The Breath Geek

The Breath Geek Breathwork, bio-hacking and life coaching Dr. Richard L. Blake

08/31/2026

"Real diagnoses are real. Real autistic people exist. Real depression exists. This research doesn’t deny any of that — it’s narrower. It’s about how social platforms shape the way mental-health identity gets expressed through reinforcement.
🧠
Griffith & Stein (2021) sampled public posts from 14,626 users disclosing ten different diagnoses via hashtags. They found that community responses — likes, shares, comments — predicted how often people went on to post about their mental health. The more encouragement a disclosure received, the more disclosure followed. The strength varied by label, and posts tagged with autism received the most likes and shares on average across the dataset.
💬
Some caveats matter. This is observational and cross-sectional, so it shows association, not direct cause. Other readings are possible — people who post more are simply more visible, so they receive more responses. And nothing here suggests posters are insincere. The simplest reading is that ordinary people respond to social reward in ordinary ways, and platforms are built around that fact.
⚠️
Researchers including Lucy Foulkes and Jean Twenge have raised similar concerns about how social media may be amplifying mental-health labels in young people in ways that don’t reflect real changes in underlying illness.

"

08/24/2026

If this hit something, comment with the lightbulb emoji.
And tell me — what's one thing about you your parents definitely didn't teach you?
Caption
The 'Jim twins' are one of the strangest cases in behavioural genetics — but they point to something that unsettles a core therapy-culture belief: that your parents are the architects of your mental health.
🧠
Bouchard and colleagues studied more than 100 pairs of twins separated in infancy and reared apart, over a 20-year programme at the University of Minnesota. About 70% of the variance in IQ tracked with genetic variation, and on personality, temperament, interests and social attitudes, identical twins raised apart were about as similar as those raised together (published in Science).
💭
None of this means parents don't matter. Severe abuse, neglect and chaos shape children in real and lasting ways. Genes interact with environment — they aren't destiny. And the Minnesota study has critics who've raised methodological concerns, so it shouldn't be treated as the last word.
🛑
But the dominant story — that adult distress maps neatly onto parental failure — is doing more explanatory work than the evidence supports. Temperament is real. Heritability is real. And blaming ordinary parents for ordinary struggles doesn't tend to heal anyone — it just hardens into a worldview.

. . . .

08/19/2026

"Venting doesn't work the way you think it does.

Researchers analysed 154 studies on anger. Over 10,000 people, every age and background.

Rage rooms. Boxing. Jogging. Screaming into a pillow.

None of it lowered anger. Some of it made things worse.

🧠

Every time you vent about someone, you're rehearsing the story, not releasing it. That's the part most people miss.

What actually worked was calming the body down, not revving it up. Slow breathing. A pause. Stepping away and coming back later.

💭

This isn't a case for burying it and saying nothing. Reflection matters, and so does feeling heard, especially straight after something happens.

The problem is repetition without anything new going in. Telling the same story to the same anger, on loop.

🛑

If it's still there after years of getting it off your chest, that was never going to be the fix.

Kjærvik & Bushman (2024). A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal. Clinical Psychology Review.

Drop the 🔥 if this challenged something you believed. Tag someone stuck in a vent loop about their family.

08/16/2026

For decades, the message was loud and clear: depression = chemical imbalance.
But in 2022, Moncrieff et al. published an umbrella review in Molecular Psychiatry showing there’s no convincing evidence that serotonin levels or activity are associated with depression. (Nature)
Antidepressants do outperform placebo, but Khan et al. (2015) showed the difference is modest: ~40% respond to meds vs ~30% to placebo (PMC).
Other meta-analyses confirm the reductions in symptoms are often below “clinically meaningful” thresholds (BioMed Central).
This isn’t about dismissing anyone’s experience.
It’s about recognising that the healing you achieved was your work — not marketing slogans, not a serotonin story that never held up.
And if diagnosis growth keeps rising the way it has, soon everyone will wear a mental illness label.
We deserve better than myths. We deserve mental health built on truth.

08/15/2026

A 2024 study compared ayahuasca retreats vs guided breathwork sessions. Both groups improved — but breathwork surprised everyone:
Wellbeing ↑ 18.9% with ayahuasca, ↑ 13.8% with breathwork

Resilience ↑ ~5% with ayahuasca, ↑ ~10% with breathwork → double the gain

Self-compassion ↑ in both groups

Personality traits shifted in both: neuroticism ↓, agreeableness ↑

(Khubsing, R. S. I., van Leerdam, M., Haijen, E. C. H. M., & Kuypers, K. P. C., 2024, Psychoactives)
And these weren’t short-term changes — they lasted for months after.
This matters because the Big Five personality traits are some of the strongest predictors of life outcomes, stronger than IQ. Being lower in neuroticism and higher in agreeableness means you’re not only more successful — you’re also easier to live with, work with, and love.
The study didn’t specify which exact breathwork was used, only that it was “consciousness altering.” Most likely it was conscious connected breathwork — but if anyone knows differently, please let me know.
And here’s the kicker: this isn’t something you can DIY with box breathing or Wim Hof. This is deep, facilitated work that needs a trained professional to guide it safely.












08/14/2026

"Your brain aches for lost loved ones in a way that looks, on a scan, a lot like craving — and that’s not a metaphor, it’s neuroscience.
🧠
O’Connor et al. (2008) found that activity in the nucleus accumbens — a brain region tied to reward and motivation — tracked with the intensity of yearning in bereaved people. The more someone longed for the person they’d lost, the more this region fired. Rather than framing grief as weakness or attachment as pathological dependence, it suggests yearning is closer to a biological drive — more like hunger or thirst than addiction.
💭
This matters because we’ve steadily eroded the structures that used to carry people through loss — extended family, ritual, community — and increasingly replaced them with a single weekly therapy hour. What the grieving nervous system tends to need most is sustained, embodied, relational presence: people.
⚠️
Caveat: this doesn’t mean therapy has no place in grief. There’s good evidence for specific interventions, especially for the roughly 10% who develop prolonged grief disorder. But for most people, the research points to social support and community as the strongest variables — the very things modern life strips away.
If you do comment ‘newsletter’ make sure to check your hidden DM inbox for the link..

08/14/2026

94% of therapists lean liberal.
That’s not balance — that’s monopoly.
📊 Studies show:
▪️ At a 2011 SPSP conference of ~1,000 social psychologists, only 3 identified as conservative (

08/12/2026

"Growth mindset is one of the most cited ideas in modern parenting and education. It’s also one of the clearest case studies in psychology’s replication crisis.
🧠
Sisk et al. (2018) ran two meta-analyses across 273 studies and found the average effect of growth mindset on academic achievement was d = 0.08 — trivially small. Li & Bates (2019) ran a rigorous replication and found mindset interventions changed what learners said about intelligence but had no measurable effect on resilience to failure, ability, or attainment. A 2023 meta-analysis went further: when restricted to preregistered, blinded, properly controlled studies, the effect was indistinguishable from zero — and authors with a financial stake reported larger effects than independent researchers.
💬
To be fair, it isn’t entirely one-sided. Yeager et al. (2019), in Nature, found a small positive effect of a brief intervention in lower-achieving US students. So it isn’t nothing — but it’s nowhere near what parents and teachers were sold. The honest version: a small effect, for some kids, in some settings. Not a universal lever.
⚠️
The cultural cost is real. Parents were handed a simple story — praise effort, change outcomes — and many now blame themselves when their child struggles. Temperament, ability, environment and luck were always doing most of the work.

08/11/2026

“There are two kinds of people — those who don’t realise they need therapy, and those who don’t know when to stop.”
– adapted from Nassim Taleb by

We’re watching two extremes play out —
On one side, people suffering in silence and destroying everything around them while calling it “strength.”
On the other, people who’ve built an entire identity around healing… and never actually heal.

Therapy isn’t a personality
And avoidance isn’t resilience
Both ends of the spectrum are broken
You don’t go to therapy to stay in therapy
You go so you can live again














08/10/2026

What if your childhood memories aren’t just remembered… but reshaped?
In a 2019 study by Patihis, Cruz & Herrera, participants were asked to reflect on either the positive or negative traits of their mother.
The result?
Just a few minutes of reframing altered how much warmth they recalled from childhood.
Literally — memory changed.
Now imagine doing that every week in therapy.
Or on social feeds filled with narcissist callouts, “toxic parent” memes, and algorithm-fed rage.
It’s no surprise we’re seeing a rise in family estrangement.
☝️ Let’s be clear:
Yes, some mothers are abusive.
Yes, estrangement can be the right choice.
But if memory is this flexible…
We need to ask:
Is this healing?
Or just emotional reprogramming?
Here’s the full study if you want to dive deeper:
Patihis, L., Cruz, N., & Herrera, M. E. (2019).
🎙️ Also — we’ve recovered a podcast with the study author Lawrence Patihis for RUNGA Radio - coming out soon.
You won’t want to miss it.
Find it in the link in bio.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2167702619842468

Address

Walnut Creek, CA

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Breath Geek posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category