Breathwork could provide NHS with support for Covid-19 trauma

Richard Blake, The Breath Geek

Breathwork therapist Richard Blake – aka The Breath Geek – has spoken about concerns the Coronavirus pandemic could have lasting effects on NHS staff.

He said: “A lot of people will appear to survive Coronavirus unscathed, but trauma is all about what happened on the inside. 

“Every little piece of trauma is like opening a tab on a browser – eventually we end up with a lot of tabs open. Without processing, they build up, but breathwork can help close some of those tabs down.”

Richard is among many therapists to support Duty to Care’s work in providing NHS staff with mental health and wellbeing support during this difficult time. Combining science with emerging spiritual technologies such as breathwork and bio-hacking to promote self-healing. 

With concerns over the longer-term implications for NHS staff rising, particularly with regards to depression, anxiety and those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The Office for National Statistics revealed that 49.6% of people in Great Britain reported high anxiety in March 2020 compared to just 19% at the end of 2019.

Richard believes breathwork could be a key technique for helping NHS staff to cope with their experiences during the pandemic. He said: “Breathwork is a powerful, yet much easier technique for processing trauma. General psychotherapy has such poor results for PTSD while breathwork has a much higher success rate.”

An NHS staff survey revealed that nearly 28% of NHS staff have suffered back pain in the last year as a direct result of their work. Richard added: “A lot of people get back pain because of unresolved trauma. Breathwork allows us to let out that emotion without revisiting the trauma. 

“The psychotherapy approach of saying you have depression or anxiety, doesn’t actually change the problem. Breathwork is less painful because you are able to put the mind into a relaxed and almost hypnotic state while releasing the emotion.”

Duty to Care is working with a range of therapists to provide NHS staff with direct access to holistic and wellbeing therapies, plus mental health support. Among those listed are Richard’s breathwork sessions – a therapy which helped him to cope with his own severe depression. He said: “I had really bad depression as a teenager and got over it with psychotherapy, but I used addiction as a crutch, and it was only when I discovered breathwork that I could finally get rid of addiction.”

The treatment is so powerful that NHS staff could see huge results from their very first session with The Breath Geek. Richard said: “Even a single breathwork session can reduce anxiety and see significantly lower anxiety for a week after treatment. But ideally I would work with clients for 6-8 weeks to get the best results.”