About Abi

I grew up in a family of meditation practitioners. It wasn't until later in life that I started being more intentional about breathwork. Once I did, I realized how useful these practices were on a day-to-day basis. They've been invaluable in furthering my photography work too.

I started researching and structuring them for myself, and figured a visualizer to guide you through any of them would be more useful than wading through endless YouTube videos and not-so-clear websites.

Hope this site is as useful to you as it has been to me.

Find me elsewhere

• abiassi.com (my personal site, separate from this project) →
• LinkedIn →
• X / Twitter (@abiassi_) →

Methodology

Every technique on the site goes through the same research pass, in this order.

1. 1
   Pick what to cover. The techniques people actually search for and practice. Box, 4-7-8, coherent breathing, the physiological sigh, Wim Hof, the pranayama variants, the COPD-rooted ones like pursed-lip and Buteyko. Plus the use cases they show up against: anxiety, sleep, focus, blood pressure.
2. 2
   Source the lineage. Who actually came up with this. Mark Divine for box. Andrew Weil for 4-7-8. Wim Hof for WHM. Konstantin Buteyko for his method. For the older yoga practices, the earliest text we can point to (the 15th-century Hatha Yoga Pradipika for Nadi Shodhana and Kapalabhati). Where there's no single originator (pursed-lip, belly), say so.
3. 3
   Find the research. PubMed, DOI registries, Cochrane. Systematic reviews and RCTs beat single studies. Mechanism work, especially mouse studies, gets called out as such so it doesn't get mistaken for clinical evidence.
4. 4
   Verify everything. Every citation URL gets fetched and confirmed before it ships. Where a study is paywalled, the link goes to the free PubMed Central version.
5. 5
   Match language to evidence. Strong evidence gets stated directly. Smaller studies get a “research suggests.” Weak, contested, or null findings get said out loud. The Wim Hof Method works no better than slow breathing for mood. Ujjayi's throat constriction doesn't actually outperform plain slow breathing on baroreflex.
6. 6
   Place sources where you can use them. One to three peer-reviewed links per page, hyperlinked on the specific claim. No numbered footnotes. No end-of-article reference lists. Click a phrase, land on the study.

I'm not a clinician. If you have a medical condition, please talk to your doctor before adopting a new breathing practice.

Read the full editorial policy →

Get in touch

Found an error? Have a feature request? Send me a note at hi@abiassi.com. It goes straight to me.