you sort of let go and continue to breathe, and it’s an automatic thing like your heart beating. And the body goes into this rhythm, and you go into a trance state.” Loew noted that “you need to do it right” to reap the full benefits of IHP. (This is where working with a certified facilitator, at least initially, can be of value.)
Integral Breathing for Creativity and Positive Self-Development
Healthy self-development is key to successful recovery. When you’re newly sober, you’re getting to know yourself again—or maybe even for the first time—and hopefully building self-esteem and self-confidence. Integral breathing can support this process of forging a positive sense of identity and purpose. It does this by placing you in a “theta state” where “you’re much more open to suggestions.”
“When you’re more open to suggestions, you can do trauma work, because if something comes up, you can ask the patient, ‘Is that real? Do you really feel that way?’ and things dawn on them quicker.”
Another advantage of being in this theta state is that you’re able to get in touch with your innate creativity. Integral breathing accesses some of the same creative parts of the brain that inspire musical creativity, according to Loew. This can have direct application to one’s daily life. You may not become a rock star, but you may notice more of an unobstructed flow in creative solutions for life’s challenges. Loew said she has had success using breathwork to creatively affirm and manifest positive outcomes in her personal life.
The Health Benefits of Breathing Exercises
Of course, more breathing in general is always a good thing for mind-body health, Loew said. Research has found that breathing exercises can have many benefits, including improved mood, reduced anxiety and stress, lower blood pressure, and better sleep. Many first responders in Shatterproof FHE Health use integral breathing to help them fall asleep, Loew said.
With IBT, “you’re getting three times more oxygen flowing through your body than you normally do, so you’re oxygenating your entire body.”
Sometimes, if Loew is working with a person who has diabetes, she will invite them to “check their blood sugar levels before their IBT session and then check their blood sugar levels again after they are done breathing.” Loew is the first to admit she has “no exact data,” but from her more anecdotal experience, “there’s always an improvement with the breath.”
How to Do Integral Breathing and What It’s Like
When we asked Loew for a mini tutorial on integral breathing, she gave us this teaser:
I have this thing that I do at the beginning of each group. I say, ‘I’m going to ask you to breathe in a very certain and determined way and then am going to ask you to mimic what I’m doing.’ It is an open-mouthed breath connecting the in breath with the out breath, and it’s a connective breath not a deep breath. There’s also a flow to it, and it is more of a breathing in the chest than it is a breathing in the belly like in yoga.
What to Know About Integral Breathing After Rehab
If you’re hoping to benefit from integral breathing after rehab, it needs to be more of a practice. “It’s sort of like going to the gym,” Loew said. “You have to make the time to sit down and do it to really reap the rewards.”
Loew said integral breathing is safe to do on one’s own “after you have breathed your trauma out and have done maybe 6-10 group sessions in inpatient treatment.”
“You will not go as deep on your own as you would with a practitioner,” Loew said, speaking from experience. (She sometimes breathes during her lunch hour and “never goes as deep” as she otherwise would with a facilitator.) Even so, self-guided integral breathing is both “extremely safe” and can be beneficial at reducing relapse, by relaxing, calming, grounding, and recharging the mind and body.
Integral Breathwork Therapy as Long-Term Maintenance
Given the many benefits for relapse prevention, how might someone access IBT as more of a long-term maintenance therapy after rehab? Through “breathwork intensives,” according to Loew. She is one of a small number of practitioners who conduct these weekend immersions in IBT and facilitates them in cities around the country.
Anyone can come and experience healing.
“It’s universal. Anyone can breathe,” Loew said. “It has changed my life.”
Interested in how integral breathwork therapy can help you or a loved one? We’re here to help. Contact us today.
