Is Pranayama Safe? An Honest Answer To The ABC’s Meditation Article

The short answer. Is pranayama safe? For most people, practised slowly and with a teacher in the room, or LIVE interactive online, yes. The research that says otherwise is mostly about intensive silent meditation retreats and phone apps used alone, which is not what happens in a guided yoga class. There is one real caution, and it is breath retention for anyone with a history of trauma or panic. Iyengar yoga has rules on this, and we follow them.

Now the longer version, because you deserve the whole thing rather than the comfortable half.

What did the ABC article actually say?

The ABC published “Meditation can help and it can harm” on 6 September 2026. It is built around Willoughby Britton, a psychiatry researcher at Brown University in the United States.

She spent twenty years promoting the benefits of meditation. Then one of her own studies went the wrong way, and she treated two hospital patients who had become seriously unwell after meditation retreats. She changed her mind, and she has studied meditation harm ever since.

The article gives one number. About one in ten meditators will have a bad effect that lasts more than a month or gets in the way of daily life.

It then tells two stories.

Sue, in her seventies in Florida, found pranayama through a phone app three years ago and used it a couple of times a week. Alone in her car one day she felt herself dissolving into nothing. In her words, “it was just the void and I was the void.” She did not feel right for about eighteen months.

Jane, in her mid-seventies, had practised Zen meditation for years. On the first night of her fourth five-day silent retreat her mind was “fizzing, like a sort of lemonade bottle.” She told the teacher the next morning and was told, “Oh, you don’t need to sleep when you meditate.” She went home, was diagnosed as psychotic and manic, and spent two decades in and out of hospital.

Is pranayama safe, or was the ABC right to worry?

Both, in different measures. The article is right that breathing and meditation practices are strong enough to affect people, and right that this has been under-reported for years. It is wrong to leave the reader with no way to judge how often anything goes wrong.

Nicholas Van Dam, who runs the Contemplative Study Centre at the University of Melbourne, makes the best point in the piece. He says people should be told the risks before they start.

He is right, and we agree with him. Anyone who tells you a breathing practice cannot possibly affect you is telling you it does not work. It does work. That is the point of it. So, the honest position is not to deny the risk. It is to say how big it is, how to avoid or reduce the risk, and what is done about it.

Where does the “one in ten” figure come from?

It comes from a 2021 study by Britton’s own team, published in Clinical Psychological Science. That study followed 96 people. All of them were doing an eight-week mindfulness therapy course, and all of them were already anxious or depressed when they started. Four in ten met the criteria for major depression.

There was no comparison group. Nobody followed a similar set of people who were not meditating. So, there is no way to know what would have happened to them anyway.

And there is a sentence in that same study that did not make it into the article. Britton and her colleagues wrote that these rates are similar to what happens in ordinary talking therapy, where between three and fourteen people in every hundred report a lasting bad effect.

Their own conclusion was that meditation causes distress “at similar rates to other psychological treatments.”

That is a very different headline from the one the ABC ran.

What happens to people who do not meditate at all?

This is the comparison that settles the question, and the article never makes it. Two studies have done it properly.

The first, published in Psychological Medicine in 2022, compared a mindfulness course against a waiting list. It found no evidence of extra harm on any measure it looked at, including paranoid thinking, which is the symptom the article worries about most.

The second, published in JMIR Mental Health in 2026, ran two trials in distressed adults. It found the rate of bad experiences was the same in people who did the guided meditations and people who did not. In other words, much of what gets counted as a meditation problem is simply what happens to people over eight weeks.

For a sense of scale, here is what the same question looks like elsewhere.

• Psychological therapy. A survey of 14,587 people across 184 services in England and Wales found five in every hundred reported a lasting bad effect.
• Antidepressants. Across 77 clinical trials, between 58 and 76 people in every hundred reported at least one unwanted effect.
• Sugar pills. In drug trials generally, around three-quarters of people on a placebo also report an unwanted effect.

None of this makes the risk zero. It makes the risk look like the risk of any other thing that actually helps.

What actually went wrong for the two people in the article?

Read the two stories again and the pattern is not hard to see. In both cases the safeguards were missing, not present and failing.

Jane was on her fourth five-day silent retreat. She did not sleep on the first night. She raised it with a teacher and was told sleep did not matter. She believes she was probably already unwell before she arrived, and nobody had asked her.

That is sleep loss, days of silence, an unrecognised illness and a teacher who missed it. Four known risk factors in a single week.

Sue was in her seventies, at home, on her own, following a phone app. There was no teacher. Nobody could see her face. There was nobody to tell when it started to go strange.

Neither of those is a description of a yoga class from Flametree Yoga.

Is pranayama the same thing as a meditation app?

No. The ABC calls pranayama “a type of meditation involving modifying the length and timing of breaths.” That is how an app describes it. It is not what it is.

The word yoga does not appear anywhere in that article. Not once.

Pranayama is the fourth of the eight limbs of yoga. In the Iyengar method it comes after the poses, it carries a written list of who should not do it, and it is taught by a person who can see you and guide you, in the studio or online.

What did B.K.S. Iyengar say about who should not practise?

He was blunter than the ABC. In Light on Yoga, published in 1966, he wrote:

Do not seek to master pranayama in a hurry, as you are playing with life itself. By its improper practice respiratory diseases will arise and the nervous system will be shattered. By its proper practice one is freed from most diseases.

In Light on Pranayama, published in 1981, he added, “Do not practise when the mind or body are dull or depressed.”

He also listed the signs that mean stop for the day. Heaviness or tightness in the lungs. A breath that sounds harsh or rough. A tense face. Restlessness or irritability. Feeling faint or swaying.

Those are close to the words Jane used about her first night. Her teacher had a rule available and did not use it.

Is breath retention (kumbhaka) safe?

This is where we do take heed from the research, and we would rather say it out loud than leave it out.

A German trial published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2023 added yoga breathing to therapy for 74 people with post-traumatic stress. Unwanted effects happened in 15 of the 40 people doing the breathing, against 1 of the 34 who were not. They were tied specifically to the breath holding.

The split in the results matters. People who found the practice comfortable did better than the control group. People who pushed on through a bad reaction during the breath holds ended up worse than if they had done no breathing at all.

So here is our rule, and it is now part of how we teach.

If you have a history of trauma, panic attacks, or a mental health condition you are being treated for, please tell us before you begin pranayama. You do not have to explain anything you would rather not. We will teach the practice without the breath holds, which is a complete practice in its own right and not a watered-down version.

Who should not do pranayama, or should modify it?

Asking whether pranayama is safe is really asking who it is safe for, and the Iyengar yoga answer to that has been in print for decades. The caution list below is long-standing and specific.

Tell your teacher, and expect the practice to be adjusted, if any of these apply.

1. High or low blood pressure, or a heart condition. Breath holding after an inhalation is not advised with high blood pressure or heart disease.
2. Depression or very low mood. Breath holding after an exhalation is not advised, and Iyengar’s instruction is to practise poses and relaxation instead until the mood lifts.
3. Glaucoma, a detached retina, recent eye surgery, or ear disease. No breath holding, and no Skull-Shining Breath.
4. Epilepsy. Fast breathing techniques are avoided.
5. Pregnancy. No Skull-Shining Breath, no Bellows Breath, no long breath holding.
6. Any acute illness, exhaustion, or a mind that is agitated today. Come to the class and do the poses and relaxation instead.
7. Under about sixteen years of age. No breath holding.

None of this is new, and none of it is ours. It has been in print for sixty years.

What is pranayama actually good for?

The ABC gave the benefits about 250 words and no numbers at all. Most of their article was about the negative side.

Here are the positive numbers, with the studies named, so you can check them yourself.

Blood pressure. Three separate research reviews since 2024 agree. Slow breathing lowers the top number by roughly 7 mmHg and the bottom number by roughly 3.5 to 4. The most recent, in Clinical Cardiology in 2026, pooled 13 trials and 1,097 people.

The nervous system. A review of 223 studies found that slow breathing raises heart rate variability, one of the better markers of a settled nervous system. It rises during the practice, straight after it, and after a course of it.

Older practitioners may get more, not less. One study compared older and younger adults doing the same slow breathing. The older group’s response was significantly larger. Most of our morning pranayama students in Darwin are over fifty.

Breathing and the lungs. Across 73 trials involving nearly 5,500 people with asthma and lung disease, quality of life improved. There were no unwanted effects from the breathing techniques reported in any of them.

Sleep and attention. People report sleeping better, although the machines that measure sleep have not yet confirmed it, and we will say so. Paced breathing produces fewer lapses of attention, though not faster or sharper thinking.

That is the honest version. It is less exciting than the version you see on an app, and it is a good deal more likely to be true. It is also the reason the question is not simply whether pranayama is safe, but whether it is worth doing. On this evidence, taught properly, it is.

Flametree has also published elsewhere on other benefits of pranayama breathwork, including how Iyengar yoga and breathing help lower blood pressure and what breath meditation does for mindfulness, attention and emotional control.

What should you do if the article worried you?

Being worried by that article is a reasonable response to what it describes. Here is what we would say to three different readers.

If you practise alone from an app, with nobody to ask, you are in exactly the situation that produced the one pranayama story in the article. Come and learn it properly, then practise at home online, or in the studio, knowing what you are doing.

If you already attend our morning classes, nothing here changes. For example, supine Victorious Breath and Interrupted Breath, with a teacher in the room, or LIVE online is about as gentle an entry to breathwork as exists.

If something in a class ever feels wrong, stop. Open your eyes. Breathe normally. Then tell us. You will not be letting anybody down. You will be doing precisely what Iyengar told people to do.

And if there is something in your history you think we should know, have a quiet word with us before class. It stays with us, and it changes what we teach you.

Pranayama and breathwork classes in Darwin

Flametree Yoga Studio runs pranayama and breath meditation classes four times a week.

Your first class is free. Then, there are half price deals for your first 12-32 classes, at beginner or non-beginner level.

See the timetable and book a place here:

https://flametreeroom1.punchpass.com/classes

Frequently asked questions

Is pranayama safe?

Yes, when it is taught in the standard order. It usually starts with Victorious Breath (AKA Ocean Breath) and Interrupted Breath (AKA Staircase breathing), lying down, without any breath holding. You progress with informed guidance from your teacher. It carries no documented risk in the research literature.

Can pranayama cause anxiety or panic?

Fast breathing techniques can, because rapid breathing is used clinically to bring on a panic attack in research settings. Slow breathing is a different matter, and a 2025 review of pranayama trials found unwanted effects were more common with fast techniques than slow ones. At Flametree we teach slow practices as the staple.

Is meditation dangerous for people with mental illness?

The evidence points to caution rather than exclusion. Intensive retreats, sleep loss and unsupervised practice are the conditions where problems cluster, especially for people with a history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or trauma. A short, supervised, slow breathing practice is a different proposition. If you are being treated for a mental health condition, tell your teacher and speak to your own doctor.

Is pranayama safe with high blood pressure?

The slow practices generally are, and breath holding after an inhalation generally is not. B.K.S. Iyengar listed high blood pressure, hypertension and heart conditions as reasons to leave out internal breath retention. Slow Victorious Breath without holding is fine, and it is one of the practices the blood pressure research is built on. Tell your teacher before class, and follow their instructions.

Does slow breathing really lower blood pressure?

Three research reviews published since 2024 agree that it does, by roughly 7 mmHg on the top number. The open question is how long the effect lasts between practices, not whether it happens. It is a supplement to medical treatment, not a replacement for it, and you should not change any prescription without talking to your doctor.

Flametree Yoga Studio, Woolner and Coolalinga, Darwin NT. This article is general information and not medical advice. The main sources are Britton and colleagues in Clinical Psychological Science, 2021; Hirshberg and colleagues in Psychological Medicine, 2022; Beloborodova and colleagues in JMIR Mental Health, 2026; Haller, Mitzinger and Cramer in Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2023; Cheng and colleagues in Clinical Cardiology, 2026; Laborde and colleagues in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2022; and B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga, 1966, and Light on Pranayama, 1981. Full references are available on request.