Stop Holding Your Breath When You Play

If you play an instrument, there’s a good chance you hold your breath at the hard parts. Most musicians do. And if you’ve noticed it, you’ve probably tried the obvious fix: take a deep breath before you play.

Here’s why that doesn’t work: a deep breath is still tense. Try it right now. Take a big, deliberate inhale. Notice your shoulders lift? Your chest tighten? You’re trying to breathe, and that effort is just another form of the tension you’re trying to fix.

The breath-holding itself isn’t random. It fires at the critical moments — the big shift, the fast passage, the exposed entrance. Right before the hard part, your nervous system runs a set of commands: I have to get this right. I have to be perfect. I need to prove I’m good enough. These are impossible commands. Your body can’t fulfill them. And the effort of trying shows up everywhere — in your hands, your shoulders, your jaw, and your breath.

What makes this especially tricky is that breath-holding works as a feedback loop. Stress causes you to hold your breath. But holding your breath also triggers fight-or-flight. So the loop reinforces itself: hard part coming, hold breath, body tenses, hard part is harder, hold breath more next time.

Most of the standard advice falls into three traps. Taking a deep breath adds more effort on top of effort. Breathing exercises (inhale for four, exhale for six, breathe from your diaphragm) add a system to manage, but the problem was never that you lacked a system — it was that you were interfering with something that was already working.

And the sneaky third trap is a kind of shallow, controlled hyperventilation where musicians keep their breath moving constantly, figuring that if it’s moving, they can’t be holding it. But managed breathing from a place of anxiety is still controlled breathing.

All three approaches are additive. The answer is subtractive.

What I teach my students is called Easy Breathing. The instruction is embarrassingly simple: stop interfering with your breath. Don’t take a deep breath. Don’t hold it. Don’t regulate it. Just let it do what it already knows how to do. Your body has been breathing your entire life without your conscious participation. It knows how much oxygen you need. Your job is to get out of the way.

Here’s how to try it. Put your instrument down. Close your eyes. Notice your breathing without changing it. Find where it moves easily — maybe at your nose, maybe at your belly. Just observe the breath that’s already happening without you doing anything. That quality of effortlessness is what you’re after.

Now pick up your instrument. Choose a passage where you usually tense up. And play it with one intention: let your breathing stay easy. Not deep. Not controlled. Just easy.

When this works — and it often works immediately — the changes are visible. Shoulders drop. The face softens. The guitar face goes away. Hands go from a death grip to something soft and alive. The player starts swaying naturally with the music. And the sound opens up. This is universal. The sound always gets more resonant when you stop clamping down. Your instrument is a resonating body, and when your body stops clamping, both of you ring more freely.

Easy Breathing works because it interrupts the fight-or-flight loop at its source. When you let your breathing be easy, you’re telling your nervous system: we’re safe. No emergency. And your nervous system responds by releasing the brace.

Try it today. Pick your hard passage, find your easy breath, and play. You might be surprised how much changes when you stop fighting yourself.

If you want to try this live with guidance, the Musician’s Tension Reset Lab runs monthly and is free.

If you’re dealing with chronic pain or tension that’s been limiting your playing and you’re ready to go deeper, learn about the Perform Without Pain program.