From Fight/Flight and in Survival to Feeling Like Yourself Again with Tash Forbes
If you're a mum reading this with your shoulders somewhere up near your ears, breath caught high in your chest, mentally running through everything that still needs doing — this conversation is for you.
In this episode, breathwork facilitator and mind-body coach Tash Forbes shares how she went from years of being stuck in fight or flight to feeling calm, clear and genuinely like herself again. Her story is one so many mums will recognise: high-functioning on the outside, completely frazzled underneath, and convinced that "just pushing through" was simply what life looked like now.
The good news? The tool that helped her turn it around is one you already carry with you everywhere you go — your breath.
Why "just take a deep breath" doesn't work
Tash's biggest pet hate, as a breathwork facilitator, is being told to "take a deep breath." When you're already stressed and someone says it, the alarm bells go off — because most of us do it completely wrong.
The next time someone tells you to breathe deeply, notice what actually happens. For most of us, the shoulders lift towards the ears and the breath rushes into the chest. That kind of breathing doesn't calm you down — it keeps you wound up.
Instead of "take a deep breath," Tash suggests getting curious: where is my breath actually going? When you breathe in, are your shoulders climbing? Is your chest tightening? Or is your ribcage expanding outwards and your belly softening? It's that lower, belly-and-ribs breath that signals safety to your body — and it's the shallow, shoulders-up version that Tash sees in almost every single person she's worked with over the past year.
What shallow breathing is really telling your nervous system
Breathing is automatic. We don't think about it — which is exactly why so many of us have quietly drifted into a stressed-out pattern without ever noticing.
Watch a baby breathe and you'll see big, full belly breaths every time. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the pressure of modern life trains us to breathe short, sharp and shallow. As Tash puts it, the stress of the modern world has quite literally taken our breath away.
Here's why that matters physiologically. Short, shallow breathing keeps your body in the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system — adrenaline up, cortisol pumping, the brain convinced there's danger to escape. Your body floods your extremities to help you run, even though the only "threat" is a toddler demanding breakfast.
Slow, low belly breaths do the opposite. They tell your brain there's no immediate danger, switching you into the "rest and digest" state where you can finally relax. For Tash, realising this was a revelation: she'd spent years asking herself why can't I relax? Is something wrong with me? — when really, she just wasn't breathing in a way that allowed her body to settle.
Running from your life vs. coming back to it
As mums, we tend to assume the fix has to be big. I need a girls' trip. I need more lunches out. I need to get away. And those things feel good — there's a hit of endorphins, a moment of relief.
But the mental load is still waiting when you walk back through the door. Within seconds, that holiday calm is gone.
Breathwork offers something different: a way to bring calm and ease into the day you're actually living, without needing to escape it. Because you're breathing anyway, it's simply a matter of noticing where the breath is going and asking, do I need a deep breath right now?
Tash's story: from high performer to hospital to healing
Tash's path into breathwork wasn't a single dramatic moment — it was a build-up over years of being stuck in survival mode.
She came from a high-pressure career as a housing manager with the Department of Communities, overseeing major social housing and staff. She was the strong one, the high performer, the mum taking the kids everywhere, baking all the things, doing all the things. But underneath, she was reactive and snappy, yelling at the kids, disconnected from her husband and her own needs, battling anxiety and unable to sleep.
After the birth of her third child, postnatal anxiety and depression landed her in hospital and on anti-anxiety medication. She's clear that medication has its place and does work — but when she asked her doctor when she'd be able to come off it, the answer was essentially "whenever you feel you can," which left her stuck in a cycle of not being able to feel anything unless she was on it.
Then she came across a now-familiar phrase on an Instagram reel: the body keeps the score. Down the rabbit hole she went, learning how past experiences she'd never allowed herself to feel — because she always had to be the strong one — were being stored in her body and creating a constant, low-grade unease.
That curiosity led her to breathwork. In her first deep session, her body breathed in an activating way and she was flooded with emotion — and the experience of finally feeling and processing those old events was profoundly healing. Afterwards she noticed subtle shifts: less snappy with the kids, no longer triggered by certain songs on the radio. A couple more sessions in, she knew this needed to reach more people.
The two sides of breathwork: functional and transformational
Tash describes two distinct approaches, and she uses both with clients.
Functional breathwork is the everyday, regulating kind — the breathing techniques that move you out of fight or flight and back into calm. This is the simple belly breath you can do at the kitchen bench.
Transformational breathwork is the deeper work. Using a conscious, connected breathing technique (you may have heard of styles like 9D or transformational breathwork), it can be quite activating and uncomfortable, but it allows the body to release stored emotion, gain insight and reset the nervous system. It was this deeper work that helped Tash get to the root of her anxiety — old beliefs around self-worth and a constant need to prove she was a good mum, wife and friend.
For someone brand new, Tash sees value in both and often weaves them together. The functional breath regulates you day to day; the deeper breath releases and resets at a level the daily practice can't reach.
Learning to hold discomfort — and joy
One of the most powerful threads in this conversation is the idea of holding discomfort.
When your child screams at you and your body snaps into defensive mode, the urge to react back is automatic — Tash used to do it constantly, then judge herself for it. But when you breathe into your belly and drop out of fight or flight, you create a gap. You can feel the discomfort, recognise I'm not actually in danger here, and choose a different response.
She uses flying as an example. She once couldn't board a plane without a Valium, her whole body braced with anxiety. By breathing into her belly, she learned to feel the anxiety and hold it — letting her body calm down even while her brain insisted she wasn't safe.
And here's the part we talk about far less: it's not only the hard emotions we struggle to hold. For someone who'd spent a lifetime pushing feelings down, even love and joy felt unfamiliar and hard to sit with. Learning to hold the full range — grief and happiness — through her breath was genuinely liberating.
This matters enormously in parenting. So often the urge to instantly fix or stop our child's distress comes from our own inability to sit with discomfort. When we can pause, breathe and stay present instead of over-soothing or shaming, we're often pleasantly surprised by what our kids do next.
Have we forgotten what calm feels like?
For a lot of modern women, the honest answer is yes. Tash regularly sees clients find it genuinely uncomfortable just to lie still — we've become so quick to reach for the phone to soothe any discomfort that calm now feels foreign.
Many of us, in early parenthood especially, find busyness feels safe and stillness feels threatening. The brain, still breathing short and shallow, keeps scanning for the next threat — and stillness itself becomes the threat. Learning to breathe in a way that supports your body to sit in stillness is what makes that calm accessible again, even if it feels awkward at first.
It also explains why meditation often fails frazzled mums. You can't meditate your way out of fight or flight — sitting alone with racing thoughts just feels worse, so you never go back. Breathwork is different: rather than wrestling with your mind, you simply come back to your breath and notice what arises in your body.
One simple practice to try today
Tash's favourite technique is beautifully basic — the belly breath.
Breathe into your belly, not your chest, so your belly and ribs expand outwards.
Make your exhale longer than your inhale — try breathing in for around four and out for six to eight. (If that's tricky, an even count like in for five, out for five works too.)
Keep chest breaths to a minimum throughout the day.
Everyone's breath capacity is a little different, so find what feels right. The key is simply that the breath is going low, into the diaphragm and belly, rather than high into the chest.
The real trick is anchoring it to moments you already do on autopilot. Turning on the coffee machine. Clipping the kids into their car seats before you start the car. Settling in to read a book or water the garden. In each of these little pauses, bring your awareness back to your breath and reset. As Tash says, the more micro-moments you add to your day, the less you feel you need the big getaway — because you're regulating yourself in real time.
The ripple effect: parenting, marriage and feeling like yourself
The changes in Tash's life have been, in her words, a complete 180.
As a more regulated mum, she has patience she never had before — enough that a little grief comes up when she thinks back to the reactive mum she used to be. (As she gently reminds us, we don't know what we don't know.) Things still aren't perfect; shoes still don't go on and nobody clips into the car seat on cue. But there's so much more presence and patience in the hard moments.
Her marriage shifted too. From someone touched out, exhausted and questioning whether she even wanted to keep going, she now has the capacity to be genuinely curious about her husband's day rather than putting him last on the list. More love, more presence, more connection.
And it's worth remembering the research that says you only need to be a "good enough" parent around 30% of the time. If breathwork helps shift even that 30% of how you show up, the impact on you and your kids is enormous.
The one thing to take away
When Tash was asked to leave mums with a single message, hers was simple:
Check your breath. You're already doing amazing. You don't need to do any more — let's just make what you already have work for you.
So before you race on to the next thing on your list, take a moment. Drop your shoulders. Send the breath low into your belly. Make the exhale long. That small, free, always-available reset might just be the first step back to feeling like yourself again.
