When Julius Thomas hung up his NFL cleats in 2018, he didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have to go from a master to a rookie, you go from winning a lot, knowing what you\u2019re doing and very comfortable with all of it, to then having to rebuild that,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThat is extremely challenging, because in the beginning of any journey, it\u2019s losing, doing it wrong, working really hard, struggling through it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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,<\/a> he sees how much of peak performance relies on stepping back and checking in with ourselves.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things I say is the biggest unaddressed area of performance in all of sport is emotional regulation,\u201d Thomas told Muscle & Fitness.<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019s cleat.<\/p>\n Thomas resisted pinning the run on any single cause. He also didn\u2019t think any of this was unusual. \u201cFootball has a 100% injury rate\u201d he says. \u201cEvery single person that plays football is going to get injured, so injuries are just high in that sport in general.\u201d<\/p>\n Contact injuries come with the job, he said, while training loads, surfaces, off-season habits, mobility, and recovery\u2014or the lack thereof\u2014shape the non-contact ones. Research has also shown that the mind does have a seat at the table.<\/p>\n A 2017 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine<\/em><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you just only floor it, only floor it, only floor it. How long do you think that engine is going to do well?\u201d Thomas explains. \u201cNot very long.\u201d<\/p>\n The brakes represent the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-digest branch that counters the stress response. \u201cIf we don\u2019t do enough to create more parasympathetic tone in our nervous system, if we don\u2019t sleep enough hours, all we\u2019re doing is degrading the major systems in our body,\u201d he explained, noting the cost of the grind will come sooner or later.<\/p>\n This pattern follows high performers into the boardroom as well. Thomas has coached executives who asked him for nootropics to sharpen their focus\u2014then admitted that he himself was only getting four hours of sleep a night for 20 years. So he\u2019s built a framework called \u201cStriving for 100\u201d 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).<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re either gonna pay the cost slowly and surely by recovering in your 30s and 40s and 50s,\u201d he says, \u201cor you\u2019re gonna pay it all of a sudden when you\u2019re sick.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI am eight years in transition. And I\u2019m almost to where I want to be in my next profession,\u201d he admitted, but pointed out the difficulty he\u2019s experienced with identity and how much our society gets it wrong.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt really bothers me when people say that about athletes, because they\u2019re trying to minimize the challenge of the experience, so that when the athlete finds himself in the psychological challenge, they feel like they shouldn\u2019t be, and this should be easy,\u201d he explained, adding that identity runs deeper than a label, and it\u2019s built by what you do every day and reinforced by how others see you.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to get people to see you in your new career,\u201d he admitted.<\/p>\n Now he prepares athletes for that shift and asks them whether they\u2019re ready for one of the hardest things they\u2019ll ever do, and whether they\u2019ve built the tools to get through it.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you have the psychological skills to reframe, recontextualize, find meaning, find purpose?\u201d he\u2019d ask.<\/p>\n What he doesn\u2019t want any player to forget is that the struggle says nothing about them. Every major life change strains us. \u201cTransitions are always hard,\u201d he said. But with the right tools and support, it becomes easier to navigate over time.<\/p>\n Most of us were never taught to name what we feel, let alone work through it when stress drags on for months. Thomas wasn\u2019t either, and he\u2019s seen the toll it could take on the body.<\/p>\n \u201cEmotions trigger our nervous system,\u201d he says, referring to his studies in psychoneuroimmunology. \u201cSo the better you get at managing emotions and reducing negative emotions, the less sustained stress you\u2019d have on your nervous system.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n However, simply putting a feeling into words can help turn the volume down. A 2007 UCLA brain imaging study in Psychological Science<\/em><\/a> found that labeling emotions dampened the amygdala\u2019s response to negative images.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are not interested in paying for mental health services, but they\u2019re really interested in new pants and new shirts and nice bags,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are constantly asking for help in so many areas of our life,\u201d he says, \u201cbut we somehow, as a culture, believe that we should handle what\u2019s in our heart and in our mind by ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\nThomas\u2019 Take on NFL Injuries This Season<\/h2>\n
How Every High Performer Pays the Tab<\/h2>\n
![\"Julius](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.muscleandfitness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Julius-Thomas-smiling-at-a-speaking-event.jpg?quality=86&strip=all\")
<\/div>When the Pain Doesn\u2019t Show on an X-Ray<\/h2>\n
Meet Thomas at Eud\u0113monia<\/h2>\n