Breathwork, burnout and the body's intelligence: a conversation with Delphine

Delphine has worked for over 25 years as a VP of product management in global technology. She runs teams across time zones — engineers, data scientists, product managers — and does it as a single mother of two. She is precisely the kind of woman who appears to be managing everything. And several years ago, her nervous system stopped cooperating entirely.

The burnout was physical, not just mental. She could not move her body. The chronic pain she had been managing — severe IBS, paralysis in her arms, accumulated physical tension she had been treating as separate problems — converged into a complete shutdown. Talking therapy, which she had been engaged in for years, had not reached what her body was carrying.

What did reach it was somatic work, and then breathwork. And the understanding that changed everything was this: the anxiety she had been treating as a mental health problem lived primarily in the body. The gut that contracted before a difficult conversation. The jaw that tightened under stress. The breath that had been held shallow and high in the chest for so long it had become her normal.

Delphine now works as a breathwork coach. We spoke about how the breath functions as a physiological tool, what the body knows before the mind does, how resilience is actually built, and what a simple breath practice can do for a high-performing woman in two minutes or less.

The body knows first

Delphine's turning point came through a gastroenterologist who, faced with her severely symptomatic gut, asked her a single question before anything else: are you worried about anything? Your gut is your second brain, he told her.

That reframe opened a different way of reading the signals her body had been sending throughout her life. Not as inconvenient symptoms to be managed, but as information. The belly contracting when a specific thought arrived. The jaw tightening before a confrontation. The arms aching in response to sustained stress. All of it was the body communicating. All of it had a pattern.

This is what somatic work — and specifically somatic experiencing — helped her to see: the direct connection between thought and physical response. Not as a theory. As something she could observe in real time. And once she could observe it, she could work with it rather than around it.

The implication for high-performing women is significant. Many of the physical symptoms that active, disciplined, high-functioning women manage as separate health concerns — the gut issues, the chronic tension, the fatigue that does not respond to rest, the headaches, the jaw clenching — may have a unified origin. Not in the body as a malfunctioning system, but in the body as a system that is accurately registering what has not been allowed to be processed or expressed.

What breathwork actually is — and is not

Breathwork is not new. Delphine is direct about this. It comes from Pranayama, from ancient yogic practice that has existed for thousands of years. The current cultural attention it is receiving is not the source of its value — that value has been known and practised long before it became a social media trend.

What breathwork offers, at the most fundamental level, is conscious access to a physiological process that is otherwise automatic. We are, as Delphine notes, the only mammalian species capable of bringing breathing to conscious awareness. Most of us do not use this capacity. Most of us breathe shallowly, from the chest, in a pattern that keeps the sympathetic nervous system partially activated, most of the time.

The physiological mechanism is straightforward. The inhale activates the sympathetic nervous system — the branch associated with alertness, effort, and the stress response. The exhale activates the parasympathetic — the branch responsible for rest, digestion, and recovery. When the exhale is extended to twice the length of the inhale, the parasympathetic activation is deliberately prolonged. The nervous system state shifts. Not because the external circumstances have changed, but because the body has been given a direct signal.

For a woman who is about to enter a high-stakes meeting in a state of physiological stress, one minute of extended exhale breathing — in for two counts, out for four — can shift the state from which she engages with that situation. Not by calming her down in a way that reduces her sharpness, but by grounding her in a way that gives her access to choice rather than reaction.

Resilience as window of tolerance

Delphine's definition of resilience is one of the most precise I have encountered. Resilience, she says, is not toughness. It is not the capacity to endure more. It is the expansion of the window of tolerance — the range of experience the nervous system can move through without becoming destabilised.

When the window of tolerance is narrow, small stressors produce large responses. A difficult email, an unexpected change in plans, a physical symptom — any of these can tip the system into a state that is disproportionate to the trigger, because the system has very little buffer. This is not a character weakness. It is a nervous system state.

Breathwork, practised consistently, expands that window. Not by eliminating the stressors, but by increasing the system's capacity to move through them without collapsing. The breath holds that Delphine uses in her practice — extending beyond what feels comfortable, then taking in one more sip of air — are a direct training of this. The body learns that it can tolerate more than it thought. That the edge is further than it appeared.

This is directly applicable to athletic performance as well as leadership. The ability to stay grounded under high intensity — to make clean decisions when the body is under load, to maintain form and precision when effort is uncomfortable — is a nervous system skill. Breathwork builds it.

The practical application

Delphine's morning practice is substantial: a breath hold on waking, Kapalabhati breath for gut health and energy, and two rounds of Soma Breath — a music-guided breathwork method that uses specific frequencies and rhythms to facilitate a deeper journey inward. This is her non-negotiable daily routine.

For women who are not yet working with a breathwork practice, she starts with one thing: awareness. In the first session with any new client, she asks only that they become conscious of their breath. Not to change it. Just to notice it. Where is it living? Is it high in the chest? Is it held? Is there any movement below the sternum?

That single shift — from unconscious, automatic breathing to a moment of conscious observation — is, she says, the beginning of transformation. Clients text her within days to say they cannot stop noticing their breath. That is the point. That noticing is the beginning of choice.

From there, the extended exhale is the primary tool for moment-to-moment regulation. Available in any meeting, at any desk, before any difficult conversation. No mat required. No class. Just the breath, brought into awareness, and the exhale made deliberately long.

Delphine runs Inner Alchemy breathwork workshops on the last Friday of each month in Crystal Palace, South London, and works with clients one to one and in group coaching programmes. Find her on Instagram. If you are interested in the physical performance and recovery side of this work, I work with women in person in South East London and online. More details can be found here.

Seema Chopra works with high-performing women to train intelligently, recover well, and sustain performance without burnout