Meet the Team
Dr Tim Hughes
Tim is an Anaesthetic Registrar and Advanced Breathwork Instructor with a particular interest in breathing, stress physiology and the non-technical aspects of clinical care.
He qualified as a doctor in 2013 and has worked predominantly in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine since 2017. He has a particular interest in obstetric anaesthesia, where he combines technical expertise with careful communication, breathwork, meditative and hypnotic language and curated music to bring calmness and clarity to potentially stressful moments.
This is the part of medicine he finds most fulfilling. What may be another working day for a clinician can be a huge day in a patient's life. Tim believes good care should recognise that vulnerability and the privilege of looking after people during some of their most significant moments.
His interest in stress and recovery is also personal. Having experienced anxiety and periods of burnout himself, alongside supporting his wife, an Emergency Medicine Consultant, through burnout, he became increasingly interested in what we can realistically influence when many of the pressures around us cannot easily be changed.
Tim subsequently trained with the world renowned Patrick McKeown of the Oxygen Advantage, becoming an Advanced Breathwork Instructor. His approach is practical and physiology-led: understanding what happens to our breathing and bodies under pressure and using simple techniques to influence our state, recovery and resilience.
He is also a sauna master and guides breathwork, sauna and cold-exposure experiences at Güs in Sheffield. Heat, cold, music and meditation have become an important part of his own wellbeing, and he particularly enjoys creating guided sauna rituals that allow people to slow down, reconnect and experience controlled stress while maintaining a sense of calm.
Tim is particularly interested in bringing these approaches to doctors and others working in high-pressure environments. Breathwork, meditation, heat and cold cannot fix an overstretched system — but they can provide simple, physiological tools to help us recover better, find clarity under pressure and remain present for the parts of our work and lives that matter.
Co-Founder
Dr James Brunning
Co-FounderJames is a practising Consultant Anaesthetist and breathwork instructor whose interest in wellbeing has developed through both his professional life and his own experience of learning to look after himself differently.
He qualified in medicine in 2002 and completed the FRCA in 2009, followed by a postgraduate qualification in medical education in 2010. Alongside his clinical and educational work, James is a Trust Wellbeing Lead and has spent recent years developing and running wellbeing events for doctors. This has given him first-hand experience of the pressures facing people working in medicine, as well as what can genuinely help when given the time and space to step away from the demands of clinical work.
Some of the experiences that have most shaped his approach to health and recovery have happened outside conventional medical training.
James has maintained a daily meditation practice since 2010 and stopped drinking alcohol in 2019, a decision he describes as changing the trajectory of his own health more profoundly than almost anything he had learned at medical school. Wanting to understand and develop practical ways of influencing how we feel and function, he subsequently completed a diploma in hypnosis in 2020 and trained as a breathwork instructor in 2022.
His interest is not in wellness as another form of optimisation, or another thing to fit into an already busy life. Instead, James is interested in the quieter work of recognising when we are running on empty, understanding our own responses to stress, and creating enough space to recover properly.
That perspective is informed by medicine and physiology, but also by philosophy. James follows Stoic thought and writers such as Ryan Holliday, Alain de Botton and Oliver Burkeman, exploring acceptance, limitation and the reality that a meaningful life does not necessarily come from continually trying to do more.
Alongside this, James has been a facilitator with Menspeak, a not-for-profit community interest company, since 2025. The work creates spaces in which men can speak openly and honestly about stress, mental health and the things they are carrying, sometimes for the first time.
Across his work with breathwork, meditation, hypnosis, heat and cold exposure and group facilitation, there is a consistent thread: practical ways of stepping out of constant doing and becoming more aware of what is actually happening in the body and mind.
James brings the perspective of someone who has spent decades working in medicine, and who has also had to learn many of these lessons personally. He is particularly interested in making them accessible to doctors and others working in demanding, high-responsibility environments, without pretending that the answer is simply to become better at coping with an unsustainable workload.