Can a Breathing Technique Help Teenage Girls Feel Less Alone?

 Can a Breathing Technique Help Teenage Girls Feel Less Alone?

A teenager can be surrounded by friends, conversations, and constant messages, and still feel profoundly alone. Now, a study of 174 adolescent girls suggests that something as simple as changing the way they breathe may help some of those who feel most disconnected find their way back to a sense of connection.

Adolescence is often a challenging time for most teenagers. Academic pressure, changing friendships, and peer pressure to blend in, combined with reduced emotional support from family, often lead to social isolation.

Research points out that while loneliness can intensify during adolescence, girls more often than boys experience a sharper increase. According to a 2023 World Health Organisation (WHO) study of approximately 280,000 adolescents across Central Asia, Europe, and Canada, more than one in four 15-year-old girls reported frequent loneliness, compared with only 13% of boys in the same age group.

The feeling of isolation is exacerbated in adolescents with high levels of adverse childhood experiences (ACE). An adverse experience could be a result of many factors, including abuse or neglect from parents or relatives, bullying, a dysfunctional family, other traumatic or highly stressful experiences such as loss of a parent, or constant discord in the family.

Being surrounded by people doesn’t mean not feeling lonely and isolated. Social isolation doesn’t necessarily indicate that the individual is lacking friendships. A teenager can have friends yet feel profoundly lonely. The deeper issue, therefore, may not always be the absence of people, but the absence of a sense of connection. As Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar puts it, “Loneliness is not the absence of people; it is the absence of felt presence.”

Moreover, loneliness and social isolation are found to be strongly linked to depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and academic slowdown.

And so, how do we help teenagers, especially girls, feel less isolated and more connected was the question on the minds of UCLA researchers while devising an intervention study. The study they came up with combined social-emotional learning and breathwork. The intervention focused on managing social anxiety through practical, science-based breathwork practices to regulate the nervous system.

The study design focused on 174 adolescent girls, aged 14 to 18, from two high schools in Southern California in the USA. The tool deployed in the study was Art of Living’s foundational breathwork program, SKY Breath (a shorthand for Sudarshan Kriya Yoga). The idea was to compare whether SKY Breath’s structured, rhythmic breathing technique brought in any additional benefits on emotional regulation, resilience and social connection, as compared to the standard techniques the schools previously deployed.

Researchers divided the schools into two groups-one participated in the SKY Schools programme, while the other continued with its usual physical education classes. The SKY programme ran for four weeks, followed by another eight weeks of daily breathwork. By comparing the two groups, researchers sought to understand whether a structured breathing-based programme could make a difference to adolescent girls during a particularly formative period of their lives.

When the study kicked off, for the first four weeks, the girls participated in a programme that combined social-emotional learning with group activities designed to encourage communication, alongside SKY breathwork, physical activities and yoga-based practices. The idea was to give the girls an opportunity to connect while learning techniques to manage their emotions and stress. Once the four-week programme ended, they continued practising breathwork every day for another eight weeks, extending the intervention to a total of 12 weeks.

The findings when the study ended were revealing, particularly for girls who had experienced higher levels of adversity in their lives. After eight weeks, their social connectedness score in this cohort showed an improvement of approximately 8% from the baseline.

More importantly, the girls who had faced the greatest challenges showed a measurable improvement in their sense of connection with others. “What’s striking is that the girls who needed help the most benefited the most,” said Dara Ghahremani, research professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the study’s senior author.

The findings suggest that sustained practices combining breathwork and social-emotional learning may have a role to play in helping vulnerable adolescents feel more connected.

Gurudev offers a perspective that eases the pain born of isolation. “When you have the feeling of being completely disconnected, then don't struggle to get connected,” he says. “Rest. It is like when you are sleeping; you are totally disconnected from the closest person also.”

The role of the breath becomes particularly key here. As the global spiritual master and the force behind the SKY programme, Gurudev says, “The breath is the link between the body and the mind.” Emotions and the breath are closely intertwined-when we are anxious or overwhelmed, our breathing changes; consciously working with the breath can, in turn, influence how we experience stress. This understanding also informs the Art of Living’s work with young people, where breathwork and meditation are introduced as practical tools for managing stress and building emotional resilience.

The research has opened an important conversation about how such practices, rooted in ancient Indian wisdom, offer a low-cost, scalable way to support student wellbeing and help adolescents regulate their stress and improve their social connectedness, particularly in vulnerable social groups. 

"Numerous scientific studies and systematic reviews have demonstrated the positive effects of meditation, including among adolescents," shares Neha Singh, a practicing senior clinical psychologist from Mumbai, "Based on my clinical observations of several cases in which meditation, combined with practices like Sudarshan Kriya, has contributed significantly not only to emotional regulation but also to an enhanced overall sense of well-being." 

She cites one particular case where "a teenage patient had experienced multiple adverse events within a span of two years, including the loss of a loved one. She appeared to benefit considerably from the Sky Breathing technique. The practice facilitated the processing of her grief and supported her emotional healing.”