The Power of Breath: Exploring Male Mental Health with Jamie Clements

Breathwork has grown in popularity and awareness has increased, yet misconceptions still exist – how would you define the practice in simple terms?

The breath is the forgotten pillar of health. Breathwork is how the ancient power of the breath has been brought back to life in the modern world. It is an umbrella term that covers any way we can use the breath to shift our state and our experience of life, from simple daily practices through to deeper therapeutic experiences.

You often speak about the emotional power of conscious breathing. How can breathwork support mental health and emotional wellbeing?

Most of us carry emotions we’ve never fully felt, grief we managed, anger we swallowed, joy we dimmed. Breathwork creates the conditions for those emotions to move through the body rather than stay stored in it. It’s not about manufacturing catharsis or performing healing. It’s about building the capacity to feel what’s real, without being overwhelmed by it. When you can do that, the nervous system stops working so hard to protect you from yourself, and that’s where genuine wellbeing begins.

Men are often conditioned to suppress emotions rather than process them. How can breathwork help create a healthier relationship with emotional expression?

The gift of breathwork for men is that it takes out the need for conversation entirely. You don’t have to articulate what you’re feeling or explain it to anyone – you just breathe, and the body does the rest. For men who’ve spent years living from the neck up, that’s quietly revolutionary. The breath meets you exactly where you are, without requiring you to perform vulnerability or have the right words. It’s an on-ramp to emotional life that doesn’t feel like a therapy session – until it does, and by then you’re already in it.

What happens physiologically when we focus on our breath? How does breathwork help regulate the nervous system and reduce stress?

Your breath is the only part of your autonomic nervous system you can consciously control. Everything else – heart rate, digestion, stress response – runs automatically. That makes the breath a direct line into your nervous system; a way to influence systems that are usually completely outside your reach. A longer exhale stimulates the vagus nerve and signals safety to the brain. Slower breathing improves heart rate variability, a key marker of stress resilience. You’re not just calming down in the moment; with consistent practice, you’re genuinely rewiring your baseline.

In your experience, why do so many men struggle to slow down and connect with themselves, and their breath, in everyday life?

Because slowing down feels like a risk to a nervous system that’s been running on adrenaline for years. Rest doesn’t feel safe, it feels like falling behind, being soft, losing control. Men are also rarely given permission to not know what they’re feeling. We’ve been trained to problem-solve our way through everything, and the breath isn’t a problem to solve, it’s an experience to have. That’s unfamiliar territory. The honest truth is that most men aren’t disconnected from themselves because they’re broken. They’re disconnected because they’ve been rewarded for it.

You often write about presence and awareness – how does conscious breathing help people reconnect with the present moment.

The breath only ever exists right now. You can’t take yesterday’s breath or tomorrow’s, only your next one. That makes it the most immediate anchor to the present moment available to us. When you bring conscious attention to your breath, you interrupt the mental commentary, the planning, the replaying, and you land back in your body, in this moment. It’s not complicated, which is partly why we dismiss it. We’ve been conditioned to believe that real transformation requires complexity. The breath is a quiet, persistent reminder that it doesn’t.

For men who feel overwhelmed, disconnected from themselves or under pressure, what simple breathing practices would you recommend they start with?

Start with the physiological sigh: a deep inhale through the nose, a second short sip of air at the top, then a slow exhale through the mouth. It’s the fastest way to interrupt an acute stress response. From there, build a simple daily practice – five minutes of equal inhale and exhale, around five to six seconds each. Not in a special room with candles. On your commute, before a meeting, sitting in your car. The location doesn’t matter. The consistency does. Small and regular beats intense and occasional every time.

What misconceptions do people commonly have about breathwork, vulnerability and men’s emotional wellbeing?

The biggest misconception is that vulnerability means falling apart – that if you open the door to what you’re feeling, you won’t be able to close it again. In my experience, the opposite is true. Emotional avoidance is exhausting. Breathwork doesn’t make men weaker; it builds the capacity to stay steady in the face of difficulty, which is the actual definition of strength. The other misconception is that breathwork is for a particular kind of person – spiritual, expressive, already comfortable in their body. It isn’t. I’ve watched boardroom executives and ex-military men have some of the most transformative sessions I’ve ever witnessed.

How important is consistency when it comes to breathwork, and what long-term changes can one expect to experience?

Consistency is everything. Your nervous system learns through repetition, not intensity. Ten minutes daily for a month will do more than a single hour-long session, however powerful that session feels. The changes are often subtle at first – you catch yourself dysregulated earlier, you return to baseline more quickly, you notice you’re breathing in your chest and something in you just shifts. Over time, the research shows genuine changes: lower resting breath rate, improved heart rate variability, reduced baseline anxiety. You’re not managing symptoms anymore. You’re changing your default settings.

Looking ahead, do you believe breathwork could play a bigger role in conversations around masculinity, men’s mental health and modern wellbeing? And why is that particularly relevant right now?

We are in a crisis of male disconnection – from self, from others, from meaning. The statistics are stark, but I see it more clearly in the rooms I work in: men who are high-functioning and quietly falling apart, who have every external marker of success and no idea who they are beneath it. Breathwork matters here because it’s embodied, immediate, and doesn’t require men to already be fluent in the language of feelings. It meets them in the body before it asks anything of the mind. It’s actually the most direct route there is.