What do you do before your feet hit the floor? I don’t mean coffee or exercise. I mean the minutes before you get out of bed. My guest, Tim Thomas, calls the first five minutes after waking and the last five before sleep the two golden five minutes. Most of us spend them on our phones or let them pass without a second thought. In this episode, we cover how to use breath to change your state, keep worry from hijacking your attention, and build an easy on-ramp so the habit survives a bad morning. We also get into breathing through your thumb and what a pot of coffee taught an Army platoon about ego.
Guest Bio: Tim Thomas is a former professional fighter and Special Forces soldier who has spent over a decade working with veterans, professionals, athletes, and everyday people to improve sleep, resilience, and nervous system health. He is also a survivor of PTSD, pharmaceutical addiction, alcohol addiction, and family breakdown. Along the way, he has raised over 1.3 million dollars for charities close to his heart and founded his company Breathwork in Bed. A platform focused on natural and immediate sleep improvement.
We Discuss:
The Golden Five Minutes
The few minutes before sleep and after waking can shape how we feel more than we realize. Rather than creating an elaborate routine that becomes another obligation, the goal is to make those moments easy enough to use consistently.
Breathing provides an especially simple starting point because we don’t have to get out of bed or accomplish anything first. Instead of waking up and letting unfinished tasks and anxious thoughts take over, we can bring attention to one breath in and one breath out. The principle is straightforward: “If something’s easy and effortless, I’ll do it regularly. If something’s hard, I’ll only do it for a bit.”
Using Breath to Change Our State
Breathing gives us a way to deliberately influence our state. Tim Thomas shares his practice of using left-nostril breathing before sleep to wind down and right-nostril breathing after waking to become more alert. Research suggests unilateral nostril breathing can affect autonomic activity, although studies have not consistently shown that the left and right nostrils produce these specific calming and activating effects. Nasal breathing also increases nitric oxide availability, which plays a role in blood flow and vascular function.
Morning activation can involve more than breathing. Tim also recommends massaging around the eye sockets to help with that lingering feeling of fatigue after waking. These simple practices work from the body up, offering another way to influence how we feel before the thinking mind takes over.
Making Healthy Habits Almost Too Easy
Knowing that a morning routine might help doesn’t make it any easier to follow when we’re tired and don’t want to get out of bed. The better approach may be to remove as much friction as possible. Breathwork can begin while we’re still lying down, helping us build enough momentum that eventually putting our feet on the floor doesn’t feel like such a big task.
That philosophy shaped Breathwork in Bed: press a button, follow simple breathing and movement instructions, and gradually move from rest toward action. Instead of requiring motivation to get started, the practice aims to create the physical and emotional state that makes action easier. The objective isn’t an elaborate morning routine; it’s an easy first win.
Connection Changes What Comes Next
Once we’ve taken a few minutes to check in with ourselves, we can turn our attention toward someone else. Something as simple as sending a “Good morning” text or recording a 20-second message can turn an inward practice into an opportunity to connect with another person. It doesn’t require money, much time, or a grand gesture.
Connection can also build on itself. When we feel connected, reaching out becomes easier; when we feel disconnected, withdrawing can become easier too. A small act of connection in the morning gives us a chance to interrupt that pattern and start the day by reaching beyond ourselves.
Getting Out of Our Heads and Into the Body
We spend a lot of time trying to understand our experiences intellectually, but not everything has to be processed through thought. Breathwork gives us a way to pay attention to what we’re actually feeling in the body rather than simply thinking about how we feel.
Tim walks us through a gratitude exercise that makes the distinction clear. We choose a person, place, or thing we’re deeply grateful for, imagine holding it in our hand, bring it toward our chest, and breathe while noticing the physical sensation of gratitude. We then imagine losing what we value before bringing it back and taking several celebratory breaths.
The exercise has similarities to the Stoic practice of negative visualization—briefly imagining the loss of something we value as a way of appreciating its presence—but adding breath and physical sensation changes the experience. When I imagine my spouse disappearing, my breathing changes, tears come, and I feel the sadness physically. When I imagine getting my spouse back, that feeling shifts to relief and joy. Gratitude is no longer something I’m simply thinking about; I can actually feel it.
Why We Keep Looking Outside Ourselves
We want to feel calm, connected, satisfied, and less consumed by our thoughts, and we often look outside ourselves for ways to get there. That isn’t inherently a problem. Relationships, medicine, technology, and other forms of support all have important roles in our lives. But they aren’t the only ways we can influence how we feel.
Breath gives us one way to influence our internal state without needing anything else in the moment. That can be especially useful when our minds are busy or we’re struggling to settle ourselves.
Worry Steals Processing Capacity
Worry can consume an enormous amount of attention without changing the thing we’re worried about. If most of our mental energy is spent rehearsing what could go wrong, we may have less attention available when the situation we’ve been anticipating actually arrives.
If we spend 80 percent of our processing capacity worrying, we leave only 20 percent available to deal with the problem itself. The goal isn’t to convince ourselves that nothing bad will happen. It’s to preserve our attention so we have more of it available when we actually need to respond.
Turning the Phone Against the Phone
Our phones can easily pull our attention outward first thing in the morning, but we can also use the same technology as a cue to do something different. Instead of waking up and immediately moving into email, news, or social media, a notification can remind us to stay in bed for a few minutes and breathe.
The phone becomes a prompt rather than the focus of the practice. As Tim puts it, “The high-tech part of Breathwork in Bed isn’t the app, it’s your lungs.” The technology gets us started, but the actual practice requires little more than breathing and paying attention to what’s happening in the body.
Sleep Is the Soil
We tend to notice the visible signs that life is going well, such as how productive we are, how we look, and what we have. But those visible outcomes depend in part on less visible foundations, including how well we sleep and recover.
Sleep is the soil that supports everything growing above it. When we improve the conditions underneath, we give other parts of our lives a better environment in which to develop. Rather than focusing only on the “branches and fruit” everyone can see, we can pay more attention to the roots supporting them.
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