Author: Margaretha Montagu

What this is: A compassionate, research-informed exploration of why successful people struggle with comparison—and a practical roadmap for redirecting that energy into genuine self-knowledge and resilience.

What this isn’t: Another hollow “just be grateful” lecture, a collection of platitudes about self-love, or advice that ignores the very real pressures of high-achievement culture.

Read this if: You’re exhausted from the mental gymnastics of measuring yourself against colleagues, peers, or the curated perfection on LinkedIn. You’re ready to stop the comparison carousel and build something more sustainable—starting with honest self-reflection.

Time investment: 23 minutes that could save you years of wasted emotional energy.

Five Key Takeaways for Successful Professionals

1. Comparison is a survival mechanism gone rogue: Your brain is doing exactly what evolution designed it to do—it’s just catastrophically misapplied in a world of highlight reels and selective sharing.
2. The “having it all together” mirage is costing you: Research shows that 67% of executives report increased stress in 2025, yet we continue to believe everyone else has cracked the code whilst we’re barely keeping our heads above water.
3. Your reference group determines your suffering: Comparing yourself to the most successful people you know creates a systematically skewed dataset that guarantees dissatisfaction—it’s bad science applied to your self-worth.
4. Upward comparison without reflection breeds burnout: When you look up without pausing to understand what you’re actually seeing (and what you’re not), you fuel the very stress that’s already threatening your wellbeing.
5. There’s a third option beyond comparing up or down: Lateral curiosity—learning from others without the evaluative sting—offers a way forward that builds resilience rather than eroding it.

Introduction: The Exhausting Mathematics of Not Measuring Up

If you’re reading this, you’re probably brilliant at what you do. You’ve achieved things that would astound your younger self. You’ve built something: a career, a reputation, a life—that functions, mostly, on the outside.

And yet.

Yet you’re still calculating. Still measuring. Still running the mental spreadsheet that compares your chapter three to everyone else’s chapter twenty, your messy middle to their glossy finale, your 3 am panic attacks to their seemingly effortless competence.

Stress destroys Lives. To find out what you can do to safeguard your sanity by taking my insight-giving quiz, subscribe to my mailing list.

The exhaustion isn’t from the work itself. It’s from the endless mathematics of measuring up—an equation that never balances because you’re comparing variables that were never meant to be compared in the first place.

In a world where 82% of executives at larger organisations report high stress levels, where burnout has become the water we swim in rather than the warning sign we heed, the question isn’t whether comparison is happening. It’s whether we can redirect this deeply human impulse before it dismantles everything we’ve worked to build.

Because here’s what I’ve learned in twenty years of working with high-achievers in crisis, in hosting stress management retreats where guests walk the Camino de Santiago, and in writing eight books about navigating life’s inevitable upheavals: the people who seem to “have it all together” are usually just better at hiding the cracks. And the ones who actually thrive? They’ve stopped trying to measure up to an illusion in the first place.

The Woman Who Always Fell Short

Aline Hodgkins stood in her corner office on the forty-third floor, forehead pressed against the window glass, feeling the coolness seep through to her skull. Below, the city sprawled in its Tuesday morning efficiency—cars and people and purpose, all moving with the kind of certainty she used to feel.

Used to.

Her phone buzzed. Another notification. Jennifer from her MBA cohort had just been appointed CFO of a company Aline had never heard of but immediately researched. Series C funding. Exponential growth. The kind of trajectory that made Aline’s own career, solid, respectable, well-compensated, feel like a participation trophy.

She could taste the coffee she’d drunk too quickly, bitter at the back of her throat. Her assistant had commented on how tired she looked this morning. At the school gates, another mother had mentioned, ever so casually, that her daughter was “thriving” in the accelerated programme whilst Aline’s son was still struggling with basic maths. Even the woman who cleaned their house seemed to radiate a kind of contentment Aline couldn’t locate in herself.

The mathematics started automatically now, unbidden. Jennifer: CFO at forty-one. Aline: Vice President at forty-three. Jennifer: featured in Forbes. Aline: not. Jennifer’s Instagram showed a kitchen renovation, a skiing holiday, a husband who looked at her like she’d hung the moon. Aline’s own feed, when she bothered to check it, which she did compulsively, which she hated herself for doing, showed a carefully curated version of competence that felt increasingly like a costume she couldn’t quite fill out.

She’d started waking at 4am, her mind immediately racing through the inventory of everything she hadn’t achieved, everyone who was ahead, all the ways she was falling short. The weight of it sat on her chest like a physical thing. Her doctor had suggested it might be anxiety. Aline had laughed, a sound without humour, and said she was just busy. Stressed. Fine.

She wasn’t fine.

The smell of her own perfume suddenly seemed cloying, too sweet. She’d chosen it because a colleague wore something similar, a colleague who always seemed unflappable. Aline had thought perhaps the scent held some secret, some alchemy of confidence she could purchase at a department store counter.

It didn’t work like that. Nothing worked like that.

Her hands, she noticed, were trembling slightly. She pressed them flat against the glass. Beyond her reflection, professionally dressed, outwardly successful, the city continued its indifferent Tuesday. Someone down there was probably looking up at these offices, at windows like hers, imagining the people inside had it all sorted. Had cracked some code Aline was still desperately trying to decipher.

The irony wasn’t lost on her. She could hear the hum of the air conditioning, feel the expensive carpet beneath her shoes, smell the leather of her briefcase: all the trappings of success that had once mattered terribly and now felt like props in a play she could no longer remember her lines for.

Her phone buzzed again. A meeting in ten minutes. She needed to sound authoritative, certain, like someone who had it together. Like someone who wasn’t spending every spare moment scrolling through other people’s achievements, trying to locate the precise moment when she’d fallen behind.

Aline straightened her jacket, tasted the metallic edge of adrenaline mixed with that morning’s coffee, heard her own breath: shallow, quick—and made herself walk towards the conference room. Each step felt like a small betrayal of the exhaustion she couldn’t admit, the inadequacy she couldn’t shake, the comparison trap she couldn’t—wouldn’t—escape.

Because if she stopped comparing, if she stopped measuring, what would she use as proof that she mattered at all?

The Architecture of Comparison: Understanding What’s Actually Happening

Let’s talk about what’s really going on in moments like Aline’s. Because comparison isn’t a character flaw or a sign of weakness—it’s a fundamental human mechanism that’s been catastrophically amplified by the conditions of modern professional life.

In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger introduced Social Comparison Theory, which posits that people evaluate themselves by comparing their abilities, opinions, and circumstances to those of others, particularly when objective standards are unclear. This was, and remains, a crucial insight. We’re wired to look sideways at our fellow humans to gauge whether we’re on track, whether we’re safe, and whether we belong.

The problem? Festinger developed this theory in an era when your comparison pool consisted primarily of people you actually knew: neighbours, colleagues you saw daily, perhaps a handful of visible public figures. Today, you’re comparing yourself to thousands of carefully curated highlight reels, algorithmic suggestions of who you “should” be following, and an endless stream of other people’s victories with none of the context that would make them comprehensible.

Research into social comparison has revealed something particularly relevant for high-achievers: we tend to engage in upward comparisons—evaluating ourselves against those we perceive as better off, far more frequently than downward comparisons. And whilst upward comparisons can occasionally motivate us, they more often trigger feelings of inadequacy, envy, and what researchers delicately call “reduced subjective well-being.”

Here’s where it gets particularly brutal for executives and professionals: the very traits that propelled you to success, ambition, competitive drive, high standards, make you especially vulnerable to the corrosive effects of comparison. You’re comparing yourself not to your actual peer group but to the absolute top performers in every domain, creating what I call the “Pinterest Effect”: a life assembled from everyone else’s best moments, which no single human could possibly achieve.

And the stakes have never been higher. Recent data shows that 67% of executives report increased stress in 2025, with economic uncertainty, labour shortages, and the relentless pressure to do more with less creating a perfect storm of comparison triggers. When everyone around you appears to be handling the chaos with grace whilst you’re barely holding it together, the comparison trap doesn’t just affect your mood, it affects your health, your relationships, your capacity to actually do the work you’re here to do.

But here’s what might surprise you: the solution isn’t to stop comparing altogether. That’s neurologically impossible and, frankly, not even desirable. The solution is to understand the mechanism well enough to redirect it, to move from reflexive comparison to conscious curiosity, from measurement to meaning.

This shift is the beginning of something profound. Because when you stop wasting energy on the endless mathematics of measuring up, you suddenly have that energy available for things that actually matter: innovation, genuine connection, the kind of leadership that comes from self-knowledge rather than performance. You become not just less stressed but more effective. Not just more content, but more creative.

And here’s the ripple effect no one talks about: when you stop performing the exhausting theatre of having it all together, you give permission to everyone around you: your colleagues, your team, your children—to do the same. You create what researchers call “psychological safety,” which is, it turns out, the single greatest predictor of team performance and individual well-being.

The work of unlearning comparison isn’t just personal development. It’s a radical act of leadership in a culture that profits from your perpetual sense of inadequacy. It’s choosing reality over illusion, substance over performance, your actual life over everyone else’s filtered one.

And it starts with one uncomfortable question: What would change if you stopped trying to have it all together, and instead got honest about what you actually have?

A Writing Prompt for Deeper Exploration

Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Put pen to paper (not fingers to keyboard—this matters). Write continuously, without editing, in response to this question:

“If no one could see me, measure me, judge me, or compare me to anyone else, what would I choose to do with my energy today?”

Don’t think about the answer. Let your hand discover it. Notice what comes up, especially the things that surprise you, make you uncomfortable, or seem “selfish” or “unrealistic.” Those are the breadcrumbs leading you back to yourself.

When the timer goes off, read what you’ve written. Then ask: What’s one small thing I could do today that honours this truth?

Not a grand gesture. Not a life overhaul. One thing. Perhaps it’s saying no to a meeting that drains you. Perhaps it’s taking a walk without your phone. Perhaps it’s admitting to one person that you’re struggling.

Further Reading: Five Unconventional Books for Those Ready to Stop Comparing

These aren’t the usual suspects in the self-help canon. I’ve chosen them because they approach the comparison problem from unexpected angles—angles that actually work for people who are too smart for platitudes.

1. “The Art of Living” by Epictetus (trans. Sharon Lebell)

Why this book: Written nearly two millennia ago by a former slave who became one of Rome’s most influential philosophers, this slim volume offers a radically different framework for evaluation. Epictetus argues that the only thing truly within your control is your response to circumstances—everything else is external noise. For high-achievers drowning in comparison, this ancient permission to focus solely on what you can influence is breathtakingly liberating. The modern translation by Sharon Lebell reads like a conversation with a wise friend who refuses to let you off the hook.

2. “The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts

Why this book: Watts takes apart the very premise that security and certainty are achievable—or even desirable. In a culture where “having it all together” is the ultimate achievement, this philosophical exploration reveals how our pursuit of certainty actually creates the anxiety we’re trying to escape. It’s particularly valuable for executives who’ve built entire careers on appearing unshakeable. Watts suggests that embracing uncertainty isn’t resignation; it’s the only honest response to being human. The comparison trap relies on the illusion that someone, somewhere has figured it all out. This book dismantles that illusion entirely.

3. “Finite and Infinite Games” by James P. Carse

Why this book: Carse distinguishes between two types of games: finite games (played to win, with clear winners and losers) and infinite games (played to continue playing, with the goal of bringing more people into the game). Most comparison happens because we’re treating life as a finite game—measuring who’s winning, who’s ahead, who’s achieved more. Carse offers a completely different framework: what if the point isn’t to win but to keep playing well? This philosophical shift dissolves comparison at its root because you’re no longer competing in the same game everyone else appears to be playing.

4. “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller

Why this book: Miller, a psychoanalyst, explores how highly capable people often develop a “false self” designed to meet others’ expectations—and how this adaptation, whilst successful externally, leads to profound internal disconnection. If you’ve always been the achiever, the capable one, the person others rely on, this book will uncomfortably illuminate why comparison feels so urgent: you’ve been measuring yourself against external standards for so long that you’ve lost touch with your actual self. It’s not comfortable reading. It’s essential reading.

5. “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew B. Crawford

Why this book: Crawford, who holds a PhD in political philosophy and runs a motorcycle repair shop, explores the dignity and satisfaction of manual work in a culture obsessed with knowledge work and abstract achievement. Why include this in a list about comparison? Because Crawford offers a beautiful argument for work that has intrinsic rather than comparative value—work judged by whether the motorcycle runs, not by how your results compare to someone else’s. For professionals trapped in industries where everything is relative and nothing is quite real, this book offers a glimpse of what it feels like to do work that doesn’t require you to compare yourself to anyone.

P.S. If these books resonate, you might also find value in my 2-day online course, Road Map to Resilience: From Burnout to Breakthrough, which takes you through practical frameworks for building stress resilience that don’t depend on measuring up to anyone else’s standards.

What My Retreat Guests Have Discovered

“I arrived at Margaretha’s Camino de Santiago retreat utterly exhausted from trying to keep pace with everyone around me. My entire identity was wrapped up in being the person who could handle anything. The first day of walking, I kept checking my fitness tracker, comparing my pace to the other guests, mentally measuring myself against some imaginary standard of what a ‘good’ pilgrim should achieve. By day three, something shifted. Perhaps it was the rhythm of the walking, perhaps it was the storytelling circles with Margaretha’s horses—Twiss had this way of simply being present without judgment that undid something in me. I realised I’d been comparing myself to versions of people that didn’t even exist. The woman I thought was ‘thriving’ at work? We talked one evening, and she admitted she was barely sleeping. The colleague I envied? She confessed she felt like a fraud most days. By the end of the retreat, I wasn’t fixed—I don’t think that’s the point—but I had finally stopped running the endless calculation of who was ahead and who was behind. For the first time in years, I felt like I could just… be. That might sound simple, but it felt revolutionary.”
—Sophie B, Corporate Attorney, Age 47

“Joining Margaretha’s virtual storytelling circle was initially about finding community during a particularly isolated period. What I didn’t expect was how hearing other people’s actual stories—not their highlight reels, not their LinkedIn profiles, but their real, messy, complicated lives—would shift my relationship with comparison entirely. In the circle, there was nowhere to hide and, paradoxically, no need to. We weren’t performing for each other; we were simply sharing what was true. I found myself telling a story about a professional failure I’d spent two years trying to pretend hadn’t happened. The relief of not having to curate my narrative, of not having to be impressive or inspirational or anything other than honest, was profound. I started to see how much energy I’d been spending on appearing to have it together, energy I could have been using to actually build a life I wanted rather than one that looked good from the outside. The circle taught me that comparison thrives in isolation and dies in authentic community. Now when I notice myself starting the comparison spiral, I reach out to someone in the circle, and we get real. It’s the antidote I didn’t know I needed.”
—Janet K, Tech Executive, Age 39

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: But isn’t some comparison healthy? How do I know if I’m ambitious or just trapped in toxic comparison?

A: The difference lies in what happens after the comparison. Healthy ambition uses others as inspiration for growth you genuinely desire; it feels energising and clarifying. Toxic comparison uses others as evidence of your inadequacy; it feels depleting and leads to either self-criticism or performative achievement (doing things because you “should,” not because you want to). Ask yourself: Am I comparing because I’m curious about possibilities, or because I’m trying to confirm a story about not being enough?

Q: I work in an industry where comparison is literally built into the culture: rankings, performance reviews, promotion competitions. How can I stop comparing when my job requires it?

A: You’re right that some professional contexts require evaluation. The shift isn’t to pretend these systems don’t exist but to separate them from your self-worth. Practice what I call “contextual comparison”: yes, you’re being evaluated on these specific metrics in this specific context, but that evaluation doesn’t define your worth as a human being. It’s like playing a game—you track the score without believing the score is who you are. Also, consider: what would happen if you brought the same excellence to your work whilst caring slightly less about how you rank? Often, that reduction in anxiety actually improves performance.

Q: I’ve tried to stop comparing myself to others, but it feels impossible. Is there something wrong with me?

A: Nothing is wrong with you. Comparison is a deeply embedded neurological process—research suggests that as much as 10% of our daily thoughts involve some form of comparison. Trying to simply “stop” is like trying to stop noticing the colour blue once I’ve mentioned it. Instead of attempting to eliminate comparison, practice noticing it without judgment. “Ah, there’s my brain doing that comparison thing again.” Then, consciously redirect: “What do I actually know about this person’s reality? What do I want for myself, regardless of what anyone else is doing?” It’s a practice, not a destination.

Q: What if my comparison to others has actually motivated me to achieve important goals? Am I supposed to give that up?

A: No. But there’s a crucial distinction between using someone’s achievement as a proof of possibility (“if they can do it, perhaps I can too”) versus using it as a weapon against yourself (“they’ve done it and I haven’t, therefore I’m inadequate”). The first is inspiration; the second is self-flagellation. Inspiration feels like expansion; comparison feels like contraction. Notice which one is actually driving you. Often, what feels like motivation is actually anxiety wearing an achievement costume—and that’s not sustainable.

Q: I’m concerned that if I stop comparing myself to others, I’ll become complacent or lose my edge. Isn’t comparison what keeps me striving?

A: This is the fear nearly everyone has, and it’s worth interrogating. First, ask yourself: has constant comparison actually made you happier, healthier, or more fulfilled? Or has it just made you more anxious while you continue achieving? Second, consider an alternative source of drive: intrinsic purpose. What if you strived not because you needed to be better than someone else, but because the work itself mattered to you? That’s not complacency; that’s integrity. And research consistently shows that intrinsic motivation produces better outcomes — and better wellbeing — than external comparison. You won’t lose your edge; you’ll find a sustainable one.

Conclusion: Radiating Contentedness

Here’s what I’ve come to understand after two decades of working with brilliant, accomplished, exhausted people in crisis: the ones who seem to “have it all together” are either lying (to themselves, to you, or both) or they’ve discovered something the rest of us are still trying to learn.

They’ve stopped comparing.

Not stopped achieving. Not stopped growing. Stopped measuring their internal reality against everyone else’s external performance.

Because here’s the truth that takes most of us decades to accept: your life is immeasurable. Your worth is unrankable. Your journey is incomparable, not because you’re special in some Instagram-affirmation kind of way, but because no one else has your particular constellation of gifts, wounds, circumstances, and callings. The comparison you’re making isn’t just exhausting; it’s logically absurd. You might as well compare the ocean to the mountain and declare one of them inadequate.

The work isn’t to become someone who never compares. It’s to become someone who notices the comparison, understands what triggered it, and chooses—consciously, deliberately—to redirect that energy towards something that actually serves your life rather than depleting it.

This is the beginning. Not of having it all together (you won’t, and neither will anyone else, ever), but of building a life that doesn’t require you to pretend otherwise. A life where your energy goes towards what you’re creating rather than how you’re measuring up. Where your relationships are built on authenticity rather than performance. Where your achievements matter because they align with your values, not because they look impressive on paper.

And when you do this, when you finally stop trying to have it all together and start getting honest about what you actually have, something extraordinary happens. The people around you start to do the same. Your colleagues breathe a little easier. Your children learn that worth isn’t conditional on performance. Your community becomes a place where people can be real rather than impressive.

That’s the ripple effect of choosing to stop comparing. That’s how one person’s private decision to stop measuring up becomes a quiet revolution in how we all measure what matters.

You don’t need to have it all together. You never did. You just need to get honest about what you actually have—and then, perhaps, do something meaningful with it.

The mathematics can wait. The life you’re actually living cannot.

An Invitation: Walking Your Own Camino

If this article resonated, you might be ready for something more than reading about change. You might be ready to experience it.

For years, I’ve hosted stress management retreats in the rolling hills of south-western France, where guests walk sections of the ancient Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. These aren’t wellness retreats in the Instagram sense, no juice cleanses, no forced positivity, no pretence that a weekend can fix what took years to build.

Instead, you walk. We practice mindfulness and meditation exercises designed specifically for stress management. We sit in storytelling circles with my Friesian horses, Twiss, Kashkin, and Zorie. (Horses, it turns out, are remarkably good at teaching humans how to be present without performing. They don’t care about your CV or your LinkedIn profile. They respond only to who you actually are in the moment.)

The landscape itself does something that offices and screens cannot. The rhythm of walking, the simplicity of physical movement, the space that opens up when you’re not reachable by email—these conditions allow something in you to settle. To stop running the comparison mathematics. To remember what it feels like to just be, without measuring whether you’re being enough.

I’ve watched corporate attorneys discover they can cry without the world ending. Tech executives realise they’ve been chasing a definition of success that was never theirs to begin with. Medical professionals find permission to be human rather than superhuman. They arrive exhausted from trying to keep pace with everyone around them. They leave with something more valuable than solutions: clarity about what they actually want, beneath all the noise about what they should want.

These retreats aren’t about fixing you. You’re not broken. They’re about creating conditions where you can finally hear yourself think, where comparison loses its grip because you’re too busy experiencing your actual life to worry about how it looks from the outside.

We keep the groups intentionally small. We balance solitude with community. We honour both the need to talk and the need for silence. And yes, the horses are there—not as therapy animals in any clinical sense, but as teachers of a particular kind of presence that humans have mostly forgotten.

If you’re reading this and feeling that pull—the one that says, “Yes, this, I need this”—I’d invite you to explore what a retreat might offer. Not as another thing to check off your list. Not as a way to become more impressive or more together. But as a radical act of redirecting energy from comparison to actual living.

You can learn more at by clicking here. Read the testimonials. Look at the landscape. Notice how your body responds to the possibility of stopping, just for a moment, the endless mathematics of measuring up.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: transformation doesn’t happen in your head. It happens in your body, in the landscape, in the presence of others who’ve also stopped pretending they have it all together.

It happens when you finally give yourself permission to stop comparing long enough to discover what you actually have.

Perhaps it’s time.

What You’re About to Read (And Why You Should)

Right now, you’re probably reading this between meetings, or whilst pretending to listen to someone drone on about Q4 targets, or perhaps at 23H55 when you’ve finally closed your laptop but can’t quite shut down your mind. You’re successful. You’re driven. You’re absolutely knackered, though you’d never admit it.

This article explores the sneaky, often invisible symptoms of burnout that high-achievers miss until they’re face-down in their third espresso of the morning, wondering why they just snapped at their partner about the “wrong” type of milk. We’re not talking about the obvious signs—exhaustion, cynicism, reduced performance—but the peculiar, unexpected ones that creep up like uninvited guests at a dinner party.

If you’re an executive, entrepreneur, or professional who prides themselves on “handling it all,” this is your wake-up call. Or rather, your permission slip to finally acknowledge you might need one.

Five Key Takeaways for the Perpetually Productive

1. Burnout disguises itself brilliantly – Your brain interprets symptoms as character flaws rather than distress signals, so you push harder instead of pausing.
2. High-achievers are expert symptom-maskers – Your very skills that made you successful (resilience, determination, problem-solving) become the camouflage that hides your burnout.
3. Physical symptoms often appear first – Your body sounds the alarm long before your mind admits something’s wrong, manifesting in peculiar ways you’d never connect to stress.
4. Recognising unconventional symptoms is a superpower – Early detection means early intervention, potentially saving your health, relationships, and the work you’ve built.
5. Burnout recovery isn’t weakness; it’s strategic recalibration – Understanding these symptoms is the first step toward sustainable success rather than spectacular collapse.

Introduction: The Invisible Epidemic

Here’s what nobody tells you about burnout: it’s a master of disguise.

Whilst you’re busy being brilliant—closing deals, leading teams, revolutionising industries, keeping dozens of plates spinning whilst simultaneously planning Tuesday’s board meeting and remembering your mother-in-law’s birthday—burnout is quietly redecorating your internal landscape. It doesn’t announce itself with a brass band and a banner reading “You’re Burnt Out!” Instead, it hints. It leaves cryptic clues you’ll likely attribute to ageing, poor sleep, or that dodgy prawn sandwich from the airport.

I’m Dr Margaretha Montagu—MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, Storyteller Life Coach—and in my twenty years as a doctor with a special interest in stress management, I’ve witnessed countless intelligent, capable people completely miss their burnout symptoms. For fifteen years, I’ve hosted stress management retreats on the Camino de Santiago, and I’ve observed a fascinating pattern: the most successful people are often the last to recognise they’re struggling.

Why? Because the very traits that propelled you to success—your ability to push through discomfort, your talent for problem-solving under pressure, your unwavering commitment to excellence—become the very mechanisms that blind you to burnout’s approach.

Professionals miss these symptoms because they’re inconvenient, inexplicable, and frankly, embarrassing. You’re not the sort of person who “can’t handle” stress. You’ve built an empire on your capacity to manage chaos. Admitting to burnout symptoms feels like admitting defeat, so you rationalise them away. That persistent rash? Probably an allergy. The sudden aversion to foods you once loved? Maybe your taste buds are maturing. The inexplicable urge to cry during an insurance advert? Just hormones. PMT. Tuesday.

But here’s the truth, drawn from my experience with over forty guests whose testimonials grace my website, eight non-fiction books exploring divorce, loss, unexpected illness, and coping with crises, and countless storytelling circles: recognising these unconventional symptoms isn’t admitting weakness. It’s demonstrating the wisdom to listen when your body and mind are trying to tell you something crucial.

The Curious Case of Geoff Bradley

Geoff Bradley first noticed something was wrong on a Tuesday.

Not because Tuesdays held any particular significance in his carefully orchestrated life, but because he found himself standing in the Marks & Spencer food hall at 7:47 AM, holding a packet of Percy Pigs, crying.

Not elegant, single-tear crying. Proper, shoulder-shaking, mortifying crying in front of the gummy sweets whilst a woman with a shopping basket edged nervously past him towards the hummus.

Geoff was a management consultant. Forty-three years old. Three children. Beautiful home in Surrey. Partnership on the horizon. He ran half-marathons. He did Dry January. He was, by every observable metric, absolutely fine.

Except he wasn’t.

The Percy Pig incident wasn’t the beginning, though it felt like it. Looking back, Geoff would realise the warning signs had been accumulating like unpaid parking tickets stuffed in a glove compartment—ignored until the bailiff arrives.

Three months earlier, he’d developed an odd twitch in his left eyelid. Not constant, just a persistent flutter that appeared during client presentations, making him feel like he was winking inappropriately at the CFO of a pharmaceutical company. He’d blamed screen time, booked an eye test, and bought blue-light-blocking glasses that made him look like a pretentious jazz musician.

The eyelid kept twitching.

Then came the dreams. Not nightmares exactly, but peculiar, vivid scenarios where he’d arrive at important meetings completely unprepared—naked, or speaking gibberish, or discovering he’d somehow enrolled in a university course he’d never attended and the final exam was starting. He’d wake at 4 AM, heart hammering against his ribs like it was trying to escape, the smell of his own fear-sweat sharp and acrid in the darkness. His wife, Sarah, would mumble something comforting and roll over. Geoff would lie there, staring at the ceiling, counting his breaths until the alarm released him at 6.

The taste of coffee changed. His beloved morning ritual—that first scalding sip of the Guatemalan single-origin he ordered monthly—suddenly tasted metallic, wrong, like licking a battery. He switched brands. Then tried decaf. Then gave up entirely, which sent Sarah into a minor panic because Geoff without coffee was like Christmas without turkey: theoretically possible but deeply unsettling.

He started snapping. Sharp, brittle responses to innocuous questions. When his twelve-year-old daughter asked if he’d be home for dinner, he’d bitten her head off about “constant demands” and “not being able to predict the future.” The wounded look in her eyes had made him feel like he’d kicked a puppy. He’d apologised, blamed work stress, promised to do better.

But the snapping continued.

His body felt foreign. Heavy. Like he was operating a meat-suit that didn’t quite fit. His shoulders had crept up somewhere near his ears and refused to descend despite yoga, massage, and Sarah’s increasingly concerned suggestions that he “just relax.” His jaw ached from clenching. He’d chewed through two night guards in as many months.

The worst part? The indecision.

Geoff had built his career on decisive action. He could walk into a boardroom, assess seventeen different variables, and make a call that would affect thousands of employees within minutes. But suddenly, choosing between the chicken or salmon at a restaurant required genuine mental effort. He’d stare at menus whilst waiters shifted impatiently, paralysed by the weight of this insignificant choice. Sarah had started ordering for him.

Things he’d once loved—the Sunday morning run, the monthly book club, playing guitar badly in the garage—felt like obligations. Items on an endless to-do list that stretched beyond the horizon. He’d catch himself standing in the shower, the hot water drumming against his skull, thinking about absolutely nothing. Not meditating. Not relaxing. Just… vacant. An empty shop with the lights on but nobody home.

Which brought him to Percy Pigs.

It was his daughter’s birthday next week. He’d remembered, miraculously, and stopped to grab her favourite sweets. A small gesture. Easy. Except as he stood there, holding that cheerful pink packet, something inside him simply… broke.

The tears came from nowhere, hot and unstoppable. He felt the accumulated weight of three months—no, truthfully, closer to eighteen months—of pushing through, of telling himself he was fine, of one more late night, one more difficult client, one more weekend working whilst his family went to the cinema without him.

A shop assistant approached hesitantly. “Sir? Are you alright?”

Geoff looked at her—she couldn’t have been more than twenty, with kind eyes and a name badge that read “Priya”—and heard himself say, “I don’t think I am, actually.”

It was the first honest thing he’d said in months.

That evening, after the embarrassment had faded and he’d made it home with the Percy Pigs (and, oddly, a sense of relief), Sarah had suggested something radical: “Maybe you should talk to someone.”

“Like a therapist?” Geoff had bristled.

“Like someone who understands this stuff. Properly.”

Three weeks later, Geoff found himself in one of my storytelling circles during a stress management retreat, walking the Camino de Santiago through the golden countryside of south-west France. He sat on a wooden bench beside the paddock where my Friesian horses—Kash, Twiss, and Zorie—grazed peacefully alongside the smaller Falabellas, Loki and Lito. The autumn sun was warm on his face. The air smelled of grass and horse and possibility.

“Tell your story,” I’d invited the group. “Not the version where you’re fine. The real one.”

And Geoff did. He talked about Percy Pigs and twitching eyelids and the peculiar loneliness of lying awake at 4 AM. He talked about the shame of not recognising what was happening to him until he was crying in a supermarket.

The other participants—a CEO from Manchester, a surgeon from Edinburgh, a tech entrepreneur from London—nodded. They knew. They’d all missed their own symptoms too, attributing them to everything except what they actually were: burnout symptoms waving increasingly frantic flags.

In the storytelling circle, Geoff’s story wasn’t a confession. It was a map. And for the first time in eighteen months, he didn’t feel lost.

The Twenty Unconventional Burnout Symptoms: Understanding the Hidden Signs

Burnout symptoms typically conjure images of exhaustion and cynicism—the obvious markers we’ve been trained to recognise. But after two decades of clinical practice and fifteen years hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats, I’ve identified twenty unconventional burnout symptoms that successful professionals consistently overlook. These are the sneaky indicators that something’s seriously amiss, though you’ll likely attribute them to anything but burnout.

Physical Symptoms: When Your Body Whispers (Then Shouts)

1. Unexplained Physical Pain That Migrates

Your shoulder aches. Then your lower back. Then mysteriously, your hip. You visit physiotherapists, try different pillows, blame your chair. The pain moves because it’s not structural—it’s your body’s way of saying “STOP” in increasingly loud volumes.

2. Changes in Taste and Smell

Coffee tastes wrong. Foods you’ve loved for decades suddenly repulse you. This isn’t COVID; it’s your nervous system in overdrive, affecting sensory processing. When you’re chronically stressed, your body deprioritises “non-essential” functions—like enjoying your breakfast.

3. Persistent Low-Grade Illness

You’re not properly ill, but you’re never quite well. A constant slight sore throat, perpetual sniffles, that cough that won’t shift. Chronic stress suppresses immune function, leaving you vulnerable to every virus within a five-mile radius.

4. Unusual Skin Reactions

Rashes appear. Eczema flares. Your skin—the body’s largest organ and a direct reflection of internal stress—literally tries to shed the anxiety you’re carrying.

5. Digestive Chaos

Your gut is your “second brain,” and when burnout strikes, it protests loudly. IBS symptoms, nausea, appetite changes, or that constant slightly-sick feeling aren’t just digestive issues—they’re distress signals.

Cognitive Symptoms: When Your Brilliant Mind Betrays You

6. Decision Paralysis Over Trivial Matters

You can negotiate million-pound contracts but can’t choose which socks to wear. This isn’t indecisiveness; it’s decision fatigue. Your prefrontal cortex is exhausted from the constant high-stakes choices at work.

7. Loss of Procedural Memory

You forget how to do things you’ve done thousands of times. The route home. Your computer password. How to make toast. These aren’t senior moments—they’re signs your brain is running on emergency power mode.

8. Time Distortion

Mornings feel like afternoons. You can’t remember if something happened yesterday or last week. Burnout disrupts your internal clock and memory consolidation, creating an unsettling temporal fog.

9. Inability to Concentrate on Previously Enjoyed Activities

You pick up that novel you’ve been excited about and read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word. Your brain, overloaded with stress, can’t switch off enough to engage with anything non-essential.

10. Obsessive Thought Loops

The same worry circles endlessly. You replay conversations, anticipate disasters, or mentally compose emails at 2 AM. It’s like having a browser with seventy-three tabs open—everything’s slow and nothing quite works.

Emotional Symptoms: The Feelings You’re Not Supposed to Have

11. Crying at Unexpected Triggers

Insurance adverts. A kind word from a stranger. Percy Pigs. These disproportionate emotional responses occur because you’ve been suppressing feelings for so long that even minor stimuli breach the dam.

12. Sudden Rage Over Minor Inconveniences

Someone chews too loudly and you want to flip the table. The milk’s finished and you experience genuine fury. This isn’t about the milk—it’s accumulated stress finding the nearest available exit.

13. Emotional Numbness

Alternatively, you feel nothing. Your child wins an award. Your team closes a huge deal. You know you should feel something, but there’s just… static. Emotional numbness is your psyche’s circuit breaker, preventing complete overwhelm.

14. Inappropriate Emotional Responses

You laugh at serious moments or feel oddly detached during crises. Your emotional regulation system has gone haywire, producing responses that don’t match the situation.

15. Loss of Empathy

You find yourself irritated by others’ problems. Your team member’s struggling and instead of compassion, you feel annoyance. This isn’t you becoming a terrible person—it’s compassion fatigue, a recognised burnout symptom.

Behavioural Symptoms: The Things You Start (or Stop) Doing

16. Withdrawal from Social Connections

You cancel plans. Avoid phone calls. The thought of small talk feels insurmountable. When burnout strikes, social interaction requires energy you simply don’t have, even if you’re naturally extroverted.

17. Loss of Interest in Hobbies

Guitar gathering dust. Running shoes unused. The creative pursuits or physical activities that once energised you now feel like burdens. This anhedonia—inability to experience pleasure—is a classic burnout symptom often mistaken for depression.

18. Increased Reliance on Coping Mechanisms

An extra glass of wine becomes three. Online shopping sprees. Binge-watching entire series in one sitting. These aren’t moral failings—they’re attempts to self-soothe when proper stress management has become impossible.

19. Compulsive Productivity (The Paradox)

Counterintuitively, some people respond to burnout by working more. If you can’t sleep, you might as well answer emails, right? This desperate productivity is your brain trying to regain control whilst actually accelerating the burnout.

20. Neglect of Basic Self-Care

Showering feels effortful. You wear the same clothes repeatedly because choosing is exhausting. Teeth-brushing becomes optional. When you’re burnt out, even fundamental self-maintenance can feel overwhelming.

The Ripple Effect: How Your Burnout Affects the World

Here’s what successful people often fail to recognise: your burnout doesn’t exist in isolation. It ripples outward, affecting your family, your team, your organisation, and your broader community in ways both obvious and subtle.

The Professional Impact

When you’re experiencing burnout symptoms, your decision-making quality diminishes. Research shows that chronically stressed executives make more risk-averse choices, miss creative solutions, and struggle with long-term strategic thinking. You might maintain the appearance of competence whilst your actual cognitive performance has declined significantly. Your team notices—even if they don’t say anything. They observe the irritability, the inconsistency, the withdrawal. Leadership burnout creates anxiety that cascades through entire organisations.

The Family Toll

Your partner becomes your emotional shock absorber. Your children learn that work always comes first, that exhaustion is normal, that pushing through is virtue. You’re modelling burnout as a lifestyle choice, potentially programming the next generation to repeat your patterns. The dinner conversations you miss, the school plays you’re too tired to attend, the weekends spent recovering rather than connecting—these aren’t just moments; they’re the fabric of family life you’re gradually unravelling.

The Health Consequences

Untreated burnout doesn’t just go away. It evolves. Chronic stress increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, digestive disorders, and mental health crises. In my twenty years of medical practice, I’ve watched brilliant people’s health deteriorate dramatically because they mistook warning signs for weakness. That’s not sustainable success—it’s a slow-motion health crisis.

The Economic Cost

Burnout costs the global economy hundreds of billions annually in healthcare expenses, absenteeism, and reduced productivity. But more personally, it costs you. The partnership you might miss because you’re too exhausted to perform optimally. The business opportunity you can’t pursue because decision paralysis has you frozen. The creative innovations that die unborn because your brain is too overwhelmed to imagine anything beyond survival.

The Beginning of Something Beautiful

Yet here’s what I’ve witnessed repeatedly in my storytelling circles and Camino walking retreats: recognising these unconventional burnout symptoms can be transformative—not just for you, but for everyone connected to you.

When Geoff Bradley identified his symptoms, he didn’t just recover; he revolutionised his approach to work. He implemented boundaries his team actually respected because he modelled them consistently. He became more productive in fewer hours because he stopped confusing busy-ness with effectiveness. His children got their father back—not the exhausted shell who existed in their home, but the engaged, present parent they’d been missing.

More remarkably, Geoff became an advocate within his organisation for sustainable work practices. He shared his Percy Pig story (much to his initial mortification) at a leadership meeting, and the subsequent conversation revealed that half the senior team was struggling with similar symptoms they’d been hiding. The company implemented changes—mandatory disconnect time, mental health resources, workload audits—that improved retention, satisfaction, and actual business outcomes.

This is the paradox: confronting your burnout symptoms often makes you more effective, not less. You develop genuine resilience rather than brittle stoicism. You make better decisions because you’re not operating in crisis mode. You inspire loyalty because you’re authentically human rather than performing invulnerability.

Recognition is revolution. Not the dramatic, overnight kind, but the sustainable, meaningful kind that actually lasts.

Three Powerful Writing Prompts for Self-Exploration

Writing is one of the most effective tools for understanding your internal landscape. I’ve used these prompts in my storytelling circles with remarkable results. I suggest setting aside twenty minutes of uninterrupted time, making yourself comfortable, and writing without editing or judgment.

Prompt 1: The Unsent Letter

Write a letter to yourself from five years in the future. In this letter, your future self explains how recognising your burnout symptoms changed the trajectory of your life. What did you do differently? What did you stop doing? What became possible once you acknowledged what was happening? Be specific and compassionate—your future self isn’t angry with present-you for struggling; they’re grateful you finally listened.

Prompt 2: The Honest Inventory

Complete this sentence in as many ways as feel true: “Something I’ve been pretending not to notice is…” Don’t censor yourself. Include the trivial and the significant. The physical symptoms, the emotional responses, the behavioural changes. Sometimes seeing the accumulated list makes patterns visible that individual symptoms obscure.

Prompt 3: The Alternative Story

Describe a typical day in your life, but written from the perspective of someone who loves you—your partner, your child, your best friend. What do they notice that you don’t? How do they interpret your behaviour? This perspective shift can reveal how your burnout symptoms are affecting others and how visible they actually are to people who know you well.

Further Reading: Five Unconventional Books

These aren’t your typical self-help books about burnout. They’re thoughtful, research-backed explorations that approach the subject from unexpected angles.

1. “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman

I chose this because it addresses the root cause of so much professional burnout: our delusional belief that we can “optimise” our way to doing everything. Burkeman’s gentle, philosophical approach helps readers accept finitude rather than fighting it—a crucial perspective shift for recovering from burnout.

2. “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk

This landmark trauma text belongs on any burnout reading list because it explains precisely why unconventional physical symptoms emerge during chronic stress. Van der Kolk’s research illuminates how our bodies store stress and why ignoring physical symptoms never actually works.

3. “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle” by Emily and Amelia Nagoski

The Nagoski sisters explain the crucial distinction between stressors (the things that cause stress) and stress (the physiological response). This book is especially valuable for understanding why “dealing with” the problem isn’t the same as actually processing the stress response—and why so many conventional approaches fail.

4. “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” by Johann Hari

Hari’s investigation into depression reveals insights directly applicable to burnout, particularly around disconnection—from meaningful work, from other people, from values, from nature. His research helps explain why burnout isn’t just individual pathology but often a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances.

5. “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

This book challenges the productivity culture that creates burnout in the first place. Pang’s research into deliberate rest and recovery offers practical strategies whilst validating what burnt-out professionals need to hear: rest isn’t laziness; it’s a strategic necessity.

P.S. My own book, Embracing Change – in 10 Minutes a Day, which offers bite-sized, practical strategies for managing life’s transitions—including the transition from burnout to recovery. It’s specifically designed for busy professionals who insist they don’t have time for self-care (spoiler: you don’t have time not to).

Voices from the Journey: Guest Testimonials

Sarah M., Marketing Director, London

“I arrived at Margaretha’s Camino retreat convinced I was just tired. Tired! As if eighteen months of chronic stress was merely a sleep deficit. Within two days of walking, of slowing down enough to actually think, I realised I’d been experiencing at least twelve of these unconventional symptoms—the decision paralysis, the rage, the peculiar numbness. I’d been crying in my car before work most mornings, which I’d somehow normalised. The storytelling circles gave me permission to name what was happening without performing competence. Margaretha’s combination of medical expertise and genuine compassion created a space where I could finally admit: I’m not fine, and that’s okay. The Camino literally and metaphorically gave me a path forward. Two years later, I’m still walking—literally and figuratively—and those symptoms? Gone. Because I finally learned to recognise them as signals rather than character flaws.”

James P., Tech Entrepreneur, Bristol

“I’ve never been much for ‘sharing feelings,’ but Margaretha’s storytelling circles were different. Perhaps it was the setting—sitting outdoors with those magnificent horses nearby, something about their calm presence made vulnerability feel less terrifying. I heard my own story in others’ experiences—that same withdrawal, that loss of interest in things that once brought joy, that creeping sense of becoming someone I didn’t recognise. One participant talked about crying over Percy Pigs, and I suddenly remembered sobbing over a podcast about penguins the previous month, which I’d shoved into the ‘weird, let’s never mention it’ category of my brain. The circle helped me recognise that these weren’t isolated peculiarities but connected symptoms of something bigger. Being witnessed without judgment, in a group of fellow high-achievers who’d also missed the signs, was transformative. I learned that recognising burnout symptoms isn’t admitting defeat—it’s demonstrating wisdom.”

FAQs: Your Questions Answered

Q: I’m successful and high-functioning. Can I really be burnt out?

Absolutely. In fact, high-functioning professionals are often the most burnt out because you’ve developed sophisticated compensatory mechanisms. You’re brilliant at pushing through, at maintaining appearances, at delivering despite being depleted. Burnout doesn’t discriminate based on competence—it actually targets it. Your very ability to keep performing whilst burning out delays recognition and intervention, often leading to more severe symptoms.

Q: Aren’t some of these symptoms just normal stress or ageing?

Context matters. Occasional decision fatigue after a demanding week? Normal. Sustained inability to make trivial decisions despite adequate rest? Potential burnout symptom. The key is pattern, persistence, and accumulation. If you’re experiencing multiple unconventional symptoms simultaneously, lasting weeks or months, dismissing them as “normal” is precisely the cognitive bias that perpetuates burnout.

Q: What’s the difference between burnout and depression?

There’s significant overlap, and they can coexist, but burnout typically has a clear connection to work or caregiving stress, whilst depression can emerge without external stressors. Burnout symptoms often improve with genuine rest and removal from stressors; depression typically requires more intensive intervention. That said, untreated burnout can evolve into clinical depression, which is why early recognition matters. If you’re unsure, consult a medical professional—ideally one who understands both conditions.

Q: How long does recovery from burnout take?

There’s no universal timeline, which I know is frustrating for goal-oriented professionals. Mild burnout might resolve with several weeks of genuine rest and boundary implementation. Severe, chronic burnout can require months or even years of sustained lifestyle changes. Recovery isn’t linear—you’ll have good days and setbacks. What I’ve observed is that recovery accelerates dramatically when you stop trying to “optimise” it and simply commit to the process with patience and self-compassion.

Q: Can I recover whilst remaining in the same job?

Sometimes, but it requires significant boundary changes and organisational support. I’ve worked with executives who’ve recovered by renegotiating their roles, delegating differently, and implementing non-negotiable recovery practices. However, if your work environment is toxic, if your organisation actively punishes boundaries, or if the fundamental nature of your role is unsustainable, recovery might require a job change. This isn’t failure—it’s wisdom. Not every situation is fixable, and recognising that is a sign of health, not weakness.

Conclusion: The Courage to Notice

Here’s what I’ve learned from two decades of medical practice, fifteen years hosting Camino walking retreats, countless storytelling circles, and eight books exploring how humans cope with life’s most challenging moments: noticing is an act of courage.

Noticing that you cried over Percy Pigs and that means something.

Noticing that your body has been trying to tell you something for months, and you’ve been too busy to listen.

Noticing that success without sustainability isn’t actually success—it’s a beautifully decorated path toward collapse.

The twenty unconventional burnout symptoms outlined here aren’t a comprehensive diagnostic tool—I’m not attempting to replace proper medical evaluation. Rather, they’re an invitation to pay attention. To trust that when your body whispers, you don’t need to wait until it’s screaming. To understand that the most successful people aren’t those who never struggle, but those who recognise struggle and respond with wisdom rather than denial.

Geoff Bradley’s story isn’t unique. I’ve heard variations of it dozens of times—in consultation rooms, on Camino trails, in storytelling circles surrounded by horses who somehow make vulnerability feel safer. The details differ, but the arc remains consistent: something breaks through the armour of competence, forcing recognition. And that recognition, whilst initially terrifying, becomes the foundation for something more sustainable, more authentic, and ultimately more successful than the brittle perfection that preceded it.

You’re reading this for a reason. Perhaps you recognised yourself in these symptoms. Perhaps you recognised someone you love. Perhaps you’re simply curious about why successful people struggle in ways that don’t appear in the leadership literature.

Whatever brought you here, I invite you to stay curious. Notice without judging. Pay attention to what your brilliant, overworked body and mind are trying to tell you. Because recognising these unconventional burnout symptoms isn’t the end of your success story.

It’s the beginning of a better chapter—one where you’re sustainable, present, and genuinely well, not just appearing to be.

And that, I promise you from both my medical expertise and lived experience, is worth more than any partnership, any deal, any achievement that requires you to betray yourself to attain it.

You deserve to be well. Not just successful—well. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, though our culture insists they are.

Proving otherwise starts with noticing. And you’ve just taken the first step.

A Path Forward: Walking Towards Wellness

If this article has resonated—if you’ve recognised yourself in these symptoms, if Geoff’s story felt uncomfortably familiar, if you’re ready to do something different—I’d like to invite you to consider something that’s helped dozens of successful professionals reclaim their wellbeing.

My Camino de Santiago Crossroads Retreat in the sun-drenched countryside of south-west France offers something rare in our hyperconnected world: genuine space to pause, reflect, and heal.

Imagine this: walking ancient pilgrimage routes through rolling hills and medieval villages, each step a meditation, each day an opportunity to shed the weight you’ve been carrying. The rhythm of walking—steady, purposeful, gentle—creates a natural container for processing stress. There’s something profoundly healing about putting one foot in front of the other, mile after mile, with no agenda beyond presence.

Our days blend mindful hiking with meditation and mindfulness exercises specifically designed for stress management. We explore techniques grounded in both my medical training and my experience as an NLP Master Practitioner and Medical Hypnotherapist—practical tools you’ll actually use when you return to your demanding life.

But perhaps the most transformative element is our storytelling circles. Gathered in the peaceful presence of my Friesian horses—Kash, Twiss, and Zorie—and my gentle Falabella ponies, Loki and Lito, we create a space where successful people can finally stop performing competence and simply be human. There’s something about the horses’ calm, non-judgmental presence that makes vulnerability feel less terrifying. They don’t care about your job title or your achievements; they respond to your authenticity. It’s remarkably liberating.

In these circles, you’ll hear your story reflected in others’ experiences. You’ll recognise that the unconventional burnout symptoms you’ve been hiding aren’t character flaws but comprehensible responses to unsustainable circumstances. You’ll discover that the most successful people aren’t those who never struggle, but those brave enough to acknowledge struggle and ask for support.

This isn’t a luxury spa break. It’s not a corporate team-building exercise. It’s dedicated time to reconnect with yourself, to process what you’ve been pushing through, and to develop sustainable practices for managing stress without sacrificing success.

The Camino has been welcoming weary pilgrims for over a thousand years. Perhaps it’s your turn to walk towards wellness. Find out more

Stress destroys Lives. To find out what you can do to safeguard your sanity by taking my insight-giving quiz, subscribe to my mailing list.

I need six months of vacation, twice a year.

You’re contemplating solo travel but terrified you’ll end up sobbing into your overpriced airport coffee? Or perhaps you’ve already booked that ticket and now you’re catastrophising about everything from pickpockets to poisonous spiders? Either way, you’re in the right place. This article shares twelve hard-won lessons from someone who’s made every possible solo travel mistake (yes, including accidentally joining a funeral procession in rural France whilst wearing fluorescent cycling gear). You’ll discover why your smartphone is both your best friend and worst enemy, how to navigate the peculiar loneliness of eating magnificent food alone, and why talking to strangers might just save your sanity. Plus, there’s a rather amusing story about a woman named Alice who learned these lessons the spectacular way on the Camino de Santiago.

5 Key Takeaways for First-Time Solo Travellers

1. Your discomfort is temporary; your regret about not going is permanent – That knot in your stomach before departure? It dissolves approximately seventeen minutes after you’ve successfully navigated your first solo restaurant meal.
2. Pack half the clothes, twice the confidence – You’ll wear the same three outfits anyway, and that “just in case” evening gown will mock you from the bottom of your rucksack for the entire journey.
3. Loneliness and solitude are entirely different experiences – One feels like punishment; the other feels like freedom. Learning to distinguish between them is the secret superpower of solo travel.
4. The locals know better than TripAdvisor – That Instagram-famous restaurant is probably mediocre and overpriced. The place where the postman eats his lunch? That’s where magic happens.
5. You’re more capable than you think – Every problem you solve independently (even if it’s just working out the European loo flush mechanism) builds a small fortress of self-belief that nobody can take away from you.

Introduction: The Permission Slip You Didn’t Know You Needed

Something nobody tells you about solo travel: the hardest part isn’t navigating foreign train systems or deciphering restaurant menus written entirely in mysterious squiggles. It’s not even the actual being alone bit, though that’s admittedly peculiar at first.

No, the hardest part is giving yourself permission to go.

We women are spectacular at finding reasons why now isn’t the right time. The dog needs walking. The garden needs weeding. That friend-of-a-friend’s cousin’s wedding requires attendance. We’ve become world-class experts at prioritising everyone else’s needs whilst our own dreams gather dust in the corner like forgotten Christmas decorations.

But here’s the truth that took me embarrassingly long to grasp: your life is happening right now. Not after retirement, not when you’re thinner, not when you’re braver. Now. This minute. And if you’re reading this article whilst simultaneously talking yourself out of that trip you’ve been fantasising about for the past six months, consider this your official permission slip.

I’m Margaretha Montagu, and for over twenty years, I’ve been guiding people – particularly women – through transformational experiences on the Camino de Santiago in southwest France. I’ve witnessed hundreds of first-time solo travellers arrive at my retreats near Eauze looking absolutely terrified, convinced they’ve made a catastrophic mistake. And I’ve watched those same women leave days later, walking taller, laughing louder, and already planning their next adventure.

Through my storytelling circles (held both during retreats and as separate gatherings), I’ve heard countless travel tales – the triumphant, the disastrous, and the downright hilarious. These stories, shared with vulnerability and courage around flickering candlelight or beneath the vast Gascon sky, have taught me something profound: we all share the same fears, make the same mistakes, and discover the same revelations when we finally take that leap into solo travel.

So let me share with you the twelve lessons I wish someone had whispered in my ear before I embarked on my own journey. But first, let me tell you about Alice…

Alice Newman’s Spectacular Introduction to Solo Travel on the Camino

Alice Newman arrived at the tiny train station in Eauze on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, looking like someone who’d packed for every possible apocalypse scenario. Her rucksack – a behemoth in aggressive purple – appeared to have its own gravitational field. She emerged from the train carriage backwards, wrestling the bag through the doorway whilst simultaneously clutching a rolling suitcase, a duty-free shopping bag that kept splitting, and what appeared to be a ukulele in a soft case.

The platform was empty except for a ginger cat that regarded Alice with the withering disdain only French cats can properly muster.

“Bonjour, chat,” Alice said brightly, her voice pitched slightly too high with nervousness. The cat yawned, revealing a pink tongue and impressive indifference, before sauntering away with its tail at full mast.

Alice consulted her phone – battery at 8%, naturally – and then the crumpled paper printout of my retreat directions. The afternoon sun felt thick as honey on her skin, and the air smelled of warm stone, lavender, and something yeasty that might have been the boulangerie on Rue de la République. In the distance, church bells chimed three times, the sound hanging in the air like audible mist.

She’d been walking for approximately four minutes when the handle of her rolling suitcase – which she’d purchased specifically for this trip despite my email explicitly advising against wheeled luggage on the Camino – snapped clean off. The case tipped sideways with a crash that startled a nearby pigeon into explosive flight.

“Brilliant,” Alice muttered. “Absolutely brilliant.”

She stood there on the sun-bleached pavement, squinting at the map, whilst doubt began its familiar creeping crawl up her spine. What on earth was she doing here? She was a forty-three-year-old accountant from Northampton who got anxious ordering pizza over the phone. Who was she kidding, thinking she could do this?

The rational part of her brain – the bit that had convinced her to book this retreat after three years of “maybe next year” – reminded her that she was only 1.2 kilometres from the retreat centre. She could absolutely manage 1.2 kilometres. She’d walked further going round IKEA looking for tea towels.

So Alice did what any sensible woman would do: she abandoned the broken suitcase behind a recycling bin (she’d retrieve it later, she told herself, knowing she absolutely wouldn’t), redistributed her belongings between her rucksack and the splitting duty-free bag, and set off again.

That’s when she realised she’d been reading the map upside down.

Twenty minutes later, she found herself in someone’s back garden, face to face with a extremely large pig. The pig – who seemed equally surprised by this development – made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a query. Behind Alice, she could hear dogs barking and a woman’s voice calling something in rapid French.

“I am so sorry,” Alice said to the pig, backing away slowly. “I appear to have taken a wrong turn.”

The pig snorted, which seemed like reasonable commentary on the situation.

By the time Alice finally located the retreat centre, she was sweating through her carefully chosen “first day impression” linen shirt, her hair had staged a full rebellion against its clip, and the duty-free bag had finally given up entirely, depositing three novels and a family-sized Toblerone into a particularly muddy patch. Her trainers – which she’d bought specifically because they were “suitable for light hiking and very comfortable according to seventeen Amazon reviews” – had already raised a blister on her right heel that felt like it had its own heartbeat.

I was grooming Twiss, one of my Friesian horses, when Alice rounded the corner. She stopped dead, taking in the scene: the converted stone barn with its lavender-framed doorway, the paddock where Kashkin, and Zorie stood like living sculptures, and Loki and Lito, my Falabella horses, who were presumably plotting something mischievous behind the hay bales.

“Is this…” Alice’s voice cracked slightly. “Is this the Camino CrossRoads retreat?”

“It is indeed,” I replied, setting down the brush. “And you must be Alice. Welcome.”

That’s when she started crying. Not delicate, camera-ready tears, but proper shoulder-shaking sobs that seemed to come from somewhere deep and long-ignored. Kash, curious as always, stretched his magnificent neck over the fence rail and exhaled warm, grassy breath across Alice’s tear-stained face.

“I’m sorry,” Alice gasped between sobs. “I just… I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never travelled alone. I got lost. There was a pig. My suitcase broke. I don’t even know why I’m here. My sister said I was being ridiculous, that I should join a book club like a normal person instead of gallivanting off to France by myself at my age…”

I handed her a tissue and waited, giving her the space her tears needed. Twiss stood patiently, this enormous gentle creature offering the kind of non-judgmental presence only horses can provide.

“The thing is,” Alice continued, wiping her nose rather inelegantly, “I’ve spent my entire life doing what everyone else thought I should do. Safe choices. Sensible choices. And then I turned forty-three, and I looked at my life, and I thought… is this it? Is this all there is? The same conversations, the same Sunday roast, the same routes to work? And I kept seeing these photos of the Camino, and I just… I wanted to know what it felt like. To walk with nothing but what you can carry. To be nobody’s wife or mother or colleague for a few days. Just… me.”

She looked up at me, vulnerability and defiance mixing in her reddened eyes. “Does that sound utterly mad?”

“It sounds,” I said gently, “like you’re exactly where you need to be.”

Over the next five days, I watched Alice transform in the ways I’ve witnessed countless times before, yet which never cease to move me. That first evening, at our storytelling circle, she could barely speak above a whisper when sharing why she’d come. But by day three, emboldened by the daily walks, the meditation sessions, and the quiet confidence that comes from successfully navigating each small challenge, she was telling stories that had the entire group weeping with laughter.

The Alice who left on Sunday morning was not the same Alice who’d arrived crying in the driveway. This Alice walked taller. Smiled more readily. Had learned that she could read maps (albeit occasionally upside down), handle discomfort (the blister had been thoroughly addressed), and perhaps most importantly, enjoy her own company.

“I think,” she said to me as she prepared to leave, her rucksack now sensibly packed, “I think I might actually be quite good at this solo travel thing.”

And the truth is, she was right. Because solo travel isn’t about being fearless or having everything sorted. It’s about taking that first terrifying step despite the fear, and then the next one, and the next. It’s about learning that you’re far more capable, resourceful, and resilient than you ever imagined.

Alice’s story illustrates something I’ve observed through years of facilitating storytelling circles: our travel disasters often become our most treasured memories. The broken suitcase, the wrong turn, the unexpected pig – these aren’t the parts that go wrong. These are the parts that make the story worth telling, that transform a trip into an adventure, that reveal character we didn’t know we possessed.

The 12 Solo Travel Tips I Wish I’d Known (Before Learning Them the Hard Way)

1. Your Luggage Should Be Your Friend, Not Your Nemesis

If you can’t comfortably carry your bag for fifteen minutes, you’ve packed too much. Full stop. I don’t care if you “might” need that second pair of heels or if you’re “just being prepared” with seven different jacket options. Every extra kilogram is a small act of self-sabotage.

The reality: You’ll wear approximately 20% of what you pack and resent the remaining 80% every single time you have to move locations. Pack for a week maximum, regardless of trip length. Accommodation comes with sinks. Washing clothes is an adventure in itself, and hotel laundry services are often brilliantly affordable.

What to pack instead of clothes: A portable phone charger, a universal adapter, a water bottle, and a book that makes you think differently. Also, bring a sarong or large scarf – the most versatile item in any traveller’s kit. It’s a blanket, a beach towel, a modest cover-up for religious sites, a picnic rug, a dress, and occasionally, a superhero cape when you’re feeling particularly triumphant.

2. Eating Alone Is a Skill Worth Mastering

The restaurant solo meal is many travellers’ greatest fear, hovering somewhere between public speaking and discovering a spider in the shower. We imagine everyone staring, pitying us, wondering what tragic circumstance has led to our solitary dining situation.

Here’s the truth: nobody is looking at you. They’re too absorbed in their own lives, their own conversations, their own phones. And even if they are looking? They’re probably thinking, “Good for her. I wish I had the confidence to dine alone.”

The secret: Bring a notebook or book if you need a security blanket initially, but try to wean yourself off props. Dining alone is an opportunity to actually taste your food, to people-watch shamelessly, to have a conversation with the waiter that might reveal the best local secret spot. Some of my most memorable meals have been solo affairs where I was fully present to the experience rather than distracted by companion conversation.

Practical tip: Lunch is easier than dinner for beginners. Start there. Also, sitting at the bar rather than a table often feels more natural and can lead to lovely spontaneous conversations with bartenders or neighbouring diners.

3. Your Phone Is Both Blessing and Curse

Navigation apps have made solo travel infinitely more accessible. Translation apps are minor miracles. The ability to video call home when loneliness strikes is genuinely comforting. But your phone can also rob you of the entire point of solo travel: being present, noticing, discovering, getting gloriously lost and finding your way back.

The balance: Designate phone-free hours. Use your phone for navigation to get somewhere, then put it away and actually experience being there. The Instagram stories can wait. The emails definitely can wait. That moment – right now, right here – cannot.

Controversial opinion: Some of my retreat participants initially panic when they discover the mobile signal near our Camino routes is patchy at best. By day two, they’re describing it as liberating. There’s something profoundly peaceful about being temporarily unreachable, knowing that the world will manage perfectly well without your immediate input.

4. Loneliness and Solitude Are Not the Same Thing

Solitude is choosing to be alone and finding richness in it. Loneliness is feeling isolated even in crowds. Solo travel will introduce you to both, sometimes within the same hour.

The wisdom: When loneliness strikes (and it will), don’t panic or convince yourself you’ve made a mistake. Loneliness is often your psyche adjusting to the unfamiliar silence where other people’s needs, opinions, and energies usually reside. Sit with it. Journal through it. Walk through it. It usually passes.

The counterintuitive bit: Sometimes the solution to loneliness isn’t seeking company but leaning further into solitude until you break through to the other side, where you discover you’re actually rather enjoyable company for yourself.

5. You’ll Make Friends in the Most Unexpected Ways

Solo travel doesn’t mean lonely travel. In fact, you’ll often find it easier to connect with others when you’re alone. People are far more likely to chat with a solo traveller than interrupt a couple or group.

Where connections happen: Hostel common rooms, walking tours, cooking classes, queues (British people, this is your superpower), and anywhere you ask someone to take your photo. The photo request is the universal icebreaker.

The storytelling circle effect: I’ve witnessed this phenomenon repeatedly in my circles. When people share stories – particularly about their vulnerabilities, fears, and adventures – bonds form with remarkable speed. Strangers become friends. Acquaintances become confidants. It’s why I’ve made storytelling circles central to my retreats. There’s something about the combination of shared experience, vulnerability, and the non-judgmental presence of horses that creates psychological safety for authentic connection.

6. Trust Your Instincts, But Question Your Anxiety

Your instincts are ancient, wise, and designed to keep you alive. Your anxiety, however, is often an overprotective friend who sees danger in every shadow and catastrophe in every minor inconvenience.

Learning the difference: Instinct feels calm and clear, even when it’s warning you. It says, “Something’s off here. Let’s leave.” Anxiety feels frantic and catastrophic. It says, “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE. WE’RE GOING TO DIE. WHY DID WE EVER LEAVE HOME?”

Practical application: If something feels genuinely wrong – a person, a place, a situation – trust that feeling and extract yourself. If you’re just feeling scared because everything is unfamiliar, that’s anxiety doing its anxiety thing. Acknowledge it (“Thank you for trying to protect me, anxiety”), then do the thing anyway.

Safety basics: Share your itinerary with someone back home. Keep copies of important documents in separate locations. Trust local women – if you’re lost or concerned, looking for help from other women is often your safest bet. And for goodness’ sake, don’t advertise that you’re travelling alone to complete strangers, particularly men who are paying you too much attention.

7. Embrace the Glorious Art of Getting Lost

Getting lost is not a failure of navigation; it’s an opportunity for discovery. Some of my most treasured travel memories involve taking wrong turns that led to unexpected churches, hidden cafés, or conversations that changed my perspective.

The exception: Don’t get lost at night in unfamiliar areas. That’s not adventurous; that’s silly. Do your exploring during daylight hours when you can properly assess your surroundings and when help, if needed, is readily available.

The secret: Download offline maps before you travel. Google Maps and Maps.me both offer this function. Then you can wander freely, secure in the knowledge that you can always find your way back.

8. Budget for Generosity (Including Towards Yourself)

Solo travel can be more expensive than travelling with companions because you’re not splitting accommodation or meal costs. But pinching every penny creates a stingy, anxious experience that rather defeats the purpose.

The balance: Budget wisely, but build in room for spontaneity. When the fishmonger in the market offers you a taste of something unidentifiable, say yes. When you stumble upon a small museum that charges €5 entry, go in. When the locally made olive oil costs twice what the supermarket version does, buy it anyway and consider it an edible souvenir.

The gift to yourself: Budget for at least one experience that feels extravagant. Maybe it’s a proper massage, a cooking class, or a meal at that special restaurant you’ve been eyeing. Solo travel is partly about proving you can be delightfully generous with yourself, that you’re worth the investment.

9. Routines Will Save Your Sanity

When everything is unfamiliar, small routines become anchors. They provide structure, reduce decision fatigue, and give you something reliable to hold onto when everything else feels strange.

Examples: Morning coffee in the same café for a few days running. An evening walk at sunset. Journaling before bed. A specific time for calling home. These aren’t boring limitations; they’re gentle rhythms that help you feel grounded whilst everything else is gloriously chaotic.

The retreat rhythm: This is partly why my Camino retreats incorporate daily meditation, regular walking times, and evening storytelling circles. The predictable structure allows participants to relax into the experience rather than constantly wondering what’s happening next. It’s the same principle you can apply to your own solo travels.

10. Learn Basic Local Phrases (And Mispronounce Them with Confidence)

You don’t need fluency. You need approximately ten phrases: hello, thank you, please, excuse me, where is, how much, this one, delicious, toilet, and help. Master these, and you’ll navigate 90% of situations.

The magic bit: The effort matters more than accuracy. Locals appreciate attempts at their language, even spectacularly butchered ones. It shows respect and openness, and it often leads to patient, amused interactions where both parties end up gesticulating wildly and laughing together.

In France specifically: “Bonjour” before any interaction is non-negotiable. It’s not being friendly; it’s basic manners. Launch straight into English without greeting first, and you’ll encounter significantly less helpfulness. Say “Bonjour, parlez-vous anglais?” and watch doors open that seemed firmly closed moments before.

11. Document the Internal Journey, Not Just the External

Yes, take photos. Capture those sunset moments and architectural details. But also document what you’re feeling, thinking, discovering about yourself. The photos will trigger memories of places; the journal will trigger memories of who you were becoming.

The practice: Write in the moment, not just later when everything is sanitised through memory’s filter. Write when you’re scared. Write when you’re euphoric. Write when you’re sitting in a café feeling slightly ridiculous and wholly alive.

Years later: You’ll forget the name of that restaurant or which Tuesday you visited which museum. But you won’t forget how it felt to realise you could navigate an entire day in a foreign country by yourself, or the moment you stopped checking your phone every five minutes, or the evening you chose to sit under stars instead of heading back to your room because other people’s opinions about what you “should” do suddenly mattered significantly less.

12. Your First Solo Trip Won’t Be Perfect (And That’s Rather the Point)

If you’re waiting until you feel completely ready, completely confident, completely certain, you’ll never go. The truth is, you’ll never feel entirely ready for something you’ve never done before. Readiness comes from doing, not from contemplating doing.

Permission to be imperfect: You’ll pack wrong things. You’ll get lost. You’ll have meals that are disappointing and accommodation that’s less charming than the photos suggested. You’ll have moments of profound doubt where you wonder why you’re putting yourself through this instead of being comfortably at home in your pajamas watching Netflix.

And then: You’ll have a moment – maybe small, maybe spectacular – where you realise you’re doing it. You’re actually doing it. You’re navigating a foreign country by yourself. You’re solving problems independently. You’re discovering that you’re resourceful, capable, and far stronger than you imagined.

That moment? That’s what you came for. Everything else is just the journey to that realisation.

The Deeper Truth About Solo Travel

Solo travel, at its heart, isn’t really about the destinations at all. It’s about the relationship you develop with yourself when nobody else is watching, when there’s no audience for your personality, when you’re free to shed the roles and expectations you’ve been carrying like invisible luggage.

I’ve hosted women on retreat for over twenty years, and I’ve come to understand that the physical journey is merely the container for something far more profound. When you walk day after day with nothing but what you can carry, when you strip away the accumulated responsibilities and identities that usually define you, something remarkable happens. You remember who you actually are underneath all of that.

The Camino has been a pilgrimage route for over a thousand years, walked by millions seeking something – penance, adventure, healing, answers, or simply a pause from the relentless pace of modern life. What I’ve observed is that everyone who walks it finds exactly what they need, though rarely what they expected.

This is true of all solo travel, really. You set out thinking you’re going to find stunning landscapes or taste extraordinary food or see famous landmarks. And yes, you’ll find those things. But what you’ll actually discover is far more valuable: you’ll find out what you’re capable of when you’re solely responsible for yourself.

The Solo Travel Learning Curve

There’s a predictable arc to most people’s first solo travel experience, and understanding it helps normalise the emotional rollercoaster you’ll likely experience.

Days 1-2: Excitement mixed with terror. Everything is hyper-stimulating. You’re acutely aware of being alone. Every interaction feels significant. You’re probably over-thinking simple tasks like ordering breakfast or finding the bus stop. Your senses are overwhelmed with newness.

Days 3-4: The wobble. This is when doubt creeps in. The initial adrenaline has worn off. You’re tired. Something has probably gone a bit wrong. You might be feeling homesick or questioning why you’re doing this to yourself. This is the phase when many people nearly give up. Don’t. This is just your psyche adjusting to the unfamiliar.

Days 5-7: The settling. You’ve developed a rhythm. You know how to work the shower. You’ve found a café you like. You’re no longer startled every time someone speaks to you in a language you don’t understand. You’re starting to enjoy your own company.

Day 8 onwards: The transformation. You’ve crossed some invisible threshold. You’re comfortable being alone. You’ve stopped constantly checking your phone for validation from the world you left behind. You’re present. You’re noticing things. You’re having conversations with strangers. You’re making decisions based purely on what you want to do, not what you think you should do. You’re free.

Understanding this progression helps you push through the wobble phase, knowing that the transformation phase is waiting just beyond it.

Why Women’s Solo Travel Differently

I work primarily with women on my retreats, and there’s a reason for that. Women’s relationship with solo travel is complicated by layers of socialisation that men simply don’t contend with to the same degree.

We’re taught from girlhood to be careful, to not take unnecessary risks, to consider how our actions might be perceived. We’re told the world is dangerous for women alone. We’re trained to always be aware of our surroundings, to carry our keys between our knuckles, to never leave drinks unattended, to watch what we wear and where we walk and how we smile.

All of this is true, to varying degrees. But it’s also incomplete. Yes, women face specific safety considerations when travelling alone. But we also face an internal barrier that’s often more limiting than any external danger: the belief that we shouldn’t be doing this at all, that wanting to explore the world independently is somehow selfish or foolish or dangerous beyond reason.

Through my storytelling circles, I’ve heard women share the internal arguments they had with themselves before booking their first solo trip. The guilt about leaving families. The worry about what others would think. The fear of appearing selfish for prioritising their own desires. The concern about seeming like they’re having a midlife crisis or running away from something.

Very rarely does anyone think they’re running towards something, which is usually far closer to the truth.

The Role of Storytelling in Processing Experience

This is why storytelling circles have become such a vital component of my retreats. Sharing our stories – our fears, our failures, our small victories – is how we make sense of experience. It’s how we transform events into meaning.

In our circles, I provide prompts: “Tell us about a time you surprised yourself.” “Share a moment when you felt completely lost.” “Describe your first solo meal in a restaurant.” The stories that emerge are always more honest, funnier, and more moving than anyone expects.

There’s something about the combination of the Camino, the horses, and the circle itself that creates psychological safety. People share things they’ve never told anyone. They laugh until they cry. They cry until they laugh. They discover that their struggles are universal, not unique failures. They hear echoes of their own journey in others’ stories.

This communal processing of individual experience is ancient and powerful. It’s how humans have made sense of their lives for millennia, sitting around fires sharing stories. In our modern, isolated lives, we’ve lost much of this. My circles attempt to reclaim it.

The Unexpected Gift of Animal Presence

My Friesian horses – Twiss, Kashkin, and Zorie – and my Falabellas – Loki and Lito – aren’t just attractive backdrop elements for Instagram photos (though they do photograph magnificently). Their presence serves a deeper purpose.

Horses are prey animals, which means they’re exquisitely attuned to emotional energy. They respond to what you’re actually feeling, not what you’re pretending to feel. You can’t fake calm around a horse. You can’t pretend confidence you don’t possess. They’ll sense the truth and respond accordingly.

This makes them remarkable teachers for solo travel preparation. If you can learn to regulate your emotions enough to be calm around a thousand-pound animal, navigating a foreign train station suddenly seems rather manageable.

But beyond that, horses offer non-judgmental presence. They don’t care about your career, your appearance, your social status, or any of the things humans often judge each other on. They care whether you’re present, genuine, and calm. It’s remarkably refreshing.

I’ve watched countless retreat participants have breakthroughs simply by spending quiet time with the horses, grooming them, walking with them, or just sitting in their presence. There’s something about being truly seen by a creature that wants nothing from you except authenticity that cracks open defences we didn’t even realise we were carrying.

Further Reading: 5 Unconventional Books for Solo Travellers

Most solo travel book lists recommend the same predictable titles – “Eat Pray Love,” “Wild,” “The Art of Travel.” Those are lovely books, but I’d rather share five less obvious choices that offer genuine wisdom for the internal journey solo travel represents.

1. “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” by Rebecca Solnit

This isn’t a travel guide; it’s a philosophical exploration of what happens when we move through landscapes at walking pace. Solnit examines walking as a form of thinking, of being, of processing the world. For anyone embarking on the Camino or any walking-focused journey, this book illuminates why something as simple as putting one foot in front of the other can be so profoundly transformative. It’s scholarly without being pretentious, and it will change how you think about the simple act of walking.

2. “The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors” by James Edward Mills

This book tackles an uncomfortable truth: the outdoor adventure and solo travel worlds have been predominantly white spaces, often unwelcoming to people of colour. Mills combines memoir with historical examination, exploring why this matters and how it’s changing. I include it because truly understanding solo travel requires acknowledging that the experience isn’t identical for everyone. Your race, gender, sexuality, and ability all affect how you navigate the world, and pretending otherwise is naive. This book expands perspective magnificently.

3. “Women Who Travel: A Memoir in Passages” edited by Lavinia Spalding

This anthology collects short pieces from women travellers across different eras and cultures. What makes it valuable isn’t just the diversity of voices but the honesty. These aren’t sanitised “everything was magical” travel essays. They include fear, failure, awkwardness, and all the messy bits that travel actually involves. Reading it feels like sitting in one of my storytelling circles, hearing real experiences from real women.

4. “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthiessen

Ostensibly, this is about a naturalist’s journey to the Himalayas searching for the rare snow leopard. Actually, it’s about grief, Buddhism, and what we’re really searching for when we travel. Matthiessen wrote it after his wife’s death, and it’s suffused with the kind of raw honesty that comes from having nothing left to lose. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a profound one. If you’re traveling solo to process something difficult – grief, divorce, illness, life transitions – this book will speak to those depths.

5. “Lab Girl” by Hope Jahren

This might seem an odd inclusion on a solo travel list, as it’s actually a memoir by a geobiologist about her life in science. But Jahren writes about the natural world with such intimate wonder, such careful attention, that it transforms how you see everything. Solo travel is partly about developing the capacity to truly notice your surroundings, to be present to detail and beauty. This book is a masterclass in that kind of attention.

P.S. About My Own Book

I’d be remiss not to mention my own book, “You ARE Good Enough,” which addresses the fundamental doubt that stops many people from pursuing solo travel in the first place. The book isn’t specifically about travel; it’s about the pervasive belief so many of us carry that we’re not quite enough – not brave enough, not interesting enough, not capable enough, not deserving enough.

This belief becomes particularly loud when we contemplate solo travel. It whispers that we need more experience before we can possibly do this, that we should wait until we’re thinner/richer/braver/younger/older, that other people manage solo travel because they’re inherently different from us in some fundamental way.

The book challenges those assumptions systematically, offering both practical strategies and philosophical reframing for recognising your own sufficiency. Because until you believe you’re enough exactly as you are right now, you’ll keep postponing the life you want to be living.

Real Voices: Testimonials from the Journey

From Sarah M., First-Time Solo Camino Walker

“I arrived at Margaretha’s retreat convinced I’d made a terrible mistake. At 56, having never travelled alone, having barely left my hometown except for family holidays, I was certain I was too old, too inexperienced, too everything to be attempting the Camino. The first night, during the storytelling circle, I couldn’t even speak without crying. I felt ridiculous.

But Margaretha didn’t rush me or try to fix me. She just let me be exactly where I was. Over the next week, walking the Camino stages at my own pace, sitting with the horses (Kashkin particularly seemed to understand my anxiety), and hearing other women’s stories in the evening circles, something shifted.

I realised I’d spent my entire adult life waiting for permission – from my parents, my husband, my children, my colleagues – to do what I wanted. And the remarkable truth was that the only person who could give me that permission was me.

The last night, I shared my story again in the circle. This time, I didn’t cry. I laughed. And the next morning, I started planning my next solo adventure. I’m heading to Scotland in the spring. By myself. And I’m not scared anymore. Well, I’m a bit scared. But it’s the exciting kind of scared now, not the paralysing kind.”

From Jennifer L., Storytelling Circle Member

“I’d been attending Margaretha’s storytelling circles for about six months before I finally worked up the courage to book my first solo trip – just a long weekend in Paris, nothing dramatic. But for someone who’d always travelled with friends or my ex-husband, it felt monumental.

What the circles taught me was that everyone’s internal narrative is far more dramatic and catastrophic than reality usually turns out to be. Hearing other women share their travel stories – including the mishaps and the moments of doubt – normalised the fear I was feeling. It made me realise that feeling scared doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do something; it just means you’re doing something that matters.

The circle also gave me a framework for processing my experience. I knew I’d be sharing my story when I returned, which somehow made me pay more attention whilst I was away. I noticed more. I was more present. I collected moments specifically because I wanted to share them.

When I did share my Paris story – including the bit where I got hopelessly lost in Montmartre and ended up having the most magnificent accidental lunch at a tiny bistro I’d never have found otherwise – the group’s response was so warm and enthusiastic. They celebrated my small victories with genuine joy. It made me realise that solo travel isn’t about being a fearless adventurer; it’s about being brave enough to be uncertain and doing it anyway.

I’ve now done four solo trips, and I’m planning my fifth. Each one gets easier, but more importantly, each one reveals more of who I actually am when nobody else’s expectations are shaping me. The storytelling circles gave me the courage to start, and they give me a community to process and celebrate with afterwards. It’s been genuinely life-changing.”

Frequently Asked Questions About Solo Travel

Q: I’m terrified of being lonely. How do I handle solo meals, especially dinners?

A: Loneliness during meals is probably the number one fear I hear, and here’s what I’ve learned: the anticipation is always worse than the reality. Start with lunch, which feels less emotionally loaded than dinner. Bring a book or journal if you need a security blanket initially, but try to wean yourself off.

The secret technique? Sit at the bar rather than a table. It feels more natural to be alone, the bartender usually chats with you, and you’re positioned to people-watch or strike up conversations with neighbours. Also, remember that most people dining around you aren’t thinking about you at all – they’re absorbed in their own lives. And the few who do notice you solo? They’re typically thinking, “Good for her,” not “Poor thing.”

Finally, reframe it: you’re not eating alone; you’re dining independently. You’re free to eat when you want, order exactly what you fancy, linger or leave as you please, and actually taste your food without distraction. It’s a luxury once you adjust to it.

Q: Is solo travel safe for women? My family is convinced I’ll be kidnapped or worse.

A: Let’s be honest: there are specific safety considerations for women travelling alone. But there’s a vast difference between being sensible and being paralysed by fear. The world isn’t nearly as dangerous as 24-hour news cycles would have you believe.

Practical safety measures: Share your itinerary with someone at home. Stay in well-reviewed accommodation. Don’t advertise that you’re alone to strangers (wearing a fake wedding ring is a choice some women make). Trust your instincts about people and situations. Avoid excessive alcohol in unfamiliar places. Don’t wander unfamiliar neighbourhoods at night.

But here’s the thing: millions of women travel solo every single year without incident. You’re statistically more likely to be harmed by someone you know than by a stranger in a foreign country. Being cautious and sensible is smart. Letting fear prevent you from living your life is not.

Also, tell your family that their fears, whilst coming from love, are often rooted in cultural messaging about women needing protection and not being capable of navigating the world independently. That messaging is outdated and limiting. You’re not a helpless damsel; you’re a competent adult making informed choices.

Q: I don’t speak any foreign languages. Can I still solo travel?

A: Absolutely. I’ve guided English-only speakers through the French Camino countless times. Here’s the truth: you can navigate most situations with ten basic phrases, hand gestures, and a friendly smile. Translation apps have made this even easier.

Learn hello, thank you, please, excuse me, and “Do you speak English?” in the local language. The effort matters more than accuracy. Even butchered attempts at local phrases signal respect and openness, which typically results in patient, helpful responses.

Also, remember that humans have been communicating across language barriers for millennia. A combination of pointing, miming, showing pictures on your phone, and good humour will get you remarkably far. Some of my most memorable travel interactions have been with people I shared no common language with – laughter and kindness translate universally.

Q: I’m over 50/60/70. Am I too old for solo travel?

A: Absolutely not. In fact, many of my retreat participants are in their 50s, 60s, and beyond, often embarking on their first solo adventures. You’re not too old; you’re finally old enough – old enough to know yourself, to have the confidence and resources to travel, to be done living according to others’ expectations.

The only adjustment might be in trip style. Choose accommodation and activities that suit your energy levels and physical capabilities. But age brings advantages: patience, perspective, confidence, and often more time and financial freedom than younger travellers possess.

I’ve watched women in their 70s walk the Camino with more grace and presence than anxious 30-year-olds. Age isn’t a barrier; it’s often an asset. The only thing you’re too old for is letting fear and “shoulds” dictate your choices.

Q: How do I deal with well-meaning friends and family who think I’m having a crisis or being selfish?

A: This is surprisingly common, particularly for women. When we step outside expected roles – when we prioritise our own desires, when we choose adventure over obligation – people often respond with concern or judgment.

Remember: their discomfort is about them, not you. Often, they’re projecting their own fears or regrets. Your solo travel might highlight paths they didn’t take, freedoms they didn’t claim, and that can trigger defensive responses.

You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval. You’re an adult making considered choices about your own life. Share your plans with those who’ll be genuinely supportive. Don’t waste energy trying to convince naysayers. Simply say, “I appreciate your concern, but I’ve thought this through and I’m excited about it,” then change the subject.

And after your trip, when you return glowing with confidence and stories? Many of those doubters will suddenly be asking how you did it and whether you think they could possibly… That’s when you smile and say, “Absolutely you can. Let me tell you what I learned.”

Conclusion: Homeward Bound

Here’s what nobody tells you about solo travel until you’ve experienced it: it’s not really about the places at all.

Yes, you’ll see stunning landscapes and taste extraordinary food and experience different cultures. Those things are wonderful. But the real journey – the one that stays with you long after you’ve unpacked your bag and returned to ordinary life – is the journey back to yourself.

We spend so much of our lives being shaped by others’ expectations. We mould ourselves to fit relationships, careers, families, and societal norms. We become so practised at considering what everyone else needs and wants that we lose track of our own desires. Sometimes we lose track of who we actually are underneath all those roles and responsibilities.

Solo travel creates space for that self to re-emerge. When you’re alone in a foreign place where nobody knows you, you’re free to shed all those accumulated identities. You’re not anyone’s partner, parent, child, colleague, or friend. You’re just… you. And if you’ve been playing roles for long enough, that can feel both terrifying and intoxicatingly free.

The woman who arrives at my retreat centre on that first day – anxious, over-packed, convinced she’s made a terrible mistake – is never the same woman who leaves. The transformation isn’t about suddenly becoming fearless or enlightened. It’s subtler and more profound than that.

It’s about discovering that you can navigate uncertainty. That you’re resourceful and capable. That you can trust your own judgment. That you can enjoy your own company. That the world is both bigger and more welcoming than you imagined. That you contain multitudes you never knew existed.

Every problem you solve independently – even tiny ones like working out the bus system or ordering breakfast in broken French – builds a small fortress of self-belief that nobody can take away from you. You’re collecting evidence, experience by experience, that you’re enough. That you always were.

This is why I’ve dedicated over twenty years to guiding people, particularly women, through transformational experiences on the Camino. Because I’ve witnessed many times what happens when people give themselves permission to take up space, to prioritise their own desires, to step into uncertainty with courage.

They don’t just discover France or Spain or wherever they’re travelling. They discover themselves. And that discovery changes everything.

So if you’re reading this whilst simultaneously talking yourself out of that trip you’ve been dreaming about, please stop. Stop waiting for the perfect time, the perfect circumstances, the perfect version of yourself. Stop letting fear or other people’s opinions or your own doubts hold you back from the life you actually want to be living.

Book the ticket. Pack the bag (but not too much). Take the first step. And then the next one. And the next.

The world is waiting for you.

Invitation: Walk the Camino in Southwest France

If reading this article has stirred something in you – a longing for space, for transformation, for the chance to rediscover your natural rhythm away from life’s relentless demands – I’d love to welcome you to one of my Camino de Santiago retreats.

Nestled in the rolling hills of southwest France near Eauze, my Camino Crossroads retreats offer something rare and precious: time. Time to walk ancient paths at your own pace. Time to sit in silence or share stories around the circle. Time to breathe deeply and remember who you are when nobody else’s needs are clamouring for your attention.

Our days follow a gentle rhythm designed to soothe frazzled nervous systems and reconnect you with what matters.

You walk sections of the Camino, but this isn’t about endurance or reaching destinations. It’s about the meditative quality of placing one foot in front of the other, about landscapes that invite contemplation, about conversations that unfold naturally when walking side by side rather than face to face.

The horses – my beloved Friesians Twiss, Kashkin, and Zorie, along with Loki and Lito, my spirited Falabellas – offer their own form of therapy. Their presence is grounding, their non-judgment complete. Whether you’re grooming them, walking with them, or simply sitting in their company, they teach presence and authenticity in ways humans often can’t.

Evening storytelling circles create the kind of genuine connection we’re all craving but rarely find. Prompted by questions designed to evoke authentic sharing, participants discover they’re not alone in their struggles, fears, or dreams. Stories are witnessed with compassion. Laughter and tears flow freely. Bonds form that often last far beyond the retreat itself.

The retreats specifically incorporate stress management techniques because I understand that many women arrive carrying the accumulated tension of lives spent caring for everyone else. We practise breathwork for anxiety. We learn meditation techniques you can take home and use daily. We explore how movement – whether walking the Camino or spending time with horses – naturally regulates our nervous systems in ways our modern, sedentary lives often prevent.

This isn’t about escaping your life; it’s about returning to it with renewed clarity, energy, and sense of self. It’s about remembering that you’re not just a collection of roles and responsibilities. You’re a whole, complex, fascinating human being who deserves time, attention, and care – from yourself most of all.

Group sizes are intentionally small to maintain the intimate, safe atmosphere where genuine transformation happens. The pace is gentle, honouring that we’re here to restore, not to prove anything. All fitness levels are welcome – the Camino adapts to you, not the other way around.

If your soul is whispering that it’s time – time to pause, to reflect, to reconnect, to rediscover – you’ll find more information about retreat dates, what’s included, and how to book HERE.

The Camino de Santiago Crossroads Retreat

The Camino has been calling pilgrims for over a thousand years. Perhaps now it’s calling you. And perhaps you’re finally ready.

Look, we’ve all seen those morning routines videos. You know the ones: someone wakes up at 4:47 AM looking suspiciously well-rested, drinks lemon water while watching the sunrise, journals their gratitude, does yoga on a pristine white rug with their adorable dog/cat/parrot, and somehow makes it to work looking like they’ve just stepped out of a wellness magazine photoshoot.

Meanwhile, the rest of us hit snooze seventeen times, stumble to the kitchen like caffeinated zombies, and consider it a win if we remember to put on matching socks.

Researching my Why do I need a Morning Routine? article, I discovered there is a whole world of morning routines out there that are actually… way out weird? Borderline unhinged?Stark, raving bonkers? You decide. Here are 22 unconventional ways to start your day that’ll make you either the most interesting person at brunch or someone people politely avoid making eye contact with. Your call.

Margaret’s Morning

5:45 AM: Margaret’s alarm goes off. But instead of groaning and reaching for her phone, she bolts upright, rips off her pajamas, and sprints directly to her backyard kiddie pool filled with ice water. Her neighbours have stopped calling the police.

5:50 AM: Emerging from the cold plunge, now thankfully wrapped in her dressing gown, Margaret stands barefoot on her lawn for exactly 11 minutes of “grounding.” Mrs. Henderson from next door waves. Margaret does not wave back—she’s in her silent non-communicative hour.

6:01 AM: Time for breakfast! Margaret, eyes closed, blindfolded for maximum sensory deprivation, attempts to eat yoghurt with her left hand (she’s right-handed). Approximately 40% makes it into her mouth. Her shirt bears the evidence of the other 60%.

6:15 AM: Margaret removes the blindfold and stands in front of her bathroom mirror for an intense session of mirror work affirmations. “You are POWERFUL, Margaret!” she shouts at her reflection. “You are a FORCE OF NATURE!” Her roommate texts from the other room: “plz stop i have a meeting in 10 min”

6:30 AM: Before allowing herself coffee, Margaret must solve today’s riddle: “What has keys but no locks, space but no room, and you can enter but can’t go inside?” She stares at her phone for eight minutes before finally Googling it. (It’s a keyboard. Obviously. She knew that.)

6:45 AM: Finally caffeinated, Margaret spends ten minutes plotting her random act of kindness for the day. She settles on leaving encouraging sticky notes in the office bathroom stalls.

7:00 AM: One full song of uninhibited dancing in her bedroom. Today’s selection: “Baby Shark.” She achieves spiritual enlightenment around the “doo doo doo doo doo doo” part.

Margaret arrives at work looking slightly disheveled, smelling faintly of grass and pool chlorine, with yoghurt on her collar. But is she ALIVE? Is she PRESENT? Of course she is.

Is she questioning the very fabric of reality before 8 AM?

You bet your gratitude journal she is.

The Morning Routines List: 22 Ways to Shake Up Your Morning

1. Cold plunge first thing – Jump into ice-cold water or a cold shower immediately upon waking to shock your system into alertness and boost circulation. Your nervous system will either thank you or file for divorce.

2. Morning silence hour – No phones, music, or talking for the first 60 minutes—just quiet contemplation and presence. Perfect for introverts or people avoiding their responsibilities.

3. Backward breakfast – Eat dessert for breakfast instead of traditional breakfast food. Life’s short. Have the cake.

4. Sunrise photography walk – Head out with a camera to capture the early morning light, combining exercise with creative practice. Bonus: you’ll finally use that expensive camera gathering dust.

5. Writing morning pages in unusual places – Journal three stream-of-consciousness pages while sitting in your car, on the roof, or in a closet. The weirder the location, the more honest you’ll be. Apparently.

6. Random act of kindness planning – Spend 10 minutes plotting a small anonymous act of kindness you’ll execute that day. Be the mysterious hero nobody asked for.

7. Singing or humming for 10 minutes – Use vocal exercises to activate your voice and energise your body. It’s a type of breathwork.

8. Barefoot grounding – Stand outside on grass, dirt, or sand for 10-20 minutes to “ground” yourself to the earth’s energy. Science is still out on this one, but it feels nice.

9. Micro-adventure challenge – Take a different route to work or explore a new street in your neighbourhood each morning. Get lost on purpose.

10. Inverted morning – Do headstands, handstands, or use an inversion table to get blood flowing in the opposite direction. See the world from a new perspective, literally.

11. Sensory deprivation start – Spend time in a dark, quiet room or wear a blindfold and earplugs to heighten awareness. Basically, meditation for people who think they’re too cool for meditation.

12. Creative constraint challenge – Set a weird limitation for your morning (only use your left hand, hop everywhere, speak in rhymes) to activate different neural pathways.

13. Morning debate with yourself – Argue both sides of a random topic out loud to activate critical thinking before the day begins. “Should cereal be considered a soup?” Discuss.

14. Scent-based wake-up – Use strong, unusual scents like eucalyptus, peppermint oil, or coffee beans to stimulate your olfactory system first. Your nose leads, you follow.

15. Gratitude scavenger hunt – Find five things in your home you’re grateful for that you’ve never consciously appreciated before. That weird lamp your aunt gave you? Today’s its day to shine.

16. Mirror work affirmations – Stand face-to-face with yourself in the mirror for 5-10 minutes, making direct eye contact while speaking affirmations. It’s uncomfortable, which means it’s probably working.

17. Darkness breakfast – Eat your morning meal completely in the dark or blindfolded to heighten your other senses and create a meditative eating experience. Napkins recommended.

18. Morning voice memos to future self – Record rambling audio messages to yourself about your current thoughts, dreams, or goals to listen to months or years later. Future you will either cringe or cry. Maybe both.

19. Puzzle or riddle before coffee – Refuse caffeine until you’ve solved a complex puzzle, riddle, or brain teaser. Masochistic but effective.

20. Dance party for one – Put on high-energy music and dance wildly for one full song with complete abandon, curtains closed, no judgment. What happens in the living room stays in the living room.

21. Opposite hand routine – Brush teeth, make coffee, get dressed, and do everything with your non-dominant hand to build new neural pathways. Also builds patience. And humility.

22. Watch 10 minutes of stand-up comedy. Because one really shouldn’t take life too seriously.

Ditto this blog post.

The Bottom Line

Morning routines don’t have to make sense to anyone but you. While the internet insists you need to wake up at dawn, meditate for an hour, and optimise every second of your existence, maybe what you actually need is to stand on one foot while eating ice cream and reciting Shakespeare. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

The best morning routine is the one that makes you feel alive, present, and maybe just a tiny bit unhinged. It’s the one that breaks the monotony of alarm-snooze-coffee-commute-repeat. It’s the one that reminds you that mornings don’t have to be something you survive—they can be something you actually look forward to. Maybe.

So tomorrow, when that alarm goes off, don’t reach for your phone. Maybe crawl to the kitchen instead. Eat dessert. Stand on your head. Argue with your reflection. Dance like nobody’s watching (because hopefully, nobody is).

Life’s too short for boring mornings.

Here’s to weird and wonderful.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and my other questionable life choices. And then I’m going to watch this:

What You’ll Discover in This Article:

You’re successful. You’re accomplished. You run companies, manage teams, juggle impossible deadlines, and somehow still make it to your daughter’s piano recital. So why does everything feel like you’re perpetually running to catch a train that left the station three hours ago? This article explores why the most powerful people in the world swear by morning routines—and why you might actually need one too. Not because you’re failing, but because you’re ready to stop merely surviving and start genuinely thriving.

Five Key Takeaways for Time-Starved Professionals

1. Morning routines aren’t about productivity theatre—they’re about reclaiming sovereignty over your own nervous system before the world makes its demands.
2. The first hour of your day sets your biochemical tone—cortisol, decision fatigue, and emotional resilience are all established in those precious morning moments.
3. High achievers who resist routines often do so because they’re already running on empty—creating structure feels like “one more thing” when you’re already sinking in quicksand.
4. A morning routine isn’t another item on your to-do list—it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible, including being present for the people you love.
5. Starting small changes everything—you don’t need a three-hour ritual involving yoga, journaling, and cold plunges. You need ten intentional minutes that belong entirely to you.

Introduction: You’re Awake at 4:11, Again

It’s 3:47 in the morning, and you’re awake again.

Not because you want to be. Not because you’ve suddenly been blessed with the gift of insomnia as a life hack. But because your mind is already racing through tomorrow’s presentation, the difficult conversation you need to have with your business partner, whether you remembered to sign the permission slip for your son’s field trip, and that nagging sensation that you’re somehow letting everyone down—including yourself.

You’ve read the articles. You know the statistics. Establishing well-defined habits conserves mental energy whilst staying focused on priorities, and in 2025, leading executives have refined their morning habits to enhance mental clarity, physical well-being, and productivity. But here’s the thing nobody tells you: when you’re already overwhelmed, the idea of adding anything else to your day—even something beneficial—feels like being asked to juggle flaming torches whilst standing on one leg.

So let me ask you directly: Why do you need a morning routine?

The answer isn’t what you think. It’s not about becoming more productive (though that’s a useful side effect). It’s not about optimising every moment of your existence until you’re essentially a well-dressed robot. It’s about something far more profound: reclaiming your life before your life reclaims you.

I’ve spent twenty years working with professionals exactly like you, people whose external success masks an internal chaos that’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage. For the past fifteen years, I’ve hosted stress management retreats where guests walk the ancient Camino de Santiago, finding their rhythm again through mindfulness, meditation, and the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. I’ve written eight non-fiction books about divorce, loss, unexpected illness, and coping with crises—the unglamorous territory of being human when life doesn’t go according to plan. And I’ve gathered over forty testimonials from guests who’ve discovered that transformation doesn’t require dramatic gestures; it requires consistent, intentional attention to the moments that matter most.

Including the morning ones.

Alan Nottman’s 4:13 AM Epiphany

Alan Nottman stood in his kitchen at 4:13 AM, staring at the coffee machine as though it held the secrets to the universe. Outside, the world was still mercifully dark, that particular quality of pre-dawn darkness that feels both peaceful and vaguely accusatory, depending on why you’re awake.

He wasn’t supposed to be awake.

The coffee machine gurgled to life—a sound he knew so intimately he could probably identify it in a police line-up of household appliances. His hand reached for the mug before his brain fully engaged, muscle memory from years of predawn wake-ups. The ceramic was cold against his palm, a small shock of reality that made him pause.

How many mornings had he stood in this exact spot, this exact position? How many times had he promised himself “just this week” or “after this project” or “once things settle down”? And how many times had “things settling down” proven to be as mythical as unicorns or balanced budgets?

Alan’s feet were cold on the kitchen tiles—he’d forgotten slippers again. The chill travelled up through his heels, a creeping reminder that his body still existed beneath the suit and the titles and the carefully cultivated persona of someone who had everything under control. His shoulders ached. When had they started aching? Probably around the same time his jaw had started clenching during conference calls, though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when that had begun either.

The coffee finished brewing, releasing that rich, almost chocolatey aroma that had once meant possibility but now simply meant survival. He poured it slowly, watching the dark liquid fill the mug with the kind of intense focus usually reserved for bomb disposal or signing divorce papers. Which, he thought darkly, weren’t entirely unrelated activities in his current life trajectory.

His phone buzzed on the counter—a dull, insistent vibration that made his stomach tighten before he even looked at the screen. Emails. Of course. Because somewhere in the world, it was already business hours, which meant somewhere in his world, someone needed something. The notification count glowed like a small, accusatory sun: 47 unread messages since he’d checked at midnight.

Midnight. When he’d finally climbed into bed next to his wife, Sarah, trying not to wake her, though they both knew she was already awake, pretending to sleep because it was easier than acknowledging the growing chasm of unspoken resentments between them. When had they stopped talking? Really talking, not just exchanging logistics about school pickups and whose turn it was to call the plumber?

Alan lifted the coffee mug to his lips, and the steam rose into his face—warm, almost intimate, like a secret being shared. The first sip burned slightly, that perfect edge of discomfort that meant the coffee was exactly the right temperature. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, allowing himself this small pleasure.

And in that moment, with his eyes closed and the coffee warming his hands and the silence of the pre-dawn kitchen wrapping around him like a cocoon, something shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no angels singing or celestial lights breaking through his ceiling. But Alan became suddenly, achingly aware that this might be the only moment today that truly belonged to him. Not to his clients. Not to his board of directors. Not to the seventeen people who reported to him or the quarterly earnings call that would determine whether his company met projections. Not even to his children, whom he loved desperately but saw mostly as tired faces across the dinner table, faces that had started looking at him with a mixture of need and resignation, as though they’d already accepted his absence even when he was physically present.

This moment. This coffee. This kitchen. This strange, liminal space between night and day. It was his.

And he was wasting it checking emails.

Alan set down his phone with deliberate care, as though it might explode if handled roughly. His hand trembled slightly—adrenaline or exhaustion, he couldn’t tell anymore. They felt increasingly similar. He looked around his kitchen properly for the first time in months: the stack of school artwork pinned haphazardly to the fridge, his daughter’s drawing of their family where he appeared as a tiny figure in the corner, holding what looked like either a briefcase or a tombstone. The pile of unread cookbooks his wife had bought during that brief period when she’d convinced herself that if she just made more elaborate meals, he’d come home earlier. The motivational magnet someone had given him that read “Success is a journey, not a destination,” which had always struck him as something people said to justify never actually arriving anywhere.

The kitchen smelled like coffee, yes, but also like the faint ghost of last night’s dinner—something with garlic that his daughter had refused to eat, leading to the usual negotiation, followed by the usual defeat, followed by cereal before bed. The smell of family life, messy and imperfect and somehow both comforting and suffocating.

Alan’s breathing had slowed. He noticed this with surprise, the way you notice you’ve been humming a song without realising it. His shoulders had dropped maybe half an inch, though they still carried enough tension to qualify as mountain ranges. The clock on the microwave blinked 4:19 AM. Six minutes had passed. Six minutes of not checking emails, not planning, not optimising, not achieving. Just… being.

He heard a sound from upstairs—the pipes groaning as water moved through them, which meant Sarah was awake too, probably standing in their ensuite bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror and wondering when her husband had become a stranger who occasionally slept in her bed. The thought made his chest tighten with a guilt so familiar it had almost become comfortable.

What if, Alan thought, the question wasn’t “How do I fit more into my day?” What if the question was “How do I make sure the day doesn’t steal everything from me before I’ve even had a chance to remember who I am?”

He took another sip of coffee. The taste had changed slightly now that it had cooled—less bitter, more complex, with subtle notes he’d never noticed before because he was usually already halfway out the door by this point in his morning.

Alan looked at his phone again, still buzzing periodically like an insect trapped in amber. For the first time in years, he made a choice that terrified him more than any board meeting or earnings call ever had: he decided not to pick it up. Not yet. Not for another ten minutes. Maybe twenty.

He had no idea what he’d do with those minutes. He had no routine, no plan, no productivity hack to optimise this thin slice of morning. But standing there in his kitchen with cold feet and warm coffee and the strange sensation that he’d just stumbled across something important without even looking for it, Alan Nottman decided that maybe, just maybe, not having a plan was exactly the point.

That’s when the real work began.

The Annoying Truth About Morning Routines

Here’s what nobody tells you about morning routines: they’re not really about the morning at all. They’re about identity.

Every morning, whether you realise it or not, you’re making a fundamental choice about who you are and what your life means. Are you someone who reacts, or someone who responds? Are you a person whose day owns them, or someone who owns their day? These aren’t abstract philosophical questions—they’re neuroscience.

Research has found that well-defined routines can reduce cognitive load, freeing mental resources for creative thinking. But let’s translate that from academic-speak into human terms: every decision you make depletes your energy. Every time you wonder, “What should I do next?” you’re spending precious mental currency that you’ll need later for actual important decisions. By the time you’ve decided what to wear, what to eat, whether to exercise, and how to respond to the seventeen things demanding your attention before 8 AM, you’re already exhausted. And you haven’t even started work yet.

A morning routine isn’t about optimising your productivity (though that happens). It’s about protecting your nervous system from the onslaught of demands, decisions, and digital noise that will otherwise colonise your consciousness before you’ve had a chance to remember what you actually care about.

Think about it this way: when you board an aeroplane, the flight attendants tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. This isn’t selfishness—it’s survival. Your morning routine is your oxygen mask. It’s the twenty minutes (or two hours, or even just ten minutes) where you remember that you’re not merely a productivity unit or a problem-solving machine. You’re a human being with a body that needs care, a mind that requires stillness, and a spirit that deserves to be more than merely functional.

The Ripple Effect: How Your Morning Changes Everything

But here’s where it gets really interesting: your morning routine doesn’t just affect you. It affects everyone around you.

I’ve watched this transformation countless times during my Camino de Santiago retreats. Someone arrives frazzled, disconnected, running on fumes and force of will. They start each day with simple mindfulness practices before walking—nothing elaborate, just breathing, noticing, being present. Within days, their entire demeanour shifts. They become more patient. More present. More genuinely themselves. And then they start talking about the changes they want to make when they return home. Not huge, sweeping changes. Small ones. Like reclaiming their mornings.

Those small changes ripple outward. A parent who’s less frazzled in the morning creates a calmer household for their children. An executive who’s centred before entering the office makes better decisions and creates less stress for their team. A partner who’s taken time to care for themselves has more capacity to genuinely connect with their spouse. This isn’t new-age philosophy—it’s practical emotional ecology.

We live in an interconnected system. Your stress is contagious. But so is your calm. So is your groundedness. So is your capacity to be fully present for the people and moments that matter.

The Community Dimension: Beyond Individual Transformation

In my storytelling circles, we explore this idea regularly. We gather—professionals, parents, people navigating transitions—and we tell stories about the moments that changed us. And repeatedly, the stories that resonate most deeply are about small morning moments: the cup of tea drunk in silence before the house wakes, the ten-minute walk around the block, the journal entry that unlocked clarity, the meditation that reconnected someone to their own breath.

These aren’t trivial domestic details. They’re the foundation of resilient communities. Because communities aren’t built by exhausted, overwhelmed people running on empty. They’re built by individuals who’ve learned to care for themselves well enough that they have genuine capacity to care for others.

When you establish a morning routine, you’re not just changing your day—you’re participating in a quiet revolution of people choosing presence over productivity theatre, depth over distraction, being over merely doing.

Three Powerful Writing Prompts to Explore Your Morning Identity

Grab your journal (or open your notes app, I’m not precious about the format) and spend ten minutes with each of these prompts:

1. The Morning Inventory Describe your typical morning in excruciating sensory detail. What do you hear, smell, feel, taste, see? Don’t analyse or judge—just observe and record. Then ask yourself: Is this the morning of someone living the life they want, or someone surviving the life they have?

2. The Future Morning Write about your ideal morning five years from now. Not the Instagram-perfect, perfectly lit version—the real one. What does it feel, sound, smell like? Who else is there? What emotional quality does it have? How does your body feel? What’s the first thought you have when you wake? Now ask yourself: What’s the smallest step I could take tomorrow to move one inch closer to that morning?

3. The Morning Legacy Imagine your children, or your team members, or your closest friends describing your morning energy to someone else. What would they say? Would they describe someone rushed, stressed, distracted? Or someone grounded, present, intentional? Write the description you’d want them to give, then write the description they’d honestly give today. The gap between those two descriptions is your invitation to change.

Further Reading: Five Unconventional Books That Will Transform Your Relationship with Mornings

Most books about morning routines are insufferably prescriptive: wake at 5 AM, meditate for an hour, run ten kilometres, drink green juice, optimise your mitochondria. These books are not that. These are books that understand the deeper questions beneath the surface ones.

1. “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh

Why this book: This Vietnamese Buddhist monk doesn’t tell you what to do with your mornings—he teaches you how to be fully present for whatever you’re doing. Whether you’re washing dishes or drinking tea, he offers practices for transforming ordinary moments into extraordinary ones. For the busy professional who believes they don’t have time for elaborate routines, this book reveals that presence isn’t about time—it’s about attention. And attention is something you can practise anywhere, including in your kitchen at 6 AM whilst making coffee.

2. “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialised Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies” by Resmaa Menakem

Why this book: This might seem like an unusual choice for a morning routine book, but stay with me. Menakem explores how trauma lives in our bodies and how we can heal through somatic practices. Many high-achieving professionals carry stress not in their minds but in their clenched jaws, tight shoulders, and shallow breathing. Your morning routine needs to address your body, not just your schedule. This book offers practical body-based practices that take minutes but can shift your entire nervous system. It’s especially valuable for understanding how your morning stress patterns might be inherited survival responses rather than personal failings.

3. “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel Naomi Remen

Why this book: Remen, a physician who counsels people with life-threatening illnesses, writes about the wisdom found in ordinary moments. Her short, story-driven essays are perfect for reading in small increments—perhaps, say, during a morning routine. What makes this book invaluable is her understanding that transformation doesn’t happen through grand gestures but through small, consistent moments of noticing, caring, and choosing differently. Her writing reminds us that our morning routine isn’t about perfection—it’s about practising kindness towards ourselves.

4. “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Why this book: Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about the indigenous practice of greeting the day with gratitude and attention to the natural world. Her lyrical writing invites us to consider our morning not as a productivity sprint but as a threshold moment where we cross from the dream world into the waking world. For professionals who feel disconnected from their bodies and the natural world, this book offers a gentle reconnection. Reading even a few pages in the morning can shift your entire orientation from scarcity and urgency to abundance and relationship.

5. “The Practice of Groundedness” by Brad Stulberg

Why this book: Stulberg writes for high-achievers who’ve discovered that constant striving has left them feeling unmoored and exhausted. Unlike traditional productivity books, this one argues for groundedness over growth, presence over performance. He offers practical frameworks for building routines that create stability rather than just efficiency. What I particularly value is his honesty about the challenges of maintaining practices when life gets chaotic—because life always gets chaotic. This book acknowledges that reality whilst still offering genuine pathways forward.

PS: And Then There’s “Embracing Change – in 10 Minutes a Day”

I wrote this book for people exactly like you: professionals who believe they don’t have time for transformation. The premise is simple and perhaps slightly rebellious: meaningful change doesn’t require hours of daily practice. It requires ten minutes of consistent, intentional attention. The book offers daily practices for navigating transitions, building resilience, and reclaiming your life from the tyranny of urgency. Many of the practices work beautifully as morning routines precisely because they’re designed for time-starved, overwhelmed humans who are doing their best with limited resources. It’s available on my website, and I wrote it because I was tired of transformation being marketed as something that requires wealth, leisure, and a personal assistant to manage your existing commitments whilst you become enlightened.

Real Voices: Two Stories of Morning Transformation

Sarah’s Story: From Camino Guest to Morning Advocate

“I arrived at Dr Montagu’s Camino retreat in pieces. Successful on paper, shattered in reality. The idea of a ‘morning routine’ felt like a joke—I could barely manage to get dressed most days without feeling overwhelmed. But those mornings on the Camino changed everything. We’d wake early, gather for simple mindfulness exercises, then walk in silence as the sun rose. Nothing elaborate. Just breathing, walking, noticing. For the first time in years, I experienced mornings that didn’t feel like an assault. When I returned home, I was terrified of losing that peace. But I didn’t. I started with just ten minutes before my family woke—sitting in silence, drinking my coffee with actual attention. That ten minutes has become the anchor of my entire day. I’m not exaggerating when I say it saved my marriage and my sanity. Those mornings on the Camino didn’t just give me a routine—they gave me back my life.” — Sarah T., Marketing Director, London

Jennifer’s Story: Empty Nest, Full Mornings

“Joining Dr Montagu’s storytelling circle seemed frivolous at first. My children had left home, my career was winding down, and I felt invisible and purposeless. But in those circles, I discovered something profound: my stories mattered. And the story that surprised me most was about my mornings. For thirty years, my mornings had belonged to everyone else—getting children ready, managing household chaos, coordinating schedules. When that ended, I felt lost. I had no idea who I was in the morning without someone needing me. The storytelling circle helped me see that reclaiming my morning wasn’t selfish—it was necessary. I started small: tea on my patio, watching birds, writing in my journal. Those quiet mornings taught me who I am beyond mother, beyond wife, beyond professional. I’m someone who loves the way morning light looks on leaves. Who thinks better with a warm cup in her hands. Who still has stories to tell, even if they’re just to myself. My mornings now aren’t about productivity—they’re about companionship with myself. That might sound strange, but it’s the most important relationship I’ve rebuilt.” — Jennifer M., Teacher (retired), Manchester

Five Razor-Sharp FAQs

Q1: I barely have time to shower in the morning. How am I supposed to add a routine?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you do have time. You’re choosing to spend it reactively—checking emails in bed, scrolling news whilst brushing your teeth, letting the morning happen to you instead of with you. Start with five minutes. Set your alarm five minutes earlier. Use those minutes to sit quietly and breathe. Not meditate perfectly, not optimise, not achieve—just breathe. If you genuinely cannot find five minutes, your morning routine is the least of your problems. You need to examine your entire life structure, because you’re living in crisis mode masquerading as normal life.

Q2: What if I’m not a morning person?

Then adapt the principle to whenever you wake. The point isn’t to become someone who leaps from bed at 5 AM singing showtunes. The point is to create a deliberate threshold between sleep and the demands of your day. If you naturally wake at 9 AM, your morning routine happens at 9 AM. The time matters far less than the intention. That said, you might discover you’re not actually “not a morning person”—you’re a person who’s been treating mornings as an enemy to overcome rather than an ally to befriend.

Q3: What if my routine stops working?

Then it stops. Routines aren’t meant to be rigid structures that you maintain through force of will when they’re no longer serving you. They’re meant to evolve with your life. Pregnancy, illness, job changes, family crises—these all require adaptation. The flexibility to adjust your routine when circumstances change isn’t failure. It’s wisdom. Start again. Start smaller. Start differently. The point is the starting, not the perfection.

Q4: Can’t I just have coffee and get on with my day? Why does everything have to be so intentional?

You absolutely can. And if your life is genuinely working brilliantly, if you’re deeply satisfied, connected, energised, and fulfilled, then carry on. But you’re reading this article, which suggests something isn’t working. The question isn’t “Why does everything have to be so intentional?” The question is: “What happens when you spend your entire life on autopilot, never stopping to ask if you’re actually heading where you want to go?” Intention isn’t the enemy of spontaneity—it’s the foundation that makes genuine spontaneity possible.

Q5: What if I try and fail? I’ve tried morning routines before and they never stick.

Then you’ve learned what doesn’t work for you. Try differently, not harder. Maybe you’ve been attempting someone else’s ideal morning instead of designing your own. Maybe you’ve been making it too complicated. Maybe you’ve been treating your morning routine as another achievement to optimise rather than a gift you give yourself. Here’s a radical thought: what if “failing” at a morning routine just means you haven’t found your rhythm yet? Keep experimenting. Treat it like play rather than performance. And remember: even one morning of choosing presence over reactivity is worth celebrating, not dismissing because you “failed” the rest of the week.

Conclusion

So why do you need a morning routine?

Not because you’re broken and need fixing. Not because you’re insufficiently optimised or productive. Not because successful people do it and you should too.

You need a morning routine because you deserve to remember who you are before the world tells you who you need to be today.

You need a morning routine because your nervous system deserves a moment of peace before the onslaught begins.

You need a morning routine because the people you love deserve the best version of you, not the frazzled, depleted version that’s left over after you’ve given everything away to everyone else.

You need a morning routine because life is short, and spending your mornings in reactive chaos isn’t how you want to spend the precious, limited mornings you have remaining.

And mostly, you need a morning routine because somewhere deep inside, beneath the exhaustion and the obligations and the carefully maintained persona of having everything under control, there’s a version of you that remembers what it feels like to greet the day with something approaching curiosity, or peace, or even joy. That version hasn’t disappeared. It’s just been waiting for you to create the space for it to emerge.

Your morning routine is that space. It’s not one more thing on your impossibly long list. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible—not just bearable, but actually meaningful.

Start tomorrow. Start with five minutes. Start with breathing. Start imperfectly. Start messy. Start without knowing exactly what you’re doing.

Start unconventionally.

Just start.

Because your life—your real life, not the one you’re performing for everyone else—is waiting for you in those morning moments. And it’s been patient long enough.

A Gentle Invitation: Walk the Camino, Find Your Rhythm

If this article has stirred something in you—a recognition, a longing, perhaps a whisper of possibility—then let me extend an invitation.

For fifteen years, I’ve hosted small groups of professionals, parents, and people navigating life’s messier transitions on walking retreats along the Camino de Santiago in the south-west of France. These aren’t boot-camp productivity workshops or wellness retreats where you’re relentlessly optimised. They’re something gentler and perhaps more radical: spaces where you remember how to simply be.

Each morning, you’re invited to practise mindfulness and meditation exercises specifically designed for stress management—nothing esoteric or complicated, just practical tools for calming your nervous system and reconnecting with yourself. You walk ancient paths at a human pace, not a productivity race. We gather in storytelling circles where your story matters, where you can explore the questions you haven’t had space to ask anywhere else.

And yes, there are the horses: my gentle Friesians, Twiss, Kashkin and Zorie, and my charming Falabellas, Loki and Lito. They teach us things about presence and authenticity that no human teacher could convey quite the same way.

These 7-day retreats aren’t about escaping your life—they’re about remembering how to live it fully. Many guests arrive wondering if they need a morning routine. By the time they leave, they’ve already established one, not through force or discipline, but through the simple experience of what it feels like to greet each day with intention, peace, and genuine presence.

The retreats are small by design, typically just two to four participants. This isn’t about crowds or networking—it’s about depth, connection, and having enough space and silence to hear your own thoughts again.

If you’re curious about what mornings could feel like when they belong to you rather than your obligations, I’d be honoured to host you.

Learn more about my retreats

Sometimes the answer to “Why do I need a morning routine?” is best discovered not through reading about it, but through experiencing what it feels like to wake up in the French countryside, step onto ancient paths, and discover that you’ve been carrying your peace with you all along. You just needed permission to access it.

Whenever you’re ready.

Dr. Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP) is an NLP Master Practitioner, Storytelling Life Coach, Equine-assisted Learning Facilitator and Medical Hypnotherapist with twenty years of experience in stress management. She has spent fifteen years hosting walking retreats on the Camino de Santiago and has authored eight non-fiction books addressing divorce, loss, unexpected illness, and coping with life’s major crises. Her work combines medical expertise with deep understanding of the human spirit’s capacity for resilience and reinvention.

For over a thousand years, pilgrims have made their way across Europe to Santiago de Compostela, each one carrying their own questions, their own burdens, their own hopes. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once observed, “Europe was made by pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela.” But what is it about this ancient path that continues to call to us, generation after generation?

The Teaching Path

Carolyn Gillespie offers a simple but profound truth: “The path is the teacher.” There’s something remarkable about this idea. We’re so accustomed to seeking wisdom in books, in experts, in the voices of others. But the Camino suggests that sometimes the greatest teacher is simply the act of moving forward, step by step, day after day. The path doesn’t lecture. It doesn’t overwhelm you with information. It simply invites you to walk, to breathe, to notice, to be present.

Paulo Coelho takes this idea further, reminding us that “life always teaches us more than the road to Santiago does, but we don’t have much faith in what life teaches us.” How true this is. We’re willing to travel across the world, to blister our feet and ache our muscles, seeking wisdom on an ancient pilgrimage route. Yet somehow we overlook the lessons that life offers us daily in our own homes, our own neighborhoods, our own hearts. Perhaps the Camino’s greatest gift is teaching us to pay attention—not just on the path, but everywhere we go.

António Machado captured this beautifully in his famous verse: “Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar”—Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking. These words resonate so deeply because they speak to a fundamental truth about life itself. We cannot wait for the perfect moment, the clear answer, the certain path. We must simply begin, trusting that the way will reveal itself as we go.

Walking With an Wide Open Heart

When preparing for the Camino, many pilgrims ask: What will I find? What answers will I get? What will change? Jane V. Blanchard offers perhaps the wisest counsel for anyone considering this journey: “Don’t come to the Camino looking for answers. Instead, come with an open heart and you may be surprised by what you find.”

This invitation to openness is at the heart of the pilgrim experience. When we come seeking specific answers, we often miss the gifts we weren’t expecting. But when we come with open hearts, ready to receive whatever the journey offers, transformation becomes possible. The Camino has a way of giving us what we need rather than what we think we want.

Kevin A. Codd speaks to this mystery when he writes about the pilgrim spirit: “To feel the pull, the draw, the interior attraction, and to want to follow it, even if it has no name still, that is the pilgrim spirit. The ‘why’ only becomes clear as time passes, only long after the walking is over.” How many of us have felt that wordless pull toward something we can’t quite name? That sense that we need to go, to walk, to seek, even when we can’t articulate exactly what we’re seeking? This is the beginning of pilgrimage—following that inner call with trust rather than certainty.

A Metaphor for Life

Hape Kerkeling describes the Camino as “a metaphor for life: You start out not knowing what to expect, you take it step by step, and you trust the path ahead.” In these words, we find a mirror of our own experience. Life, like the Camino, rarely gives us the complete map at the beginning. We set out with hopes and plans, but the actual journey unfolds in ways we could never have predicted. We learn to take it day by day, kilometer by kilometer, trusting that each step forward is enough.

Shirley MacLaine echoes this sentiment simply: “Walking the Camino is a metaphor for life itself.” On the path, we experience everything life offers—beauty and pain, connection and solitude, joy and struggle, doubt and faith. We wake before dawn and walk into uncertainty. We meet strangers who become friends. We discover strengths we didn’t know we had. We face our limitations with humility. We keep going even when we’re tired, even when we’re not sure why we’re doing this, even when every part of us wants to stop.

And through it all, as John Brierley reminds us, “The Camino leaves its mark on everyone who walks it.” This mark is different for each pilgrim, but it’s always there—a subtle shift in perspective, a deeper appreciation for simplicity, a renewed sense of what truly matters.

Learning to Keep Going

One of the most practical and profound lessons of the Camino comes from Tristina Oppliger: “The Camino taught me to keep going, to keep moving forward when life gets hard—even if it’s one step at a time.” This is no small thing. In our daily lives, we often wait until we feel ready, until conditions are perfect, until we have the energy or motivation. But the Camino teaches us that sometimes we simply need to put one foot in front of the other, even when it’s hard, even when we’re tired, even when the path ahead seems impossibly long.

There’s a beautiful resilience that develops on the Camino. You wake up with sore feet and aching shoulders, and you walk anyway. You face a mountain that seems too steep, and you climb it anyway. You get lost, and you find your way back. You reach your limit, and then you discover you can go a little further. These lessons of endurance and perseverance don’t stay on the Camino—they come home with us, strengthening us for whatever challenges we face in ordinary life.

Releasing What We Hold Too Tightly

Christine Valters Paintner offers another profound insight: “Pilgrimage invites us to notice what we are holding too tightly to, so we might release ourselves into the current of life.” There’s something about carrying everything you need on your back for weeks that teaches you about the weight of what we carry—both literally and metaphorically.

On the Camino, pilgrims quickly learn to distinguish between what they truly need and what they’ve been carrying out of habit or fear. That extra pair of shoes gets sent home. Those “just in case” items are left behind. And as the backpack gets lighter, something inside us often lightens too. We begin to question: What else have I been carrying that I no longer need? What worries, what grudges, what expectations could I release? What would it feel like to travel lighter through life?

The Transformation, Not the Destination

Richard R. Niebuhr cuts to the heart of pilgrimage with these words: “Pilgrimage is not about the road; it is about the transformation.” Yes, the Camino Frances is beautiful. Yes, Santiago de Compostela is a magnificent destination. Yes, receiving your Compostela certificate is meaningful. But these external markers are not the point. The point is who you become in the process of getting there.

Jane V. Blanchard expresses this beautifully: “Use the guides and the maps to lead you to Santiago; use the lessons learned on the camino to find your way.” The maps get you to the cathedral. But the lessons—about perseverance, about community, about simplicity, about faith, about yourself—these guide you through the rest of your life.

And then comes Paulo Coelho’s beautiful paradox: “Santiago is not the end of the Camino, but the beginning.” After all those kilometers, after all that effort, you arrive at the cathedral, and you realise that this is where the real journey starts. The Camino was preparation, training, awakening. Now comes the harder part: taking what you’ve learned and living it in your everyday life back home.

Walking in Faith

Throughout history, pilgrimage has been a spiritual practice, a physical expression of faith and seeking. The Book of Proverbs offers this assurance: “In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” There’s deep comfort in this promise—that when we walk with awareness, with intention, with openness to something larger than ourselves, we are guided.

Sir Walter Ralegh, in his beautiful poem “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage,” prayed for “my scallop shell of quiet, my staff of faith to walk upon, my scrip of joy, immortal diet, my bottle of salvation, my gown of glory, hope’s true gage.” These metaphors speak to the inner resources we need for any pilgrimage: quiet, faith, joy, hope. Whether we’re walking across Spain or simply walking through our daily lives, these are the provisions that sustain us.

The Unexpected Gift of Community

One of the most beautiful surprises of the Camino often comes in the form of other pilgrims. Helen Burns captures this perfectly: “I had no idea when starting off on my lone pilgrimage how many dear friends I would make.” You set out alone, perhaps seeking solitude or self-discovery, and somehow you find yourself walking alongside others who are on their own journeys. You share meals, stories, struggles, and laughter. You help each other over difficult terrain. You celebrate each other’s victories.

The Camino community is unlike any other. There’s a vulnerability, an authenticity, that develops when you’re all carrying your lives on your backs, walking toward the same destination, sharing the same challenges. Strangers become friends quickly because the usual walls we maintain in daily life seem unnecessary here. Everyone is tired, everyone is searching, everyone is trying to keep going. In this shared vulnerability, real connection becomes possible.

Starting Again

So what does the Camino actually teach us? It teaches us that we are stronger than we think. That we need less than we imagine. That beauty exists in simple things—a cold glass of water, a kind word from a stranger, a sunrise over a wheat field. That community forms when we’re open to it. That we can keep going even when we’re tired. That transformation happens not in grand moments but in the accumulation of small steps. That faith is simply continuing to walk, even when you can’t see around the next bend.

The path is still there, ancient and patient, waiting for the next wave of seekers and wanderers and questioners. And perhaps that’s the final lesson: the Camino doesn’t demand perfection or certainty or even understanding. It simply invites us to walk, to remain open, to trust the journey.

As you consider your own path—whether it leads to Santiago de Compostela or simply through the landscape of your daily life—may you walk with courage and curiosity. May you remain open to the lessons that come. May you discover strengths you didn’t know you possessed. May you lighten your load and open your heart. May you find community in unexpected places. And may you remember that every journey, every step, is both an ending and a beginning.

Walking the Camino in Southwest France

Perhaps you’ve felt that quiet pull, that wordless invitation to walk, to seek, to open yourself to transformation. You don’t need to walk 800 kilometers to experience the wisdom of the Camino. Sometimes, a week is enough—enough to step away from the noise of daily life, enough to discover what emerges when you walk with intention, enough to taste the pilgrim spirit and see what it awakens in you.

I invite you to join me for one of my 7-day Camino de Santiago walking retreats in the beautiful countryside of southwest France. You’ll walk a section of this ancient path, carrying a light pack through landscapes that have welcomed pilgrims for centuries. You’ll move at a gentle pace that allows for reflection and conversation, for silence and community. Each evening, we’ll gather to share our experiences, to rest, and to prepare our hearts for the next day’s journey. This is pilgrimage in its most accessible form—a week to step out of your ordinary routine and into something that might just change the way you see everything.

You don’t need to be an experienced hiker. You don’t need to have all the answers about why you want to come. You simply need to feel that pull, that curiosity, that sense that perhaps it’s time to walk toward something. If these words resonate with you, if you’ve been waiting for an invitation to begin your own Camino journey, consider this it.

More information

Buen Camino! May your blisters be few and your insights be many.

The Original Camino de Santiago Quotes:

“The path is the teacher.” Carolyn Gillespie, Pilgrim

“‘Life always teaches us more than the road to Santiago does’, he answered. ‘But we don’t have much faith in what life teaches us’. ” Paulo Coelho

“Don’t come to the Camino looking for answers. Instead, come with an open heart and you may be surprised by what you find.” Jane V. Blanchard 

“The Camino is a metaphor for life: You start out not knowing what to expect, you take it step by step, and you trust the path ahead.” Hape Kerkeling, I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago.

“The Camino leaves its mark on everyone who walks it.” John Brierley

“To feel the pull, the draw, the interior attraction, and to want to follow it, even if it has no name still, that is the “pilgrim spirit. The ‘why’ only becomes clear as time passes, only long after the walking is over.” Kevin A. Codd, Beyond Even the Stars: A Compostela Pilgrim in France

“Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” António Machado

In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Prov 3:6

Give me my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope’s true gage, And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage. The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage by Sir Walter Ralegh

“The Camino taught me to keep going, to keep moving forward when life gets hard — even if it’s one step at a time.” Tristina Oppliger

“Pilgrimage invites us to notice what we are holding too tightly to, so we might release ourselves into the current of life.” Christine Valters Paintner

“Use the guides and the maps to lead you to Santiago; use the lessons learned on the camino to find your way.” Jane V. Blanchard 

“Pilgrimage is not about the road; it is about the transformation.” Richard R. Niebuhr

“I had no idea when starting off on my lone pilgrimage how many dear friends I would make.” Helen Burns

“Walking the Camino is a metaphor for life itself.” — Shirley MacLaine, The Camino: A Pilgrimage of Courage

“Europe was made by pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Santiago is not the end of the Camino, but the beginning.” Paulo Coelho

Why High-Performers Are Trading Meditation Apps for Walking Boots

Summary
Executives are having nervous breakdowns in business class. Not the dramatic kind—the silent erosion where you’re crushing quarterly targets while forgetting what joy feels like. The solution isn’t another productivity hack. It’s a simple stress reset: walking. Specifically, walking ancient paths where your smartphone becomes gloriously irrelevant and your nervous system finally exhales. Welcome to the micro-recovery revolution meets medieval pilgrimage—where stress management gets its hiking boots on.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Micro-recovery beats macro-meditation: Your nervous system doesn’t need hour-long interventions; it needs 60-90 second pressure-release valves throughout your day that you’ll actually use.
2. Walking meditation synchronises your three brains: Extended walking creates neural coherence between your head (cognition), heart (emotion), and gut (intuition)—something no boardroom ever achieved.
3. Stress accumulates in the body, not the mind: You can’t think your way out of chronic stress because it’s stored in your fascia, breath patterns, and muscle memory. Movement metabolises it.
4. The Camino effect is real: Multi-day walking on historic pilgrimage routes triggers measurable changes in brain wave patterns, cortisol levels, and decision-making clarity that persist for months.
5. Recovery isn’t reward—it’s strategy: High-performers who integrate intentional pauses outperform those who glorify grinding by every meaningful metric: creativity, longevity, leadership presence, and life satisfaction.

Introduction: The Question Nobody’s Asking

Here’s what I’ve learned after 20 years as a GP specialising in stress management and a decade guiding executives through walking retreats on the Camino de Santiago: the people who most need to stop are the ones most convinced they can’t.

We’ve built entire industries around helping people manage stress while remaining stressed. Meditation apps deliver mindfulness between meetings. Wellness programs offer yoga at lunch. Executive coaches teach resilience as if stress were simply a matter of mental fortitude.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: stress isn’t pressure that needs managing. It’s pressure that needs releasing.

Your body knows this. Your nervous system is screaming it. But your mind—that brilliant, ambitious, achievement-addicted mind—keeps overriding the signals.

What if I told you that the fastest way to reset during a hectic workday isn’t another breathing technique, but remembering how to walk like you mean it? Not walking to your next meeting. Not walking while checking your phone. Walking, as THE point.

And what if the most sophisticated leadership development tool available isn’t in Silicon Valley—it’s a 1,200-year-old footpath across Europe where pilgrims have been sorting out their souls since Charlemagne was crowned?

I love stories, so let me tell you about Marcus.

The Man Who Forgot How to Sleep

Marcus Henshaw’s assistant called me on a Tuesday in March. “He won’t admit it,” she said quietly, “but I think he’s in trouble.”

Marcus was 47, CFO of a mid-sized tech firm, married with two teenagers he saw mainly at breakfast, if breakfast happened. He’d been assesed by his cardiologist after presenting with chest pain that turned out to be nothing—and everything. Clean arteries. Perfect cholesterol. Textbook ECG. But a resting heart rate of 94 and the kind of tension radiating from his shoulders that made the doctor ask, “When did you last take a full breath?”

When Marcus consulted me via Zoom three weeks later, I noticed his hands first. They couldn’t settle. Drumming the chair arm, adjusting his watch, checking his phone even though he’d just checked it. His eyes had that particular glaze of someone running on fumes and caffeine, the pupils slightly dilated, the blink rate too fast.

“I don’t sleep,” he said, before I’d asked anything. Not as confession—as fact. “Two, maybe three hours. I lie there doing Monte Carlo simulations in my head. My wife says I’ve stopp breathing sometimes. I downloaded apps. Tried the magnesium. Read the Matthew Walker book.” He laughed—sharp, bitter. “Knowing why you can’t sleep doesn’t help you sleep.”

I asked him to describe a typical day. He stood up to answer, unable to remain seated, and began pacing his office like a captive animal.

“I wake at 4:47. Don’t know why that exact time, but it’s always 4:47. Lie there until 5:30, then gym. Emails during cardio. Shower at the gym. Protein shake in the car. Office by 7:15. Meetings until lunch, which I eat at my desk while on calls. Afternoon’s the same. Home by 7:30 if I’m lucky, but I’m checking my phone through dinner, which pisses off my wife, and then I work until midnight.” He stopped, looked at me. “That’s a good day.”

“What does your body feel like?” I asked.

He stared at me as if I’d asked him to translate Sanskrit. “My body?”

“When’s the last time you felt your feet on the ground?”

The question stopped him mid-pace. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I… I don’t know what you mean.”

And there it was. The complete disconnection between the man and the nervous system carrying him around. Marcus’s breath was shallow and high in his chest. His jaw was clenched so tight I could see the muscle working. His shoulders sat somewhere near his ears. When I asked him to take a deep breath, he inhaled sharply through his nose and held it, as if breathing were another task to optimise.

“Marcus,” I said gently, “your body thinks it’s being chased by a bear. Every moment of every day. That’s what’s happening physiologically. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You’re just stuck in a nervous system state that was designed for acute danger, not chronic pressure.”

Something shifted in his face. Not relief exactly—recognition.

“I’m going to suggest something that will sound insane,” I continued. “I want you to walk across part of France with me. No laptop. No phone signal for most of it. Just walking. Eight days. On an ancient pilgrimage route where millions of people have walked for over a thousand years.”

He laughed. “I can’t just disappear for eight days.”

“That’s what every single person says. And then they do. And then they come back and realize they should have done it three years earlier.”

---

Three months later, Marcus stood in the town square of Eauze in southwest France, looking mildly terrified. His backpack was too heavy—first-timer mistake, despite the packing list. His hiking boots were broken in but his face wasn’t. He kept reaching for the phone I’d asked him to leave in the locked safe at our accommodation.

“What do I do if there’s an emergency?” he’d asked the night before.

“Your assistant has my number. Your wife has my number. The company has backup protocols. And here’s the radical truth, Marcus: the world will turn without you checking your email for a week. If that’s not true, you’ve built something too fragile.”

Day One was brutal—not physically, but psychologically. He walked the Chemin de Saint-Jacques between Eauze and the next village, roughly 15 kilometres through rolling vineyards and sunflower fields. Marcus walked like he was late for a meeting, pushing ahead, breathing hard, not looking at anything.

By the afternoon, his feet hurt. Not catastrophically, just enough that he couldn’t ignore them. “I don’t think my boots are right,” he muttered.

“Your boots are fine. You’re walking like you’re trying to outrun something.”

“I need to make good time.”

“Why?”

He had no answer. There was nowhere to get to. No meeting waiting. Just another village, another meal, another bed. The pointlessness of rushing confronted him, and I watched his face cycle through confusion, frustration, and something like grief.

We stopped at a stone wall overlooking a valley where autumn light turned the vineyards bronze. I made him sit. “Close your eyes. Tell me three things you can hear.”

“This is touchy-feely nonsense.”

“Humour me.”

He sighed. Closed his eyes. Thirty seconds passed. “Birds. Some kind of bird. Wind in the… I don’t know, the leaves. And… tractors? Somewhere far away.”

“Now, three things you can feel.”

“The stone. It’s warm. Sun on my face. And my feet. They’re throbbing.”

“Now, three things you can smell.”

His face changed. Softened. “Earth. Something sweet, like… honey? And mint, maybe?”

When he opened his eyes, they were different. Present. “I haven’t done that since I was a kid,” he said quietly. “Just… noticed things.”

That night, he slept six hours straight.

By Day Three, his pace had changed. He’d stopped checking the time. Stopped asking how much further. He walked beside me instead of ahead, and we fell into the rhythm that happens when humans walk together—a kind of silent agreement between bodies and breath.

On Day Four, something broke open. We’d walked through morning mist that clung to the fields, our boots wet with dew, and Marcus started talking. Not the rehearsed executive summary version of his life—the real thing. The deal that haunted him. The promotion he’d sacrificed his marriage for. The moment he realised his daughter was afraid to interrupt him. How he’d become someone he didn’t recognise and couldn’t figure out how to stop being.

“I’m so tired,” he said, and started crying. Just standing there on a dirt path between sunflower fields, crying like the world was ending. “I’m so fucking tired.”

I let him cry. Handed him water. We sat on our packs in the middle of the path, and I said, “That’s your body finally talking to you. Listen to it.”

By Day Seven, Marcus walked differently. His shoulders had dropped. His breath had deepened. He’d started noticing things—a hawk circling, the way light moved through oak leaves, how morning tasted different from evening. At dinner that night, he said, “I don’t know who I’m going to be when I go back. But I can’t be who I was.”

The final morning, he turned to me and said, “Thank you for making me do this.”

“You made yourself do it. You just needed permission to stop.”

---

Six months later, Marcus sent me an email. Subject line: “Still sleeping.” He’d restructured his role, hired a deputy, implemented no-meeting Wednesdays, and taken his family to Greece for two weeks—phone off. “My wife says I’m back,” he wrote. “My daughter actually talks to me now. And I sleep. Not perfectly, but most nights I get six solid hours. Turns out my body just needed me to stop treating it like an inconvenience.”

The Science of Why Walking Works: Your Nervous System Needs Movement

Here’s what happens neurologically when you’re under chronic stress: your sympathetic nervous system—the gas pedal—stays down. Your amygdala becomes hypervigilant. Your prefrontal cortex, which handles rational decision-making, gets partially shut down. Blood flow diverts from your digestive system and reproductive organs to your large muscles, preparing you to fight or flee from threats that never materialise.

You can’t think your way out of this state. You have to move your way out.

Walking—specifically, sustained, rhythmic walking—does something remarkable: it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the brake pedal. The repetitive motion, combined with time in nature and distance from digital stimuli, creates what neuroscientists call “transient hypofrontality”—a temporary quieting of your planning, judging, always-analysing prefrontal cortex.

This is why solutions appear on walks that never emerge in meeting rooms. Your brain waves shift from beta (active, anxious thinking) to alpha and theta (creative, integrative states). Problems that seemed insurmountable at your desk suddenly have obvious answers on a forest path.

But it’s not just your brain that changes—it’s your entire nervous system. Extended walking recalibrates your vagal tone, the measure of how well your body recovers from stress. High vagal tone means you can shift from activated to calm quickly. Low vagal tone means you’re stuck in overdrive, which is where most high-performers live.

The Camino specifically adds another layer: it’s a pilgrimage route. Something about walking where millions have walked before you, carrying their own burdens and questions, creates a sense of being part of something larger than your quarterly targets. There’s humility in following ancient footsteps. And humility is often the gateway back to yourself.

Guest Testimonial: Sally M., Marketing Director

“I came to Dr. Montagu’s retreat thinking I’d get some exercise and clear my head. I left with my life back on track. For three years, I’d been in constant fight-or-flight mode, powering through exhaustion with coffee and willpower. Within four days of walking, my body finally felt safe enough to rest. I slept through the night for the first time in months. But the real gift was remembering what it felt like to be present—not planning the next thing or reviewing the last thing, just HERE. That shift has stayed with me. I still walk every morning before work, and when stress builds, I know how to release it now instead of white-knuckling through it. This retreat didn’t just change my stress management—it changed how I show up in the world.”

Three Micro-Stress-Reset Practices You Can Start Today

You don’t need to walk across France tomorrow (though I highly recommend you do eventually). You can begin retraining your nervous system right now with these practices I teach all my clients:

1. The Doorway Reset (30 seconds)

Every time you walk through a doorway today—any doorway—pause completely. Take three full breaths: in for four counts, hold for four, out for six. That’s it.

Why doorways? They’re natural transition points. You’re already moving from one space to another. This practice simply makes the transition intentional. Within a week, your nervous system will begin associating doorways with micro-recovery. You’re essentially installing pause buttons throughout your environment.

The extended exhale is crucial—it activates your vagus nerve, which runs from your brainstem to your abdomen and is the primary brake pedal for your stress response. Six seconds out signals safety to your body in a way no amount of positive thinking can match.

2. The Calendar Compassion Buffer (2 minutes)

Stop scheduling back-to-back meetings. I know this seems impossible. Everyone says it’s impossible right before they do it and realise it was their sanity.

Your brain needs 120 seconds to process what just happened and prepare for what’s next. Without this buffer, you carry emotional residue from one interaction into the next. That tension in your jaw? That’s unmetabolized stress from three meetings ago, compounding.

Schedule 28-minute meetings instead of 30. Use those two minutes to stand, stretch, look out a window, shake your body literally—shake your hands, roll your shoulders, do anything that moves stuck energy. This isn’t luxury. This is basic nervous system hygiene.

3. The 3-5-7 Breath (90 seconds)

When pressure spikes and you feel panic rising, use this pattern: breathe in through your nose for 3 counts, hold for 5, exhale through your mouth for 7. Repeat three times.

Why this works: when you’re stressed, your breath becomes shallow and rapid, which signals danger to your amygdala, which releases stress hormones, which makes your breath more shallow. It’s a vicious cycle. The extended exhale breaks the cycle by activating your parasympathetic nervous system faster than any other technique.

I’ve watched executives go from the edge of panic attacks to functional presence in under two minutes using this breath. Keep it in your back pocket for difficult conversations, presentations, or moments when you feel control slipping.

Journaling Prompt: Where Are You Running To?

Take 15 minutes with your journal and explore these questions without editing yourself:

1. If I could stop running, what would I be afraid I’d discover?
2. What does my body feel like right now? (Actually scan from your feet to your head—where is there tension, pain, numbness?)
3. When was the last time I felt truly rested, not just “not working”?
4. What would change in my life if I treated rest as strategy, not reward?
5. If my body could speak to me right now, what would it say?

Don’t rush this. Write messily. Write honestly. This isn’t about solutions—it’s about finally listening.

The Perfect Quote for This Moment

“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”
— John Muir

I chose this quote because it captures the essential paradox of walking retreats: you come seeking solutions, strategies, or stress relief, and you receive something far more valuable—yourself back.

Muir, the Scottish-American naturalist who founded the Sierra Club, understood that nature doesn’t give you what you think you need. It gives you what you’ve forgotten you needed. When you walk with intention through landscape—especially ancient landscape—you don’t extract value like it’s another resource to optimise. You receive. You soften. You remember that you’re not separate from the natural world but part of it, subject to the same rhythms of exertion and rest, growth and dormancy.

The Camino operates on this principle. You don’t conquer it. You walk it. And in walking it, it walks you back to your essential self—the one that existed before the job titles and quarterly targets, the one that still knows how to be awed by sunset and humbled by blisters.

Why I Host These Retreats: A Personal Note

After 20 years as a doctor, I’ve seen every presentation of chronic stress: the executive with mysterious chest pain, the lawyer with IBS that no medication touches, the entrepreneur who hasn’t slept properly in three years. I’ve written prescriptions, referred to specialists, and taught breathing techniques.

But something shifted when I walked the Camino for the first time. 10km, more or less in my backyard. I realised that we’re trying to solve a body problem with mind tools. Stress lives in your tissues, your fascia, your breath patterns, your muscle memory. You can’t cognitive-behavioural-therapy your way out of a dysregulated nervous system.

Walking—particularly extended, intentional walking on sacred ground—does what therapy can’t and medication won’t: it gives your body permission to release what it’s been holding. The rhythm of footsteps becomes meditation. The physical exhaustion becomes catharsis. The distance from normal life becomes perspective.

For the past decade, I’ve been hosting small groups on the French Way of the Camino de Santiago, specifically the section between Eauze and Nogaro in southwest France. This isn’t the tourist Camino—it’s quieter, less crowded, undeniable agricultural. You walk through working vineyards and sunflower fields, past Romanesque churches that have stood for 800 years. The landscape holds you differently here.

I’ve watched CEOs cry on day three. Seen lawyers sleep for ten hours straight by day five. Witnessed the exact moment when someone’s shoulders finally drop and their breath deepens and they look around and notice they’re alive, not just productive.

This work—combining my medical training with NLP mastery and hypnotherapy, all delivered through the ancient technology of walking—is the most meaningful thing I do. Because I’m not fixing people. I’m walking beside them while they remember how to be whole.

Further Reading: Five Books That Changed How I Think About Stress and Recovery

1. “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” by Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist at Stanford, explains brilliantly why humans are uniquely terrible at managing stress. Zebras get chased by lions, experience acute stress, then it’s over. Humans experience chronic psychological stress that our bodies can’t distinguish from physical danger. This book will help you understand what’s happening in your body when you’re “just stressed.” It’s dense but accessible, and it changed how I practice medicine.

2. “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk

Van der Kolk demonstrates that trauma and chronic stress aren’t just psychological—they’re physiological. Your body literally stores unprocessed stress. This groundbreaking work explains why talk therapy alone often isn’t enough and why movement-based practices (like walking meditation) can access healing that cognitive approaches can’t reach. Essential reading for anyone serious about understanding the mind-body connection.

3. “In Praise of Walking” by Shane O’Mara

O’Mara, an Irish neuroscientist, makes the scientific case for walking as humanity’s superpower. He covers everything from how walking shapes our brains to why it enhances creativity and mood. This book will make you want to cancel your gym membership and just walk. It’s also delightfully readable—O’Mara clearly loves his subject, and it shows.

4. “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer

This isn’t a scientific book—it’s a spiritual one. But Singer’s exploration of how we get trapped in our own mental patterns, and how to observe rather than identify with our thoughts, is profound. The chapter on pain alone is worth the price. I recommend this to clients who intellectually understand stress management but can’t seem to actually implement it. Sometimes the barrier isn’t information—it’s identity.

5. “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle” by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

The Nagoski sisters explain the crucial difference between stressors (the things that cause stress) and stress itself (the physiological response in your body). You can eliminate every stressor and still have stress trapped in your system. They offer practical, evidence-based strategies for “completing the stress cycle”—and walking is one of the most effective. This book is particularly helpful for high achievers who think they can think their way out of burnout.

Five Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: “I can’t possibly take a week off. How do I know this retreat is worth it?”

The question itself reveals the problem. If you can’t take a week off, you’ve built something fragile—either a business model that depends entirely on your constant presence, or an identity that can’t tolerate rest.

Here’s what I tell everyone who asks this: the people who “can’t get away” are exactly the people who most need to. Your work will be there when you return. The emails will wait. And if your entire organisation collapses without you for eight days, that’s a structural problem that deserves urgent attention.

What you get from this retreat isn’t just stress relief—it’s pattern interruption. You can’t see the system when you’re in it. Distance creates perspective. Every single participant has told me they wish they’d done it sooner. Not one person has regretted the investment of time.

Q2: “I’m not spiritual or religious. Is this stress reset retreat for me?”

Absolutely. The Camino is a pilgrimage route, yes, but what you’re pilgrimaging toward is entirely personal. Some people walk for spiritual reasons. Others walk to solve a business problem or process grief or simply prove to themselves they can.

I’m a medical doctor. I approach this work through neuroscience and physiology, not mysticism. The “magic” of walking is actually just biology functioning as designed. Your nervous system resets. Your brain waves shift. Your body metabolises stored stress through movement.

That said, there’s something profound about walking where humans have walked for over a millennium, carrying their own burdens and questions. You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to feel connected to something larger than yourself. That sense of humility and perspective is often what high-performers have lost—and desperately need back.

Q3: “What if I’m not fit enough? I don’t want to hold the group back.”

The retreat is designed for humans, not athletes. We walk 10-12 kilometres per day—roughly 6-7 miles. Yes, you’ll be tired. Your feet might hurt. But we’re not racing. There’s no prize for arriving first.

I’ve hosted people from their 30s to their 70s, from marathon runners to people who haven’t exercised in years. The only requirement is that you can walk continuously for an hour at your own pace. If you can do that, you can do this.

Also, struggling a bit is part of the point. When your feet hurt and your legs are tired, your carefully constructed identity as “senior executive” or “industry leader” becomes irrelevant. You’re just a person, walking. There’s deep wisdom in that reduction.

Q4: “What’s different about your retreats versus just walking the Camino on my own?”

Three things:

First, structure without rigidity. I handle all logistics—accommodation, meals, route planning, and emergency protocols. You just walk. But there’s also flexibility built in for rest days, shorter walking days, or private processing time when needed.

Second, medical and therapeutic expertise. I’m not just a host—I’m a doctor and trained therapist who specialises in stress and nervous system regulation. If someone has a physical or emotional breakthrough (or breakdown), I have 20 years of clinical experience to support them appropriately.

Third, intentional community. Walking alone is powerful. Walking with a small group of people on similar journeys—all high-performers, all reckoning with the cost of success—creates a container for transformation that solo walking doesn’t. The conversations that happen around dinner tables after a long day of walking are often as valuable as the walking itself.

Q5: “What happens after the retreat? How do I maintain this when I’m back in the chaos?”

This is the most important question, and why our final two days include integration work. We don’t just walk and hope the benefits stick—we explicitly practice translating the experience into sustainable daily rhythms.

You’ll leave with a personalised micro-recovery protocol: specific practices that fit your schedule and personality. We work through likely obstacles and plan for them.

But here’s the deeper truth: you won’t be able to go back to exactly how you were. Once your nervous system remembers what true rest feels like, it won’t tolerate chronic activation the same way. Once you’ve experienced presence, busy-ness feels different. You’ll naturally make different choices—not through willpower, but because your system now has a reference point for what regulation feels like.

Most participants report that six months later, they’re still walking daily, still implementing the practices, and most importantly, still sleeping. That’s not me being a great host—that’s nervous system change that persists because it’s physiological, not just psychological.

Conclusion

Here’s what I’ve learned after guiding hundreds of high-performers through this journey: the walk doesn’t change you. It reveals the real you.

Underneath the job title and the quarterly targets and the endless optimisation, there’s a person who once knew how to rest. Who could feel joy without needing to justify it. Who understood that life isn’t a problem to solve but an experience to have.

That person didn’t disappear. They just got buried under layers of stress, performance, and the relentless pressure to prove themselves valuable through productivity.

Walking—particularly walking on ancient paths where millions have carried their own burdens—strips away those layers. Not through forced introspection or therapeutic processing, but through the simple, repetitive rhythm of one foot in front of the other. Through exhaustion that’s earned rather than chronic. Through silence that isn’t empty but full.

Marcus found himself again between Eauze and Nogaro. So have dozens of others. Not because the Camino is magic, but because it creates conditions where your nervous system can finally do what it’s been trying to do all along: release, restore, remember.

You don’t need to walk across all of France to begin this journey. Start with the doorway reset. Try the 3-5-7 breath. Take a 15-minute walk without your phone tomorrow morning.

But if you’re reading this and thinking, “This sounds nice, but I can’t get away,” pay attention to that thought. That’s not wisdom—that’s fear. Fear that if you stop, you’ll discover you’re not as essential as you think. Fear that rest might reveal how tired you actually are. Fear that pausing means losing ground in a race you’re not even sure you want to win anymore.

The people who most resist this work are the ones who most need it. I know because I was one of them.

Your Invitation: The Rediscover Your Natural Rhythm Retreat

If this article resonated, you’re exactly who this retreat is designed for.

I host small groups (maximum 4 people) on the French Way between Eauze and Nogaro in southwest France—a quiet, beautiful section of the Camino de Santiago that holds you differently than the tourist routes, walking through vineyards and medieval villages, supported by 20 years of my medical expertise and a decade of guiding people back to themselves.

This isn’t a vacation. It’s not a networking event. It’s a stress reset for people who’ve forgotten how to rest and are ready to remember.

👉 Learn more and see testimonials from 40+ past participants

The retreats fill quickly—not because I’m a brilliant marketer, but because people who’ve walked with me can’t stop talking about it. That’s the only metric that matters.

Your nervous system is waiting for you to listen. The path is already there. You just need to take the first step.

Dr. Margaretha Montagu
MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist
Founder, Camino de Santiago Stress Reset Walking Retreats

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P.S. Still not sure? Send me an email at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com. I’m happy to answer questions, discuss whether this stress reset retreat is right for you, or simply share more stories of transformation. The investment isn’t just time and money—it’s giving yourself permission to be human again. That’s priceless.

Research

Bahrami, F. (2025). Walking farther and more: learning from long-distance walkers in London. Mobilities, 1–18.

Ding, Ding et al. Daily steps and health outcomes in adults: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis The Lancet Public Health, Volume 10, Issue 8, e668 – e681

Ungvari Z, Fazekas-Pongor V, Csiszar A, Kunutsor SK. The multifaceted benefits of walking for healthy aging: from Blue Zones to molecular mechanisms. Geroscience. 2023 Dec;45(6):3211-3239.