When I nearly cried on a TEDx stage and Why the Science of Children’s Breathing Is Hard to Ignore
- Charlotte Marsh
- May 13
- 8 min read
“Mummy, help me find my breath… I just need to find my breath.”
Those words, spoken by an upset little girl, stayed with me for years.
At the time, I didn’t realise they would eventually lead me towards neuroscience research, sleep medicine, breathing physiology and ultimately onto a TEDx stage delivering my talk: One Breath at a Time, Helping Children Connect.
My talk explores a question I believe is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore:
Could the way children breathe be influencing far more than we once realised?
Sleep.
Attention.
Stress.
Learning.
Behaviour.
Emotional regulation.
Even cognitive performance.
Because the deeper I explored the science around breathing, sleep and child development, the harder it became to dismiss what researchers across multiple disciplines were beginning to find.
Over the past few years, neuroscientists, sleep specialists, ENT consultants, psychologists and multidisciplinary medical teams have increasingly been exploring one surprisingly fundamental area of health: breathing.
Standing on the TEDx stage talking about breathing was never something I imagined for myself. In the hours beforehand, I was extremely nervous. At one point, I quietly took myself off to a toilet just to calm down for a few minutes. While I was there, another speaker walked in, a younger lady, who told me she was about to speak about her recovery from an eating disorder. Listening to her story immediately shifted my own perspective. My nerves suddenly felt much smaller compared to the bravery it must take to publicly revisit something so deeply personal. Before we left the ladies room, I helped with a hair adjustment and then we ventured out.
I had deliberately chosen to speak first because I thought waiting around all day would make my nerves worse. The downside was that the event itself started late. Lighting adjustments and camera setup were still happening around the time I should have been beginning to talk, so it all felt a bit chaotic before I stepped onto the red dot.
When I finally walked onto the stage, I consciously slowed myself down. I took an extra sip of water, fitted in a couple of slow exhales and pressed my feet firmly into the floor before beginning. I remember glancing around the room, taking stock of the eyes on me, then I saw people nodding in the right places. I even noticed one person on their phone, ironic really, considering they later spoke to the audience about nervous system attunement! When everybody joined in with the practical breathing exercise, I felt relieved. As I came toward the closing section of the talk, I became very conscious of slowing down the final lines for impact.
Beyond the studies that helped shape my TEDx script, additional peer-reviewed research continues to explore the relationship between breathing practices, wellbeing and mental health.
One such study came from researchers affiliated with Yale University, Stanford University and the University of Cambridge. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, the 2020 study was a registered randomised controlled trial exploring whether structured wellbeing programmes could improve university students’ mental health.
This was not simply anecdotal wellness reporting. It was:
peer-reviewed,
published within a respected psychiatric journal,
pre-registered as a clinical trial,
and conducted by researchers working across psychology, neuroscience and emotional intelligence.
The study found that
students participating in the breathing-based SKY programme showed improvements across multiple mental health and wellbeing measures including stress, depression, positive affect, mindfulness, social connectedness and overall mental health
compared with the control group.
The researchers also discussed wider respiratory and neurocognitive research within the paper, including evidence suggesting
breathing practices may influence attention, emotional regulation and psychological flexibility.
Importantly, this does not mean breathing “cures” mental illness. But it does suggest respiration may play a more important role in mental wellbeing than many people previously assumed.
Separately from the Yale-linked study, neuroscience and brain imaging research has also explored how breathing itself may influence cognition and brain activity. One functional brain imaging study comparing nasal and mouth breathing concluded:
“We can conclude that various brain regions related to working memory and normal breathing are adequately induced in nasal breathing conditions, but not in oral breathing conditions.”
Why does this matter in childhood? Because childhood is not simply a smaller version of adulthood. The airway, nervous system and brain are all still developing. If breathing patterns influence attention, sleep quality, stress physiology and cognitive processing, then these conversations may matter far earlier in life than we once presumed.
A 2024 systematic review published in Frontiers in Psychology also examined breathing-based interventions for anxiety and highlighted growing evidence that breathing and body-based practices may influence state anxiety and nervous system regulation. The review suggested that
“breathing-based interventions may help reduce anxiety not simply through relaxation, but by influencing the communication between the brain, body and nervous system itself.”
And even more recently, a 2025 Review on Nasal vs Mouth Breathing & Brain Function
published in Thoracic Research and Practice.
Researchers specifically examined working memory, learning skills, and altered brain activation with oral breathing, ALL significant when it comes to children’s development. They concluded that
“how we breathe may influence cognition itself, with oral breathing linked in some studies to altered brain activity and poorer working memory performance.”
Neuroscientist Dr Reza Hosseini publicly commented on my work, stating:
“Healthy breathing in childhood can meaningfully influence sleep quality. Proper nasal breathing supports airway stability, reduces nighttime disruptions, and helps children reach restorative stages of sleep… these habits start early. Your work is more important than most people realize, especially since these habits start early.”
That final line is worth repeating…these habits start early.
Now, many well-meaning people are beginning to use breathing techniques without always recognising that children are physiologically different from adults. Advice such as “take a big breath” is not universally helpful, and children’s breathing patterns, respiratory rates and regulatory systems require different considerations.
Children naturally breathe much faster than adults, so simply giving a child an adult-style breathing exercise without understanding these differences may sometimes miss the mark entirely. This is why evidence-informed conversations matter.
And the evidence base continues to grow and the ramifications are being examined more widely. A 2023 meta-analysis by Fincham and colleagues reviewed randomised controlled trials on breathwork and found evidence suggesting
breathing interventions may positively influence stress, anxiety and depression outcomes.
There is also increasing research exploring links between sleep-disordered breathing, cognition and child development.
The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children found that a history of sleep-disordered breathing in early childhood was associated with significantly increased odds of special educational needs later in childhood.
A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis concluded that
sleep-disordered breathing in children was associated with deficits across intelligence, attention, executive function, memory and language.
This does not automatically mean breathing problems are the sole cause of these issues.
But collectively, the science is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
What has surprised me most throughout this journey is not resistance from clinicians, but the growing number who quietly say:
“We are seeing this too.”
After the TEDx talk, a GP with 25 years of clinical experience publicly described seeing “the devastating impact” that disordered breathing and poor sleep can have on children’s long-term health trajectories when left unrecognised. They referenced multidisciplinary work involving ENT specialists, sleep physicians, dentists and systematic reviews examining links between sleep-disordered breathing and neurocognitive outcomes.
In recent months, concerns around sleep-disordered breathing and neurocognitive outcomes were also raised in relation to the Government’s current ADHD review. I noticed that breathing and more importantly, sleep-disordered breathing was absent from a previous review, and raised this point with a GP colleague. This action contributed to wider multidisciplinary discussions and has generated a joint statement from healthcare professionals calling for the issue to be considered more carefully and for breathing and sleep-disordered breathing considerations to form part of future review recommendations, including greater awareness of airway assessment during ADHD pathways.
It was a reminder to me that sometimes people working closely with children spot important gaps early, and that simply raising a question can help wider professional conversations begin.
What matters most is that the conversation is now happening, because perhaps this is how meaningful progress often begins…
…not with one profession working in isolation, but with researchers, clinicians, educators and people working directly with children all beginning to notice similar patterns at the same time.
I am not a neuroscientist or medical doctor. I am a breath coach working closely with children and families. Sometimes individuals can notice important patterns before wider systems fully catch up to them.
But perhaps the strangest part of this entire TEDx experience came midway through the talk itself.
At one point, I briefly lost my place and time stood still.
Or at least I thought it did.
To me, it genuinely felt as though time completely stopped. I honestly believed I had been standing silently on stage for at least two minutes. In reality, when I later watched the recording back, there was barely any noticeable pause at all!
But internally, my mind raced at extraordinary speed:
“You’ve messed this up.”
“You fool.”
“You’ve practised this perfectly so many times.”
“Not now, surely?!”
“I don’t even know what I said last.”
“Where am I in the flow?”
“All this effort gone to waste.”
“You cannot stand on a TEDx stage and CRY.”
And then somehow, almost instinctively, I simply started talking again, in exactly the right place.
Watching it back afterwards was bonkers. The pause I’d experienced internally and the reality the audience experienced were completely different things, no discernible pause!
Afterwards, the adrenaline crash hit me HARD.
The moment I walked off stage, my body temperature suddenly dropped. I started shivering uncontrollably, I was freezing cold in a way that almost felt like shock. I put on my coat, wrapped a scarf around myself, pulled on socks and boots from my bag, and still could NOT warm up. It took at least forty minutes for the chill to settle down.
In many ways, it reminded me just how profoundly physical these experiences are,
and perhaps how deeply connected breathing, stress physiology and the nervous system really are.
None of this suggests breathing is a magic cure.
But it does suggest that the scientific evidence is strong and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss.
If this conversation resonates with you, whether as a parent, teacher, healthcare professional or simply someone curious about the connection between breathing, sleep and wellbeing, I’d love you to watch and share the TEDx talk. Please leave me a comment on the YouTube thread as I’d love to know what struck you the most?
Because awareness changes conversations.
And conversations change outcomes.
One Breath at a Time, Helping Children Connect
Thank you, Charlotte
Research & References
• Seppälä et al. (2020) — Promoting Mental Health and Psychological Thriving in University Students: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Three Well-Being Interventions (Frontiers in Psychiatry)
• Jung & Kang (2021) — Investigation on the Effect of Oral Breathing on Cognitive Activity Using Functional Brain Imaging
• Chin P, Gorman F, Beck F, Russell BR, Stephan KE, Harrison OK. A systematic review of brief respiratory, embodiment, cognitive, and mindfulness interventions to reduce state anxiety. Front Psychol. 2024;15:1412928. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1412928
• Bakırcı N, Gönenli G, Çolak Ö, Savcı S. Effects of nasal and oral breathing on respiratory muscle and brain function: a review. Thorac Res Pract. 2025;26(1):1–8. doi:10.5152/ThoracResPract.2024.24061
• Fincham et al. (2023) — Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials
• Bonuck et al. — Pediatric sleep disorders and special educational need at 8 years
• Menzies et al. (2022) — Neurocognitive outcomes of children with sleep disordered breathing: A systematic review with meta-analysis
• Joint multidisciplinary statement regarding sleep-disordered breathing and neurocognitive considerations within ADHD review discussions
Brilliant, reflective, honest and inspiring blog. Thank you for being the person that highlighted the UK government ADHD, autism and mental health review was taking place so an open joint statement could be submitted. Let's keep our fingers crossed the final report includes recommendations that sleep disordered breathing needs to be corrected before ADHD assessments. Sleep disordered breathing in adults and children may be common but it is not normal. The brain needs to repair and recover whilst sleeping which requires nasal breathing, without snoring or stopping breathing. Well done Charlotte for all your hard work educating and changing how people breathe.
Kind regards,
Dr Louise Oliver