Julian Thomas spent enough time at football’s highest level to know what success looks like. He made two Pro Bowls, played in the Super Bowl and lined up alongside stars like Peyton Manning during his run with the Denver Broncos. But even with all that on his résumé, something was off.
That question - why he wasn’t happy during some of his best moments - ultimately pushed Thomas toward a second career far removed from the field. The former Broncos tight end is now a clinical psychologist and performance coach, and he works with athletes who are dealing with the same kinds of mental health issues he once felt himself, according to columnist Troy Renck of the Denver Post.
Thomas, now 38 and living in Florida, has always had more going on than just football. He also starred in basketball at Portland State, and one of the defining traits of his game was curiosity. He wanted the details, but he also wanted the reason behind them, asking not just what his team was doing, but why.
For Thomas, the real turning point came in March of 2015, when he signed a five-year, $46 million deal with the Jacksonville Jaguars and still found himself asking why the moment didn’t feel bigger. He said he had trouble “making sense of the money,” and that experience opened his eyes to a gap in the way athletes are prepared. The physical side gets drilled relentlessly, but the mental and emotional side often gets left behind.
After retiring in 2018, Thomas began what Renck described as “self-discovery.” He studied psychology and neuroscience, in part to better understand CTE, the degenerative neural disease that can affect former football players and boxers after they leave their sport.
He became comfortable in a lab coat, per Renck, and eventually completed a one-year clinical residency at Nova Southeastern’s Psychology Services Center. Today, he is Dr. Julian Thomas, and mental health has become central to the way he sees sports and life.
He can also point to the numbers. The key ones, as cited by Thomas, are that one in thre Americans experiences an anxiety disorder, while one in five will face a depressive disorder.
From there, Thomas launched Optimal Performance, where he created an app that also works as a performance coach. There’s already a waiting list for it, and it factors emotional issues into an athlete’s expected physical performance. For Thomas, it’s a direct answer to the kind of uncertainty he carried as a player - and a different kind of help than scrolling the internet for solutions.
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