When You Don’t Know What You’re Feeling: Let's breathe.
- Steve Whittle
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
“There’s nothing more exhausting than masking that you’re fine when your body and mind know you’re not.”
Men are masters of endurance. Of pushing through, of carrying things without complaint and holding everything together.
I see you being strong and powering through, it’s time to pause now.
When you have been in survival mode for too long, without pause, the weight can become unbearable, not just physically and mentally, but emotionally.
That’s when things start to slip: your energy, patience, and ability to sleep, focus, or connect with yourself and others.
As a female breath practitioner who works closely with men, I’ve seen how this pressure to keep it all together silently eats away at the foundations of confidence and well-being. While society might still be catching up, the truth is this: there is immense strength in finding ways to feel again.
Safely. Quietly. At your own pace.
I’d like to create a change in how men navigate their struggles.
Not with words, but with manageable action from a powerful tool, your breath.
Yes, that thing you have with you every second of the day.
Seems simple, I get it, I hear it all the time!
But trust me and let me explain.
It is really hard to talk and that doesn’t mean you have to struggle.
For generations, boys and men have been taught to disconnect. To “get over it.”
To keep calm and carry on.
Emotional literacy, the ability to name, navigate and express their feelings wasn’t handed out equally. You might not have learned to speak up at work, on the pitch, in a crisis. Definitely not about shame, sadness or grief. Tricky emotions to navigate and communicate, so you have to internalise and let them sit inside without any coping strategies.
This gap is generational conditioning and let me tell you now, you do not have to speak about things to organise and understand them. In time, once you understand them and feel them, you can speak. But thats not the first step.
That’s where I come in and help navigate this process with breathwork, a gentle lean inward to organise and get ready for whatever step you take next.
Breathwork isn’t just woo-woo. It’s science and it works!
At its core, breathwork is the art of changing how you breathe to change how you feel. It’s accessible, it’s silent and for many men I work with, it’s been the gateway into self-regulation without needing to talk. Imagine changing your state just by navigating your inhales and exhales, again seems too simple, right? I understand, but trust me you hold the power.
When you breathe slowly and deeply through your nose, you stimulate the vagus nerve, which calms the heart and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the one responsible for rest, digestion and recovery. This brings you out of fight-or-flight mode, survival mode.
A 2018 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that even 5 minutes of slow-paced breathing daily significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety and improved mental focus.
That’s why it works. Not because it’s trendy. But because your nervous system listens to your breath before it listens to your thoughts, sometimes (most of the time!!) those thoughts have taken charge,
It’s time to flip the switch. From the mind and into the body.
Sounds less scary than it sounds, promise.
If you’re new to this, let me give you a place to start
You don’t need to meditate, this is more structured to follow. You don’t need a guru. You just need one song, any song that you enjoy, this can be absolutely anything that feels familiar to you. Something maybe a little gentler, but if slipknots your thing, you do you.
Try this:
Put your song on and lay on the floor.
Knees bent and feet planted on the ground.
Inhale through your nose for 4 seconds.
Briefly pause at the top
Exhale slowly through your nose for 6 seconds.
Relax your shoulders to the ground
Feel the rise and fall of your belly
Count through for the whole track
If you lose count, don’t worry, just start again until the end.
If all you do today is this, that is enough, one whole song! What you have done is shift your body into a more regulated state. That’s not nothing. That’s a message to your system that you’re allowing yourself to gently drop out of the mind.
Dropping out of the mind doesn’t mean no thoughts, it means slowly shifting your attention to any sensations in the body. Your heartbeat, your back on the ground, the air coming in and out through your nose. Stick with it, sometimes this doesn’t feel easy, but with consistency and patience you will start to feel a lean into slowing down. Morning, night or lunch. You decide.
Try the inverted Triangle breathing technique with Louise here.
Confidence is built by presence.
If you’ve lost confidence in yourself, in your ability to cope, to show up, to keep things together, that’s not weakness. That’s exhaustion and the antidote to exhaustion isn’t more doing.
It’s slowing down, regulating and reconnecting to your own body. Just like the practice above.
Confidence in knowing how to do that, connecting with safety within to be able to sit with your inner world without seeking external distractions. It’s a step by step process and like I said, that doesn’t happen straight away.
When you begin to notice your breath, you begin to notice what else is going on inside you. That awareness becomes trust. That trust becomes clarity. And that clarity? It becomes confidence and safety.
Today is the best day to start, even if you drop off, start again.
You can start today. You can start really small. These little steps, pauses and slight movements forward. But even then this can feel very big and that is okay.
What you’re feeling is valid. I see you and want the best for you.
Your nervous system is tired of holding the weight alone. And your breath, quiet, steady and yours is a tool that’s always available.
Even when nothing else feels like it is.
You’re starting with one conscious breath in and out.
That is powerful. That is yours and no one can take that away from you.
Written by a woman who has sat with men in silence, in grief and in frustration. I believe that your healing doesn’t make you soft. It makes you powerful in the ownership of connecting with the most powerful anchor you have with you every second of the day…
…your breath and your body!!
Louise Mortimer
The SPXCE
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