🌬️ How Breathing Wrong Is Holding You Back — Calm, Energy & Transformation with Jamie Clements With Jamie Clements
Jamie Clements is a breathwork specialist and founder of The Breath Workspace — a practice built on one deceptively simple idea: that the way you breathe shapes everything. Your mood, your energy, your anxiety, your sleep, your emotional history, and your capacity for transformation. Jamie works with individuals, corporate teams, and retreat groups across the UK, counting Channel 4, Meta, the Four Seasons, and Heineken among his clients. He's the creator of 21 Days of Breathwork — a structured programme designed to take anyone from the basics to the depths — and has forged a working friendship with England rugby legend Johnny Wilkinson along the way. 🏉
He came to this work through his own crisis. Anxiety. Panic attacks. A feeling, in his early twenties, of being a passenger in his own life. What breathwork gave him back was agency — and from that, everything else followed.
In this conversation, Jamie shares:
The three pillars of breathwork and what each one actually does 🧱
Why most people are breathing wrong without knowing it — and the vicious cycle it creates
How conscious connected breathing can access states comparable to psychedelics — without a substance in sight 🌀
What working with elite performers like Johnny Wilkinson taught him about discipline, surrender, and the love of the game
His personal blueprint for daily breathwork practice — from micro-moments to monthly deep dives 📋
Mouth taping, deviated septums, and why what happens while you sleep is undoing your daytime work 💤
The four words he wants his course graduates to use
1. From Passenger to Driver 🚗
Jamie didn't find breathwork through curiosity. He found it through necessity.
He'd had what looked, from the outside, like a conventional life — decent school, university degree, playing high-level rugby. Inside, he was struggling. Anxiety had been a constant companion. By his early twenties, it had become panic attacks. He felt like a passenger to his own experience.
The door opened unexpectedly. A fellow rugby player — someone he trusted — suggested breathwork. Jamie was resistant. Sceptical. He knew how to breathe; everyone does.
But he went. And something happened.
It was a visceral, felt-sense experience. I couldn't deny that something was happening within me.
It wasn't an overnight cure. But it was a doorway. And the deeper he walked through it, the more he found — an understanding of his nervous system, a new relationship with anxiety, and eventually a complete change of direction in life.
Breathwork gave me back ownership of my life. And from there, everything else unfolded.
2. The Three Pillars — A Framework for Everything 🧱
Jamie thinks in frameworks. When asked what breathwork can do for people, he doesn't give a list of benefits. He gives a map.
Pillar One: Functional Breathing 🌬️
This is the foundation. It asks one question: how are you actually breathing right now?
The average adult takes between 20,000 and 30,000 breaths every day. Each one sends a signal back to the body through the nervous system. And for most people, the vast majority of those signals are creating stress.
Why? Because modern life — its pace, its posture, its air quality, its stress loads — has pushed most people into a pattern of breathing that is:
Shallow — into the upper chest rather than the belly
Fast — far above the optimal resting rate
Through the mouth — bypassing the nose's filtering, humidifying function
The result is a feedback loop: shallow breathing creates stress in the system, which triggers more shallow breathing, which creates more stress. An infinite loop most people don't even know they're in.
The fix starts with awareness. Simply noticing how you breathe — when you're on a call, writing an email, walking into a difficult meeting. From awareness comes change.
Optimal functional breathing at rest: slow, deep, through the nose, using the diaphragm — expanding into the lower belly and side ribs.
Pillar Two: Nervous System Regulation 🧘
This pillar is about using the breath as a remote control for your internal state.
Simple, evidence-backed techniques — box breathing, extended exhale, five to fifteen minutes of deliberate practice — can make a measurable difference to:
Stress and anxiety — moving out of a dysregulated state 😰
Energy and alertness — activating without caffeine ⚡
Sleep quality — preparing the nervous system for deep rest 💤
Focus — quieting the background noise 🎯
The breath is directly wired to the autonomic nervous system. You can't think your way to calm. But you can breathe your way there.
Pillar Three: Conscious Connected Breathing 🌀
This is the deep end — and the most misunderstood.
Also known as transformational breathwork, this is what Jamie describes as an unsung therapeutic modality. Sessions involve intentional, rhythmic breathing — bigger, fuller breaths at a continuous pace — for 30 to 60 minutes, lying down in a safe, well-facilitated space.
What happens physiologically is significant:
Blood biochemistry shifts
Blood flow to certain brain regions changes
The default mode network — the seat of rumination and ego — quiets down
Activity in areas associated with emotional processing and the unconscious increases
The result is a trance-like state in which unconscious material can surface. Old emotions. Stored experiences. Things that have been pushed down and never expressed.
It's giving challenging material from within the psyche somewhere to be explored and recalibrated.
People who have sat with plant medicines, who have years of experience in healing modalities, report that breathwork can access states that transcend those experiences. No substance. No shaman in the Amazon. Just breath, safety, and a willingness to go in. 🌿
3. The Benefits — And Why They All Lead to the Same Place 💊
The list of documented benefits of breathwork is long:
Lower blood pressure and heart rate. Reduced cortisol. Better sleep. Increased energy. Stronger immune function. Reduced anxiety. Improved focus. Emotional release. Processing of stored trauma. Breaking cycles of rumination.
Jamie's framing of why these benefits arise is the most useful thing he says on the subject:
Almost all of these are downstream symptoms of nervous system dysregulation.
The mainstream medical system treats symptoms. Insomnia gets a sleeping pill. Anxiety gets medication. But if you look at the bigger picture — at the state of the collective nervous system in modern society — what you see is a chronically activated, chronically stressed, hypervigilant population.
Breathwork doesn't add health. It restores a baseline that modern life has pushed off-kilter.
4. Working with Johnny Wilkinson — Discipline, Surrender, and the Love of the Game 🏉
One of the more unexpected chapters in Jamie's journey has been his relationship with Johnny Wilkinson — rugby icon, and someone whose post-career philosophical depth surprised even the sport that made him.
What Jamie finds most interesting about working with elite performers isn't technical — it's relational. Most of them, at the highest levels, have started to lose the thing that got them there.
When you first became a musician, or started playing rugby, it was your life. It brought you so much joy. And then it becomes a career. Then a profession. And then, if you're not careful, you lose the magic.
His role with these performers isn't to teach them something new. It's to clear away the noise — the pressure, the expectation, the weight of identity built around the thing — and help them come back to the heart of why they started.
The concept he and Johnny explored together: the balance between discipline and surrender. 🎯
Too much discipline and everything feels rigid, forced, tight. Too much surrender and there's no structure — fluid in the shadow sense, where nothing sticks.
It's like bowling alley bumpers. The structure isn't the goal. The structure is what allows you to flow freely inside it.
The best performers, Jamie observes, share one quality: they love the process. They don't obsess over the destination. They find meaning in the doing, every day. And that, paradoxically, takes them further than those who grind toward outcomes.
5. How to Know If You're Breathing Wrong — And What To Do About It 🔍
You don't need a test. You need a moment of attention.
Jamie's starting point is simple: throughout the day, at natural transition points, just stop and notice.
Are you breathing through your nose or your mouth? 👃
Into your chest or your belly?
Are you even breathing — or are you holding? (Email apnoea is real: many people unconsciously hold their breath while reading messages)
When you're heading into a big meeting, are you already breathing fast and shallow?
These micro-observations start to build a picture of your unique breathing pattern — and where the gaps are.
From there, the practical intervention is accessible to anyone:
At natural pauses in the day — end of a call, before a meeting, between tasks — take 2 to 5 slow, deep breaths in and out through the nose. Expand into the belly. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale.
That's it. That's the beginning.
It's micro-moments. A minute, two minutes, five minutes. Look for the natural breaks in your day and use them.
Jamie is careful to add something most breathwork practitioners miss: your breathing pattern is shaped by the state of your nervous system. Working directly on the breath helps — but so does the pace at which you live your life, your environment, your relationship with nature and stillness.
A lot of people go: the problem is my breathing, so I'll fix it through my breathing. But if you're living in a high-pace, high-stress environment, you're up against it to create meaningful change.
6. Mouth Taping and the Sleep Problem 😴
One of the more practical — and polarising — topics Jamie covers is mouth taping at night.
The logic is straightforward: if you're breathing correctly during the day but mouth-breathing for eight hours while you sleep, you're undermining everything you've built. Mouth breathing during sleep affects:
Cognitive function the next day 🧠
Sleep quality — reducing the depth and restorative value of rest
Hydration levels
Overall nervous system health
A small piece of tape across the lips invites the breath back through the nose. For people who have the capacity to breathe nasally and no pre-existing medical conditions, Jamie suggests it can be genuinely transformative.
He has personal experience of this. He's had surgery to correct a deviated septum — not enjoyable, but worth it for the long-term gain.
If you're awake sixteen hours breathing well, and then you go to bed and mouth-breathe for eight hours — you're undoing a lot of the positive work.
7. The Blueprint — A Daily Practice That Compounds 📅
When Jamie works with someone one-to-one, this is the framework he prescribes:
Morning — a balancing practice, first thing. Sets the tone for the day. 🌅
Mid-morning reset — 10 to 15 minutes. A recalibration before the day accelerates.
Mid-afternoon reset — catching the natural dip. Preventing the 3pm spiral into stress-breathing.
Pre-bed — a deep relaxation practice. Preparing the nervous system for genuine rest. 🌙
Micro-moments throughout — 2 to 5 breaths at natural pauses. End of a call. Before a meeting. Walking between rooms.
The four anchored practices plus the micro-moments create a scaffold for the nervous system across the whole day. Within a couple of weeks of hitting this consistently, Jamie reports measurable change in how clients feel. And the longer you maintain it, the more it compounds.
Monthly: a deeper dive — a full transformational breathwork session. The heavier hit. The intentional exploration of the deeper layers of the psyche.
The daily work lays the stability. The monthly work goes digging — resolving the underlying stuff so the whole thing pieces together.
This is also the structure of his 21 Days of Breathwork programme — three stages, three pillars, moving from functional awareness through nervous system tools to conscious connected breathing and transformational experiences.
8. What Expanded States Actually Feel Like ✨
Jamie is not precious about the more extraordinary end of what breathwork can produce. He talks about it plainly, because he's seen it too many times to be surprised.
In one of his own experiences — at a point when he had been struggling with low mood and depression — he had a session in which an overwhelming feeling of joy and bliss arrived.
It was like a light bulb switching back on. A visceral reminder that this emotion was possible in my life.
It didn't last forever. That's not the point. The point was the reminder — a felt, undeniable experience of an emotional state he'd lost access to. A North Star to aim at.
He's worked with people who have years of experience in healing, plant medicine, and transformational practice. And they've told him breathwork accessed something that transcended all of it.
They've had the single most powerful experience of their life. In a room in London. Just their breath.
Fireside Chat 🔥
💫 Four words your course graduates use: Peaceful. Connected. Loving. Whole.
📖 A book that isn't obvious: You Are the Happiness You Seek by Rupert Spira.
🧒 Words for your younger self: It's not that serious — don't forget to laugh. 😂
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How Breathing Wrong Is Holding You Back — Calm, Energy & Transformation with Jamie Clements
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