An article in the Guardian confirms that the NHS recognises the link between dysfunctional breathing and health issues. The awareness that slowing down the breath can reduce stress has become almost ubiquitous. It has quietly moved from niche practice into everyday clinical behaviour. In the NHS, if you arrive at an appointment visibly anxious, a clinician may suggest slowing your breathing. Dentists do the same. Even driver education courses for those caught speeding now include breathing techniques to manage stress behind the wheel.
The breath can calm the nervous system. It can interrupt a stress response. Changing how you breathe changes how you feel. UK society, across health settings, education and everyday life, has bought into this. And rightly so.
What is now emerging, however, goes considerably further. Clinicians are beginning to recognise that breathing patterns can contribute to disease. The deeper insight into how crucial proper breathing is to health is finally becoming realised.
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Dysfunctional breathing and health: what we now know
For close to two decades, research has been documenting the relationship between disordered breathing patterns and health conditions, revealing the impact of breathing on sleep, mood, blood pressure, and even inflammatory conditions. Research has also examined the physiological mechanisms that link these two things in considerable detail, and cutting-edge work continues to deepen this understanding. This information has either not been known by most clinicians, or has at least not been integrated into assessment and treatment.
Given that oxygen is essential to life, it is rather bemusing that this was not recognised earlier as a central concern of modern medicine. This is not something abstract or peripheral. Breathing provides the oxygen that makes the production of adenosine triphosphate, ATP, the body’s primary energy molecule, more or less possible. The efficiency of that process, at a cellular level, is directly shaped by how a person breathes.
A lack of awareness among clinicians about breathing patterns, and a corresponding absence of dysfunctional breathing as a recognised clinical entity, has meant it remains largely underdiagnosed, undertreated, and absent from primary care thinking. This matters enormously. Retraining breathing might reduce the symptoms of existing health conditions, and might in some cases prevent them from arising in the first place. Clinicians could, quite literally, nip it in the bud.
Dysfunctional breathing in the news
A piece published in The Guardian on 15 April 2026 ‘Are you breathing properly? How I found out I wasn’t’ is precisely the kind of signal that we at Minded have been waiting for, and one we recognise as a significant moment of change. The article cites several clinicians, including Dr Juanita Mora of the American Lung Association, who states that dysfunctional breathing is present in approximately 12% of adults, rising to around 30% in people with asthma, which only adds insult to injury in a condition where breathing is already the central issue. Dr Mora notes that dysfunctional breathing is correlated with, and can lead to or exacerbate, sleep problems, depression and anxiety, chronic fatigue, muscular tension, dizziness, and IBS, an inflammatory disorder which raises the question of whether other inflammatory conditions might also be aggravated, as well as cardiovascular conditions. This is not a marginal clinical finding. It is a description of a widespread, underrecognised driver of ill health.
The assessment gap
Dr Dena Garner, an exercise physiologist who has spent fifteen years studying breathing mechanics and has long recognised the impact of poor breathing on health, notes that even amid growing awareness of the link between poor breathing and health, there is still no agreed assessment methodology for identifying and measuring it. To be clear about what this means: medicine does of course have measures of respiratory function. Spirometry assesses lung volumes and airflow, peak expiratory flow monitors conditions such as asthma, arterial blood gas analysis evaluates gas exchange, and cardiopulmonary exercise testing examines the breathing response under load. These are valuable tools, but they measure respiratory disease and capacity. They are not the same as identifying dysfunctional breathing as a primary pattern and treating it as a core clinical issue in its own right.
The Nijmegen Questionnaire, the most widely used screening tool for breathing pattern disorders, was developed and validated specifically for hyperventilation syndrome and is now routinely applied to a far broader range of presentations than it was ever designed for. This is a telling sign that the field is working beyond the limits of its own tools, and that something more comprehensive is needed. The practical consequence is that assessment, where it happens at all, remains partial, inconsistently applied, and poorly matched to the full range of people whose health is being shaped by how they breathe. This is precisely the gap that yoga therapy is positioned to address.
Where yoga therapy comes in
This is where yoga therapy enters, and the entrance is a significant one.
Yoga has always articulated the relationship between breath and physical and mental health. The deliberate alteration of breath to cultivate distinct mental qualities and address health conditions has been discussed for centuries, and some would argue millennia. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that yoga therapy, a health profession rooted in yoga, places considerable importance on breath as a contributor to ill health, and actively investigates it when a client presents with health concerns.
Yoga therapists examine whether a client is breathing diaphragmatically or from the upper chest, the rate of breathing, the ratio between inhale and exhale, the intensity and effort of the breath, and more. These are not simply elements drawn from yogic energetic theory. Each has clearly documented physiological effects well established in respiratory science, with direct links to health conditions when how a person breathes does not align with what their physiology needs in a given moment or overall. Yoga therapy also holds the energetic dimension of pranayama, drawing on centuries of understanding about how breath shapes mental and vital states, and this sits alongside rather than in contradiction to the physiological evidence.
Dysfunctional breathing and breath assessment
Like the world of clinicians, yoga therapy does not yet have a fully standardised breath assessment methodology across all schools and training programmes. There are, however, many common considerations. At Minded, we have a specific assessment process, and we believe that a conversation with other yoga therapy schools about agreeing on shared measures could be enormously valuable, both for the field itself and as a contribution to respiratory medicine more broadly. The kind of accessible, clinically meaningful assessment tool that Dr Garner identifies as missing is precisely the kind of thing yoga therapy, drawing on its depth of breath knowledge, could help to create. Such a tool could be used alongside assessment approaches that require additional specialist skill and technology.
Assessment, however, is only part of what yoga therapy brings. Having identified the specific nature of a person’s dysfunctional breathing, a yoga therapist has a genuinely wide range of targeted tools to draw on, because yoga holds the broadest gamut of breath techniques of any tradition and no other tradition comes close. A yoga therapist would not simply suggest that a person begin diaphragmatic breathing, the primary focal point of the Guardian article. They would consider rate, depth and ratio in relation to the individual’s specific health conditions, ensuring that what is offered supports the whole person. Yoga therapy is a biopsychosocial approach, and this integration is inherent to how it works.
The work does not end with a single technique either. A yoga therapist would offer an ongoing process, assessing changes in the breath over time, tracking shifts in the person’s health, and continuing to build on what is working. This is responsive, longitudinal clinical support, and it is precisely what is needed as healthcare begins to take dysfunctional breathing seriously.
A moment to contribute, not just observe
The clinical recognition now emerging, that how a person breathes is implicated in the development and persistence of serious health conditions, is not a surprise to anyone working in yoga therapy. It is a confirmation of what the tradition has always held and what practitioners have been working with for years.
What is new is the audience. The conversation is reaching clinicians and the public in a way it has not before. This is not a moment to watch. It is a moment to contribute, to bring what yoga therapy knows into the clinical discussion that is opening, to offer the assessment framework and the breadth of practice that healthcare is now discovering it needs, and to make the case plainly that the expertise required to address dysfunctional breathing properly already exists.
The NHS is catching up. Yoga therapy should be part of what it is catching up to.
The Minded Institute’s world leading yoga therapy training equips its students with the tools and knowledge to assess and work with breath clinically.
