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I tried breathwork everyday for 30 days

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A filmmaker known for turning his own bad habits into internet-famous experiments decided his lungs were next.

Matt D’Avella, the documentary director and YouTuber behind the long-running “30 Day Experiments” series, spent December 2019 building a new video around a single question: does breathwork actually do anything, or is it just wellness-industry noise? He’d already put himself through 30 days of meditation, cold showers, 5 a.m. wake-ups, and cutting sugar for the same channel, so a month of structured, conscious-breathing sessions was a natural next test for the format.

• D’Avella committed to a daily breathwork practice for 30 straight days as the latest entry in his “30 Day Experiments” series.
• The video, released in December 2019, followed his prior experiments with daily meditation, cold showers, waking up at 5 a.m., and cutting sugar.
• “I tried breathwork everyday for 30 days” pulled in more than 1.1 million views within its first two months online.

Rationale for Selecting Breathwork

D’Avella’s channel has built its audience on exactly this premise: pick a habit claimed to boost focus, energy, or mental clarity, live with it for a month, and report back with an honest verdict rather than a sales pitch. Breathwork fit the pattern. It’s cheap, requires no equipment, and carries the same kind of stress-reduction and clarity claims that drove his earlier trials with cold exposure and early rising.

Rather than picking one method and sticking with it blindly, he treated the 30 days as a testing ground for different conscious breathing exercises, documenting which ones actually changed how he felt and which ones just felt like sitting still and inhaling on a schedule.

Finding a Routine That Stuck

The early days were rough. D’Avella struggled to lock in a consistent time and technique, cycling through different approaches before settling into something sustainable. That trial-and-error stretch is a recurring beat in his experiments — the same friction he documented when he first tried forcing himself out of bed at 5 a.m. or standing under cold water every morning.

Once he found his groove, he noticed subtle changes in his mood and energy levels.

By the midpoint of the month, the inconsistency gave way to a routine he could actually repeat daily, and that’s when the more noticeable effects on focus and relaxation started to show up in his day-to-day filming and editing work.

Observed Changes After Thirty Days

As the days added up, D’Avella reported handling stressful moments with more ease, staying more present during conversations, and noticing better sleep and more energy on waking. Those are the same categories of self-reported benefit that show up across his other habit trials, which is part of why fans of the healthy lifestyle corner of YouTube tend to watch these videos back to back — the format lets viewers compare one habit’s payoff against another’s.

The comparison to his cold-shower experiment is a useful one: both practices lean on the nervous system, and both videos track a similar arc of early discomfort giving way to a calmer baseline. Viewers chasing that same nervous-system angle have also gravitated toward wellness content built around breath control and recovery, like Laird Hamilton’s underwater breath-holding pool routine.

The Audience Response

The video’s 1.1-million-plus views in its first two months set off the usual round of discussion among D’Avella’s millions of subscribers and other habit-focused creators, many of whom treated it as a jumping-off point for their own takes on mindfulness routines and habit formation. It’s the same pattern that follows every entry in his 30-day series — a personal experiment turning into a shared conversation about which habits are worth the month.

D’Avella has never framed these videos as clinical proof of anything. He’s clear that a single person’s 30 days isn’t a study — it’s a documented anecdote, the same disclaimer that ran through his meditation and sugar-cutting videos. That honesty about the limits of a one-man trial is arguably why the series keeps drawing an audience that also shows up for other self-experiment content, including channels built around habit and discipline claims like the one behind this manifestation-focused habit video.

By the time the month wrapped, D’Avella had logged breathwork alongside cold showers and early wake-ups as another entry in his running catalog of 30-day tests — and given his release pace, the only real question left is which habit he decides to put on the clock next.