I didn’t know what to expect when I got an email from an Australian breathwork coach who used to be a Special Forces Commando. I knew it would be interesting. I didn’t know it would reframe almost everything I thought I understood about why people struggle to heal.

Tim Thomas is the founder of Breathwork in Bed. He’s also a former Australian Special Forces Commando who served in Afghanistan, a professional fighter, a recovered pharmaceutical and alcohol addict, and someone who has personally watched breathwork save 40 veteran lives from suicide in under 12 months. He’s not a guy who found breathwork at a yoga retreat. He’s a guy who weaponized sleep deprivation against enemies in combat, then spent years fighting his own nervous system before he figured out how to fix it.

That context matters. A lot.

We Weaponized Sleep in War

In Afghanistan, Tim’s unit didn’t always need bullets. Sometimes they just needed to take the enemy’s sleep for three nights. As Tim put it, that was enough to “mess them up better than a bullet.” Sleep deprivation wasn’t a side effect of war — it was a deliberate weapon.

Most of us have never thought about sleep that way. We treat it like a lifestyle choice, something we’ll get around to optimizing after we’ve handled everything else. But Tim’s experience forced him to understand something most of us never have to reckon with: sleep isn’t a luxury. It’s the foundation of every other human function. Mess with it, and everything else falls apart. Fix it, and everything else becomes possible.

The Soil Nobody Is Looking At

Tim has a saying: sleep is the soil from which everything grows.

Most people — patients, providers, everyone — are focused on the visible stuff. The symptoms. The fruit. They want to fix what they can see. And there’s a whole industry of marketers and interventions happy to sell them something for that. But Tim’s point is simple and inconvenient: if the soil is wrong, nothing grows the way it should. You can treat the symptoms forever and never get to the root.

The root is the nervous system. And the nervous system has a back door that almost nobody is using.

Your Lungs Are a Medicine Cabinet

This is where Tim’s message gets genuinely startling.

He talks about the nervous system in two parts — the ancient wiring and the new wiring. The new wiring is the thinking mind, the prefrontal cortex, the part that worries and plans and second-guesses. The ancient wiring is older than language, older than rational thought, and it outranks everything else. It’s the part that breathwork talks to directly.

As Tim put it: “We don’t own a set of lungs. We own a medicine cabinet with a lot of different shelves.”

Specific breathing patterns drop cortisol. Others raise mental acuity. Others move you from fight-or-flight into a state where you can actually receive help — where words land, where connection is possible, where healing can begin. And the most startling part? People are spending hundreds of dollars a month on medications designed to replicate what intentional breathing does naturally.

For health professionals, this isn’t just interesting. It’s practical. Tim’s approach gives providers a low-friction intervention they can use before a clinical conversation even starts — a way to move a dysregulated client into a state where the work they’re about to do together actually has a chance.

Two Five-Minute Windows

Here’s the simplest thing Tim said, and possibly the most useful:

Your entire day is set in two five-minute windows. The five minutes before you fall asleep, and the five minutes after you wake up. Most people — without realizing it — poison both of them. Racing thoughts going in. Dread coming out. And then they wonder why they can’t seem to get traction no matter what they try.

Tim’s breathwork practice is built entirely around those two windows. Not because everything else doesn’t matter, but because when someone is exhausted and struggling, they don’t need twelve things to remember. They need one easy win. And when they get it, something shifts. As Tim says, energy is like money — how you invest it is how you get it back.

What 40 Lives Looks Like

I want to end here, because this is the part that stayed with me longest.

Tim’s goal when he started working with veterans was to save 40 lives from suicide. That was his lifetime goal. He achieved it in 12 months.

40 people who are still here. Because someone paid attention to their sleep. Because someone understood that pain, left long enough, stops being just pain — it becomes isolation, disconnection, the quiet certainty that you are the only person going through this. And in that place, there’s no energy, no options, no way forward.

Breathwork didn’t fix everything for those veterans. But it fixed the soil. And once the soil was right, things started to grow.

That’s what Tim Thomas is offering. Not a miracle. Not a replacement for clinical care. A doorway — for providers and patients alike — into a state where healing actually becomes possible.

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Search “Breathwork in Bed” on any app store for 28 days of free access. https://breathworkinbed.com.au/

Reach out to Tim by searching “Breathwork in Bed” on most social media platforms, or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bettersleepbetterworld/.

Listen to the full conversation with Tim Thomas on The Care We Need Podcast.

Brett Benes is co-founder of Benes Companies, a health education and facilitation company working to turn the tide on complex illness in the United States.