How Creativity Helps When You Feel Lost, Overwhelmed, or Disconnected
Creativity isn't just for artists. Discover how creative practices can support wellbeing, reduce overwhelm, and help you reconnect with yourself when life feels noisy or uncertain.
Sometimes the problem isn't that we don't know what to do. It's that we've heard so many voices telling us what we should do that we can no longer hear our own. The productivity experts. The wellbeing experts. The people on social media who seem to have figured it out. The friends with strong opinions. The endless stream of advice arriving through podcasts, newsletters, books, and algorithms. None of it is necessarily wrong. In fact, much of it may be thoughtful, useful, and well-intentioned. But there comes a point where all of that input can begin to drown something out.
Our own voice.
We stop noticing what we think because we're busy collecting what everyone else thinks. We stop paying attention to what we need because we're trying to keep up with what everyone else appears to need. We become disconnected. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just gradually. A little further away from ourselves than we realise.
This was one of the themes that stayed with me from a recent conversation with Claire Venus, founder of Creatively Conscious. Although we talked about creativity, online life, burnout, visibility, trust, and self-expression, underneath all of it was a question that feels increasingly important:
How do we stay connected to ourselves in a world that is constantly competing for our attention?
The Cost of Overriding Ourselves
One of the most powerful ideas in the conversation was surprisingly simple. Claire talked about paying attention to what feels uplifting and what feels tightening. What expands us and what contracts us. What feels like ours and what feels like something we've absorbed from somewhere else.
It's easy to dismiss this as a small thing.
But many of us have become remarkably skilled at overriding those signals. We push through exhaustion. We say yes when we mean no. We follow advice that doesn't fit. We continue with projects that drain us because we've already invested so much time. We force ourselves to be consistent when what we really need is rest. Eventually, we stop asking ourselves a very important question:
How does this actually feel?
Not how it looks. Not whether it's impressive. Not whether someone else would approve.
How does it feel?
Because our bodies often know something long before our minds catch up.
Creativity Is Sometimes a Form of Reconnection
When people hear the word creativity, they often think of art: Painting. Writing. Music. Design. But creativity can be something much broader than that. It can be the act of making space for yourself again.
A notebook opened at the end of a difficult day.
A walk without headphones.
A garden.
A sketchbook.
A conversation.
A few quiet minutes spent wondering what you actually think about something.
Creativity creates room. And for people who feel overwhelmed, burnt out, anxious, or disconnected, room can be surprisingly healing. Not because it fixes everything. But because it allows us to hear ourselves again.
What If The Goal Isn't To Push Harder?
Many of us have absorbed the idea that if something isn't working, we simply need to try harder.
Be more disciplined. More productive. More consistent. More efficient.
Yet Claire challenges that idea in a way I found refreshing. She describes consistency as one of the biggest myths of modern creative life, arguing instead that what matters is understanding your own creative practice and your own rhythms.
That feels relevant far beyond creativity.
Because perhaps the question isn't:
"How do I make myself keep going?"
Perhaps the question is:
"What do I need in order to thrive?"
Those are very different questions.
One asks us to override ourselves. The other asks us to listen.
Finding Your Way Back
If you've been feeling disconnected lately, maybe the answer isn't another strategy. Maybe it isn't another expert. Maybe it isn't another thing to optimise. Maybe it's simply paying closer attention.
To what lifts you up.
To what drains you.
To what feels alive.
To what feels like yours.
Sometimes finding our way back to ourselves begins with noticing what we've stopped noticing. And perhaps that's what being creatively conscious really means. Not becoming a different person. Just becoming more aware of the one who's already here.
Listen to my full conversation with Claire Venus on A Thought I Kept: How We Stay Creatively Conscious.
And if you're feeling lost, overwhelmed, creatively stuck, or unsure what you need next, our wellbeing sessions offer space to explore what might help you reconnect with yourself. Creativity often becomes part of that conversation.
Burnout Isn't Just About Being Busy
Burnout is about more than being busy. Explore the emotional signs of burnout, why wellbeing isn't a destination, and how to find your way back to yourself.
A few years ago, if you'd asked me what burnout looked like, I probably would have described someone who couldn't get out of bed. Someone who was exhausted. Someone who had simply done too much for too long. And while all of those things can be true, I've started to realise that burnout can be much harder to spot than that.
Sometimes it looks like carrying on. You still show up to work. You still answer the emails. You still remember the PE kit, book the dentist appointment and reply to the WhatsApp messages. From the outside, everything appears to be functioning more or less as normal. But something has shifted.
The things that used to bring you pleasure don't quite land in the same way. The book sits unopened on the bedside table. The walk you've been looking forward to all week suddenly feels like another item on the list. Someone suggests meeting for coffee and, rather than feeling excited, you find yourself wondering whether you can get out of it.
Life starts to feel flatter somehow. Not terrible or dramatic. Just a little more grey than it used to. This was something that really stood out for me from my recent conversation with Dr Jillian Bybee on A Thought I Kept.
Jillian is a paediatric intensive care physician, coach, writer and mother who has experienced burnout twice herself. During our conversation she shared a thought that changed the way she understood wellbeing:
"Wellness is not a state of being, it's a state of action."
We kept returning to that sentence as we talked because it challenges one of the most common assumptions many of us carry around wellbeing. Namely, that it's somewhere we're trying to get to.
If we're honest, many of us live as though wellbeing is waiting for us on the other side of life. It's over there somewhere, beyond the busy period at work, beyond the caring responsibilities, beyond the financial worries, beyond the endless list of things that need our attention. We imagine there will come a moment when life finally settles down and we'll have enough space to focus on ourselves.
Only life has a habit of refusing to settle down. There's always another deadline, another transition, another worry, another season of life that requires something from us. And so wellbeing remains permanently postponed.
What I loved about Jillian's perspective was the reminder that wellbeing isn't something that exists outside our lives. It has to exist within them. Not when things calm down. Now. Not perfectly. Imperfectly. Not as a destination. As a practice.
One of the moments that particularly struck me was when Jillian spoke about how she now understands burnout. Rather than defining it purely through exhaustion or workload, she shared a definition from Duke University's wellbeing research that describes burnout as an inability to feel positive emotion. Which is such a powerful reframe. Because it explains something I've seen in myself at times and in so many people I've worked with.
Burnout isn't always a collapse. Sometimes it's a disappearance. A gradual loss of access to the things that make us feel alive. Joy becomes harder to find. Wonder feels distant. Connection requires effort. Even gratitude can feel strangely out of reach.
We often think of burnout as a productivity problem. We imagine the solution lies in better time management, fewer commitments or a more efficient morning routine. But what if burnout is also an emotional experience?
What if part of what we're grieving when we're burnt out isn't simply our energy, but our relationship with life itself? That idea feels particularly important because so many of us have become very good at pushing through.
We're good at functioning. Good at coping. Good at convincing everyone, including ourselves, that we're fine.
As Jillian pointed out during our conversation, many of us have learned to suppress difficult emotions because they feel inconvenient, uncomfortable or overwhelming. The problem is that emotions don't really work like that. We can't neatly push away grief, anger, sadness and frustration while keeping joy, connection and hope fully intact. Often when we numb one part of ourselves, we numb other parts too.
Which perhaps explains why burnout can feel so lonely. Not because nobody is around us, but because we've become disconnected from ourselves.
One of the stories Jillian shared was about a coaching client who felt completely overwhelmed by the demands of her life. When they began working together, the thing she felt able to offer herself wasn't a wellness retreat or a radical lifestyle overhaul. It was five minutes. Five minutes spent reading in a room where nobody could find her.
I loved that story because it feels so different from the way wellbeing is often presented to us. There was no perfect morning routine. No expensive solution. No dramatic life change. Just five minutes and a growing recognition that she mattered too.
Sometimes I think we underestimate how powerful these small acts can be. Not because they solve everything, but because they begin to challenge the story that everyone else's needs must come before our own.
Perhaps that's why I left this conversation feeling unexpectedly hopeful. Not because burnout is simple. It isn't. Not because five minutes fixes everything. It doesn't. But because Jillian's perspective offers something many of us desperately need right now: a kinder relationship with wellbeing itself.
One that isn't rooted in perfection, optimisation or achievement. One that allows us to ask a different question. Not, "How do I become the best version of myself?" But, "What would help me feel a little more like myself again?" If burnout is the gradual loss of connection to ourselves, perhaps recovery begins there too. Not in becoming someone new. But in finding our way back to the person who has been there all along.
If this resonates, I'd encourage you to listen to my full conversation with Dr Jillian Bybee on A Thought I Kept.
And if you're feeling stuck, overwhelmed or unsure what support might help, you can also explore our Wellbeing Check-Ins and coaching sessions. Sometimes we need another idea. And sometimes we need another person.
The Things We Avoid and the Things We Ache For
Avoidance isn't always laziness. Explore why we avoid difficult tasks, conversations and decisions, how emotions shape procrastination, and what our desires can teach us about what matters most.
We all have something we've been meaning to deal with.
The email we haven't opened. The text message we haven't replied to. The work project that has been sitting in the corner of our desktop for months. The difficult conversation. The bank statement. The decision.
Sometimes it can feel as though there's a monster under the bed. We suspect it's there. We can hear it scratching around in the dark. But as long as we don't look directly at it, perhaps it can't hurt us.
So we keep our heads down. We busy ourselves elsewhere. We tell ourselves we'll deal with it next week, next month, when things calm down.
But whatever it is hasn't disappeared simply because we haven't looked at it.
And often, that's where the exhaustion begins.
What Are We Really Avoiding?
The thing itself is not always the problem.
The unopened envelope might only take thirty seconds to open. The email could take five minutes to answer. The phone call might last less time than we've spent worrying about it.
What we're often avoiding is how we expect we'll feel.
Shame. Guilt. Disappointment. Regret. Anxiety. Self-doubt.
It's rarely just the task.
Many of us tell ourselves we're avoiding something because we're busy, and to be fair, that's often true. Life can feel relentless. There are school runs and deadlines, caring responsibilities and life admin, work demands and household logistics. We are trying to keep a lot of plates spinning at once.
The journalist Brigid Schulte describes modern life as being made up of "time confetti" — little scraps of time scattered throughout our days rather than long stretches of uninterrupted space. We might have five minutes here and ten minutes there, but not the emotional energy needed to climb the hill of something that feels difficult.
So we choose the easier path.
We check our phones. We reorganise the kitchen drawer. We watch another episode. We answer easier emails first.
For a moment, we feel relief.
But avoidance often comes with a hidden cost.
The thing remains. The emotional energy it requires remains. The quiet hum of guilt or dread remains.
And so we find ourselves carrying it around with us anyway.
When Avoidance Isn't About Time
Sometimes the issue isn't that something feels difficult.
Sometimes it's that it no longer matters.
We can spend months trying to motivate ourselves towards something that simply isn't aligned anymore. A commitment we've outgrown. A goal that belonged to a previous version of ourselves. A project that no longer reflects what we value.
In those moments, avoidance may not be a sign that we need more discipline. It may be information. A gentle indication that something needs revisiting, revising or perhaps even releasing.
Of course, the opposite can be true as well.
Sometimes we avoid something because it matters deeply.
The novel we want to write.
The business idea we can't stop thinking about.
The course we'd love to take.
The conversation we know we need to have.
The dream that feels so important that we become afraid to touch it.
If it stays in our imagination, it remains perfect. Once we engage with it, it becomes vulnerable to disappointment, rejection or failure.
Avoidance and fear tend to keep each other company.
What Helps When We're Stuck
One thing I've noticed is that the things I avoid often become enormous in my imagination.
The task expands. The conversation grows. The consequence becomes catastrophic.
Then I finally look at it and discover it was far smaller than I'd made it.
Not always easy. But smaller.
I've found it helpful to stop asking, "How do I finish this?" and instead ask, "What would fifteen minutes look like?"
The writer Maggie O'Farrell once spoke about writing one of the most painful scenes in Hamnet. Rather than forcing herself through it, she would write for ten minutes, walk around the garden, and then come back. Ten minutes at a time.
Sometimes courage looks less like a leap and more like a series of tiny returns.
I've also found self-compassion matters more than self-criticism. When we're already struggling with something, adding shame rarely helps. Instead, I try to remember that avoidance usually makes sense.
There is often a reason I'm hesitating. A fear. A wound. A protective instinct.
Sometimes I find it helpful to imagine speaking to myself the way I would speak to a friend:
"I know this feels difficult. I know why you're avoiding it. But we'll be okay. Let's take a look together."
Finally, I've learned to notice when avoidance moves beyond procrastination and becomes something else entirely.
There are times when avoidance can be connected to anxiety, depression, burnout or emotional overwhelm. The world becomes smaller. Opportunities narrow. Relationships drift. We stop participating in our own lives.
If that's where you find yourself, it's worth treating that experience with curiosity and care rather than judgment and getting the support that you need to help you move through this.
On the Other Side of Avoidance
On the other side of avoidance sits something else. Wanting.
Not wanting in the consumer sense. Not the endless message that we should always be striving for more.
A different kind of wanting.
The quiet question: What do I actually want?
It sounds simple, but many of us struggle to answer it.
We're often very clear on what needs doing. What is expected of us. What other people require from us.
But what do we desire? That's harder.
Perhaps because wanting can feel indulgent. We learn early that practicality is admirable. Responsibility is admirable. Self-sacrifice is admirable. Wanting can feel frivolous by comparison.
And yet some of the most meaningful parts of life begin there.
Because I want to learn a new instrument.
Because I want to travel somewhere I've never been.
Because I want to spend more time with friends.
Because I want to make things.
Because I want to.
The aviator Amelia Earhart famously answered the question of why she flew across oceans with this simple statement:
There is something wonderfully freeing about that. Not because every desire should be followed. But because sometimes wanting itself is enough..
Following the Threads of Aliveness
I've come to think of wanting as a signal. It points us towards what feels alive. Towards connection. Creativity. Curiosity. Joy. Meaning. Play.
Many of us spend so much time coping that we forget to ask what brings us pleasure.
What delights us.
What energises us.
What makes us feel more like ourselves.
And yet these questions matter. Not because they solve our problems. But because they remind us we're more than our responsibilities.
More than our productivity.
More than our to-do lists.
There is a life beyond coping.
And sometimes our longings help us find it.
What Are You Avoiding? What Are You Wanting?
Lately I've been wondering whether I'm spending more energy keeping things at bay or moving towards what matters.
Perhaps that's the question I'm leaving with you too.
What are you avoiding? And what are you wanting?
Sometimes the things we're avoiding contain important information. So do the things we're longing for.
One points towards what feels difficult, uncertain or unresolved.
The other points towards what feels meaningful, alive or true.
Neither needs to be fixed immediately. But both deserve our attention.
Explore Emotions Coaching
If you're finding yourself stuck in patterns of avoidance, overwhelmed by difficult emotions, or unsure what you want next, emotions coaching can help you slow down and make sense of what's happening beneath the surface.
Together we'll explore what you're feeling, what's driving your reactions, and how you can respond with more clarity, self-trust and choice.
Because sometimes the next step isn't about pushing harder. It's about understanding what's really going on.
Find out more about emotions coaching and book a discovery call.
Thoughts Kept… About Burnout
What does burnout really feel like? Drawing on conversations from A Thought I Kept, this piece explores the signs of burnout, emotional exhaustion, perfectionism, grief, people pleasing, and what sustainable burnout recovery can actually look like.
The first sign was probably the resentment. Just a low, constant irritation that seemed to follow me everywhere. The email arriving five minutes before the end of the day that made my shoulders tense instantly. The friend asking for a favour and my internal reaction feeling disproportionate to the request. Sitting at my laptop already tired before I’d even really begun. Feeling strangely annoyed at tiny inconveniences, while also somehow too exhausted to explain why.
At the time, I wouldn’t have called it burnout. I think I imagined burnout as something more obvious than that, something involving collapse or crisis or the inability to get out of bed. But one of the things I’ve learned from the guests on A Thought I Kept is that burnout often arrives much more quietly than we expect. It can look like functioning. Achievement. Keeping going. Being capable. It can look like replying to emails, meeting deadlines, hosting meetings, making dinner, posting on Instagram, smiling at people in supermarkets, all while feeling increasingly disconnected from yourself underneath it all.
Over the past year of recording conversations for the podcast, burnout has surfaced again and again, sometimes explicitly and sometimes hiding beneath conversations about perfectionism, people pleasing, creativity, ambition, neurodiversity, work, identity, caregiving, or the pressure many of us feel to keep performing wellness while privately struggling to cope with ordinary life.
And the thing that has surprised me most is that very few people describe burnout as simply “working too hard.” Instead, they describe years of overriding themselves. Years of separating achievement from joy. Years of confusing resilience with endurance. Years of not noticing what they needed until their body eventually forced the conversation.
Listening back to these episodes, there are five lessons about burnout that I keep returning to, especially because they say something much bigger about how many of us are living right now.
1. Burnout often begins long before we recognise it
One of the most powerful things I’ve learned from these conversations is that burnout is not always obvious while you’re inside it.
Matthew Bellringer described how many neurodivergent people become so used to masking distress and unmet needs that they can function at levels of overwhelm that would feel completely unsustainable for somebody else, until eventually “the system cannot continue doing this.” This explains why burnout can be so difficult to recognise early on. Many people experiencing burnout are still functioning. They are still showing up to work, replying to emails, caring for children, making dinners, meeting deadlines, laughing in meetings, organising birthdays, and keeping everything moving while privately feeling increasingly exhausted, emotionally numb, or disconnected from themselves.
Liana Fricker spoke about realising, after a major burnout in her forties, that she could no longer ignore what her body had been trying to tell her for years. “You can’t fight this anymore,” she said. “You’re going to have to learn new ways.” There was something in that conversation that felt deeply relevant to the moment we’re all living through now, because so many people are trying to cope with a world that feels relentlessly demanding. The cost of living crisis, constant bad news, workplace pressure, caregiving, uncertainty about the future, digital overload, the sense that there is always more to respond to, improve, optimise, manage.
It means burnout symptoms often become normalised. Which is perhaps why so many people only recognise burnout once their body, mind, or emotions become impossible to ignore.
2. Burnout is often connected to grief, loss, and emotional overwhelm, not just overwork
One thing I’ve found myself thinking about while making the podcast is how often burnout conversations are really conversations about loss. Not only the loss of energy, but the loss of identity, meaning, connection, certainty, or the version of yourself you thought you were supposed to be.
In Hiroko Yoda’s episode, she described the period after the death of her mother as feeling as though “the flames of my soul had been snuffed” and “the world had drained of color.” Listening to her speak about grief, spirituality, and slowly finding her way back to herself through nature and ritual made me realise how many forms emotional burnout can take, particularly when we are carrying loss that hasn’t fully been acknowledged.
Similarly, Toni Jones spoke movingly about how much of her life had been spent avoiding her feelings entirely, pushing through burnout during a high-pressure media career before eventually turning toward books, reflection, and self-development as a way of reconnecting with herself.
I think this matters because burnout is often discussed in incredibly practical terms, as though it can be solved purely through time management or better routines. But many guests described something much more emotional underneath their exhaustion. Grief. Loneliness. Emotional suppression. A life lived too long in survival mode.
And when people search for how to cope with burnout, I think part of what they are often really asking is: how do I come back to myself after a long period of disappearing from my own life?
3. Perfectionism and people pleasing are often hiding underneath burnout
Again and again, conversations about burnout on the podcast eventually circled back to approval.
Approval at school. Approval at work. Approval in relationships. Approval online. Approval through achievement.
Matthew described learning early in life to separate what felt intrinsically rewarding from what earned praise and validation from other people.
Liana talked about slowly untangling intuition from perfectionism and people pleasing, laughing as she realised they were “three distinct balls of wool.”
What struck me listening back was how often burnout seems connected not simply to doing too much, but to becoming trapped inside identities built around usefulness, capability, achievement, or being easy for other people to rely on.
For many people, burnout recovery is difficult because the behaviours that created the burnout were also the behaviours that earned love, praise, security, or success.
And that’s why simply telling people to “rest more” often doesn’t touch the deeper issue. If slowing down makes you feel guilty, anxious, purposeless, or unsafe, then burnout management is not just about changing your schedule. It’s also about understanding the emotional engine underneath the overworking in the first place.
Liana put it beautifully when she reflected on her repeated burnout cycles and asked herself: “What is this internal engine that keeps making me run at full speed, ultimately off a cliff?” I suspect many of us are carrying versions of that same question.
4. Burnout recovery is less about becoming productive again and more about rebuilding your relationship with yourself
Something else that comes through strongly in these conversations is that burnout recovery rarely looks like bouncing back quickly into the old version of your life. Instead, many guests described it as a slower rebuilding process that required them to pay attention to themselves in entirely new ways.
Liana spoke about recognising patterns she now calls “burn downs,” smaller recurring cycles of depletion that eventually accumulate into something much larger if ignored. She described reorganising her calendar around her actual energy levels rather than the version of productivity she thought she should be capable of sustaining, deliberately creating more spaciousness during certain periods because she knew her nervous system needed it.
There was something profoundly compassionate in that conversation because it wasn’t about becoming perfect at wellbeing. It was about becoming more honest. And honesty appears repeatedly across these episodes as one of the real turning points in burnout recovery. Honest recognition of limits. Honest recognition of exhaustion. Honest recognition of what no longer works.
Matthew described burnout recovery not simply as reducing stress, but as “getting something back” again. Joy. Playfulness. Meaning. Intrinsic reward. Time spent doing things that actually feel alive rather than merely productive.
That feels important because many people experiencing burnout are not simply tired. They are disconnected from pleasure, creativity, curiosity, and spaciousness, the very things that make life feel sustainable over time.
5. People recovering from burnout are often becoming more curious, not more perfect
Perhaps my biggest takeaway from these conversations is that sustainable burnout recovery seems to involve curiosity much more than self-optimisation.
Not becoming a “better” person.
Not becoming perfectly balanced.
Not finally mastering wellness.
Just becoming more aware.
Aware of patterns.
Aware of emotional needs.
Aware of capacity.
Aware of what depletes you and what restores you.
Aware of the stories you’ve inherited about success, worth, ambition, rest, and productivity.
Liana talked about spending more time in her body rather than only in her rational mind, slowly learning the difference between intuition, perfectionism, and people pleasing.
Hiroko found herself reconnecting with the world again through tiny moments of attention to nature, ritual, and spirituality after profound grief.
Toni’s story explored what happens when we stop avoiding ourselves long enough to really ask how we are living and whether it’s sustainable.
None of these conversations offered a perfect formula for how to manage burnout, and honestly I think that’s part of why they’ve stayed with me. Because burnout recovery is rarely linear. It is often messy, cyclical, emotional, and deeply personal. But listening to these guests has reminded me that healing doesn’t always begin with dramatic transformation. Sometimes it begins with finally paying attention.
If this piece resonated, you might want to listen to our special playlist, The Thoughts I Kept… About Burnout, a collection of episodes from A Thought I Kept exploring burnout, emotional exhaustion, grief, perfectionism, people pleasing, identity, overwhelm, and the complicated process of finding your way back to yourself again.
And if you’re feeling emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed, disconnected, or unsure where to begin, you can also explore our coaching sessions through If Lost Start Here.
Our work is not about helping you become endlessly productive again. It’s about understanding what’s happening underneath the exhaustion, reconnecting with yourself more honestly, and building a version of wellbeing that actually fits your real life.
More ways to explore burnout
Living on the Edge of Burnout: How to Recognise the Signs and Find Your Way Back
Exploring burnout, emotional numbness, and the pressure to keep going. Plus some gentle ideas for reconnecting with yourself before you reach breaking point.
Emily goes quiet about twenty minutes into the session.
Up until then she’s been talking quickly, trying to explain why she booked the call in the first place. Work is busy. Home is busy. Life is busy. She keeps saying things like “It’s fine” and “I know everyone feels like this,” while also admitting she can’t remember the last time she felt properly rested. Then she stops talking altogether.
“I just don’t understand why I can’t handle all of this better,” she says eventually. “Other people seem to manage.”
I hear versions of this almost every week.
People arrive carrying so much for so long that they barely recognise the weight of it anymore. They apologise for being emotional. Or overwhelmed. Or tired. They laugh while describing how close to the edge they feel, as though softening it somehow makes it easier to hold.
And usually beneath everything else is the same hope: if I can just keep going, somehow, maybe things will sort themselves out.
I know that place well. When I think back on periods of burnout in my own life, there’s a real sense that I wasn’t fully there at all. I was moving through my days on autopilot. Showing up at work. Meeting deadlines. Replying to emails. Getting through. But I remember so little joy in those years and so little connection with myself or the people around me.
In my twenties, I was so stressed in a gallery job that the highlight of my week became buying myself a Starbucks on a Wednesday lunchtime — a surprising novelty then — because it marked the hump of the week and meant I was inching towards the weekend.
Things got so bad at one point that I remember being wheeled out of work after my body simply stopped cooperating. I had started shaking at my desk. I felt nauseous. Everything hurt. A colleague put me in a taxi and took me home, and I remember lying on the sofa in confusion and shame, wondering whether he’d noticed the awful purple Habitat throw draped across it and how I had somehow let things get this bad.
My boss’s mantra was “Suck it up.” So we did. Until people started burning out completely.
Looking back now, what strikes me is how normal it all felt at the time. The exhaustion. The emotional numbness. The belief that the problem was somehow us. That we weren’t coping well enough. That if we could just work harder, be stronger, manage ourselves better, everything would steady again.
But burnout has a way of hollowing things out quietly. It disconnects us not only from rest, but from ourselves. From joy. From clarity. From the small inner signals trying to tell us something isn’t right anymore.
And increasingly, I see people arriving in sessions already living right on that edge. They tell me they can’t switch off anymore. That they feel strangely flat. That they don’t know what they even enjoy these days. They say things like: “I should be grateful.” “Other people have it harder.” “I don’t have time to fall apart.” Sometimes they’ve become so used to overriding themselves that they barely notice they’re doing it.
There’s often a fog to burnout too. A sense that you can’t properly see yourself or your life anymore because everything is happening at full volume all at once. You’re so busy surviving the week that you lose sight of what’s actually happening to you inside it.
And because so many of our ideas about worth are tangled up with productivity, achievement and being dependable, stopping can feel almost impossible. Rest feels irresponsible. Slowing down feels like failure. Particularly in environments that quietly reward people for overriding themselves.
So where do you start when you realise you can’t keep living like this?
Honestly, I think it often starts smaller than we expect.
Not with a complete reinvention of your life. Not with a perfect morning routine or a dramatic breakthrough. But with acknowledgement.
This is hard.
I’m not coping as well as I want to admit.
Something about the way I’m living right now isn’t sustainable.
There’s something powerful about finally telling yourself the truth.
And then, gradually, there’s the process of returning to yourself by degrees.
A recent guest on my podcast, Hiroko Yoda, spoke about how she came back to the world slowly after an incredibly difficult period in her life. Through walking. Looking up. Noticing trees and skies again. Paying attention to tiny things. In Japanese culture there’s the idea of kami — spirits existing in everything — and I loved that thought of reconnecting first with the small and then with something larger than ourselves.
I think burnout recovery can sometimes look a little like that. Noticing tiny things again. Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald calls them “tiny moments of joy.” Not huge life-changing experiences, but fleeting moments that remind us we are still here somewhere underneath all the pressure. The warmth of tea in your hands. A voice note from a friend. Light through the curtains. A song in the car that briefly returns you to yourself.
And then there’s rest — which sounds obvious until you realise how morally loaded rest has become for so many of us. I’ve had to learn, slowly, that resting isn’t the same as failing. That stopping before collapse is not weakness. That backing away from burnout often involves much smaller, quieter choices than the world tends to celebrate.
Living on the edge of burnout is complicated. There’s never one single reason we arrive there and no universal way back out again. Every person I speak to carries a different story into the room with them. But perhaps this is a place to start:
To notice that burnout is here.
To stop pretending you’re fine when you’re not.
To make eye contact with yourself again instead of endlessly pushing past what you feel.
Not to fix yourself overnight. Just to begin the conversation.
*The story of Emily is not one client’s story, but a weaving together of many experiences I’ve encountered in coaching and in my own life.
If this feels familiar, or if you recognise something of yourself in it, my coaching sessions offer a space to pause before you reach breaking point.
Together, we can gently untangle what’s going on beneath the overwhelm, make sense of what you’re feeling, and explore what support, rest, boundaries or change might look like for you — without judgement, pressure, or needing to have it all figured out already.
You don’t have to keep pushing through alone. Explore emotions coaching sessions at If Lost, Start Here.
More ways to explore burnout
Finding a Better Way to Well Without Trying to Fix Yourself
Feeling overwhelmed by self-help and wellbeing advice? Explore how you can find a more human way to feel better with Toni Jones of Shelf Help.
I still remember standing in the wellbeing section of my local independent bookshop years ago, holding three different books in my hands and feeling completely overwhelmed by all of them.
One promised confidence. One promised calm. One promised a completely new life if I just followed the steps properly enough. Around me were shelves and shelves of answers. Morning routines. Better habits. Nervous systems. Boundaries. Purpose. Productivity. Healing. Manifestation. Rest. Reinvention.
And underneath all of it was this quiet but persistent feeling: if I could just find the right idea, the right practice, the right way of living, maybe I would finally feel okay.
I think a lot of us arrive at wellbeing from this place now. Not because we’re shallow or self-absorbed, but because life genuinely feels difficult. The world feels loud. Work is relentless. Relationships can be complicated. Many of us are carrying anxiety, grief, uncertainty, burnout or a low-level sense that we’ve somehow drifted away from ourselves. And when you feel like that, it makes sense to go looking for answers.
In my recent conversation on A Thought I Kept with Toni Jones, we talked about what happens when you spend a decade immersed in self-help culture. Toni has read more than 1,000 self-help books. She founded Shelf Help, the world’s first self-help book club, after burnout and a growing sense that something in her life needed to change.
What I loved most about our conversation wasn’t really the books though. It was the gentler, steadier framework underneath them.
Because Toni spoke so honestly about how messy change actually is. Not cinematic. Not linear. Not “new life in seven easy steps.” More experimental than transformational. More human than polished.
At one point we talked about the pressure that can sit underneath wellbeing culture now — the sense that we should always be improving ourselves. That wellness can become another arena where we fail, compare, strive or feel behind. And honestly, I think many people feel exhausted by that version of wellbeing, even if they can’t quite articulate why.
There’s something profoundly tiring about approaching yourself like a constant problem to solve.
What Toni kept returning to instead was curiosity.
Not: “How do I finally become perfect?”
But: “What happens if I try this?”
Not: “I must completely reinvent myself.”
But: “What if I treated this more like an experiment?”
That small shift feels important to me. Because experiments allow room for being human. They allow for bad days, contradictions, changing your mind, getting it wrong, trying again. They soften the harshness that so often creeps into conversations about growth.
And maybe that’s part of finding a better way to well.
Not turning wellbeing into another performance of goodness or discipline or achievement. But allowing it to become something more personal. More playful. More forgiving. Something shaped around your actual life rather than the life you think you should be living.
During the conversation, Toni described reading her first self-help book while completely burnt out and desperate for something to change. It was called Change Your Life in Seven Days. Looking back now, she laughs at the urgency of it. The idea that her exhausted nervous system was searching for a quick fix because she simply couldn’t carry on as she was.
I think many of us recognise that feeling.
The late-night googling. The saving of posts we never quite return to. The hopeful ordering of books. The quiet thought that maybe this next thing will finally help us feel calmer, happier, clearer, more confident, less overwhelmed.
And sometimes those things do help. Books can change us. Conversations can change us. Therapy can change us. Tiny rituals and practices can genuinely support us.
But what struck me listening to Toni was that the deeper shift seemed to come less from finding the perfect answer and more from slowly building a different relationship with herself.
One with more compassion in it.
More honesty.
More willingness to be seen.
More permission to need support.
That feels important too because I think a lot of us have absorbed the idea that wellbeing is something we should master privately. Quietly. Alone. We should hold everything together. Cope beautifully. Be low maintenance. Keep functioning.
And yet the thought Toni brought to the podcast — borrowed from Brené Brown — was this: “We don’t have to do all of it alone. We were never meant to.”
I kept thinking about that afterwards.
Because maybe a better way to well isn’t just about what we do for ourselves. Maybe it’s also about who we let sit beside us while we figure things out.
The friend who notices you’re not okay before you admit it yourself.
The conversation that helps you feel less strange.
The book club where people finally say the quiet parts out loud.
The person who reminds you that you’re allowed to need care too.
The older version of yourself who can look back and realise: things did change, slowly, even when it didn’t feel like they were changing at all.
One of the things I loved most from the episode was Toni talking about how, years ago, she felt desperate for something — anything — to change. Whereas now, after years of reflection and experimentation and self-discovery, she approaches life with more curiosity than panic. More openness than grasping.
Not because she became a completely different person.
But because she became more connected to herself.
I think that’s the part of wellbeing we don’t talk about enough. That perhaps the goal isn’t becoming somebody new entirely. Perhaps it’s becoming more honest about who we already are. Understanding what supports us. Learning what drains us. Allowing our version of wellbeing to look different from somebody else’s.
And maybe that’s why Amanda and I created the If Lost, Start Here wellbeing journal in the way we did. Not as a rigid plan or perfect prescription, but as an invitation into curiosity. Into experimentation. Into asking better questions about what actually helps you feel more alive, connected, grounded or held.
Not wellness as performance.
Not self-improvement as punishment.
Just a steadier, kinder relationship with yourself and your life.
If this conversation resonates, you can listen to my full episode of A Thought I Kept with Toni Jones, where we explore vulnerability, burnout, self-help, friendship, identity, emotional wellbeing and what it means to stop carrying everything alone.
And if you’re feeling a little lost in your own life right now — unsure what wellbeing even means for you anymore — you’re also very welcome to explore my coaching work or the If Lost, Start Here journal. Not as a way to become someone else. Just as a place to begin listening to yourself again.
A Thought I Kept… About Connection
Feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, or emotionally exhausted? Explore why human connection matters most in difficult times. Inspired by conversations from our podcast, A Thought I Kept.
There are moments when the world can feel too loud to properly hear yourself think. You wake up already behind. The news is unbearable again. Somebody somewhere is shouting online. The food shop costs more than you thought it would. Your phone keeps filling with reminders, requests, headlines, notifications. Work spills into evenings. Even rest starts to feel strangely performative. We scroll instead of pausing. We cancel plans because we’re tired. We tell ourselves we’ll reply properly tomorrow.
And slowly, often without noticing, many of us begin retreating from one another. Not dramatically. Quietly.
We stop reaching out first. We stay home more. We become suspicious of people who think differently to us. We compare ourselves. We convince ourselves everyone else is coping better. We move through life slightly armoured — overstimulated, emotionally exhausted, and unsure how to find our way back to each other again.
But one of the thoughts I’ve kept from making A Thought I Kept is this: human connection matters most precisely in the moments when we’re tempted to withdraw from it.
Not because connection fixes everything. Not because friendship erases grief or anxiety or burnout or uncertainty. But because being with other people — really being with them — can remind us that we are still here. Still human. Still part of something larger than our own spiralling thoughts.
As I pulled together conversations with Cathy Rentzenbrink, Tanya Lynch, Hiroko Yoda, Laurence McCahill, Suzy Reading, Liana Fricker and Lauren Barber, I realised that although these episodes explored very different corners of life — grief, spirituality, creativity, burnout, friendship, books, business, midlife, rest — they kept circling back to the same idea. Connection is not an optional extra to wellbeing. It might be the thing holding so much of it together.
1. We Retreat When Overwhelmed But Isolation Deepens the Feeling
One of the strange things about difficult periods is how quickly they can make us disappear from our own lives. You stop texting back properly. You feel too tired to explain how you are. Going out starts to feel like effort. You tell yourself you’ll reconnect when you feel calmer, less overwhelmed, more yourself again.
But listening back to these conversations, I kept noticing how often people found their way back through other people. Not through becoming shinier or more productive or more emotionally “together,” but through being alongside somebody else long enough to soften a little.
In my conversation with Laurence McCahill, we talked about how growth and change so rarely happen in isolation. We can read the books and underline the quotes and listen to the podcasts and still feel strangely stuck. Sometimes what’s missing isn’t another idea. It’s other people. Someone sitting opposite you saying, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.” A room where you don’t have to explain yourself quite so much. A gathering that reminds you life can feel different to this.
I think modern wellbeing culture sometimes forgets this. So much advice is aimed at the individual: your morning routine, your mindset, your habits, your healing, your optimisation. And while solitude can absolutely be restorative, there is also something profoundly regulating about being witnessed by another human being. The friend you voice note while unloading the dishwasher. The person who notices you’ve gone quiet. The neighbour you always end up chatting to longer than intended. The group chat that suddenly becomes honest at 11pm. These moments can seem tiny from the outside, but emotionally they can be enormous.
2. Connection Doesn’t Have to Look Big or Impressive
What struck me listening back to these episodes was how often connection appeared in ordinary forms. Not grand gestures or perfectly curated social lives, but cups of tea, shared books, walks, retreats, conversations that drift unexpectedly from logistics into longing.
In my conversation with Tanya Lynch, we spoke about the feeling of being gathered — of spaces where people are allowed to arrive exactly as they are, whether that’s hopeful or grieving or emotionally threadbare. There was something in that conversation that stayed with me because I think so many of us are craving precisely that kind of space right now. Not networking. Not performance. Just moments where we can stop pretending to be fine for a minute.
I think many of us accidentally make connection feel harder than it needs to be. We imagine thriving social lives and elaborate dinner parties and huge friendship circles maintained through impeccable emotional availability and perfectly colour-coded calendars. But often connection is much quieter than that. It’s somebody saving you a seat. Somebody remembering what you said last week. Somebody sending you a photo because it made them think of you.
These tiny gestures matter because they remind us we exist in other people’s minds and lives. That we are held somewhere beyond our own stress and self-criticism.
3. Being Witnessed Changes Us
There’s a moment in my conversation with Cathy Rentzenbrink where we talk about books and grief and the relief of feeling recognised by somebody else’s words. I think that’s one of the deepest forms of connection there is: the feeling that someone else has inhabited something adjacent to your own experience and survived long enough to describe it.
Loneliness is not only physical isolation. It’s also the feeling that your inner world is somehow unshareable, too strange or messy or contradictory to be understood by anyone else. Which is why it can feel so unexpectedly emotional when somebody articulates the thing you haven’t been able to say yourself.
This is part of why art matters so much to me. Why conversations matter. Why podcasts matter. Why books matter. Not because they solve life, but because they make our inner worlds feel more shareable. Somebody else has also sat in the car park crying. Somebody else has also felt lost at a dinner party or uncertain in midlife or disconnected from themselves after years of coping. Somebody else has also stared at the ceiling at 3am wondering what on earth they’re doing with their life.
Being witnessed doesn’t remove pain, but it can make pain feel survivable. Sometimes another person’s honesty becomes a bridge back to our own.
4. Rituals and Shared Experiences Help Us Feel Human Again
I kept thinking about this during my conversation with Hiroko Yoda, where we explored Japanese spirituality and the way it can live quietly inside ordinary rituals and everyday life. Shared meals. Seasonal practices. Returning to certain places. Moments of pause and reverence that tether people back to each other and to the world around them.
It made me realise how many of us are quietly searching not only for connection with other people, but connection with meaning itself. Something beyond productivity and algorithms and constant consumption. Something that helps us feel part of a wider human experience again.
Maybe this is why small rituals can feel so unexpectedly important during difficult seasons. Cooking for somebody. Reading in bed beside another person. Returning to the same café every Saturday morning. Listening to a familiar voice on a podcast while commuting home in the dark. These things can seem insignificant until you realise they are helping hold you together.
There’s comfort in repetition. In familiarity. In tiny practices that remind us we belong somewhere — to a person, a community, a season, a place, a version of ourselves we’re trying not to lose.
5. Other People Help Us Remember Who We Are
Perhaps this is the thought I’ve kept most strongly from these conversations: we do not become ourselves entirely alone.
Other people reflect us back to ourselves all the time. A friend remembers the version of you that existed before burnout. Someone notices your excitement returning before you do. A conversation unlocks a part of yourself you thought had disappeared. A community helps you imagine a different future.
We are constantly shaped by what we share, what we witness, and what we allow ourselves to receive from one another. Which feels particularly important in a culture that simultaneously encourages hyper-independence while exhausting us emotionally.
Maybe wellbeing was never supposed to be something we carry entirely alone. Maybe part of feeling better is allowing ourselves to be held — by conversations, friendships, rituals, stories, books, communities, shared meals, and moments of recognition that arrive unexpectedly in ordinary life.
Putting together this playlist reminded me that connection rarely arrives looking cinematic. More often it appears quietly. A message sent at the right moment. A conversation that stays with you for weeks afterwards. Somebody making you laugh when everything has felt unbearably heavy. A voice in your headphones helping you feel a little less alone as you move through another complicated Tuesday.
And maybe, for now at least, that’s enough.
If you’d like to listen to the full A Thought I Kept… About Connection playlist, you can find it here:
How Human Connection Helps Us Through Hard Times
Feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or disconnected? Explore how human connection can support us through difficult times, ease loneliness, and help us feel less alone in modern life.
I think one of the hardest things about modern life is that so many of us are living right at the edge of ourselves.
You can feel it in the way people answer “How are you?” with a sigh before they even begin. In the low-level exhaustion that seems to sit underneath everyday life now. In how quickly conversations move from grocery prices to burnout to the latest terrible thing in the news.
There is so much happening at once.
There’s the pressure of work and bills and trying to hold together ordinary life during a cost of living crisis. There’s the endless churn of headlines arriving directly into our palms before we’ve even had breakfast. There are wars unfolding in real time, including the ongoing devastation in the Middle East, which many people are carrying emotionally while still trying to navigate school runs, meetings, laundry, dinner, emails, ageing parents, and the strange expectation that we should somehow continue functioning normally through all of it.
And underneath all of that, many of us are simply tired. Not dramatic collapse tired. More the kind where joy starts slipping out of reach. The kind where you become permanently a little irritated, a little resentful, a little emotionally threadbare. The kind where you keep going because you have to, but feel increasingly disconnected from yourself while you do.
What interests me about difficult seasons like these is that we often respond to them in ways that make us feel even more alone.
We retreat.
We stop replying to messages.
We cancel plans.
We convince ourselves we’re too exhausted to socialise.
We scroll instead of speaking.
We mistrust people more easily.
We compare our messy lives to everyone else’s carefully edited competence.
We assume we’re behind.
We become less generous with one another because we’re barely holding ourselves together.
And the wider culture often deepens that separation. Politics becomes polarised. Algorithms reward outrage. Conversations flatten into sides to pick rather than people to understand. We become wary of saying the wrong thing, believing the wrong thing, being judged, misunderstood, excluded, criticised, corrected.
It can start to feel safer to withdraw.
But I keep coming back to the possibility that it’s exactly in moments like these that human connection matters most.
Not in a glossy “community fixes everything” sort of way. Not because a coffee with a friend magically resolves grief or burnout or fear about the state of the world. But because connection helps us carry reality differently.
There’s something regulating about being with people who allow you to exhale a little.
Someone making you laugh when you hadn’t realised how long it’s been since you properly laughed.
Someone texting to ask if you got home alright.
Someone saying, “Honestly? I’m struggling too.”
Someone sitting at your kitchen table while life remains unresolved, but somehow more bearable because another person is witnessing it with you.
Connection reminds us that we are not machines built only for productivity and endurance.
We are relational creatures. We make meaning together. We soothe each other’s nervous systems. We borrow hope from one another. We remember ourselves through other people sometimes.
And importantly, connection does not have to look impressive to matter.
I think we can sometimes make ourselves feel worse by imagining “good connection” as being endlessly social, extroverted, emotionally articulate, always surrounded by friends or part of some perfect community.
But connection can be tiny and ordinary too.
It might be the person at the local café who remembers your order. The neighbour you chat to while bringing the bins in. Sending a voice note instead of a text because you want someone to hear your actual voice. Watching a film with your teenager and briefly entering their world. Going for a walk with someone who doesn’t require you to be cheerful. Sitting in a room with other people at yoga, church, choir, book club, a protest, a workshop, or a community garden and remembering, even fleetingly, that we are living alongside one another rather than entirely alone.
Sometimes connection is simply the experience of being real with another person for five minutes instead of pretending you’re coping perfectly.
And perhaps that’s why it can feel both comforting and uncomfortable at the same time.
Because real connection asks us to emerge slightly from hiding.
To let ourselves be seen before everything is neatly resolved.
To admit we’re struggling before we’ve found the lesson in it.
To risk not being entirely self-sufficient.
Which can feel deeply vulnerable in a culture that rewards performance, certainty, independence, and appearing fine.
But when life gets hard — and for many people, it really is hard right now — isolation rarely softens the experience. Usually it sharpens it.
Connection, meanwhile, often gives us just enough steadiness to keep going.
Not because other people save us.
But because being human was probably never meant to be done entirely alone.
Explore the Connection Pathway
Our wellbeing journal, If Lost Start Here, includes a full pathway exploring connection — the people, places, conversations, communities, and everyday moments that help us feel more supported, understood, and alive.
Inside you’ll find reflections, prompts, and playful experiments to help you reconnect not just with others, but with yourself too.
You can explore the journal here
Connecting While Human
When something shifts in your relationships, it can feel confusing and lonely. This piece explores how to stay connected while being yourself, even when it’s messy.
You’re halfway through a conversation and realise you’re not really in it. You’re nodding, saying the right things, keeping the tone light enough, agreeable enough. You hear yourself laugh at something that isn’t quite funny. You offer an explanation you’ve offered before, one that lands just well enough to move things on. And at the same time, there’s something else happening underneath — a more insistent feeling that says: this isn’t quite it.
You might notice it later, when you’re walking home or making dinner, replaying the conversation in your head. The bit you didn’t say. The way you softened something. The way you tried, once again, to explain yourself into being understood. And then, almost reluctantly, the thought arrives: I don’t think this is about explaining anymore.
It’s a subtle shift, but once it’s there, it tends to stay.
This is the place Jacky Power and I found ourselves in during our conversation — not just the moment of clarity that so many wellbeing conversations promise, but in what comes just after it. The part where you realise something about yourself or your relationships, and then very messily try to do something about it.
Jacky described believing, for a long time, that if she could just say things the right way, people would meet her there. That the gap between her and others was something she could bridge with better words, more careful explanations, a little more effort. It’s such a human instinct — to assume that understanding is something we can earn if we try hard enough.
And sometimes that’s true. But not always.
Sometimes what we’re up against isn’t a lack of clarity, but a difference in direction. A difference in how we see things, what we value, what we’re willing to hold or not hold anymore. And that’s much harder to resolve, because it doesn’t bend as easily.
What follows that realisation isn’t a clean decision. It’s more like learning to walk again on uneven ground.
You say something you’ve been meaning to say, and it comes out slightly wrong. Or it lands in a way you didn’t expect. You question yourself almost immediately. Was that too much? Too blunt? Not quite right? You tell yourself you’ll try again next time, maybe in a softer way, a clearer way. You adjust, you retreat, you step forward again.
Jacky described it as “stumble, trip, stumble, trip.” And it’s exactly that. Not a confident stride into a new way of being, but a series of attempts, some of which don’t go to plan.
There’s a kind of vulnerability in this stage that doesn’t get talked about much. Because from the outside, it might look like growth — becoming more self-aware, more aligned, more boundaried. But from the inside, it can feel uncertain and exposing. You’re no longer fully comfortable in the old way of relating, but you’re not yet steady in the new one either.
And that can feel lonely.
Not necessarily in the obvious sense of being alone, but in the quieter sense of not quite being met. Of noticing that the ways you’re beginning to show up don’t always fit neatly into the relationships you’ve had before. Of realising that not everyone will come with you, or understand you in the way you hoped.
Jacky spoke about this without dressing it up. That there can be grief in it. That choosing your own direction — even gently, even kindly — can create a kind of separation. Not because you want it to, but because something has shifted, and you can’t quite go back to not knowing that.
And still, there was something else in what she said that felt just as important.
That the alternative — ignoring what you’ve noticed, continuing to override yourself for the sake of keeping things smooth — comes at a cost too. A quieter one, perhaps, but one that builds over time. A sense of being slightly out of step with yourself. Of saying yes when you mean maybe, or maybe when you mean no. Of slowly losing touch with what feels true.
This is where connection becomes more complicated than we often allow it to be.
Because it isn’t just about being close to other people. It’s also about how close you are to yourself within those relationships. Whether there is space, even in small ways, to be honest about what you feel, what you need, what you see differently now.
And that honesty doesn’t have to arrive all at once.
One of the things I took from this conversation is that connection doesn’t depend on getting it perfectly right. It might be something much smaller than that. A moment where you say a little more than you usually would. A conversation where you don’t immediately tidy up your feelings. A pause where you notice the urge to explain, and choose, just for a second, not to.
It might be noticing where you feel able to do that, and where you don’t.
Because not every space will hold it. And that, too, is information.
Jacky talks about “human tricky things” — the parts of being alive that don’t resolve easily. The feelings we don’t always have words for. The experiences that sit somewhere between connection and disconnection, between being seen and staying hidden. And what struck me is that learning to connect while human isn’t about smoothing those things out. It’s about finding ways to stay with them.
To stay with yourself when you’re unsure. To stay in relationship where you can, without forcing it where you can’t. To allow for the possibility that connection might look different now — less about being perfectly understood, and more about being real in the places that can hold it.
If you’re in that space at the moment — noticing something has shifted, but not yet sure how to live it — it might help to know that this part doesn’t need to be rushed.
You’re not behind. You’re not getting it wrong. You’re in the middle of learning something about yourself that takes time to settle.
And there is a kind of steadiness that can grow here, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet. Not from having all the answers, but from beginning to trust what you notice. From allowing that to matter, even when it complicates things.
If you’d like to hear more of this conversation, you can listen to my episode with Jacky Power on A Thought I Kept, where we explore emotions, loneliness, and what it means to stay connected — to ourselves and to each other.
And if you’re looking for somewhere to think about your own relationships or feelings a little more gently, explore our coaching and resources here If Lost Start Here.
“I’m Fine” in Midlife
In midlife, “I’m fine” can mask burnout, hormonal shifts, and emotional overload. Explore why this response changes and how to reconnect with what you really need.
You wake before the alarm, not because you’re rested but because your mind has already started. There’s a list forming before your eyes are fully open — things to organise, respond to, remember, hold together. The day begins before you’ve even stepped into it.
By mid-morning you’ve answered messages, kept something running that might otherwise have stalled, smoothed over a moment that could have turned into conflict, and made sure everyone else is more or less where they need to be. When someone asks how you are — and they do, in passing, in between everything else — you say, “I’m fine,” and keep moving.
And in many ways, you are. You’re functioning. You’re managing. You’re doing what needs to be done. But somewhere underneath that, something feels different to how it once did.
The pace is the same, or even faster, but your capacity to keep absorbing it without cost has shifted. Sleep doesn’t restore you in quite the same way. Small things feel harder. Your body speaks more loudly, even if you’re not always sure how to listen. Emotions can feel closer to the surface — or, at times, more difficult to access altogether. And yet, the expectation — internal as much as external — is often that you should still be able to carry it all.
This is where “I’m fine” in midlife can take on a particular weight. It becomes the thing that holds together a life that has grown fuller and more complex over time — work, relationships, children, parents, friendships, the quiet accumulation of responsibility, the invisible labour that sits beneath it all.
It can also hold together an identity that has been built over years. If you’ve been the capable one, the one who gets things done, the one who can be relied on, then not being fine can feel like more than just a feeling — it can feel like a fracture in who you are. So “fine” keeps you inside something familiar, even if it’s starting to feel tight.
At the same time, midlife brings its own particular pressures.
Changes in the body — hormonal shifts, disrupted sleep, anxiety that arrives without clear reason, irritability that feels out of proportion.
Changes in relationships — renegotiations, distance, new dynamics that require different conversations.
Changes in perspective — a growing awareness of time, of what has been, of what might still be possible.
And alongside all of that, a question that can be hard to ignore:
Is this still working for me?
“Fine” often steps in right at that point.
Not because nothing is there, but because what’s there feels too big, too layered, or too disruptive to fully open. It protects you from the immensity of it — grief for versions of life that didn’t happen, anger at loads that feel uneven, fear of what change might bring, longing for something more spacious or more aligned. It also protects your nervous system when things have been too much for too long.
So instead of anxiety, you might feel a kind of flatness. A functional steadiness that keeps everything moving, but leaves little room for rest, pleasure, or connection.
You can cope, but you can’t receive.
You’re productive, but not nourished.
You’re calm on the outside, but internally braced.
And over time, that can begin to feel like the place you live.
But midlife also has a way of gently interrupting that pattern. Not necessarily with a dramatic breaking point, but with a steady accumulation of moments where “fine” no longer quite fits.
Where your body asks for something different.
Where your capacity reaches a limit.
Where your desires, long held at the edges, become harder to ignore.
And this is where something else becomes possible. Not a complete reinvention, and not a rejection of everything that has brought you here, but a gradual renegotiation.
Of what you carry.
Of what you expect of yourself.
Of what you allow yourself to need.
Questions begin to surface that cut through the automatic nature of “fine”:
What am I responsible for that I shouldn’t be?
What expectations am I meeting that no one has actually asked of me?
Where have I become the only one holding something together?
What would change if I believed my needs were legitimate?
These aren’t questions to answer all at once. They’re invitations. Because “fine” in this season of life isn’t something to get rid of. It’s something to listen to. A signal that something is asking for attention, for care, for adjustment. And alongside it, there can be another version of fine — one that feels different in the body. A steadier kind of okay.
Where your mood is mostly stable, even if life is full.
Where problems feel solvable, and support feels possible.
Where you have access, even in small ways, to rest, to pleasure, to connection.
Where your yes and your no feel real.
Midlife doesn’t remove the need for “fine.” But it does offer the chance to reshape it. To let it become less about holding everything together, and more about being in relationship with yourself as you actually are — changing, adjusting, becoming.
And from there, something opens. Not all at once. But enough to feel the difference between coping… and being here, in your life, with a little more space to breathe.
Identify the hidden emotion under “fine”
Common ones in midlife:
Grief (for time, body, dreams, parents, versions of self)
Anger (from unfair load, invisibility, broken agreements)
Fear (change, aging, being alone, being trapped)
Longing (for rest, intimacy, freedom, meaning)
Shame (for needing, for not coping “better”)
Prompt:
If ‘fine’ had a feeling, it would be?.
If ‘fine’ had a message, it would be?
Find the right kind of support
If it’s hormonal/body-based: track symptoms, consider talking to a clinician, consider sleep support and nutrition.
If it’s relational: practice direct asks, therapy/couples work, boundary setting.
If it’s nervous-system burnout: prioritize downshifting (rest, somatic work, less stimulation).
If it’s meaning/identity: coaching/therapy/journaling around values and your “next chapter.”
How to talk to people when you’re FINE
Scripts to try out:
“I’m a bit depleted. I don’t need fixing, just you to listen.”
“I’m not ready to talk details, but I’m not okay.”
“Can we do a low-energy hang? I need company.”
“I’m overwhelmed. Can you take one thing off my plate this week?”
“I’m not fine, but I’m ok.”
If “fine” has become the place you’re living from more often than you’d like, this might be a moment to have a different kind of conversation.
In coaching, we explore what’s shifting in this season of life — your needs, your energy, your direction — so you can move forward in a way that feels more sustainable and more yours.
Book a free discovery call and begin to find your way from here.
What Is Emotional Fragmentation? How to Spot It and Start Healing
Emotional fragmentation can look like being articulate but emotionally disconnected. Learn what it is, how it forms, and small, embodied ways to begin reconnecting with your emotional life.
You can talk about your emotions. You might even do it brilliantly. But when someone asks how you feel, there’s a pause. A quick internal scan… then a neat answer. The right words. Not the felt experience.
This is emotional fragmentation.
It’s not about being broken—it’s about being disconnected. From the felt, embodied experience of your own emotions. Noticing this pattern is the first step toward something more integrated, more whole.
When Talking About Emotions Isn’t the Same as Feeling Them
For a long time, I would have described myself as an emotional person. I could talk about feelings with fluency—mine, yours, fictional characters’—with nuance and detail. But somewhere in my 40s, I realised something new. I wasn’t actually feeling those emotions. Not in my body. Not really.
I’d say “I’m feeling anxious” while my body remained in neutral. I’d discuss heartbreak with all the right language but none of the actual ache. I was, it turns out, managing emotions from a safe cognitive distance. Naming them, analysing them, talking about them but not letting them land.
Emotional fragmentation often shows up like this:
You can describe emotions, but you rarely feel them.
You feel detached from your own reactions, like you’re watching them through glass.
You judge yourself (and others) for being "too emotional."
You feel overwhelmed when multiple emotions appear at once.
It’s a form of self-protection. Often developed early, in environments where feelings weren’t safe, welcomed, or attuned to. Over time, your body learns: Feelings are too much. Think instead. And so you become a master of emotional language, but a stranger to your emotional landscape.
What Happens When We Don’t Feel What We Know
Why does this matter? Because emotions are not just thoughts. They’re not just moods or concepts. Emotions live in your body. They are sensory, energetic experiences designed to move through you. To guide you, inform you, protect you, and connect you to others.
When emotions are kept at a distance—intellectualised but not embodied—they don’t go away. They get stuck. They pile up. And they often show up later as confusion, overwhelm, low-level anxiety, fatigue, or shutdown.
You can be emotionally articulate and emotionally distanced at the same time.
How to Gently Reconnect With What You Feel
So how do you begin to shift from fragmentation to connection?
Not with force. Not by “feeling harder.” But by gently rebuilding the bridge between your emotions and your body. Here are a few practices to try:
1. Ask your body, not just your mind
The next time you notice an emotion, pause and ask:
Where do I feel this in my body?
What sensation is here—tightness, heat, hollowness?
Can I stay with it for a few breaths, without needing to fix it?
2. Feelings first, labels later
Instead of rushing to name the feeling, start by noticing it. Is it heavy? Sharp? Expansive? Let the body lead; let the words come later.
3. Try micro-movements
Shake your hands. Stretch. Rock. Sometimes the body knows how to move emotion through, even if you don’t know why you’re feeling it. Movement invites release.
4. Be curious, not correct
You don’t need to get it right. You’re not looking for perfect self-awareness—you’re practicing presence. Emotionally fragmented people often value precision; try valuing curiosity instead.
5. Replace "I am" with "I'm feeling"
Instead of “I am angry,” try “I’m feeling anger right now.” It’s a subtle shift, but one that reminds your nervous system: this is an experience, not an identity.
Does this sound like you? Or someone you love?
You’re not cold. You’re not broken. You’re just used to living with your emotions at arm’s length—and maybe, now, you’re ready to bring them closer.
Understanding Anxiety: 10 Things I’ve Learned About This Emotion
A thoughtful guide to understanding anxiety, drawing on research, coaching insights, and lived experience. Learn what anxiety really is and how to build a healthier relationship with it.
Anxiety is one of the emotions people most often want to get rid of. When it shows up — as racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, restlessness, or a constant hum of worry — the instinct is usually to quiet it as quickly as possible. But over the years, through emotions coaching, my own experience, research, and conversations with thoughtful guests on A Thought I Kept, I’ve come to see anxiety a little differently.
Not as an enemy. Not as a failure to cope. But as information about how our mind, body, and life circumstances are interacting in that moment.
Here are ten things I’ve come to understand about anxiety that may help you see it differently too.
1. Anxiety often appears in people who care deeply
Research on vulnerability and uncertainty — including the work of Brené Brown — suggests anxiety often shows up in people who care deeply and feel responsible for what happens next.
In other words, anxiety is often the emotional cost of trying very hard to do life well. It isn’t necessarily weakness. Sometimes it’s care that has nowhere to rest.
2. Anxiety is closely linked to uncertainty
Many researchers describe anxiety as our difficulty tolerating uncertainty. We don’t always feel anxious because something bad is happening. We feel anxious because we don’t know what will happen, and our mind begins trying to predict and prepare for every possible outcome. That prediction loop can quickly become exhausting.
A helpful question in anxious moments is simply: What uncertainty am I struggling to sit with right now?
Naming uncertainty often softens anxiety’s intensity.
3. Anxiety lives in the body before it reaches the mind
Emotion scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has shown that emotions begin with bodily sensations.
Before the mind labels something “anxiety,” the body may already be experiencing:
a racing heart
tightness in the chest
restlessness
fatigue or agitation
Your brain then interprets these sensations and constructs the emotional experience. This is why logic alone rarely calms anxiety in the moment. Your nervous system needs signals of safety first.
4. “Anxiety” is often several emotions combined
In coaching conversations, many people use the word anxiety to describe a wide range of feelings. But when we look more closely, anxiety often includes:
fear
pressure
anticipation
responsibility
grief
uncertainty
Researchers call the ability to name emotions more precisely emotional granularity, and it’s linked to lower anxiety and greater emotional resilience. Because when we’re clear about what we’re feeling we can create better choices about what to do with that.
5. Anxiety is often trying to protect something
One of the most helpful coaching perspectives is to see anxiety as a protective response. It may be trying to prevent:
mistakes
rejection
disappointment
loss
uncertainty
Seen this way, anxiety isn’t random or irrational. It’s your system trying to help you navigate something that feels important. The work isn’t eliminating anxiety. It’s learning when protection is helpful and when it can soften.
6. Anxiety grows stronger in silence
Anxiety thrives in isolation. When it stays internal, it easily turns into self-criticism:
Why can’t I handle this?
Why am I like this?
But when anxiety is shared with the right people — trusted friends, supportive communities, or thoughtful conversations — its intensity often shifts. Connection doesn’t remove anxiety. But it changes how alone we feel with it.
7. Anxiety is deeply connected to the nervous system
Many experiences labelled “anxiety” are actually nervous system responses. When the body perceives pressure or threat, it may move into patterns such as:
fight
flight
freeze
flop or faun
These responses are not character flaws. They are biological (or learned) survival mechanisms. Understanding this can reduce the shame people often feel about anxiety.
8. Anxiety is often linked to responsibility and people-pleasing
Another pattern that shows up frequently is the connection between anxiety and over-responsibility. Many anxious people believe it’s their job to manage:
other people’s emotions
other people’s comfort
other people’s expectations
When you feel responsible for everyone around you, anxiety becomes inevitable. Learning to set boundaries — emotionally and practically — often changes the experience dramatically.
9. Anxiety often appears during life transitions
Periods of change frequently bring anxiety with them.
Career shifts
Relationship changes.
Parenting transitions.
Midlife questions about identity and purpose.
Anxiety in these moments doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. It can mean your life is asking new questions of you. Questions that don’t yet have clear answers.
10. Anxiety softens when trust grows
One of the most powerful shifts I see in coaching is this: moving from trying to control the future to trusting your ability to respond to it.
At first, anxiety tells us relief will come when we figure everything out. But life rarely offers that kind of certainty. What helps more is building trust:
trust in your resilience
trust in your ability to respond
trust in your capacity to ask for support
That trust doesn’t eliminate anxiety. But it stops anxiety from running the entire show.
Anxiety isn’t the whole story of you
If anxiety is part of your experience right now, it doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. More often it means something matters. Something feels uncertain. Something may be asking for attention or change.
Understanding anxiety isn’t a quick fix. But it can be the beginning of a steadier, kinder relationship with your emotional life.
Explore emotions coaching
If anxiety has been feeling overwhelming or confusing, emotions coaching offers a calm space to explore what’s happening underneath it.
Together we can look at how anxiety shows up in your life, what it might be protecting, and how you can move forward with more self-trust and steadiness.
Explore coaching options and book a free discovery call
This post is part of the If Lost Start Here Emotions Series — an exploration of the emotions that shape our lives and what they might be trying to tell us.
Understanding Anxiety: A Kinder Way to Live With It (Instead of Fighting It)
Anxiety often shows up quietly — as restlessness, pressure, or a constant hum of worry. Learn why anxiety happens, what it’s trying to signal, and how to respond to it with more understanding and self-trust.
Anxiety rarely arrives with a clear explanation. It tends to slip in sideways, disguising itself as restlessness, urgency, tightness in the chest, or a low-level sense that something isn’t quite right, even when life looks fine on the surface. You might be getting on with your days — working, caring, showing up — but underneath there’s a constant hum of worry or anticipation that never fully settles. If that feels familiar, it doesn’t mean you’re failing at coping. It often means something in you is paying very close attention.
Many people experience anxiety as though it appeared out of nowhere, an unwelcome guest that needs to be dealt with as quickly as possible. But when we slow down and look more closely, anxiety is rarely sudden. It often builds quietly over time, shaped by responsibility, change, uncertainty, loss, or long periods of holding things together without much space to pause.
Anxiety frequently belongs to people who care deeply, who think ahead, who want to do things well and not let others down. In that sense, it isn’t random or irrational. It’s connected to how you’ve learned to move through the world and what’s been asked of you along the way. The difficulty begins when anxiety becomes something you judge yourself for, rather than something you try to understand. When it shifts from an experience you’re having to an identity you feel stuck with.
One of the biggest myths about anxiety is that it means you’re not coping properly. Another is that if you could just calm down, think more positively, or gain more control over your thoughts, it would disappear. These ideas are everywhere, but they often make anxiety worse by adding pressure and self-criticism to something that already feels heavy.
Anxiety isn’t just about thoughts. It involves your whole system — your body, your nervous system, your past experiences, and your relationship with uncertainty. Often, anxiety is your system trying to prepare you for something it perceives as demanding or risky, even if that threat isn’t clear or immediate.
There’s also a common belief that anxiety is always about fear. Sometimes it is, but just as often it’s about pressure, responsibility, anticipation, or caring deeply about outcomes you can’t fully control. When everything gets bundled into the single label of “anxiety,” it can feel overwhelming and impossible to navigate. But when you start to understand the different layers underneath it, anxiety can feel less frightening and more workable.
Learning how to handle anxiety begins with understanding how it shows up for you, what tends to intensify it, and what helps it soften, even slightly. It also means recognising that anxiety lives in the body as much as the mind, which is why reasoning your way out of it rarely works when your system feels on high alert. Anxiety often grows in isolation and eases when it’s named, shared, and met with curiosity rather than judgement.
Handling anxiety better doesn’t mean getting rid of it altogether or becoming someone who never feels unsettled. It means changing your relationship with it so it no longer runs your life. That might start with noticing the early physical signs of anxiety, rather than only paying attention once it becomes overwhelming. It might involve questioning the stories you’ve absorbed about what anxiety says about you, and replacing them with something more accurate and compassionate.
It can also help to shift the focus away from certainty and towards trust. Anxiety often promises relief if you can just figure everything out in advance, but life rarely offers that kind of clarity. What tends to help more is building trust in your ability to respond, to ask for support, and to take things one step at a time without needing all the answers upfront.
Most importantly, learning to live better with anxiety means letting go of the idea that you have to manage it alone. Support doesn’t make anxiety vanish, but it can help you understand what it’s asking for and find steadier, kinder ways to move forward.
If anxiety has brought you here, it isn’t a sign that you’re lost beyond repair. It’s often a signal that something matters, that something is changing, or that you’ve been carrying more than your share for a while. Understanding anxiety isn’t a quick fix, but it can be the beginning of a more grounded way of living with yourself.
Explore emotions coaching
If you’re struggling with anxiety and want support that helps you understand your emotions rather than push them away, emotions coaching can offer a calm, thoughtful space to explore what’s going on. Together, we can look at how anxiety shows up in your everyday life, what it’s connected to, and how you can build trust in your ability to meet it with more ease and self-compassion.
Explore coaching options and book a free discovery call
Start better understanding your emotional life today and find a way through anxiety that feels supportive, human, and even realistic.
When Everything Feels Like Too Much: A Different Way to Think About Wellbeing
Tired of self-improvement advice that doesn’t work for you? This week we’re exploring how attention, beauty, and everyday meaning can help you find steadiness when you feel lost or overwhelmed.
There are moments when life begins to feel louder than we expected. Not necessarily dramatic or catastrophic moments — although those exist too — but the quieter accumulation of things. Too much information. Too many expectations about what we should be doing with our lives. Too many messages about how we should be improving ourselves.
If you spend any time in the world of wellbeing advice, you’ll know the feeling. The promise is always that if we just find the right system, the right routine, the right mindset, things will click into place. We’ll feel calmer. Clearer. More certain about the path ahead.
But many people arrive here feeling the opposite. They’ve tried the advice. They’ve listened to the podcasts, read the books, followed the practices — and instead of clarity they feel more overwhelmed. As though wellbeing has become another task on the list.
Recently on the podcast A Thought I Kept, I spoke with occupational therapist Josephine Dolan-Dufourd about a line that has stayed with her for many years. It comes from the early twentieth-century designer Elsie de Wolfe:
“I’m going to make everything around me beautiful and that will be my life.”
At first, it can sound almost frivolous. Beauty can feel like a luxury — something decorative, something that sits on the edges of life rather than at its centre. But as Josephine talked about it, the idea began to shift. Because beauty, in the way she understands it, is not about perfection or aesthetics. It’s about attention.
Josephine’s work as an occupational therapist centres around what she calls “meaningful doing” — the everyday activities, rhythms, and choices that help us live with more ease and connection. And what she has seen again and again, working with people navigating illness, burnout, and major life change, is that wellbeing rarely arrives through grand reinventions of ourselves. More often, it begins in the smallest places.
The cup of coffee you drink in the morning, taken slowly rather than hurriedly.
The walk through your neighbourhood where you notice the flowers instead of only the things that frustrate you.
The moment of choosing clothes that make you feel like yourself.
These things are not solutions. They don’t solve life. But they change how we experience it.
One of the examples Josephine shared during our conversation has stayed with me. She once worked with a client who was deeply irritated by something very ordinary: dog mess in the streets of the village where she lived. If you went looking for it, you could see it everywhere. It became the thing that defined every walk. So Josephine began gently redirecting her attention.
Look up, she suggested. Look at the buildings. Look at the flowers. Look at the people passing by. Yes, the dog mess is still there — life will always contain the irritating, messy parts — but it doesn’t have to be the only thing you see.
This might sound like a small shift, but in many ways it’s a radical one. Our brains are naturally wired to notice what is wrong. Psychologists call this the negativity bias — the evolutionary tendency to scan our environment for threats and problems. It kept our ancestors alive.
But in modern life, surrounded by constant news updates, social media feeds, and endless comparison with other people’s lives, that same instinct can make the world feel far heavier than it really is. We begin to believe the story that everything is broken. That we are behind. That everyone else has figured something out that we haven’t.
Josephine’s perspective offers a different orientation.
Life will always contain difficulty. Illness, uncertainty, setbacks, grief — none of us escapes those parts of the story. Josephine herself has lived through many moments that could easily have led her to a much darker outlook.
When she was sixteen, her father experienced a life-changing brain injury in a car accident. It was during that time that she first encountered occupational therapy — and saw how meaningful activities could help people find dignity and purpose even in the most difficult circumstances.
Beauty, in this sense, is not the absence of hardship. It is something we learn to notice alongside it.
Later in her career, after seventeen years working in forensic psychiatric settings, Josephine reached a point of deep burnout. She realised she had lost her sense of zest for life. What helped her recover was not another professional breakthrough or productivity system, but something much simpler: a change of environment, a slower rhythm of living, and a renewed attention to what actually mattered in her day-to-day life.
That idea — that our lives are shaped by what we notice — feels particularly important right now. We live in a culture that constantly asks us to optimise ourselves. To become more productive, more disciplined, more impressive.
But perhaps another question is worth asking.
What if the work is not to become someone new?
What if the work is to notice more carefully the life you already have?
Josephine described beauty as something that can be created almost anywhere — in the way you arrange a room, the way you prepare a meal, the way you spend time with the people around you. It’s not about escaping the realities of life, but about refusing to let them define the whole picture.
And when you begin to approach life this way, something subtle shifts. You stop waiting for the future version of your life to begin. Instead, you start to realise that your life is already happening — in these ordinary moments that will one day feel strangely precious when you look back on them.
None of this removes uncertainty. You might still feel unsure about your direction. You might still be navigating change, loss, or the quiet sense that something in your life needs to move or evolve. But you may discover that steadiness doesn’t come from fixing yourself. Sometimes it comes from learning how to look. From noticing what is already here. And from asking, quietly and without pressure:
What might it mean, in my own way, to make the world around me a little more beautiful?
If this idea resonates with you, you can listen to the full conversation with Josephine on the podcast A Thought I Kept.
And if you’re looking for more support finding your footing — emotionally, practically, or simply as a human being navigating life — you can explore our coaching sessions and resources here.
When the Story You’re Living No Longer Feels Like Yours
Sometimes life looks fine on the outside, but something feels off. Explore what self-trust can look like and what it means when the story you’re living no longer fits — and how to find your footing again.
You might be standing in the kitchen, making packed lunches. Nothing dramatic is happening. No argument. No crisis. Just the familiar rhythm of the morning — coffee cooling on the side, toast popping up, your phone lighting up with emails you already feel behind on.
You might catch yourself thinking, I’m good at this. At holding things together. At anticipating what everyone else might need. At getting through the day without making too much noise. And then, almost immediately, another thought follows: But I don’t remember choosing this version of myself.
It’s not that you dislike your life. You’re capable, loved, respected. From the outside, things look fine. But there’s a growing sense that you’re performing a role you’ve learned very well — one shaped by expectation, responsibility, and what once felt necessary — rather than living from a place that feels true to you now.
When you try to put words to it, they’re hard to find. You don’t want to sound ungrateful. You don’t want to blow things up. You just know that something about the story you’re carrying feels outdated, like clothing that once fit perfectly but now restricts your movement in small, tiring ways.
This is often how it begins. Not with a bold decision or a clear turning point, but with a quiet noticing. A moment where the life you’re living feels slightly misaligned with the person you’re becoming. Where the way you’re seen — dependable, easy-going, capable — no longer matches how you feel on the inside.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since my recent conversation on A Thought I Kept with Hilary Salzman. We talked about storytelling, voice, and self-trust — not as something polished or performative, but as something deeply everyday. The stories we absorb, repeat, and live inside, often without realising we’re doing it.
Hilary shared a thought that has stayed with her for years: if you don’t tell your story, someone else will. It isn’t a warning or a call to action. It’s more like a lens — a way of noticing what happens when we stop authoring our own lives and allow habit, expectation, or other people’s assumptions to fill in the gaps.
Most of us aren’t consciously choosing to live someone else’s story. It happens gradually. We adapt. We respond. We take on roles that make us legible and useful. We learn how to be good — good at work, good in relationships, good at coping. And for a long time, those stories can be protective. They help us belong. They help us get through.
But protection can quietly turn into distance. From ourselves. From our feelings. From the sense of aliveness that comes from knowing why we’re doing what we’re doing.
In the conversation, Hilary spoke about the discomfort that arises when the way the world sees you no longer matches how you see yourself. That mismatch can show up as anxiety, restlessness, or a low-level dissatisfaction that’s hard to explain. You might feel unsettled or unsure, even though nothing is obviously “wrong”.
What stays with me is how rarely this is about needing a better plan or a more confident version of yourself. More often, it’s about noticing. Becoming curious about the stories you’re living inside. Asking gentle questions, not to fix or optimise, but to understand.
Whose expectations am I carrying here?
What version of myself am I maintaining?
What would it mean to tell this story in my own words?
We live in a culture that treats uncertainty as something to overcome — as though clarity must arrive quickly, and confidence comes from having answers. But what if uncertainty is simply information? A sign that something is shifting. A signal that the story you’ve been living has reached its limits.
Hilary talked about how clarity often doesn’t arrive as an answer, but as a feeling in the body — a sense of constriction or ease. A quiet knowing that something no longer fits. And noticing this doesn’t require dramatic change or brave declarations. It can begin by allowing yourself to feel what’s already there, without rushing to make sense of it.
This is where self-trust comes in — not as confidence or self-belief in the motivational sense, but as a willingness to stay present with your own experience. To let your emotions inform you rather than embarrass you. To trust that discomfort isn’t a personal failure, but a reasonable response to living inside a story that’s outgrown its usefulness.
Many people arrive at If Lost Start Here feeling overwhelmed, behind, or unsure why familiar wellbeing advice isn’t helping. Often, that’s because what’s needed isn’t another strategy, but orientation. A way of standing still long enough to feel where you are, and what might be asking for attention.
Living your own story doesn’t mean having a perfectly articulated narrative. It doesn’t require sharing everything or knowing exactly who you are becoming. It’s less about broadcasting and more about authorship — about being able to come back to yourself and say, this is who I am, for now. This is what matters. This is what I’m no longer willing to override.
The stories we tell ourselves shape our nervous systems, our relationships, our sense of belonging. When those stories are borrowed, inherited, or outdated, it makes sense that we feel unsettled. And when we begin to gently reclaim them — not by rewriting our lives overnight, but by listening more closely — something steadies.
You don’t need to force a new story into existence. You don’t need to perform authenticity or prove your voice. Sometimes it’s enough to notice the gap. To recognise the feeling of misalignment without judging it. To stay curious about what’s trying to emerge.
If this resonates, you might want to listen to the full conversation with Hilary on A Thought I Kept. It’s a thoughtful exploration of voice, identity, and what it means to feel more at home in your own life.
And if you’re in a season of questioning — unsure, overwhelmed, or quietly ready for something to shift — there’s support here too. Not to fix you, but to help you find your footing, in your own time, and in your own words.
You’re allowed to pause. You’re allowed to question the story you’re in. And you’re allowed to take your time deciding what comes next.
When No One Is Coming to Save You: Finding Self-Trust in Midlife
Often we can feel lost in midlife without knowing why. This week we’re exploring self-trust, confidence, and what might be keeping you stuck.
Sometimes feeling lost doesn’t look as dramatic as we think it might.
Rather it looks like getting through the day, doing what needs to be done, being relied on — and still having a sense that you’re not quite where you thought you’d be. Or that life feels oddly paused, even though everything is moving. You might not be unhappy, exactly. Just a little unheld. A little disconnected from yourself.
I notice this often when I talk to women in midlife. There’s competence there. So much experience. Caring for everyone and everything. And underneath it all, a feeling that something is meant to shift but absolutely no clear sense of how or when.
That feeling came up strongly for me in a recent conversation on A Thought I Kept with Edwina Jenner. As we talked, Edwina shared an idea that had stopped her in her tracks because it named something she hadn’t realised she was carrying.
The sense that, quietly, she had been waiting.
Waiting for things to feel easier. Waiting for confidence to arrive. Waiting for someone — or something — to step in and make life feel more manageable, more certain, more settled.
When she finally noticed that belief, it wasn’t crushing. It was clarifying.
Because alongside it came another realisation: no one else was coming to save her. She already had more agency than she’d been giving herself credit for.
Many of us arrive here having spent years responding to what’s needed — children, work, relationships, family, emotional labour. We learn to be capable. Reliable. Adaptable. And somewhere along the way, it can become easy to lose touch with our own pull. Not what’s expected of us, but what matters now.
Waiting can feel sensible. Responsible. Even kind. We tell ourselves we’ll come back to ourselves when things calm down. When there’s more space. When we feel more confident. When life gives us a clearer signal. But often, that signal never arrives.
Instead, what we notice are small signs of disconnection. Putting off caring for our bodies because we’re tired. Dismissing creative ideas because they feel indulgent. Ignoring rest, curiosity, or desire because other things seem more important.
In the conversation, Edwina spoke about strength, not as something performative or punishing, but as something built slowly, through attention and consistency. She talked about learning to trust herself again by doing what she said she would do. By listening to what pulled her, even when it felt uncomfortable. By recognising that motivation comes and goes, but self-trust is built through action.
What struck me most was how impactful this actually was.
Believing that no one is coming to save you doesn’t have to mean doing everything alone. It doesn’t mean hardening yourself or becoming self-sufficient at all costs. It can mean releasing an expectation that has unconsciously kept you waiting and turning back toward yourself instead.
There can be a kind of relief in that. Relief in realising you don’t need to become someone else to move forward. You don’t need a dramatic overhaul or a better version of yourself. You need permission to take yourself seriously. To listen more closely to what your body, your energy, and your inner life are already telling you.
When self-trust begins to rebuild, it rarely announces itself loudly. It shows up in small decisions. In boundaries that feel steadier. In caring for your body not as a project, but as a relationship. In choosing what supports you, even when it doesn’t look impressive from the outside.
If you’re feeling lost right now, it might not be because you’re “behind” or “broken”. It might be because you’re between ways of being. No longer able to live on autopilot, but not yet clear about what comes next.
That in-between can feel uncomfortable. But it’s also where attention returns. Where curiosity starts to replace pressure. Where you begin to notice that you already know more than you think.
At If Lost Start Here, we don’t believe that confidence or wellbeing come from fixing yourself or forcing change. They come from reconnecting — slowly and openly — with what matters to you now. From trusting that the things pulling at you are worth listening to.
If this resonates, you might like to listen to the full conversation with Edwina on A Thought I Kept.
And if midlife feels like a threshold you’re standing in — unsure, but ready for something to change — we’ve created a great resource to support that moment.
You can download our free midlife resource here.
How to Handle Your Emotions When You’re Feeling Lost or Overwhelmed
Feeling lost or overwhelmed by your feelings? Learn how to handle your emotions when you struggle to understand them.
There’s a moment many of us might recognise.
You’re trying to make a decision, move something forward, or simply get through the day — and your emotions feel louder than you’d like them to be. Anxiety edges in. Frustration bubbles up. Self-doubt has an opinion. And suddenly it feels harder to think clearly, trust yourself, or know what the next step might be.
When that happens, it’s easy to conclude that the problem is your emotions. That you’re feeling too much, or handling things badly. That if you could just calm down, be more confident, or stop overthinking, everything would be easier.
But what if the issue isn’t having emotions — it’s that most of us were never taught how to handle them well?
This question sat at the heart of a recent conversation on our podcast A Thought I Kept, with Isabelle Fielding. Isabelle works with individuals and organisations navigating change and uncertainty, and her work is grounded in a simple but often overlooked idea: emotions are part of being human, and learning how to relate to them is a skill — not a personality trait.
One of the key ideas Isabelle shared was this: Where there’s pain, there’s purpose. Not pain as something to glorify or push through, but pain as a signal. An indication that something matters, that a value is being touched, that attention is needed.
For many people who arrive here feeling lost, this is already a reframe. Because when emotions feel uncomfortable, our instinct is often to control them, deny them, or move away from them as quickly as possible. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel this way. We judge the feeling. We add a second layer — frustration, shame, self-criticism — on top of the original emotion.
Very quickly, things escalate.
Isabelle spoke about how emotions often stack like this. You feel anger, then feel ashamed of feeling angry. You feel anxious, then criticise yourself for being anxious again. Before long, it’s hard to know what you’re actually feeling — just that it’s too much.
Handling emotions better doesn’t mean stopping that first feeling from arising. It means learning how not to pile everything else on top.
In the conversation, Isabelle used an image that makes this easier to picture. Imagine being in the sea, trying to hold a beach ball underwater. It takes constant effort. Your arms ache. And eventually, no matter how determined you are, the ball bursts back to the surface — often catching you off guard. That’s what it can be like when we try to suppress or ignore our emotions. They don’t disappear; they resurface later, often louder and harder to manage.
A more sustainable approach is to let the ball float.
To allow emotions to be present without pushing them away — but also without letting them take over. Isabelle described this as learning to carry emotions lightly, rather than holding them right in front of your face. They’re there, but they don’t get to drive every decision.
This is where handling emotions becomes less about control and more about relationship.
Instead of asking, How do I get rid of this feeling? we might ask, Can I notice this without being overwhelmed by it?
Instead of assuming emotions make us unreliable, we can start to see them as information — not instructions.
Anxiety might be signalling uncertainty that needs time. Frustration might be pointing to a boundary or a mismatch. Self-doubt often appears where we care deeply about doing something well. None of these emotions tell us exactly what to do next but they can help us understand what’s going on inside us.
For people feeling lost, this can be grounding. Because it means you don’t have to wait until you feel calm, confident, or certain before you’re allowed to move forward. You don’t need to change who you are to begin handling things better.
Another important distinction Isabelle made was between experiencing an emotion and becoming it. Feeling anxious is not the same as being an anxious person. Feeling unsure doesn’t mean you can’t be trusted. Emotions are states — they come and go — even when they feel sticky or familiar.
Learning to handle emotions better often starts with noticing this difference.
It might mean pausing long enough to name what you’re feeling, without immediately reacting or analysing it. It might mean recognising when a second emotion — shame, irritation, self-judgment — has joined the first. It might mean allowing yourself to feel something without demanding that it resolve straight away.
This isn’t about emotional mastery. It’s about emotional steadiness.
At If Lost Start Here, we often talk about finding your footing rather than finding answers. About orientation rather than certainty. Learning to handle your emotions is part of how to navigate life. Not because emotions give you a perfect map, but because they help you stay connected to yourself as you move through change.
You may still feel unsure. You may still feel conflicted or overwhelmed at times. But handling emotions better doesn’t mean eliminating those experiences — it means being less knocked off course by them.
And that can make a real difference when you’re trying to move forward gently, in your own way.
If you’d like to explore this further, the full conversation with Isabelle Fielding is now available on our podcast A Thought I Kept.
And if you’re feeling lost or unsure and want support in understanding and handling your emotions, explore our coaching sessions.
The Thoughts That Stayed When the Year Felt Hard
A gentle end-of-year reflection drawn from A Thought I Kept — thoughts that helped when life felt overwhelming, uncertain or hard to navigate.
Some years are easy to summarise.
They arrive with neat headlines: “the year everything changed”, “the year it all came together”, “the year of big decisions".
And then there are the other years. The ones that feel harder to pin down.
This has been one of those years for many of us.
A year where you might not have clear answers. Where you feel more tired than triumphant. Where you’re still carrying questions about work, identity, relationships, or simply how to feel okay in the everyday.
When we started the podcast A Thought I Kept, we weren’t looking for big breakthroughs or polished wisdom. We asked a much simpler question:
What’s the thought that stayed with you — when everything else fell away?
As the year draws to a close, those are the thoughts we keep returning to. Not because they fixed everything, but because they helped us navigate life just that little bit better.
Here are some of the ideas that stayed — especially when the year felt heavy, overwhelming, or uncertain.
When Thinking Harder Wasn’t the Answer
One of the strongest threads running through this year’s conversations was the idea that clarity doesn’t always come from effort.
In our conversation with Katie Driver, we talked about how thinking clearly often begins with paying attention, not pushing for solutions. That sometimes the most helpful question isn’t “What should I do next?” but “What am I noticing right now?”
For anyone ending the year feeling mentally overloaded, this idea might help you create space for, rather than force, clarity.
That might look like fewer inputs. Quieter mornings. Walking without headphones. Letting your thoughts arrive without interrogating them.
When life feels hard, this kind of attention can be grounding — a way to feel less lost without needing a map.
Listen to the episode with Katie Driver on A Thought I Kept.
Learning to Trust Yourself Again (Slowly)
Another thought that stayed came up in conversations about self-trust.
Not the confident, decisive version of self-trust we often imagine — but a quieter kind. The kind that grows when you stop overriding yourself.
Several guests spoke about moments where they realised they had been ignoring their own signals for years: exhaustion, resentment, numbness, restlessness. And how wellbeing didn’t begin with adding more practices, but with listening.
If this year left you feeling unsure of yourself, this matters.
Self-trust isn’t rebuilt by grand declarations. It’s rebuilt in small acts:
pausing before saying yes
noticing what drains you
letting your feelings be information, not obstacles
That idea alone — my feelings are trying to tell me something — was one many of us kept.
Explore episodes on emotions, attention and self-trust wherever you listen to A Thought I Kept.
Overwhelm Isn’t a Personal Failure
Overwhelm came up again and again this year. Not as something to eliminate, but as something to understand.
In conversations about work, creativity and leadership, guests reflected on how overwhelm is often a signal that our systems — not our selves — need adjusting.
If you’re ending the year feeling overwhelmed, anxious or behind, this thought matters:
Overwhelm isn’t proof you’re failing. It’s information that’s pointing to too much noise, too many expectations, too little rest, or too little support. And noticing that is already a form of progress.
This is especially important at the end of the year, when reflection can quietly turn into self-criticism. These conversations reminded us that kindness — toward ourselves — is not a soft option. It’s a stabilising one.
You Don’t Need to Fix the Year to Learn From It
One of the most reassuring ideas to come out of the podcast this year was this:
You don’t need to tidy the year up to take something meaningful forward.
You can let it be unfinished.
Many guests spoke about learning through living, not through tidy conclusions. About carrying insights forward even when situations hadn’t resolved.
For anyone feeling lost or disconnected right now, that’s an invitation to stop forcing meaning — and trust that some understanding unfolds later.
Sometimes the thought you keep doesn’t explain everything.
It simply keeps you company.
Keeping these Thoughts Close
As we reached the end of the year, we realised something else: these ideas are easy to forget when life gets loud again.
That’s why we gathered the thoughts that stayed into a printable poster designed by Amanda — a way to live with them, not just read them once. Something to glance at on a difficult day. Something to remind you that you’re not alone in these questions.
You can shop the printable poster here — a collection of thoughts kept from the first year of A Thought I Kept.
And if any of these reflections resonated, we’d love for you to explore more.
Listen to A Thought I Kept — conversations about wellbeing, emotions, work, identity and self-trust, because when the year feels hard, sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t a plan — it’s a thought worth keeping.
Feeling Held in a World That Keeps Asking for More
Exploring overwhelm, anxiety, and what it means to feel held — especially when you’re carrying too much and don’t know how to slow down.
There’s a particular kind of overwhelm that doesn’t come from doing too much — but from holding too much.
Holding work.
Holding family life.
Holding emotions, expectations, plans, worries.
Holding it all together, often quietly.
It’s something that came up again and again in my recent conversation with Lauren Barber on the podcast A Thought I Kept. We didn’t set out to talk about overwhelm directly, but as we spoke, it became clear that this sense of being unheld — of carrying more than feels sustainable — sits beneath so many of the feelings people describe as stress, burnout, anxiety, or simply feeling lost.
What does it mean to feel held?
When we talk about being held, we often imagine something external: support from others, community, care, someone stepping in. And that matters — deeply. But Lauren spoke beautifully about another layer of holding too: the ways we hold ourselves when life keeps asking for more than we feel we have to give.
In the episode, she shared how anxiety has been a long-term companion for her — not always loud or dramatic, but often living quietly in the body. In the gut. In the mornings. In the constant background hum of hypervigilance. That feeling of being alert even when things are technically “fine”.
What struck me was how she described mistrusting good feelings. How, when you’ve spent a long time braced for difficulty, calm can feel unfamiliar — even unsafe. Ease doesn’t always land as relief; sometimes it lands as something to be suspicious of.
Many of us recognise this, especially when we’re overwhelmed. We might know what would help — rest, space, gentleness, support — and still struggle to let ourselves receive it.
Overwhelm isn’t always about doing too much
One of the ideas that stayed with me from this conversation is that overwhelm isn’t always about volume. Sometimes it’s about imbalance.
We’re holding a lot — but not being held in return.
Lauren talked about motherhood as a clear example of this. There are things in life that drain us simply because they have to be done. Meals, logistics, care, responsibility. We don’t always have the option to step away from them. And in those moments, the question isn’t “how do I escape this?” but “how do I support myself within it?”
Lauren spoke about counterbalancing — about finding small, everyday ways to bring nourishment back in. Not as a fix to the problem we can’t yet get to, but as a quiet form of care.
Putting music on while making breakfast.
Going for a walk, even when it’s inconvenient.
Wearing a favourite pair of earrings on an ordinary day.
These aren’t grand gestures. But they matter. Because they help the body feel a little safer. A little less alone. A little more held.
The quiet cost of never being held
So many people we speak to at If Lost Start Here tell us they feel disconnected — from themselves, from their energy, from what they want. Often, that disconnection isn’t because they don’t care, or don’t know. It’s because they’ve been holding so much, for so long, without anywhere to rest.
When you’re constantly in that state, your nervous system doesn’t get the message that it’s okay to soften. Even moments of rest can feel uncomfortable. Even joy can feel fragile.
Lauren shared how somatic practices — working with the body, not just the mind — have helped her rebuild a sense of safety from the inside out. Not by forcing calm, but by meeting what’s there with compassion. By learning, slowly, that feelings move. That sensations pass. That being held can be something you practise, not something you wait for.
Feeling held as a practice, not a destination
One of the most grounding ideas from this episode is that feeling held isn’t a one-time experience. It’s not something you achieve and then move on from. It’s a rhythm. A return.
It shows up in how you treat yourself when you’re tired.
In how you respond to anxiety rather than fighting it.
In whether you allow yourself small moments of care without earning them first.
This feels especially important at times of year when everything speeds up — when expectations multiply and space shrinks. When we’re told to reflect, plan, connect, celebrate, and keep going, all at once.
In those moments, being held might look less like changing everything and more like asking a quieter question: “What would help me feel supported right now?”
Work, energy, and being held
At the heart of Lauren’s story is a thought she’s carried since her early twenties: “Life is too short to do work that you do not enjoy.”
Lauren spoke about learning to notice when her work drains her energy — when she feels flat, depleted, disconnected. And how those sensations have become signals rather than something to push through.
For many people, changing work isn’t immediately possible. But even then, the episode offers a gentler invitation: to notice where energy is leaking, and where it might be replenished. To bring more of what you need into your days, even when the structure stays the same.
Feeling held, in this sense, is about staying connected to yourself — even in imperfect conditions.
A gentle invitation
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, unheld, or quietly disconnected right now, you’re not failing. You’re responding to a world that often asks for more than it gives back.
My hope is that this conversation with Lauren offers a pause. A moment of recognition. Perhaps even a small sense of being held — enough to help you take the next gentle step.
Listen to the full episode of A Thought I Kept: How We Learn to Feel Held with Lauren Barber — available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
And if you’d like more thoughtful reflections, tools, and ideas for everyday life, especially for those moments when you feel lost or overwhelmed, join our mailing list. You don’t have to hold everything alone.
The Thought That Changed How I End the Year
End the year with more clarity and less pressure. Discover one powerful question to reset your mind and start the new year with intention
Every year around this time, I feel a quiet tension building.
It’s not just the pressure to finish things, though that’s part of it — the projects left undone, the goals half-met. It’s something deeper. A low-grade noise, humming underneath the productivity tools and Pinterest-perfect vision boards.
That voice that says:
“You should be reflecting.”
“You should be setting goals.”
“You should be figuring out how to make next year better.”
And often, if I’m honest, I try to oblige. I sit down with the journal. I make the lists. I try to “get clear.”
But I don’t always feel clear. I just feel… tired.
So this year, I’m trying something different. Something softer.
And it started with one sentence from a conversation I had with coach and facilitator Katie Driver:
“The mind works best in the presence of a question.”
It landed so gently, I almost missed it. But the more I sat with it, the more it felt like a key — not just to better thinking, but to a better ending.
What if clarity doesn’t come from pushing — but from asking?
Katie’s work centers around helping people think for themselves — particularly those who feel like their minds are “buffering” or stuck in mental noise loops. In our episode of A Thought I Kept, she talks about the value of attention, the importance of quiet, and what can shift when we stop trying to force insight, and start trusting the questions.
As someone who has historically tried to think my way to control — to logic, list-make, or out-journal the overwhelm — this idea felt like an exhale. What if I didn’t need the answer yet? What if I didn’t need a 12-step plan? What if I just needed the right question?
So I tried one.
The question that helped me end the year differently
On a particularly messy-feeling day, I sat down with this:
What would make this a good ending — for me?
Not a successful one. Not a productive one. Not an impressive one.
A good one. For the person I actually am.
And quietly, without fanfare, an answer rose:
Letting go of something I never really wanted.
Finishing one small thing I care about.
Taking a walk in silence, no headphones.
Choosing presence over performance.
Not exactly a 10-point strategic vision. But honest.
True. Grounded. And — perhaps most importantly — doable.
Another question I’ve come to love:
“What do I need right now?”
It’s one Katie shared in the episode, and I’ve returned to it often.
When the list is long. When my brain feels foggy. When I’m tempted to sink into distraction instead of meeting myself gently.
Sometimes the answer is small — a cup of tea, a stretch, a text to someone I love. Sometimes it’s “nothing right now.” But just asking reminds me I have needs, and they’re worth listening to.
In a season that often prioritizes output — what did you accomplish, what are you planning next — this simple question helps me reorient inward. To listen. To care. To remember that ending well isn’t always about tying everything up. Sometimes it’s about releasing what no longer fits.
A better ending is possible. But it starts with presence, not pressure.
So if you’re feeling behind or burnt out or like your brain is caught in a loop —
If you’re wondering how to reset without overhauling everything —
Here’s what I learned:
You don’t need to fix it all.
You don’t need to reinvent yourself.
You don’t even need to reflect perfectly.
You just need one honest, open question.
And a little space to answer it.
Listen to the episode: What to Do When You Can’t Think Straight with Katie Driver
And if you need the space to think then explore our online and in-person coaching sessions. You can still book for the end of this year, or get a session in your calender for the start of 2026.
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