When Julius Thomas hung up his NFL cleats in 2018, he didn’t know he was about to face the hardest, and longest, transition of his life. The tight end who caught touchdowns from Peyton Manning walked into graduate school at 30 with no job, no playbook, and none of the daily wins football used to hand him.
“When you have to go from a master to a rookie, you go from winning a lot, knowing what you’re doing and very comfortable with all of it, to then having to rebuild that,” he recalled. “That is extremely challenging, because in the beginning of any journey, it’s losing, doing it wrong, working really hard, struggling through it.”
The lessons he learned over the years that followed changed the way he looked at performance. He went back to the classroom, completed a clinical residency and earned his doctorate in clinical psychology in June 2025.
In pro sports, the mentality is often to push through and keep going. While Thomas lived that for years, today, as a performance coach and consultant with his company Optimal Performance, he sees how much of peak performance relies on stepping back and checking in with ourselves.
“One of the things I say is the biggest unaddressed area of performance in all of sport is emotional regulation,” Thomas told Muscle & Fitness.
Thomas’ Take on NFL Injuries This Season
The 2026 NFL season has already tested the push-through mindset from the opening weeks. Six of the 32 quarterbacks initially named starters were hurt early in the season, including Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams and Jaxson Dart. Now Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is now expected to miss the rest of the season after doctors found deep vein thrombosis and bilateral pulmonary emboli, with his case traced back to a calf injury from an opponent’s cleat.
Thomas resisted pinning the run on any single cause. He also didn’t think any of this was unusual. “Football has a 100% injury rate” he says. “Every single person that plays football is going to get injured, so injuries are just high in that sport in general.”
Contact injuries come with the job, he said, while training loads, surfaces, off-season habits, mobility, and recovery—or the lack thereof—shape the non-contact ones. Research has also shown that the mind does have a seat at the table.
A 2017 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine linked stress responses to higher injury risk and found psychological interventions reduced injury rates. Hence, Thomas makes it a point to take our foot off the gas a lot more frequently than we do.
“If you just only floor it, only floor it, only floor it. How long do you think that engine is going to do well?” Thomas explains. “Not very long.”
The brakes represent the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-digest branch that counters the stress response. “If we don’t do enough to create more parasympathetic tone in our nervous system, if we don’t sleep enough hours, all we’re doing is degrading the major systems in our body,” he explained, noting the cost of the grind will come sooner or later.
How Every High Performer Pays the Tab
This pattern follows high performers into the boardroom as well. Thomas has coached executives who asked him for nootropics to sharpen their focus—then admitted that he himself was only getting four hours of sleep a night for 20 years. So he’s built a framework called “Striving for 100” to bring clients back to five daily habits, including exercise, sleep, nutrition, recovery and healthy substance use, with recovery anchoring the rest. One-on-one, he layers in radical acceptance, cognitive restructuring and reframing drawn from several evidence-based methods such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
“You’re either gonna pay the cost slowly and surely by recovering in your 30s and 40s and 50s,” he says, “or you’re gonna pay it all of a sudden when you’re sick.”
He holds himself to the same standard. Though when a friend had warned him a full transition would take about a decade, he refused to believe it.
“I am eight years in transition. And I’m almost to where I want to be in my next profession,” he admitted, but pointed out the difficulty he’s experienced with identity and how much our society gets it wrong.
Thomas bristles at the advice athletes often hear on the way out, that they simply need to separate who they are from the sport they played.
“It really bothers me when people say that about athletes, because they’re trying to minimize the challenge of the experience, so that when the athlete finds himself in the psychological challenge, they feel like they shouldn’t be, and this should be easy,” he explained, adding that identity runs deeper than a label, and it’s built by what you do every day and reinforced by how others see you.
Years after his last game, people still want to talk about NFL playing days, in which the two-time Pro Bowl tight end caught 12 touchdown passes in both 2012 and 2013. “It’s hard to get people to see you in your new career,” he admitted.
Now he prepares athletes for that shift and asks them whether they’re ready for one of the hardest things they’ll ever do, and whether they’ve built the tools to get through it.
“Do you have the psychological skills to reframe, recontextualize, find meaning, find purpose?” he’d ask.
What he doesn’t want any player to forget is that the struggle says nothing about them. Every major life change strains us. “Transitions are always hard,” he said. But with the right tools and support, it becomes easier to navigate over time.
When the Pain Doesn’t Show on an X-Ray
Most of us were never taught to name what we feel, let alone work through it when stress drags on for months. Thomas wasn’t either, and he’s seen the toll it could take on the body.
“Emotions trigger our nervous system,” he says, referring to his studies in psychoneuroimmunology. “So the better you get at managing emotions and reducing negative emotions, the less sustained stress you’d have on your nervous system.”
And it matters because our nervous system, immune system, and psychology are connected, he says, and when stress becomes chronic, various aspects of our life take a hit. Sleep and diet slip first when emotional strain builds, he noted, and muscle tension climbs as anxiety lingers.
However, simply putting a feeling into words can help turn the volume down. A 2007 UCLA brain imaging study in Psychological Science found that labeling emotions dampened the amygdala’s response to negative images.
Though few of us get support doing that work. He cited CDC data that reported 10.9% of U.S. men receive counseling or therapy from a mental health professional, compared with 16.9% of women. And, unfortunately, Thomas sees where we choose to spend time and money instead.
“People are not interested in paying for mental health services, but they’re really interested in new pants and new shirts and nice bags,” he said, adding how much easier it is for many of us to ask for help with physical pain or discomfort. As a player, he never hesitated to walk into the training room with a sore ankle.
“We are constantly asking for help in so many areas of our life,” he says, “but we somehow, as a culture, believe that we should handle what’s in our heart and in our mind by ourselves.”
Meet Thomas at Eudēmonia
Certainly, Thomas is no rookie in his new career, and it shows in the company he keeps. At Eudēmonia on November 5-8, he will share the stage with some of the movers and shakers of the health, wellness and longevity industry.
He recalled his first year at the event and how much the relationships he built across psychology, neuroscience, medicine and mind-body practices have stayed with him.
“The conversations, the network, the community I built at year one at Eudēmonia is still having positive influence on my life almost one year later,” he said. “And Eudēmonia has become one of the conferences that I’m most excited to go to.”
Thomas returns with keynotes on mental health and a panel discussion on mindset, performance and the capacity to adapt. The takeaway he wants the audience to leave with is hope, actionable steps, and to be educated in something that is going to help make them healthier, better, more productive and higher functioning.
“If you want sustainable high performance, you have to build well-being and quality of life into what you do,” he said.
