Breathwork To Help Men Reduce Stress and Achieve Personal Growth with Tim Thomas

A few slow, deliberate breaths can calm a stressed and reactive nervous system faster than a man can think his way out of it. My guest Tim Thomas is a breathwork coach and a former Australian Special Forces soldier. He was also a professional fighter in the nineties and has worked in veteran recovery for more than a decade. For years he valued himself by what he did. Then came a divorce. He lost his money, his home, and regular access to his kids. He ended up sleeping on his parents’ couch with a war zone going off in his head. He couldn’t sleep, and he lost six years of his life to pills. At his lowest point, at two in the morning, he started counting breaths on his fingers. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five breaths, the noise in his head went quiet.

In this conversation, Tim coaches Mike Forrester through three breaths live. The breath of possibility starts with a second inhale on top of the first. You pinch your thumb and two fingers together, which Tim calls turbo buttons, then lift your chin and open your chest. A quick snort through the nose adds to it. The breath of peace follows. You hold the breath, fold forward with your hands on your belly, and let it out slowly with a hiss. Tim explains why hunching over chokes off your energy and keeps you in fight or flight. He describes the lungs as a medicine cabinet with different shelves for sleep, focus, and stress. He uses a short breath as a circuit breaker when one frustrating thought starts taking over. He also walks through staying calm when money is tight, drawing on the season he spent eating out of restaurant bins.

The heart of the episode is what a man’s state does to the people around him. Tim says a man’s happiness and generosity follow how powerful he feels, and that power starts in his body. He’s training hard with his twenty-year-old son so he can keep up with a grandson who isn’t born yet. Good energy, he says, means catching yourself when you go down and owning it out loud. That’s what lets a family feel safe. Mike shares that he has run a 5K every month since November 2024. He does it so he can join his kids in what interests them. Tim found his value in what he had come through, apart from what he did. That echoes what Mike Forrester lives and teaches, that who you are is separate from the roles you fill. This one is for the man, and especially the dad with kids still at home, who walks in the door wound tight. He wants his wife and kids to feel safe with him the moment he gets home.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode:

Learn the breath of possibility, a short sequence that opens your chest and pulls you out of a reactive state.
Use the breath of peace in a supportive chair to relax your whole body and get ready for sleep.
Recognize how hunching over and shallow breathing keep your body stuck in fight or flight.
Use a few slow breaths to stay calm instead of angry when the bills feel impossible.
See how the hard seasons you’ve come through give you value that doesn’t depend on your job title.
Walk through how to park, breathe, and reset before you walk in the door, so your wife and kids feel safe around you.

The key moments in this episode are:

00:00:51 - How to stay strong enough to keep up with your grown kids

00:05:16 - Why your energy matters more than how your body looks

00:07:07 - How to catch yourself and own it when you lose your temper

00:08:09 - How to turn the hard things you’ve been through into something useful

00:09:12 - What happened after divorce cost him his home and his sleep

00:11:43 - How counting one breath at a time pulled him through his lowest night

00:17:14 - How to stay calm instead of angry when money is tight

00:18:44 - Breath of possibility exercise to stop reacting under stress

00:27:38 - A quick breathing circuit breaker for negative thoughts

00:31:02 - Breath of peace exercise to relax your whole body

00:39:55 - Why the quality of your life depends on the quality of your sleep