How Breathing Changes Your Magic

There's one element that quietly shapes every magical performance: your breath. In fact, breathing can deeply affect both your performance and your audience’s experience. We’ll delve into the power of breathing, and the psychology behind it.

First things first: do you actually breathe when you perform magic? 

It looks like the most natural human action. But notice your breathing right now. You might immediately realise you’re taking shallow breaths: we often use only a small portion of our lung capacity. 

As newborns, we breathe efficiently—in a deep, relaxed way (the same technique singers spend years training to master). But as we grow—often from early childhood—stress, posture, and environment gradually alter our habits, shifting us from deep diaphragmatic breathing to shallow, chest-based breathing.

And yet, breathing the way you did as a baby—deeply and through the diaphragm—helps your body and mind function more efficiently. When you breathe in this way, your brain shifts from a state of anxiety or alertness into one of focus and flow. The prefrontal cortex, which governs executive functions like decision-making and timing, becomes more active, leaving you calmer and more composed.

By contrast, shallow chest breathing is often linked to stress and the activation of the amygdala, which triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response. The result is tension, reduced control, and less effective performance. Hold your breath during a sleight and your brain interprets it as danger: the body tenses, timing tightens, hands shake, and mistakes multiply. Psychologists call this an increase in cognitive load—when part of your mental energy is hijacked by stress responses, leaving fewer resources for precision and timing.

Breathe deeply, and your system calms. Movements become intuitive, techniques flow naturally. That’s psychology.

The way you breathe not only shapes your physical state but also deeply influences how the audience experiences your performance. Controlled, diaphragmatic breathing steadies your heart rate, sharpens your focus, and fuels smooth sleight of hand—even when things go wrong. It powers your voice, giving your patter clarity and authority, and projects a steady, grounded presence that audiences instinctively trust.

By supporting posture and reducing tension, proper breathing allows you to move with elegance and sustain energy across a performance. Most importantly, it clears the mind, making your sleights more reliable, your storytelling sharper, and your improvisation smoother.

So perhaps it’s worth learning how to do it correctly.

How Do You Breathe?

This exercise will help you find out.

Find a comfortable position, either sitting or lying down, and take some time to notice your natural resting breath, without trying to change it, in order to become aware of your habitual breathing.

How is your posture? Are you sitting upright? Are you slouched? Do you feel tension in your neck, shoulders, or elsewhere? 

Take your time to notice how you are breathing. How would you describe it right now—fast or slow, deep or shallow, regular or irregular? Does it feel easy, or tense and forced? Is your inhale longer than your exhale, or are they about the same length?