Claire Fitzsimmons 18/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 18/05/2026

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.

Listen to our conversation here

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.

Get a copy of our wellbeing journal

Claire Fitzsimmons 14/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 14/05/2026

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:

Sarah Philp 14/05/2026 Sarah Philp 14/05/2026

Scotland's Wild Saunas: A Wellbeing Guide to Heat, Stillness and Place in Scotland

Discover Scotland’s wild sauna movement through this wellbeing guide to outdoor saunas in St Andrews, Skye, Edinburgh, East Lothian, Cromarty, Fife and Aberdeen. From sea dips to wood-fired heat, explore the places helping people slow down, reconnect and experience Scotland differently.

At the start of this year I made myself a promise: each month, a new sauna. Alongside a photograph a day, it's a way of noticing the rhythm of the year, not just the headline seasonal shift but the smaller turns. Scotland is in the middle of something of a sauna revolution, with wood-fired wild saunas springing up along sea-edges, nestled in foothills, in walled gardens and by sea lochs. Each one belonging to its place - shaped by the landscape it sits within and the community around it, its own personality, its own story.

Why sauna matters for wellbeing

A sauna can feel like a treat, but the more I go, the more it reveals itself as so much more – a wellbeing practice rather than an event. There's the body: the heat soothing tense muscles, the cold sharpening focus, the cycle of expansion and contraction settling the nervous system back to its baseline. Research suggests the heat triggers a cascade of repair in the body, and the cold builds resilience in a way that ripples out into the rest of the week.

There's also the social side, for one, the unique and often inspiring conversations that happen in a hot wooden box where no one has their phone, where the usual scaffolding of who-we-think-we-are falls away. And there's the pause afterwards. The cup of tea. The slowing. The way you sit with flushed cheeks and notice the sea, or the trees, or the smoke rising from the stove and feel properly here. In Scotland, where the dark months are long, that small ritual of warmth and presence can feel like medicine. And as the energy rises in the spring and summer the sauna is still a magical experience – more than you might imagine.

The landscape, whether that’s the cold sea, hillside or loch isn't a backdrop, it's the other half of the cycle. Sauna here is inseparable from the place that holds it. It’s about the heat and the cold but it’s also the wind, the water, the long northern light, the weather doing whatever it pleases.

Following the heat

Start with what's near you, you might be surprised at how many saunas are nearby. Here are the ones I've been to so far this year, beginning at the edge of the sea in January and moving through the seasons with curiosity and being in the moment.

Wild Scottish Sauna at West Sands, St Andrews

On a particularly wild January day, the only place to begin was West Sands in St Andrews. A wood-fired sauna tucked behind the dunes of the West beach, with the North Sea opening out in front and the famous old links curving away beyond. The air was sharp, the sky was wide, the waves were enormous and inside, the heat held me steady. There's something fitting about starting a year-long practice somewhere this elemental. You leave with salt on your skin, cheeks burning and the feeling of having properly arrived in the new year.

Suilanu Sauna at Croft 4, Isle of Skye

February took me west to Skye, and Suilanu turned out to be a mini retreat. A handcrafted sauna on a Broadford croft, sitting beneath a picture-perfect view of Bla Bheinn - the kind of view that does something to your shoulders before you've even stepped inside. I joined a day retreat of restorative yoga, shared lunch with a circle of brilliant women finishing the day in the sauna. Slower, softer, the heat held against the wildness outside. The day felt like being properly looked after, by the place and by each other.

Staffin Sea Sauna, Isle of Skye

February also meant a return visit to Staffin, the OG of Skye saunas and still one of the most beautifully placed I know. A wood-fired Scandinavian sauna at Staffin Harbour, looking out toward Staffin and Flodigarry Island and, on a clear day, Harris and Lewis beyond. Steam, plunge, repeat, with the elements doing much of the work. Coming back to a sauna you've already loved is its own kind of reset. A reminder that practice often means returning, not just discovering.

Pentland View Outdoor Sauna, Edinburgh

March brought me closer to home. A wood-fired sauna at the foot of the Pentland Hills, with Caerketton rising above and the city humming somewhere out of sight. Run by two warm and knowledgeable hosts who take real care of their guests. My experience was a beautifully session with oils, salt scrub, herbal tea and homemade cake by the fire pit afterwards - the kind of small, generous touches that turn an hour into a deep renewal. A reminder that you don't always have to travel far to find what you need, and that the most restorative places are sometimes the ones half an hour up the road.

Hot & Bothy Community Sauna, Archerfield Walled Garden

April, and a visit with my mum to Hot & Bothy is a community sauna tucked behind Archerfield Walled Garden in East Lothian - a small gathering of changing huts, a yurt sauna, the Bothy sauna, plunges and a fire pit, made from reclaimed materials and arranged to form a natural shelter for body and mind. The bothy hut has a window that frames the field beyond, allowing you to watch the wildlife drift past. The 90 minute sessions feel spacious allowing you to move between the saunas and the cold or if you'd rather, sit by the fire pit with herbal tea and orange slices.

Cromarty Community Sauna

Also April, and a community sauna that genuinely puts the capital C in community. A converted horsebox sauna by the Cromarty Firth, run by the Cromarty and District Development Trust. Here you sweat, take the few short steps down to the sea to dip in the lapping water, then climb back into the heat. Afterwards, coffee and cake at The Last Splash, the little café down by the water - exactly the right kind of unhurried post-sauna landing. What stays with you is the sense that this is somewhere woven into the everyday life of a small Black Isle town, supported by and supporting the people who live there.

Largo Castaway Sauna, Lower Largo

May, and onward along the Fife coast to Lower Largo. A wood-fired sauna on the edge of Largo Bay, warmly hosted with a generous attention to detail - multi-coloured changing huts, orange slices between heat cycles, home-made tablet afterwards. The picture window frames the Forth perfectly, looking back to East Lothian where on a clear day, North Berwick Law and the Bass Rock are visible across the water. The "Castaway" name nods to Lower Largo's own Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe, and the sauna does feel, briefly, like being marooned, in the best way.

Barbossauna, Aberdeen

Mid-May and I find myself in Aberdeen, the granite city, for work so the perfect opportunity to try one of a few saunas on the Aberdeen Esplanade. I chose Barbossauna, a horsebox sauna just along from the old fishing village of Footdee (or Fittie as it’s known locally). The day was a truly wild one, with enormous waves throwing themselves against the shore long before high tide and inside, the steam, eucalyptus and friendly chats did exactly what they needed to. Host Fabio is warm and easy to talk to and, it turns out, the same hands that built the horsebox in Cromarty. A small thread tying two of this year's stops together.

Going deeper

If you're curious to go deeper, I had a wonderful conversation with Cara Redpath on my Space to Think podcast. Cara is a nutritional therapist who also works at a sauna in Oban, she shares both the science and the soul of why sauna culture is taking root in Scotland. She talks about heat shock proteins, lower cortisol, the way the cold builds resilience as well as the things you can't quite measure: the third place, the social leveller, the medicine of having somewhere to go where there are no phones and no hierarchy, just people in warm, wood-fired glow getting to know each other. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and her clinical grounding will probably reframe how you think about going to the sauna for life.

From sea-edge to hillside to Loch, the saunas have started to feel like a way of seeing Scotland anew - a slow geography of warmth. I'm curious about where the heat will lead me next.

Written by Sarah Philp. Photos by Sarah Philp.

About Sarah Philp

Sarah is a Psychologist and Coach with almost 20 years of experience in Education. Her mission has always been to maximise the impact of Psychology; to help us understand ourselves and each other more deeply in order to be able to relate, learn and lead better together.

Sarah is also the host of the Space to Think podcast

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Explore our mind-body connection pathway

Claire Fitzsimmons 13/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 13/05/2026

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

Get your copy

Claire Fitzsimmons 11/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 11/05/2026

How Japanese Spirituality Can Help Us Feel Less Lost

What Japanese spirituality can teach us about wellbeing, grief and uncertainty from everyday rituals and noticing beauty to finding comfort in living between belief and doubt.

The park was the same one Hiroko Yoda had walked through countless times before. Same paths. Same trees. Same shrine tucked quietly amongst the landscape. But after her mother died, she could barely see any of it. She describes walking with her head down, shuffling through the park and back home again, where she would cry. Then repeat it the next day. And the next. Until one day she looked up.

She noticed the birds first. Then the maple trees. The shifting light through the leaves. A shrine she must have passed hundreds of times before. And in that moment, something changed. Not because her grief disappeared or because she suddenly understood everything about life or death or spirituality, but because she no longer felt entirely alone inside the world.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that since we recorded our conversation for A Thought I Kept.

Partly because I think many of us know what it is to move through life with our heads down. To become so overwhelmed by grief, anxiety, burnout, uncertainty or simply the sheer weight of being human that the world narrows around us. Our lives become logistical. Functional. We focus on getting through the day, answering messages, making dinner, remembering appointments. We stop noticing what is around us because we are working so hard to hold ourselves together within it.

And yet so much of what Hiroko shared in our conversation was about exactly that: noticing.

Noticing what remains. Noticing what connects us. Noticing the things that quietly hold us when we feel lost.

Her book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness, explores Japanese spirituality not as a rigid belief system but as something lived alongside everyday life. Something woven into nature, rituals, food, language, grief, playfulness and community. In Japanese spirituality, kami — spiritual presences — exist not just in shrines or sacred spaces, but in trees, rivers, mountains, words, objects and everyday acts of care.

I think what struck me most was how different this felt from the way spirituality is often discussed in wellbeing spaces. So much modern wellbeing culture seems obsessed with certainty. Morning routines that promise transformation. Manifesting practices that suggest we can think ourselves into a better life. The pressure to optimise, improve, transcend.

But Hiroko kept returning to something much softer and more spacious than that.

The Japanese idea of hanshin hangi — half belief, half doubt. The permission to remain somewhere in the grey zone. To not fully know. To allow uncertainty to exist without rushing to resolve it.

Honestly, it felt like a relief.

Because I suspect many of us already live there, whether we admit it or not.

We carry objects that mean more to us than they logically should. We talk to people we’ve lost. We feel calmer by the sea. We light candles. We keep rituals we cannot entirely explain. We sense that some places hold energy. We wonder whether there might be more to life than what we can immediately see or prove.

And then, often, we dismiss ourselves. We tell ourselves we’re being silly. Irrational. Dramatic.

What I loved about Hiroko’s perspective was that it made space for both curiosity and scepticism. Both wonder and uncertainty. Both grief and joy.

At one point in the conversation she talks about eating a banana at breakfast and saying itadakimasu beforehand — “I humbly receive.” And suddenly the banana stops being just a banana. It becomes the people who grew it, transported it, stocked it, bought it. It becomes weather and soil and labour and unseen connection.

That stayed with me because I think many of us are searching for meaning whilst overlooking the small moments where meaning already exists.

Noticing can become a kind of spiritual practice.

Making coffee in the morning. Opening the curtains. Walking the dog. Watering plants. Speaking kindly. Taking the long route home. Sitting quietly before the rest of the house wakes up.

Not because these things solve our lives, but because they return us to relationship with them.

And perhaps that matters especially when we feel lost.

Often when we feel uncertain, we assume we need dramatic change. A new version of ourselves. A breakthrough. A complete reinvention. But sometimes what we actually need is a gentler way of relating to where we already are.

Hiroko spoke beautifully about how Japanese spirituality allows opposites to coexist. Joy and sadness. Gratitude and anger. Light and darkness. She talked about how grief changed shape over time, how writing about her mother softened certain memories and complicated others, how healing was not neat or linear but layered.

I think there’s comfort in that too.

Because many people arrive at wellbeing feeling as though they are failing at it. Failing at being positive enough, resilient enough, healed enough, grateful enough. But perhaps wellbeing is not about eliminating darkness or uncertainty. Perhaps it is about learning how to stay connected to ourselves and the world around us whilst those things exist.

To look up occasionally, even when life feels heavy.

To notice the shrine amongst the trees.

To let a cup of coffee become a moment of connection rather than simply fuel.

To allow for half belief and half doubt.

If this resonates with you, you might enjoy my conversation with Hiroko Yoda on A Thought I Kept. We talk about grief, spirituality, uncertainty, belonging, rituals and the unseen threads that connect us to each other and the world around us.

Listen to our conversation here

And if you’re navigating your own season of uncertainty or emotional overwhelm, you can also explore coaching and support through If Lost Start Here. Not to fix yourself or become someone new, but simply to have somewhere to think things through more honestly and openly.

Explore coaching support

Claire Fitzsimmons 04/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 04/05/2026

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.

Listen to our conversation here

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.

Explore more support

Claire Fitzsimmons 01/05/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 01/05/2026

If Lost, Start Here: Our Book Is Here

If Lost, Start Here is a wellbeing journal designed for real life. Explore simple, practical ways to feel better, reconnect with yourself, and find your own way to well.

Ten years ago, we were sitting on a living room floor. Two friends, babies crawling around us, talking about all the ways we felt a bit… lost. Untethered. Overwhelmed.

And more than anything, we were talking about how hard it was to know where to start to just feel better. Not because there weren’t options. Because there were too many.

Everything we turned to—books, advice, tools—often left us feeling worse than we anticipated. Like we were somehow getting it wrong before we’d even begun. And there was a version of life we were meant to be living, and we were slightly off-track from it.

So we started asking different questions.

What do people actually need when they feel like this?
What helps when you’re tired, or overwhelmed, or uncertain?
What still counts when life doesn’t look like the version wellbeing advice assumes?

That was the beginning of If Lost, Start Here. And now, our book.

What This Book Is (And Isn’t)

This isn’t a book that asks you to overhaul your life. It’s not built on the idea that there’s a better version of you waiting on the other side of a perfect routine.

It’s more a guide for when you don’t know where to begin. A place to come back to when things feel off, or unclear, or just a bit flat.

It’s grounded in research, but it doesn’t feel like work. It’s designed to be easy to pick up, easy to move through, and importantly easy to make yours.

There’s no point in this book where you should feel like you’re failing at it. Instead, it’s about exploring.

Exploring yourself, yes, but also exploring your life. The world around you. The things that bring you back into it.

Because one of the things we kept coming back to was this: So much of wellbeing focuses on going inward.
But what about everything that happens when we go outward too?

A Guide to You And the World Around You

This book moves through ten different wellbeing pathways. Some will feel familiar like connection, creativity and nature. Others might feel like something you’ve lost touch with, or haven’t quite found your way into yet.

And that’s kind of the point.

We hear this a lot from people: “I’ve never really thought about my life this way before.”

About play, for example. Or awe. Or having a creative practice as an adult that isn’t tied to being “good” at something.

Each pathway is there as a way in. Not something to master. But something to try. Something to notice. And something to come back to when you need it.

You Don’t Have to Do It All (Or Do It Properly)

One of our favourite things about this book is that it doesn’t need you to use it in a particular way.

You can dip in and out. You can follow it month by month. You can skip around entirely and follow whatever catches your attention.

If you’re someone who likes to think things through, you might spend longer with the essays and reflections. If you’re more of a doer, you might go straight to the activities and try things out in your day-to-day life. If you’ve got very little energy, you might just read a page and leave it there.

All of it counts. It’s much more of a “choose your own way through” than a step-by-step plan.

Built for Real Life (Not Ideal Life)

A lot of this started with a very practical question:

What does wellbeing look like when you’re too exhausted, too uncertain and too overwhelmed to do alll the things.

We started looking at each area of wellbeing not as something you either do or don’t do but as something that exists on a spectrum.

So instead of:

“Go for a walk in nature.”

It might be:

“Can you look out of the window?”

Instead of:

“Build a strong social life.”

It might be:

“Who feels like an easier person to text today?”

We found research that backed up the fact that even very small moments still matter. That they still count. That they can still shift how we feel in meaningful ways.

And more than anything, we wanted to build something that worked with people’s lives as they actually are. Not as they think they should be.

A Different Way to Think About Wellbeing

There’s a lot of pressure in this space now. To get it right. To do more. To optimise. And it can quietly turn wellbeing into another thing on the list.

We wanted this book to sit slightly outside of that. To say: there isn’t one right way to well.

For some people, it might be running, wild swimming, green juices. For others, it might be going to a museum, painting at the kitchen table, watching live music, or finding small ways to be part of the world again.

This is about finding your way. Not following someone else’s.

Something You Can Come Back To

Over the years, this became something we used ourselves.

When things felt off, we’d come back to it. Run through the pathways. Notice what had slipped. What we needed more of. Not in a critical way—more like a check-in.

“Oh, I haven’t so much as touched my toes this year. Maybe mind-body could use a bit of attention.”

It’s that kind of relationship we hope this book becomes. Something you return to. Something that helps you find your footing again.

If You’re Not Sure Where to Start

That’s okay. That’s exactly where this begins.

Get Your Wellbeing Journal

Also available on Not on the High Street and Amazon.

Claire Fitzsimmons 20/04/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 20/04/2026

How to Trust That Things Will Be OK (Even When You Feel Lost)

Feeling lost or uncertain? A gentle guide to trusting life again, finding hope in difficult moments, and making space for everything you feel.

You arrive a little more tired than you expected, the kind of tired that isn’t just about the journey but about everything you’ve been carrying before you even set off.

The train was delayed, the coffee wasn’t great, and there’s already a message waiting for you from home asking something that requires more of you than you feel you have to give. You hold your bag a little tighter as you step off, aware of that familiar hum underneath it all — the one that says you’re doing your best, and still wondering if it’s enough.

And then, slowly, something begins to shift.

You’re welcomed in, properly welcomed in, with a warmth that doesn’t ask anything of you in return. There’s a cup of tea placed into your hands, a chair that feels like it was waiting for you, and a sense — rare, and difficult to create on demand — that you don’t have to perform or explain or improve anything about yourself in this moment.

You have arrived.

This is the kind of space described in my recent conversation with Tanya Lynch on A Thought I Kept, but more than that, it’s the kind of space many of us are quietly searching for in our everyday lives, especially when we find ourselves feeling lost without quite knowing how we got there. Because feeling lost doesn’t often look dramatic. It tends to look like carrying on, showing up, doing what needs to be done while holding a question in the background about whether this is how things are meant to feel.

When Life Doesn’t Look Like You Thought It Would

Tanya’s work, through journaling, retreats, and bibliotherapy, is rooted in something both simple and surprisingly hard to practice, which is the idea that everything is welcome.

Not just the parts of life that feel resolved or hopeful or easy to share, but also the uncertainty, the heartbreak, the restlessness, and the moments where you don’t know what comes next or how you’re meant to move through them. These are the parts we’re often encouraged to fix or move past, and yet they are also the parts that tend to shape us most.

There is a phrase she returns to, one that you may have heard so many times it risks losing its meaning:

Every cloud has a silver lining.

It can feel too neat for the complexity of real life, too polished for the moments when things are genuinely hard, but the origins of the phrase tell a different story. It dates back to the 17th century, from a line by John Milton in Comus, where he describes a dark cloud revealing a silver edge when caught by light.

It wasn’t written as advice or reassurance, but as an observation, a moment of noticing that even within something heavy, there might be something else present at the same time. And perhaps that is where this idea becomes more useful to us, not as a way of reframing everything into something positive, but as an invitation to look a little more closely at what is already there.

Learning to Stay With the Hard Parts

One of the things that stayed with me most from this conversation is the way Tanya speaks about challenge, not as something to avoid or move quickly beyond, but as something that is woven into the shape of a life. There isn’t a single moment where everything resolves or becomes easier, and there isn’t a version of life that is made up only of blue skies and straightforward narratives. Instead, there are multiple moments, some expansive, some difficult, some that ask more of us than we feel ready to give, and all of them becoming part of the story we are living.

Over time, something begins to build alongside that, and it is not certainty or control but a quieter kind of trust. Not the kind that insists everything will work out exactly as we hope, but the kind that recognises we have moved through difficult things before and found our way, even when it didn’t feel possible at the time.

What It Means to Feel Held

So much of what Tanya creates through her retreats is about this idea of being held, and it’s something that feels increasingly important in a world that often asks us to keep going without pausing to notice how we actually are. Being held doesn’t mean being fixed or guided towards a better version of yourself, and it doesn’t come with a list of things to do or ways to improve. It is something quieter than that, an experience of being seen without needing to justify yourself, of being able to arrive as you are without editing or softening the edges of what you’re feeling.

It’s the difference between being asked what you need to do next and being given the space to sit with where you already are. And while retreats can offer a more intentional version of that experience, the question it opens up feels relevant far beyond those spaces.

Where in your life do you feel held, and where might you need a little more of that than you currently have?

A Way to Begin Again, Gently

If you are in a moment that feels uncertain right now, this isn’t about finding a solution or creating a plan, and it doesn’t ask you to turn everything around or see things differently straight away.

It might begin somewhere much smaller.

The next time you find yourself caught in the noise of everything you’re holding, the questions, the pressure to figure things out, the sense that you should know what comes next, you might step outside if you can and allow yourself a moment to look up rather than down. Not in a symbolic or forced way, but simply to notice what is there.

Clouds moving, light catching edges, space opening up in ways you hadn’t registered before.

This is not about convincing yourself that things are better than they are, but about allowing for the possibility that more than one thing can be true at the same time, that alongside what feels difficult, there may also be something else present that you hadn’t yet seen.

A Thought to Keep

Every cloud has a silver lining may not be something you believe all of the time, and it may not be something you want to hold onto in every moment, but it can sit gently in the background as a question rather than a conclusion.

What else might be here that I haven’t noticed yet?

If you’d like to spend more time with this idea, you can listen to the full episode of A Thought I Kept with Tanya Lynch, where we explore what it means to trust that things will be OK without needing to force that belief.

Listen here

And if you are finding that you need more support in understanding what you’re feeling or where you are, you can explore our private coaching at If Lost Start Here, where we make space for all of it, not just the parts that are easy to explain.

Sometimes, finding your way doesn’t begin with knowing what to do next, but with allowing yourself to arrive exactly where you are.

Explore with us

Claire Fitzsimmons 17/04/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 17/04/2026

Grief Disco

Discover Grief Disco, a welcoming and uplifting space for anyone living with loss. A place to heal, connect and feel grief through music, movement and community.

Perfect For

Grief Disco is for anyone living with loss and looking for a different kind of space to hold it. It’s for people who don’t always have the words, who feel isolated in their grief, or who want to be around others who understand without needing everything explained. It’s for the heartbroken and the hopeful, for people who want somewhere gentle, human and a little unexpected to go with what they’re carrying.

You do not need to be good at dancing. You do not need to be ready to talk. You do not need to arrive in any particular state. You just need permission to come as you are.

Why You’ll Love It

Grief Disco offers something many grieving people are missing: a place to feel less alone without being forced into conversation or expected to “do grief” the right way. Through music, movement and a sense of shared understanding, it creates room for sadness, joy, memory, release and connection to exist together.

This isn’t about dancing to forget. It’s about dancing to remember, to honour and to reconnect. For some people that might look like tears on a dance floor. For others, it might be a small exhale, a moment of laughter, or the relief of being in a room where no one needs grief explained to them.

What Makes It Special

So much of grief can feel isolating. People don’t know what to say, or they say nothing. We can start to feel cut off from ourselves, from our bodies and from other people. What Grief Disco understands is that grief does not only live in words. It lives in the body too.

That’s what makes this space so powerful. It offers people a way to process loss through movement, music and presence, rather than through talking alone. There is no pressure to perform, no expectation to be upbeat and no fixed script for how you should feel. Everything is an invitation.

Grief Disco also holds something many of us forget is possible: that joy and grief can coexist. That a person can cry and dance at the same time. That love, memory, heartbreak and laughter can all be in the room together. In that sense, it doesn’t just offer support for grief. It offers a more human way of being with it.

The If Lost Take

There is something quietly radical about creating a place where grief is allowed to move.

So many of us are more familiar with the language of coping than the experience of actually feeling. We know how to keep going, keep functioning, keep answering “fine” when we are anything but. Grief Disco interrupts that. It offers something softer and, for many people, more freeing: a chance to let grief be alive in the body, not just managed in the mind.

What we love most is that this doesn’t turn grief into a problem to solve. It doesn’t rush people towards silver linings or ask them to package their pain into something neat and shareable. Instead, it makes room for what is true. Sometimes that truth is sorrow. Sometimes it is love. Sometimes it is a song that opens something you didn’t realise you were still carrying.

And sometimes healing looks less like fixing and more like finding a room where you can be fully human again.

Founders Story | Co-founded by Georgina Jones and Leah Davies

Grief Disco was born from lived experience of loss and a belief that grieving people deserve spaces that feel connecting, warm and real. Co-founders Georgina and Leah created it as a response to the loneliness that grief can bring and to the sense that many of the places available to grieving people do not always make room for the body, for joy or for community. Their approach is shaped by the understanding that no one should have to grieve alone, and that music and movement can help us find our way back to ourselves and each other.

Founder’s Go-To Wellbeing Advice

“Look for the love.

Look for the tiny moments of joy that are still here, even in the hardest seasons. Keep a playlist that helps shift your energy. Let music help you move what words can’t always reach.

And remember that grief is not something to fix or get over. It is something to feel, and you don’t have to feel it alone.”

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Some Practical Details

Grief Disco is a space where people can come together around grief through music, movement and optional sharing. Some events happen in person and there are also online grief discos for people who would rather join from home. The atmosphere is invitational rather than intense: you can dance, sit, cry, talk, stay quiet, turn your camera off or simply witness. There are also small ritual elements, such as dedications and moments to remember the person or people you are dancing for.

If you are grieving and looking for support, this may be one of those rare places that helps not by asking you to explain your loss, but by giving you somewhere to bring it.

Take me there

Grief Disco

Various locations. Follow on social media and sign up for their newsletter for future dates.

Website | Instagram | YouTube

More places to connect

Claire Fitzsimmons 16/04/2026 Claire Fitzsimmons 16/04/2026

Zenaa Retreats

Discover Zenaa Retreats, a welcoming, fad-free approach to yoga and wellness retreats in the UK and abroad. Designed for real life, these nourishing escapes blend movement, rest, great food and genuine connection. Perfect for beginners, solo travellers and the yoga curious.