What Is a “Slow Year?” Design a 2026 That Nourishes You Instead of Depletes You

For the exhausted, the overwhelmed, the overstimulated, and the quietly desperate for a different kind of life

I know we are nearly halfway through April, but it’s not too late. Should you want to, you can still make this year a slow year.

A slow year is a conscious, deliberate choice to organise a year around intensity and authenticity rather than velocity — protecting pockets of undisturbed rest, unhurried experience, and real focus, and treating these not as rewards to be earned once everything else is done, but as non-negotiables woven into the fabric of daily life.

It draws from the broader Slow Movement philosophy and stands as a quiet rebellion against the cult of productivity and the relentless urgency of our fast-paced modern life — not by doing less, necessarily, but by doing what actually matters, at a pace that allows you to be fully present.

The intentional living trend that’s less about doing less — and more about doing what actually matters

What this is: A practical guide to embracing the “slow year” — not as a romantic notion you flirt with in January and abandon by mid-February, but as an actual, lived experiment in doing life at a more reasonable pace. The kind where you still get things done (you are not, contrary to popular existential dread, turning into a moss-covered bench), but you stop behaving as though every email is a small emergency and every goal must be achieved before lunch.

It’s about learning how to move through 2026 with a steadier nervous system, clearer priorities, and the quiet, radical decision not to sprint just because everyone else has laced up their metaphorical running shoes and is charging toward burnout with impressive enthusiasm. There will be no rigid rules, no sanctimonious finger-wagging, and absolutely no requirement to churn your own butter unless you feel a deep and personal calling to do so.

What this isn’t: Not a lecture about digital detoxing delivered by someone who secretly checks their phone under the table. Not a minimalism manifesto that suggests you can solve existential angst by owning exactly seven objects (three of which are beige). And certainly not another breathless productivity system that promises you “more time” and then quietly fills that time with… more productivity.

You will not be asked to wake up at 4:30am, journal for an hour, meditate for another hour, drink something green and morally superior, and then optimize your circadian rhythm while listening to a podcast about optimizing your circadian rhythm. This is not about doing less so you can do more. It’s about doing what matters, at a pace that doesn’t make you question your life choices every Tuesday afternoon.

Read this if: You’re weary of the noise — not just the literal kind, but the constant, low-grade urgency humming in the background of modern life. You’ve opened the news recently and felt that peculiar mix of concern, disbelief, and a sudden desire to lie down in a dark room with a cup of tea and no Wi-Fi. Read this if you’ve started to suspect that “keeping up” is a game with no finish line, no prize, and slightly questionable rules.

Read this if there’s a quieter, wiser part of you (often drowned out by notifications and other people’s expectations) gently suggesting that there might be a different way to live a year. One with more pauses. More presence. Fewer self-imposed deadlines that were, if we’re honest, never agreed upon by anyone except your inner overachiever. Read this if you’d like to end 2026 not feeling like you survived it by clinging to the side, but like you actually inhabited it — fully, deliberately, and without needing a recovery period.

5 Key Takeaways

A slow year is not about doing less. It’s about doing things that genuinely matter — with more presence, less panic.
Intentional slowness is a radical act in a culture addicted to urgency, and choosing it requires nerve.
Nature, story, and stillness are not luxuries. They are, according to a growing body of research, genuinely restorative to a stressed nervous system.
Community and shared experience amplify the benefits of slow living far beyond anything you can achieve alone on a yoga mat.
Small, consistent rituals — a morning walk, a real book, a conversation without a screen — compound quietly into something that changes you.

Introduction

The world is, at present, exhausting, in the “I opened Twitter before my first coffee and now I need to lie down” sense. Climate headlines. Political upheaval. Cost-of-living squeezes. A relentless news cycle that seems to operate on the assumption that you actually want to feel terrible, all the time.

And here you are. Smart, resourceful, not new to hard seasons, and yet — something in you is fraying at the edges. The old strategies are not quite cutting it anymore. The weekend reset doesn’t hold till the end of Tuesday. The to-do list lengthens overnight. The things that used to light you up now barely register.

You are not broken. You are overstimulated, over-scheduled, and chronically under-nourished by the things that actually matter.

This article is about a different kind of year. A slow one. And no, that doesn’t mean quitting your job and moving to a yurt (although, honestly, some days). It means something more nuanced and more intentional than that.

Part One: The Story of Andrew Garnier, or How a Man Who Fed Everyone Finally Fed Himself

A Retreat in the French Pyrenees, Late October

Andrew Garnier had not eaten a meal sitting down in eleven years.

Not a proper one. Not the kind where you taste what’s in front of you, where you notice the weight of the fork or the particular way a good wine opens up after ten minutes in the glass. He was the chef. He plated. He tasted in fractions, a brush of sauce on a fingertip, a fragment of crust stolen mid-service, a half-spoonful of something that needed more acid. He fed three hundred people a week in his restaurant, Sel Gris, and had held his Michelin star for six consecutive years. He did not, as a rule, eat.

He slept four to six hours. He communicated mostly in imperatives. His sous-chef had started leaving printed notes on his office door rather than speaking to him directly, which Andrew had noticed and chosen not to examine too closely.

It was his older sister, Céleste, who staged the intervention. Not dramatically — she was not a dramatic woman — but firmly, in the way that only a sibling who has watched you slowly disappear can manage. She booked the retreat. She told him the dates. She said, with a precision that remined him of their mother: “You are not well, Andrew. You are just very busy, which is not the same thing.”

He drove to southwest France on a Tuesday in October, telling himself he would check the restaurant group chat every two hours.

He checked it twice the first day. Once the second. After that, he forgot.

The farmhouse surprised him. Not because it was beautiful, though it was, but because of the silence. Andrew Garnier had not stood in silence since he could remember. His world was constructed of sound: the clatter of a professional kitchen, the low roar of a full dining room, the perpetual percussion of a phone that never stopped vibrating on a countertop. Here, in the courtyard, with his bag still in his hand, he could hear a woodpecker somewhere in the trees. He stood there longer than was strictly necessary, listening.

There were three other guests. A retired cardiologist from Lyon who had recently survived a health scare that had, as he put it with elegant understatement, “clarified his priorities considerably.” A secondary school teacher from Cork who had not read a novel in three years and was embarrassed about it. A middle-aged architect from Stockholm who walked like someone recently released from a long captivity — which, in a sense, he had been.

Andrew, who spent his professional life emitting confidence and authority, found that in this company, he had very little to emit. They did not know him. They did not care about his star. They passed the bread and asked him how he’d slept.

It was strangely magical.

On the first morning, they walked a stretch of the ancient Camino de Santiago — a pilgrimage route worn smooth by a thousand years of seeking feet — through woodland already turning amber and copper, the air sharp with the smell of cold earth and pine resin. Andrew, whose daily exercise consisted of moving very fast between a pass and a stove, found the pace disorienting at first. There was no urgency. There was no destination beyond the next ridge.

Andrew crouched and rubbed a sprig of thyme between his fingers. He held his hand to his face and breathed in. A smell he had used ten thousand times, reduced to a technique, abstracted into a menu. And here it was, growing out of a rock in the Pyrenees, wild and indifferent and extraordinarily alive.

Something in his chest made a sound it had not made in a long time. Not a crack. Something gentler. Something splitting open.

In the afternoons, they read. Real books. Andrew, who had not finished a book in two years, had packed three, optimistically. He chose a novel at random — The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane — and by page thirty he was unreachable. Not gone. More precisely located than he’d been in months. He read for three hours and noticed it had happened only because his tea had gone cold.

Dinner that evening was a long, cheerful affair. A paella, a local favourite, roasted root vegetables, cheeses from a nearby farm, a wine from just over the Spanish border. Andrew ate it. All of it. At a table. Sitting down. The cardiologist poured him a second glass without asking and he did not check his phone.

Afterwards, they sat by the fire and talked. Not networking. Not pitching or impressing or managing. The teacher from Cork said she’d been so tired she’d stopped being able to tell the difference between sadness and exhaustion. The architect said he’d built beautiful spaces for other people to inhabit and had somehow neglected to inhabit any himself. Andrew said almost nothing, but listened with the full, still attention he usually reserved for a dish that wasn’t working.

On the fourth morning, before breakfast, he sat alone with his journal in the paddock, watching the horses move in the early mist. There is something about a horse at rest — the weight and warmth of it, the absolute unhurried presence — that refuses to be rushed by. You cannot multitask near a horse at rest. It will have none of it.

Andrew wrote for an hour. Not a menu. Not a staffing rota. He wrote about his father, who had cooked Sunday lunch every week of his childhood without fanfare or ambition, and how the smell of a roasting chicken could still, if he let it, make him feel genuinely safe. He wrote about what he had wanted, at twenty-two, before the wanting had been overtaken by the doing. He wrote, slowly, the first few lines of a different kind of year.

He flew home on a Friday with aching legs, a finished novel, four pages of journal, and an idea for a tasting menu built entirely around the wild herbs of the Camino path. His sous-chef said he looked strange. “Strange how?” Andrew asked. She thought about it and said: “Like yourself, actually.”

He took that as the highest possible compliment.

Part Two: So, What Actually Is a “Slow Year”?

The phrase “slow year” sits within a broader cultural movement, a quiet rebellion against the cult of productivity that has colonised most of modern life.

It draws from the Slow Movement, which began with food (the Slow Food movement, founded in Italy in 1989 as a response to a McDonald’s opening near the Spanish Steps, of all the inciting incidents) and has since spread into living, travel, fashion, and the general philosophy of doing things at the pace at which they can actually be done well.

A slow year is, at its simplest, a conscious choice to organise twelve months around intensity rather than velocity. It is a year in which you decide, in advance, that you will protect pockets of genuine rest, real attention, and unhurried experience, and that you will treat these not as rewards to be earned but as non-negotiables.

This is not the same as a sabbatical, although it can include one. It is not retirement. It is not a vow of poverty or a rejection of ambition. It is closer to what the philosopher Blaise Pascal was gesturing at in the seventeenth century when he observed (and this has aged extraordinarily well) that all of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

What a Slow Year Actually Looks Like in Practice

Protected mornings. Not all of them, not always. But enough of them. A slow morning is one in which you do not immediately hand your nervous system over to other people’s agendas.
Reading actual books. Not articles. Not threads. Not summaries of books. The sustained attention required by long-form narrative is, it turns out, a genuine cognitive and emotional tonic.
Choosing presence over documentation. Less photographing the moment, more inhabiting it.
Spending significant time in natural environments. Not as exercise, necessarily — though that helps too — but as a form of recalibration. Trees are astonishingly good at this. Research agrees.
Joining a pilgrimage. Not necessarily religious, though it can be. The act of walking somewhere, with intention, over time, changes something in the brain and the body that cannot easily be replicated by a weekend spa.
Seeking genuine community. Not networking. The kind of conversation that happens when people are fed and rested and not performing.

The Ripple Effect

When one person in a household, a family, a team, a community chooses to slow down deliberately, something shifts in the ecosystem around them. We are, as a species, deeply porous. We regulate each other’s nervous systems. A calmer person makes it easier for others to be calm. A person who has stopped performing urgency gives others silent permission to stop too.

The slow year is not a selfish act. It is, in many ways, one of the most generous things you can offer the people around you. A version of yourself that is not running on fumes, not half-present, not held together by caffeine and obligation.

Communities, too, shift when their members return to a human pace. Local shops. Conversations with neighbours. The re-emergence of people who have time to show up, to help, to notice.

Part Three: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Trying to Live More Slowly

1. Treating “slow” as a binary switch

You cannot go from 0 to 60 mph to a full stop without consequences. The people who announce loudly that they are “doing a digital detox” and then relapse by Tuesday have confused an aspiration with a strategy. A slow year is built in increments. One protected morning. One real walk. One book finished without guilt. Small and consistent beats dramatic and short-lived.

2. Waiting for permission

No one is going to give you a slow year. Your employer will not schedule it. Your family’s needs will not spontaneously reduce. The news will not become less alarming. If you are waiting for circumstances to align before you begin living more intentionally, you are going to wait a very long time. You choose it, in spite of the evidence.

3. Going it alone

Slow living done in isolation tends to feel self-indulgent and collapses quickly under social pressure. Community is load-bearing. Shared meals, shared walks, shared stories, shared laughter — these are not optional extras. They are the structure.

4. Confusing slowness with passivity

A slow year is not about achieving less. Some of the most creative, productive, and influential people in history were radical slowpokes by modern standards. Darwin took long daily walks. Wordsworth composed while walking. Keats wrote letters. Depth and output are not arch enemies. Slowing down often unlocks capacities that busyness has been suppressing.

5. Ignoring your body

The mind wants to intellectualise this. To read the books, think the thoughts, perhaps make a vision board. But the body is the instrument. Chronic stress lives in the tissues. Walking in nature, physical tiredness from real exertion, the weight and warmth of a real meal eaten slowly — these reach parts that no amount of journaling reaches alone. Don’t outsource the physical. Include it.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Your Slow Year Manifesto

Answer these three questions, longhand if you can:

1. What am I most hungry for, that I haven’t been getting? (Not achievements. Qualities of experience. Think: stillness, beauty, laughter, depth, freedom, belonging.)

2. What one thing, if I protected it consistently this year, would change how I feel most days? (A morning walk? An hour of reading before bed? A weekend monthly without commitments?)

3. Who would benefit if I became calmer and more present? (Write the names. Let that be your motivation on the days when you feel like you don’t have “time.”)

5 FAQs: Real Questions, Honest Answers

Q1: Is a “slow year” realistic for someone with a demanding job and family responsibilities? Yes — with one significant caveat: it will not happen by accident. You will need to decide, in advance, that certain things are protected. You don’t need a sabbatical or a six-figure savings pot. You need three or four genuine anchors in your year — experiences or rituals that are slow, nourishing, and non-negotiable. The rest can be ordinary. The anchors change everything.

Q2: I’m not sure I can “do nothing.” I get anxious when I’m not productive. Is slow living for me? Possibly more for you than for anyone else. The anxiety you feel about stillness is the symptom, not the verdict. Most people who describe themselves as “unable to relax” are not constitutionally incapable of it — they are deeply habituated to urgency. That habituation can change. It usually changes first in the body, on a walk or in a chair by a fire with a good book, before the mind catches up.

Q3: How is a reading retreat on the Camino different from just going on holiday? A holiday is typically about escape — different scenery, same self. A retreat offers something more structural: a container in which something can actually shift. The combination of purposeful walking (the Camino is one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in the world), extended reading, good food, and genuine community creates conditions for a kind of recalibration that a week in Tenerife, lovely as it is, tends not to.

Q4: Do I have to be religious to walk the Camino? Absolutely not. The vast majority of Camino walkers today describe themselves as non-religious. The path is ancient, yes — and that antiquity gives it a weight and a quality of silence that is palpable regardless of belief. What it asks of you is simply your feet and your attention. That’s enough.

Q5: I’ve been stressed for so long I’m not sure I know what “restored” feels like. Is that normal? Entirely. Chronic stress normalises itself. You stop remembering what baseline feels like and start mistaking exhaustion for personality. Many people who attend retreats report being surprised by the return of things they’d forgotten: curiosity, appetite (for food, ideas, company), a capacity for genuine joy. These things didn’t go anywhere. They were just buried under the noise.

Conclusion: The Year Ahead

There is a version of 2026 that looks very much like 2025. Fast, loud, anxious, and over before you could catch your breath.

And there is another version.

One with mornings that belong to you. Long walks on ancient paths through oak and bracken. A book so absorbing you miss your stop. A meal that took two hours because the conversation was too good to rush. A sky full of stars above a stone farmhouse in southwest France, the smell of woodsmoke in the air, and the quiet, settled knowledge that you are, finally, somewhere real.

You get to choose which version you’re in.

The world will not slow down for you. But you — smart, capable, weathered, ready — can choose a different pace. Not as an escape from your life. As a deeper entrance into it.

An Invitation

If some part of you is quietly desperate for an escape, the 5-Day Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the heart of southwest France might be exactly the thing.

Join us for the Book Lovers Binge Reading Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the sun-drenched southwest of France: a journey where the trail and the story unfold together. Walk ancient paths at your own pace, then settle in each evening with a good book. This isn’t a fitness challenge—it’s a gentle rhythm—one step, one chapter, one honest conversation at a time. Rolling hills, quiet villages, golden light. No expectations, no performance, no agenda but your own unfolding.

But Are You Ready for a Retreat?

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

Not sure if now is the right time, or which retreat is the right fit? Take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz when you sign up for my newsletter, and find out exactly what kind of slow experience your particular form of tired is calling for.

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Kabat-Zinn, J., Massion, A. O., Kristeller, J., Peterson, L. G., Fletcher, K. E., Pbert, L., … Santorelli, S. F. (1992). Effectiveness of a meditation-based stress reduction program in the treatment of anxiety disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 149(7), 936–943.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications, 34(4), 407–428.
Selhub, E. M., & Logan, A. C. (2012). Your brain on nature: The science of nature’s influence on your health, happiness and vitality. Journal of Affective Disorders, evidence reviewed in book-form but founded on peer-reviewed studies; see also: Ulrich, R. S. et al. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230.
Aspinall, P., Mavros, P., Coyne, R., & Roe, J. (2015). The urban brain: Analysing outdoor physical activity with mobile EEG. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 49(4), 272–276.

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What Is “Slow Friendship?”

The science and soul of slow friendship — and how to cultivate it before you burn out completely

Slow friendship is a way of relating to others that prioritises depth, authenticity, and genuine presence over speed, intensity, or obligation. Rather than rushing into closeness or holding friends to unspoken expectations, it allows connection to unfold naturally over time, giving both people the freedom to show up as their full, imperfect selves without fear of judgment or abandonment. It’s less about constant contact and more about the quality of care — a kind of friendship that doesn’t demand perfection, weathers change and contradiction, and treats the bond itself as something sacred.

What this is: A thoughtful, insight-giving look at “slow friendship” — the quietly radical art of building reciprocal, gloriously unhurried connections in a world that has somehow decided relationships should function like a quarterly performance review. (Spoiler: they shouldn’t. You are not a KPI. Your friendships are not a pipeline. There will be no bonus for “exceeding expectations in emotional availability.”) This is about the kind of connection where someone remembers what you told them last time, asks the follow-up question, and — in a move so subversive it borders on scandalous — does not check their phone while you’re answering.

What this isn’t: A lecture about putting your phone down. (You know. I know you know. Your screen-time report knows. We are not here to reopen that particular wound.) It is also not a listicle of “5 easy ways to make friends as an adult,” illustrated with stock photos of improbably radiant people laughing at salad — the kind of advice that is both technically correct and spiritually unhelpful, and that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room with a cold cloth on your forehead and reconsider your subscription to modern life.

Read this if: You are exhausted — not just tired, but existentially, soul-deep tired — by the daily onslaught of world events you cannot fix and cannot stop refreshing. If you are vaguely, embarrassingly lonely despite being perpetually, aggressively connected. If you have recently looked at your phone, noted seventeen unread messages across four group chats, and felt not warmth but a low-grade administrative panic. If you suspect your closest friendships have been quietly downgraded to sporadic voice notes and the occasional heart-react, and that somewhere along the way you stopped being known and started being… managed.

And if — just if — you are willing to entertain the mildly inconvenient, deeply appealing possibility that the remedy might involve the French countryside, a stack of novels that do not improve your CV in any measurable way, a pair of walking shoes, and the company of a small, well-chosen group of humans who have absolutely no interest in optimising you.

5 Key Takeaways

Slow friendship is not a lifestyle trend — it’s a biological necessity. Your nervous system is quite literally designed for face-to-face, unhurried connection. Anything less is a workaround, a short-term solution.
Quality over quantity is not a consolation prize. Research consistently shows that two or three genuinely close friendships have a more profound effect on wellbeing than a crowd of pleasant acquaintances.
Slow friendships are built in the margins — shared silences, shared meals, shared miles. You cannot rush them, and you absolutely cannot replicate them on a screen.
The world feels less terrifying when you feel genuinely witnessed by another human being. Slow friendship is, among other things, an extraordinarily effective antidote to news-cycle anxiety.
You don’t have to overhaul your entire life to experience this. Sometimes, one intentional week is enough to remind you who you are — and who you want to be close to.

Introduction: You Are Not Broken. You Are Just Under-Befriended.

You’re sitting with your phone in hand, having just scrolled through the news (mistake), then through social media (bigger mistake), then through three different WhatsApp group chats that are too busy and at the same time entirely devoid of anything you actually need to know. You are, by every modern metric, connected. You have notifications. You have followers. You have a contacts list so long it scrolls for what feels like several business days.

And yet.

There is a specific, hollow, slightly uncomfortable kind of loneliness that sits in the chest of people who are, technically, never alone. A loneliness that has nothing to do with being unloved and everything to do with never being truly known. Never sitting across from someone who looks at you, unhurried, and asks not “how are you?” but “no, really — how are you?“

That loneliness? It has a name now. And its antidote has one too.

Slow friendship is what happens when two people actually show up for each other — slowly, consistently, with attention and genuine interest. It is the opposite of the connection our culture has been selling us. And it is, it turns out, exactly what our overstimulated, under-nourished nervous systems are quietly screaming for.

I have been giving this a lot of thought, and for me, a slow friendship is a kind friendship. A friendship based on being kind to each other, must, it seems to me, have kindness as its foundation.

In this article, you’ll discover what slow friendship actually is, why it matters more than ever right now, and — no pressure — why a week walking an ancient pilgrim trail in the French countryside, surrounded by good books and excellent company, might be precisely the slow-friendship catalyst you didn’t know you needed.

The Story: How Sophie Marchand Accidentally Found Her Herself

Sophie Marchand was, by most external measures, doing extremely well.

She had a successful freelance consultancy, a flat she’d renovated herself in Toulouse, a book club that met monthly (mostly), and a social calendar that looked, from the outside, positively enviable. She had friends. Plenty of them. There was Camille, who she’d known since university and still texted on birthdays. There was the work crowd, perfectly nice, always up for a drink. There was the yoga group, the neighbours she waved to warmly, the LinkedIn connections she’d met at conferences and promised to “catch up with properly asap.”

Sophie, in other words, had the architecture of a rich social life. What she did not have, at the age of fifty-four, was anyone she could call at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night when the news had done its worst and the walls were closing in.

She didn’t let herself think about that too hard.

Then the year turned particularly grim. The geopolitical situation, which she’d been monitoring with the anxious vigilance of someone who reads three newspapers a day, grew grimmer still. Her work, though steady, felt increasingly purposeless. And one evening, sitting in her beautiful renovated flat, eating reheated pasta alone and watching a documentary about a problem she neither cared nor could do anything about, Sophie Marchand had a very small, very quiet, very significant meltdown.

She didn’t sob dramatically. She simply put down her fork, looked at the wall, and thought: I am so tired of feeling like this, and I have no idea who to call. No one to talk to.

It was her sister who found the retreat. “You need to get out of your own head,” her sister said, in the way only sisters can, “and you need to do it somewhere beautiful, with books, and without your laptop.” She sent a link. Sophie looked at it for three days before booking.

The morning she arrived in southwest France, Sophie was still not entirely sure what she’d signed up for. She’d imagined something slightly awkward — enforced bonding, trust falls, sharing circles. She’d prepared herself with the resigned practicality of someone who has attended enough corporate team-building events to have lost all faith in group activities.

What she found instead was this: an ancient farmhouse scented with lavender and old wood, a stack of novels on every available surface, a long table set for dinner under the evening sky, and six women she had never met, all of whom had arrived carrying, she would later understand, a version of the same weight she was carrying.

They didn’t talk about their feelings on the first night. They talked about books.

Specifically, they talked about which fictional character had annoyed them most profoundly, who had cried at the end of A Little Life (everyone, immediately, no contest), and whether there is such a thing as a beach read that is also genuinely literary. The conversation ran past midnight. The wine was very good. Sophie laughed, properly — the kind of laugh that starts somewhere deep and a bit rusty — for the first time in longer than she could accurately remember.

The next morning, they walked.

The Camino de Santiago path here was not punishing — it was inviting. Sun on limestone. The smell of wild thyme released by their footsteps. The particular silence of countryside that has been walked for a thousand years and does not feel the need to explain itself. Sophie fell into step with a woman called Nadia, a secondary school teacher from Bristol who had the extraordinary gift of asking questions and then actually waiting for the answer.

“What do you miss?” Nadia asked, somewhere around the second kilometre.

Sophie opened her mouth to say something sensible and found, to her slight alarm, that what came out instead was the truth: “I miss feeling like I matter to someone. Not in a work way. In a person way.”

There was a pause. Nadia nodded. “Yes,” she said simply. “Me too.”

That was it. That was the whole conversation. But something unlocked.

Over the next four days, something remarkable happened — not loudly or dramatically, but in the way that real things tend to happen: slowly, cumulatively, in the spaces between. It happened over shared meals, where the food was simple and exceptional and no one looked at their phones. It happened on the trail, where conversations deepened naturally when you were walking side by side instead of facing each other across a table. It happened during the afternoon reading hours — that glorious, guilt-free stretch of time set aside specifically for sitting somewhere beautiful with a novel and absolutely no agenda — when someone would occasionally read a passage aloud and someone else would say “oh god, yes,” and something true would hang briefly in the warm air between them.

By the final evening, something had shifted. Not everything — Sophie still had the freelance consultancy, the flat, the world in its current state. But she had also, somehow, acquired three women whose WhatsApp messages she actually wanted to open. Women who, when they asked how she was, meant it. Women who had seen her, unhurried, over four days of walking and reading and bad puns at dinner, and had decided they liked what they saw.

She had, without quite meaning to, made slow friends.

So What Exactly Is Slow Friendship? And Why Does It Matter So Much Right Now?

The phrase “slow friendship” is relatively new but the concept, of course, is as old as humanity. For most of our existence, friendship was inherently slow. You knew people over years. You saw them regularly, in person, for extended stretches of time. You knew their kitchen and the way they laughed and what they looked like when they were sad and trying to hide it.

Then, somewhere between the industrial revolution, the internet, and the particular social upheaval of the last decade, friendship got optimised. It got faster, flatter, and significantly more scalable. We acquired hundreds of connections we couldn’t quite distinguish from friendships, and we began, slowly, to confuse activity for intimacy.

Slow friendship is the deliberate counter-movement to that. At its core, it is simply this: choosing quality over quantity. Prioritising the sustained, reciprocal, unglamorous, enormously rewarding work of truly knowing someone — and letting yourself be known.

The researcher Brené Brown has called deep human connection “the purpose of human existence.” The psychologist Robin Dunbar, whose famous “Dunbar’s number” suggests we can maintain meaningful relationships with only around 150 people (and genuinely close ones with far fewer, perhaps five), has argued that the quality of our close friendships is one of the most reliable predictors of both mental and physical health. Loneliness, meanwhile, has been declared a public health crisis in multiple countries, with effects on mortality comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

None of this is small.

What makes slow friendship particularly urgent right now is the specific texture of modern anxiety. The world is genuinely frightening in ways that are hard to process alone. Climate change, political polarisation, economic uncertainty, the relentless algorithmic amplification of everything terrible — these are not small concerns, and the appropriate response to them is not, unfortunately, refreshing your news feed one more time.

The appropriate response, it turns out, is human connection. Specifically, the kind of loyal, trusting,lasting connection that makes you feel that whatever is happening out there, you are not facing it in a void. That someone knows you. That you matter to a specific set of people in a specific, irreplaceable way.

That, in its simplest form, is what slow friendship offers.

How Slow Friendship Ripples Outward

Here is what makes it particularly worth pursuing: the benefits of slow friendship do not stay contained within the friendship itself.

When Sophie returned to Toulouse, she was different. Not dramatically, not in ways she could have listed efficiently in a presentation — but different. She initiated a long-overdue honest conversation with Camille, who, it turned out, had also been feeling the distance between them and was quietly devastated by it. She started a small, informal neighbourhood supper club, six people, monthly, no phones at the table. She became, by her own account, a kinder and more present teacher in the workshops she ran.

This is not coincidence. When we feel genuinely connected, we become more generous, more patient, more courageous. The felt sense of being known and valued is, quite literally, regulating to the nervous system. It reduces cortisol, increases oxytocin, and makes us significantly more capable of showing up well for the other humans in our lives.

Slow friendship, in other words, is not a private luxury. It is, in the most practical sense, a contribution to the people around you.

5 Mistakes to Avoid on the Path to Slow Friendship

1. Treating depth as something that happens automatically with time. Years of knowing someone does not automatically produce closeness. Many people have long-term friends they have never been truly honest with. Slow friendship requires intentionality — the willingness to move beyond the surface, even when that feels uncomfortable.

2. Expecting it to look like your twenties. Adult friendship rarely involves spontaneous three-hour phone calls or staying up till four in the morning solving the world’s problems (lovely as that was). Slow friendship in midlife tends to look quieter — more deliberate, more scheduled, and no less meaningful for it.

3. Confusing digital contact with actual connection. Liking someone’s Instagram post, texting a birthday emoji, being “in touch” — is about maintenance, not nourishment. They are the difference between keeping a plant alive and actually tending a garden.

4. Waiting for the perfect moment to invest. The “I’ll reach out when things settle down” phenomenon is responsible for more slowly dying friendships than any falling-out. Things do not settle down. Reach out anyway.

5. Underestimating the power of shared physical experience. Walking together, eating together, reading in comfortable silence together — the body participates in friendship, not just the mind. Some of the most profound bonding happens not through talking about things but through doing things side by side. This is partly neurological: shared physical experience synchronises nervous systems and builds trust in ways that conversation alone cannot.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The Friendship Inventory

Find a quiet ten minutes. Make tea. Sit outside.

Take a piece of paper and write down three names. Not your most popular friends, or your most useful ones — but the people with whom, if you’re honest, you most want to build or deepen a genuine slow friendship.

For each name, write one sentence: What specifically am I not giving this friendship that I could?

Then write one small, concrete action you could take in the next seven days.

That’s it. You are not reinventing your social life. You are planting three seeds.

5 FAQs About Slow Friendship

Q: Is slow friendship just another name for having a best friend? Not quite. Slow friendship is more of a quality than a specific category — it describes friendships characterised by depth, reciprocity, and unhurried attention. You might have a best friend you’ve never been entirely honest with (common!) and a slow friendship with someone you see only once a year but with whom you go genuinely deep. The pace and intention matter more than the label.

Q: What if I’ve let my close friendships slide and it feels too late to recover them? It almost certainly isn’t too late. Research on “rekindled friendships” (yes, this is a studied phenomenon) suggests that reconnecting with a close friend after a long gap can re-establish emotional intimacy relatively quickly — because the foundation is already there. A handwritten note, a direct and honest message, an invitation to do something specific together — it takes courage, but rarely as much as we fear.

Q: Can you build slow friendships online? Partially. Digital connection can maintain and even deepen a friendship that has been established in person. What it struggles to do is create one from scratch — because so much of the neurobiological trust-building that underlies deep connection requires physical presence. Voice, eye contact, shared physical experience — these are not optional extras. They are how we are wired.

Q: I’m introverted. Does slow friendship work for me, or does it still require a lot of socialising? Slow friendship is arguably made for introverts. It is the opposite of exhausting surface-level networking. A small number of deeply known people, seen at a manageable frequency, in meaningful rather than performative contexts — this is introvert friendship done well. Many introverts find group retreats surprisingly natural precisely because the setting is structured, purposeful, and conducive to going deep rather than wide.

Q: How do I find potential slow friends as an adult when I’m not in an environment that naturally creates them? This is genuinely hard, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The most reliable approach is to seek shared experiences over shared interests — not a book club where everyone reads the same book and makes small talk, but an immersive, extended experience where people are stripped of their usual social performance and allowed to be real. (A five-day walking and reading retreat, for instance. Just as a completely random example.)

Conclusion: The World Is Rushing Blindly Ahead. Slow Down.

There is an old Celtic concept, anam cara, meaning “soul friend” — a companion who sees you fully, without judgement, and in whose presence you can be entirely yourself. The Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue described the anam cara relationship as one in which “all masks fall away and you can be as you really are.”

We are living in an era that specialises in masks. We perform busyness, optimism, resilience, curatedness. We perform being fine. And then we go home and feel quietly hollowed out by the performance.

Slow friendship is the counter-performance. It is the quiet act of saying: I am here. I am not rushing. I want to know you, and I am willing to be known.

As O’Donohue wrote: “When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.”

Here’s a question worth sitting with: When did you last allow yourself to be truly known by someone — not your edited, coping, doing-fine version, but the real, unguarded, slightly-overwhelmed-by-it-all version? And who in your life might be waiting for the same invitation from you?

If something in this article landed — if you recognised that hollow, over-connected loneliness, or felt a flicker of longing for the kind of friendship where you don’t have to perform — then perhaps it’s time to try something different.

The 5-Day Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in southwest France is designed for exactly this. Walking an ancient path, reading without guilt, eating well, sleeping deeply, and spending unhurried time with a small group of thoughtful women who arrived, like you, carrying the weight of the world and ready to put some of it down. No agenda other than to read, walk, reconnect — with nature, with stories, and with the kind of slow, real friendship you didn’t know you were starving for. Your nervous system will thank you. So will your future self.

Take the Quiz: Are You Ready for a Retreat?

Not sure if this is right for you? Sign up for the newsletter and take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz — a short, surprisingly accurate self-assessment that will tell you exactly where you are, what you need, and whether a week in the French countryside might be it.

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

References

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. Landmark meta-analysis of 148 studies demonstrating that adequate social relationships increase the likelihood of survival by 50%, directly supporting the claim that friendship quality is a health imperative.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2018). The anatomy of friendship. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(1), 32–51. Dunbar’s synthesis of evolutionary and neurobiological research on human friendship, including evidence for the cognitive limits on meaningful relationships and the characteristics of close bonds.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Cacioppo, S. (2018). The growing problem of loneliness. The Lancet, 391(10119), 426. A brief but authoritative commentary from the leading loneliness researchers, situating loneliness as a public health crisis and noting its physiological and psychological consequences.
Kok, B. E., & Singer, T. (2017). Phenomenological fingerprints of four meditations: Differential state changes in affect, mind-wandering, meta-cognition, and interoception before and after daily practice across 9 months of training. Mindfulness, 8(1), 218–231. While focused on meditation, this study’s findings on the role of interoception and sustained attentional practice are directly relevant to the quality of presence required for deep interpersonal connection.
Pressman, S. D., Cohen, S., Miller, G. E., Barkin, A., Rabin, B. S., & Treanor, J. J. (2005). Loneliness, social network size, and immune response to influenza vaccination in college freshmen. Health Psychology, 24(3), 297–306. A compelling demonstration that loneliness (rather than social network size alone) predicts immune response, illustrating the biological pathways through which the quality of connection affects physical health.

12/04/202603/05/2026

Why Should You Keep a Journal on the Camino de Santiago?

Exploring Embodied Cognition and Constructive Self-reflection

5 Key Takeaways

Journaling on the Camino isn’t about writing — it’s about thinking clearly. The combination of movement and reflection rewires how you process stress and emotion.
The Camino provides the perfect conditions for what psychologists call “constructive self-reflection,” breaking the rumination loop that keeps stressed people stuck.
Writing during a pilgrimage creates a personal archive of resilience — evidence you can return to when the world feels overwhelming again.
You don’t need to walk 800 km. Even a three-day section through the stunning southwest of France delivers the neurological and psychological reset that makes journalling transformative.
The community you meet on the Camino — and the stories you record — can ripple outward, changing not just your life but the lives of those around you.

What this is: A heartfelt, practical, occasionally cheeky deep-dive into why journalling on the Camino de Santiago is one of the most powerful things a person can do for their mental and emotional health — especially right now, in a world that seems to have lost the plot entirely.

What this isn’t: A beginner’s guide to buying the right journal, or a lecture about the importance of “self-care.” You already know that. This is about why the specific combination of walking, wilderness, and writing cracks something open in people that nothing else quite manages to touch.

Read this if: You are quietly exhausted by the state of the world, you’ve tried meditating (twice), you’ve read the productivity books, and you still feel like you’re living someone else’s life at someone else’s pace. Also read this if you suspect that somewhere between the news cycle and the to-do list, you got a little lost.

Introductionn: The Quiet Emergency Nobody’s Talking About

You wake up, reach for your phone, and before your feet have touched the floor, you’ve already absorbed three international crises, a political scandal, and seventeen opinions about all of it. By 8am, your nervous system is running at the kind of frequency that would have been reserved for actual emergencies in any previous century.

This isn’t weakness. This is the entirely rational response of a finely-tuned human being to an entirely irrational information environment. The trouble is, your body can’t tell the difference between a breaking news alert and a genuine threat. And so it keeps bracing. Keeps scanning. Keeps waiting for the danger to pass.

It doesn’t pass. It just refreshes.

Here’s what this article will give you: a compelling case for why the ancient practice of walking the Camino de Santiago, combined with the deceptively simple act of keeping a journal, may be the most effective and genuinely enjoyable intervention available to a stressed, world-weary, quietly-desperate-for-something-different human being in 2025.

And yes, there is a story. A rather good one, involving a woman named Vivienne Marsh, a battered blue notebook, and the precise moment she stopped running from herself somewhere on a sun-drenched path in southwest France.

The Story of Vivienne Marsh

A Story in Four Movements

Movement One: The Problem (or, How Vivienne Stopped Being Vivienne)

Vivienne Marsh had, by every observable metric, an excellent life.

She had a good job, a nice flat, two cats with only moderately volatile personalities, and a group of friends who genuinely liked and looked out for her. She ran half-marathons. She read actual books. She owned a gratitude journal she had used at least four times.

And yet.

On the Tuesday morning she turned forty-three, she stood in her kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and realised with startling calm that she could not remember the last time she had felt like herself. The not-stressed version of herself. Not performing-competence-at-a-meeting of herself. Herself. The one with opinions about poetry and strong feelings about olive oil and a laugh that started in her stomach.

That person had gone quiet somewhere around 2022, and Vivienne had been too busy to notice.

She didn’t have a breakdown. She was far too organised for that. Instead, she did what capable, resourceful women with a type A personality do: she googled solutions. Asked ChatGPT, Claude etc. She tried a meditation app (abandoned after eleven days), a digital detox weekend (spent mostly anxious about being offline), and therapy (helpful, but somehow still happening inside four walls, just as everything else).

What she needed, though she didn’t know it yet, was to get out of her head by getting into her body. To move.

What she needed was the Camino.

Movement Two: The Struggle (or, Day One, Blisters, and a Notebook She Almost Didn’t Pack)

The retreat in southwest France arrived in her inbox via a friend’s recommendation and stayed there for six weeks before Vivienne clicked the link. A reading retreat? On the Camino? It sounded either perfectly designed for her or entirely absurd. She booked it on a Wednesday evening after a particularly dispiriting news cycle, half-expecting to cancel by Friday.

She didn’t cancel.

What she did do was pack badly, overestimate her fitness, and forget that “scenic” in the French countryside might mean “uphill.” On the first morning, following a brunch that smelled of warm bread and woodsmoke, the group set off along a path lined with wild thyme and the very particular silence that only exists when there are no cars anywhere near. Vivienne’s new boots were slightly uncomfortable. Her shoulders were tight. Her brain was still analysing spreadsheets and composing emails.

The group facilitator, a warmly practical woman with the energy of someone who has walked this particular way and won, handed out notebooks before they left. Small, cream-paged things with a dark blue cover. “Write whatever comes,” she said. “Or don’t write anything. But carry it.”

Vivienne shoved hers in her jacket pocket, slightly irritated by the sentimentality of it.

By lunchtime, she had written six pages.

Not about anything important, she would tell you. About the way the light came through the oak trees in long, golden columns. About the smell of the earth after last night’s rain, something between mushroom and memory. About the sound her boots made on the packed-clay path — a soft, rhythmic thud that began, after an hour, to feel like something she could lean into.

She wrote about her cats. She wrote half a sentence about her mother and then stopped, surprised by the lump in her throat.

She ate her lunch on a low stone wall, looking out over a valley that had absolutely no idea what the FTSE 100 was doing, and felt, for the first time in longer than she could calculate, that the moment she was in was the only moment that mattered.

It was slightly terrifying. It was also, unmistakably, a relief.

Movement Three: The Solution (or, What Happened When Vivienne Started Telling herself the Truth)

By day three, something had shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no epiphany moment soundtracked by swelling violins. It was quieter than that, and stickier. Vivienne had begun to write in the evenings too, curled in one of the deep armchairs in the retreat house with a glass of local wine and her increasingly dog-eared notebook. Around her, other women read. Wrote. The fire crackled. Someone laughed softly at something in her book.

The afternoon’s shared reading session — a selection of passages about solitude, nature, and the peculiar freedom of being somewhere nobody expects anything from you — had loosened something in Vivienne’s chest. The discussion that followed, honest and unperformative in the way that conversations become when people have spent a day walking together, had loosened it further.

She wrote, that evening, about the gap between the life she was living and the life she wanted. Not in a crisis-journal way. In the way you write when you’re finally honest with yourself because you’ve run out of energy for pretending.

She wrote about what she was grateful for, properly, not in the three-words-before-bed way of the abandoned app, but in the full-bodied way of someone who has spent eight hours in extraordinary countryside and eaten extraordinary food and laughed with strangers who somehow already feel like friends. Gratitude, she discovered, is much easier to access when you’ve given your senses something real to work with.

She wrote about what scared her. About what she missed. About the version of herself she wanted to find again.

Movement Four: The Takeaway (or, a different Vivienne Marsh Goes Home)

On the last morning, the group walked a longer stretch, emerging eventually at a high point with a view that made several people go briefly speechless. The world spread out below them, green and ancient and entirely unconcerned with current affairs. Vivienne stood there and felt, in her chest and her shoulders and the soles of her slightly-blistered feet, something she would later describe to her therapist as “a sense of having been put back together in the right order.”

She came home with three things: a slightly battered blue notebook filled to the last page, a list of books she intended to read, and a clarity about her life that no amount of productivity systems had ever managed to provide.

She also came home with a new habit. Every morning, before the phone, before the news, before the day could colonise her thoughts — she wrote. Not much. Sometimes only a paragraph. But it was hers. A room of her own, in ink.

Her colleagues noticed. Her friends noticed. Her cats noticed, though they declined to comment.

Vivienne Marsh had, somewhere between the thyme-scented paths of southwest France and the last page of a cream-paged notebook, remembered who she was.

The Science of Wandering, Wondering and Writing

Why this combination is so extraordinarily effective, not just poetic, but physiological.

Walking, particularly in nature, directly reduces cortisol levels. Research from Stanford University has shown that walking in natural environments, as opposed to urban settings, reduces rumination, the repetitive, self-critical thought patterns that characterise anxiety and depression. The Camino routes in southwest France deliver this in abundance: ancient forests, open fields, gentle river valleys, and the kind of uninterrupted sky that makes problems feel manageable.

Expressive writing reorganises traumatic and stressful experiences. The pioneering work of psychologist James Pennebaker demonstrated that writing about emotionally significant events, even for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day, measurably improves immune function, reduces physician visits, and creates lasting improvements in mood. When you walk the Camino, you have time to write in this way, properly, not squeezed in between meetings, but in the golden space of an evening with nowhere else you need to be.

The combination of physical exertion and reflective writing creates what researchers call “embodied cognition.” Ideas don’t just live in your head; they live in your body. When you’ve walked eight kilometres through landscape that has hosted pilgrims for a thousand years, your body is ready to help your mind make sense of things it has been avoiding.

The Camino strips away the scaffolding. No role, no performance, no identity except pilgrim and walker. In this stripped-back state, journalling becomes not a discipline but a compulsion, because there is so much arising, so much noticing, so much feeling, that not writing it down feels wasteful.

And then there is the community. Fellow walkers, fellow readers, people who have also arrived carrying invisible weight and are, gently and without ceremony, setting some of it down. The conversations that happen on the Camino, at mealtimes, on resting stones, in the half-dark of early morning starts, are of a different quality to ordinary conversation. They are honest in the way that temporary proximity allows. And what you hear in those conversations, what you witness, often finds its way into your journal and into your understanding of your own life.

When Vivienne Marsh came home different, her relationships changed. Not because she announced anything, or made demands, or began ending sentences with “as I learned on my journey.” But because she was calmer, more present, more honest. Because she had stopped performing fine and started being, more genuinely, okay. Because she asked better questions and listened to the answers.

Her team at work noticed that meetings became less fraught. Her friendships deepened, because she brought more of herself to them. Her mother, whom she called more regularly after the retreat, commented that Vivienne seemed, somehow, lighter.

This is how it works. Clarity is contagious. Groundedness ripples. The person who finds their way back to themselves gives implicit permission to everyone around them to do the same.

A community of even slightly more intentional, slightly less reactive, slightly more grounded people is, frankly, a better community. And it starts with one person, one notebook, one path through the thyme-scented hills of southwest France.

5 Journalling Mistakes to Avoid on the Camino

Because Good Intentions and Wrong Approaches Are a Waste of Good Scenery

1. Treating Your Journal Like a List of Events “Walked 9km. Had soup for lunch. Blisters on left heel.” This is a logbook, not a journal. Push past the facts into the feelings, the questions, the noticing. What did the soup taste like? What did you think about during the uphill stretch? What surprised you?

2. Writing Only When You Have “Something Important” to Say The Camino’s magic lives in the ordinary moments: the conversation with a stranger, the quality of light at 7am, the unexpected emotion triggered by a particular bend in the path. If you wait for significance, you’ll miss it.

3. Writing for an Imaginary Reader Your journal is not your Instagram. It doesn’t need to be beautiful, wise, or quotable. The moment you start writing for an audience, even a fictional one, you lose access to the raw material that makes journalling genuinely useful.

4. Skipping the Morning Pages Mornings on the Camino are extraordinary. The light, the quiet, the particular quality of thought before the day takes hold. Even ten minutes of writing before you set off will set a completely different tone for your walk.

5. Leaving Your Notebook in Your Bag Keep it accessible. In your jacket pocket, clipped to your pack, tucked into a top strap. The insight you want to capture will arrive at a completely inconvenient moment, on a hillside, at a water stop, mid-conversation. Reach for it.

Before You Put One Foot on the Path

Find a quiet spot, ideally outdoors, ideally with something living nearby (a tree will do). Take three slow breaths. Then write, without overthinking, your responses to these three prompts:

What am I carrying into this walk that I am ready to put down?
What do I want to feel by the end of this journey?
What would it mean to come home as a slightly different version of myself?

Don’t edit. Don’t explain. Just write. Seal the page with a date and, if you like, a single word that sums up how you feel right now.

You’ll return to this on the last day. What you discover may astonish you.

5 FAQs About Journalling on the Camino de Santiago

Q: Do I have to be any good at writing to journal on the Camino? Absolutely not. In fact, having no writerly self-consciousness is an advantage. You’re not writing for publication; you’re writing for clarity. If you can think, you can journal.

Q: How much time should I set aside for journalling each day? Most people find that twenty to thirty minutes in the evening and ten minutes in the morning is ideal. But even five uninterrupted minutes of genuine honesty will serve you better than an hour of unstructured navel-gazing.

Q: What kind of notebook should I bring? Small enough to carry comfortably, large enough to write freely. Unlined pages give more creative latitude; lined pages feel less intimidating. Avoid anything so beautiful you’re afraid to use it. This is a working tool, not a keepsake.

Q: Will journalling on the Camino help with anxiety and stress? The research is clear that expressive writing reduces psychological distress, and that walking in nature reduces cortisol. Together, and in the context of community and rest, many people find the combination genuinely transformative. It is not a clinical treatment, but it is a powerful and evidence-informed practice.

Q: What if I don’t know what to write? Start with your senses. What can you see, hear, smell, taste, feel right now? Move from the physical outward. The body is an extraordinarily reliable guide to what the mind is actually trying to process.

Conclusion: Ancient Technology for Modern Problems

There is something quietly radical about walking a path that humans have walked for a thousand years, carrying only what fits on your back, and writing down what you find when the noise finally stops.

The Camino has always been, at its heart, a journey inward disguised as a journey forward. The journal is the tool that makes the inward journey legible, that turns experience into understanding and movement into meaning.

In a world that profits from your distraction and anxiety, choosing to walk, to be still, to write, to reflect, is not escapism. It is, in the most practical sense, an act of resistance. And, as Vivienne Marsh would tell you, it is one of the best decisions a person can make.

“Not all those who wander are lost. But the ones who carry a notebook tend to find their way home considerably faster.” M Montagu

Your Invitation: Five Days That Could Change Everything

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading & Camino de Santiago Retreats

If the world has been too loud for too long, and you are quietly, urgently ready for something different, consider five days in the southwest of France doing something magnificently, unapologetically good for yourself.

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Retreats combine guided walking on ancient Camino paths, shared reading and reflection, exceptional food, extraordinary landscape, and real human connection. You will walk. You will read. You will write. You will sleep deeply and wake without an alarm. The Reconnect with Nature journalling course is included. So is more fresh air than you’ve had in years.

This is not a “fix yourself” retreat. It is a find yourself one.

Take the Quiz: Are You Ready for a Retreat?

Sign up for the newsletter and discover, via the Ready for a Retreat? quiz, exactly what kind of reset your particular nervous system is asking for. It takes five minutes and is considerably more illuminating than doom-scrolling.

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
Smyth, J. M., Stone, A. A., Hurewitz, A., & Kaell, A. (1999). Effects of writing about stressful experiences on symptom reduction in patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis. JAMA, 281(14), 1304–1309.
Aspinwall, L. G., & Taylor, S. E. (1992). Modeling cognitive adaptation: A longitudinal investigation of the impact of individual differences and coping on college adjustment and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(6), 989–1003.
Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212.

Here is something to sit with: if you could write one sentence in a journal tonight, one honest sentence about where you actually are right now, what would it say?

You don’t have to share it with anyone. Just write it down.

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

11/04/202603/05/2026

Journaling in Nature: The Nervous System Reset You Didn’t Know You Needed

A guide for the quietly exhausted person who has been “fine” for far too long

What this is: A thoughtful, research-informed guide to journaling in natural settings as a practical tool for nervous system regulation, emotional honesty, and self-reconnection during or after major life upheaval. It includes a storytelling section, science, common mistakes, book recommendations, and a gentle invitation to go further.

What this isn’t: Another “buy a cute notebook and light a candle” productivity post. This isn’t about aesthetic journalling for Instagram, morning pages for writers, or gratitude lists for the mildly stressed. It’s for people who have been through something real and need something real in return.

Read this if: You’ve been so busy being strong, helpful, and “fine” that you’ve lost track of what you actually feel. You’re emerging from divorce, illness, bereavement, burnout, or any other life earthquake, and you’re ready, cautiously, to start the next chapter. You suspect that your nervous system has been running the show, and you’d like your actual self back, please.

5 Key Takeaways

Your nervous system is not broken. Hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and emotional shutdown are intelligent adaptations, not character flaws. But they stop working for you once the crisis is over.
Nature provides co-regulation without conditions. Trees, birds, water, and wind offer the nervous system a sense of safety that doesn’t come with strings attached.
Combining movement with writing is neurologically powerful. Walking before or during journalling shifts the brain out of threat-mode and into a state where honest self-expression becomes possible.
External validation is a temporary fix. True, lasting safety must eventually be sourced from within. Nature journaling is one of the most accessible ways to begin building that internal anchor.
You don’t need to be a “journaller.” If you can write a text message or a shopping list, you can do this. No talent required. Just you, a page, and somewhere green.

Introduction: The Problem With Being Fine

Journaling in Nature: The Art of Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having managed everything “effortlessly.”

You held it together through the diagnosis, the solicitors’ letters, the funeral, the redundancy, the children who needed you. You were competent and composed and, if anyone asked, “fine.” And now, now that it’s “over,” you find yourself sitting in a life that technically looks okay from the outside, feeling completely lost inside it.

Your body is tense in ways that don’t seem to have a reason anymore. You agree to things you don’t want to do. You say you’re coping a dozen times a day. You’ve almost forgotten what you actually want, what you actually feel, what you actually think when nobody needs anything from you.

You’re not broken. But something important went quiet during the crisis, and it hasn’t come back yet.

This article is about one surprisingly powerful way to bring it home.

Specifically, it’s about what happens when you take a journal outside, into nature, and let the trees, the sky, the sound of water, and a little honest writing begin to do what therapy, productivity, and sheer willpower have not quite managed: help you feel safe enough, in your own body, to tell yourself the truth again.

By the time you’ve read this, you’ll understand why nature specifically matters, how the nervous system responds to green spaces, and how to use simple written prompts outdoors to begin rebuilding the most important relationship in your life: the one with yourself.

Elize’s Story: The Woman Who Froze in the Middle of the Path

How One Afternoon in a French Forest Changed Everything Elise Thought She Knew About Herself

Elise Marchetti had not cried in fourteen months.

She had noted this fact the way you note a minor administrative curiosity, like discovering your passport expired. Mildly interesting. Probably worth addressing at some point.

She was fifty-three, a former head teacher, recently divorced after twenty-two years of marriage, and the proud owner of what she privately called “functional emotional shutdown.” She slept well. She ate sensibly. She went to the gym. She had, by any reasonable metric, handled it beautifully.

So beautifully, in fact, that her friends had stopped asking if she was okay. She seemed more than okay. She seemed sorted. This was, she understood somewhere beneath the sorted, a little bit terrifying.

She had come to the retreat in southwest France because her GP, a quietly perceptive woman, had circled something in a brochure and said, “I think this might be more useful than another round of CBT.” The words on the page had been, “For people who are ready for the next chapter but aren’t sure where to start.” Elise had folded the brochure into her bag and not looked at it again for three weeks. Then, one night at 3 am, she had booked it.

On the second morning, the group was given journals and sent outside alone for an hour.

“Write whatever comes,” they were told. “Or write nothing. But go outside. Walk first.”

Elise walked. The path wound through oak trees heavy with late summer green, and the air smelled of pine resin and, faintly, of rain that hadn’t arrived yet. Underfoot, the ground was soft and slightly uneven, the kind of walking that requires just enough attention to keep you out of your own head without demanding your full attention.

She had expected to list goals. She had brought a list of questions she thought she ought to answer. What do I want my life to look like? What are my values? What am I grateful for?

She sat on a low stone wall, opened the journal, and wrote nothing for seven minutes.

Then a chaffinch landed about two feet from her foot, looked at her with the complete indifference only birds and toddlers can convincingly pull off, and hopped away.

She wrote: I am so tired.

And then, for the first time in fourteen months, she cried.

Not dramatically. Not in a way that would have looked interesting in a film. Just quietly, steadily.

She kept writing. Not about goals. Not about what she wanted her life to look like. About the marriage, yes, but more about the years before it ended, when she had known it was going wrong and said nothing. Said less than nothing, actually. Had become so extraordinarily good at not rocking the boat that she’d essentially handed over the navigation and then wondered why she didn’t know where she was.

She wrote about how she’d learned to read her husband’s face before she said anything. About the tiny automatic calculations she performed at every dinner table: is this a good moment? Is he in the mood to talk? Will this land badly? About how she’d done the same thing at school with difficult parents, and with her own father before that.

She wrote: I have been trying to be safe by making everyone else comfortable. It has not, it turns out, made me feel very safe at all.

The chaffinch came back. She chose to interpret this as encouragement.

By the time she walked back up the path to the farmhouse, she hadn’t solved anything. Her life was still exactly as she had left it an hour ago. The divorce was still final. Her children were still grown and living in different cities. She was still, technically, in the middle of a field in France with three strangers and a journal.

But something had shifted. Some tiny, essential gear had clicked back into place.

She felt, for the first time in longer than she could pinpoint, like herself. Not the sorted, functional, managing version of herself. The actual one. The one who was tired and sad and also, it turned out, quietly furious, and also, underneath all of that, still curious about what came next.

She had not cried in fourteen months. She cried twice more that week.

Both times, she felt better afterwards.

Why Does This Actually Work? The Deeper Picture

What’s really happening when we take our pain outside?

Elise’s experience wasn’t magic, though it felt a little like it. It was neuroscience, meeting ancient wisdom, meeting an honest page.

When we go through major life upheaval, especially the kind that involves broken trust, loss, or chronic uncertainty, our nervous systems do exactly what they’re designed to do: they go on high alert. The amygdala flags danger. Cortisol floods the system. The body tightens, the breath shortens, and the brain begins prioritising survival over self-awareness.

This is what kept our ancestors alive.

The problem is that many of us stay in this state long after the immediate crisis has passed. And in that hypervigilant state, we prioritise attachment over authenticity. We fight or flee, freeze, or people-please our way through days, minimising our own needs, softening our own boundaries, rationalising away emotions that feel too big or too risky to express.

This is not a weakness. It is an extremely sophisticated, deeply ingrained strategy for staying safe in a world where connection has felt unreliable.

But it has a cost.

The cost is the slow erosion of self-trust. When we consistently override our own inner signals to manage other people’s comfort, we stop hearing those signals clearly. We lose the thread back to our own knowing. We become, functionally, strangers to ourselves.

Nature offers something different.

Research consistently shows that time in natural environments activates the parasympathetic nervous system, what we might call the “rest and digest” state, and quietens the amygdala’s threat-scanning activity. Specifically, studies have found that even twenty minutes in a natural setting measurably reduces cortisol levels and shifts brain activity away from the default mode network’s ruminative loop.

In other words, nature physiologically creates the conditions in which honesty becomes possible.

And writing in that state is different from writing from your kitchen table, where the dishes are visible and the inbox is beeping and the ambient pressure of ordinary life keeps your nervous system just brisk enough to stay managed.

Outdoors, with the sensory input of birdsong, breeze, the smell of earth, and the spatial expansiveness of sky, the body begins to release its guard. And in that release, what has been suppressed, named, unnamed, pushed down, rationalised away, begins to surface.

Not dramatically. Gently. The way it did for Elise.

How this ripples outward

Here is what is rarely discussed about this kind of inner work: it doesn’t stay inner.

When a person begins to reconnect with their authentic self, to rebuild the capacity to know what they feel, say what they mean, and tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking external reassurance, they change the quality of every relationship around them.

Not because they become easier to live with. Sometimes the opposite, at least initially. But because they become real. And real people invite realness in return.

Elise, six months after her retreat, told her daughter something she had never told her before: that she had stayed in her marriage too long because she was afraid of being alone, and that she wanted her daughter to know that fear was not wisdom, and she hoped she would not repeat her mother’s mistake.

The conversation they hadn’t been able to have for years, they had. Because one woman sat on a wall in a French forest and wrote four honest words in a journal.

Communities change one honest conversation at a time. One person who stops performing fine and starts being real, at a time.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Journalling in Nature

1. Going with an agenda. The temptation to bring a list of “journalling prompts you should answer” is understandable, but it can keep you in problem-solving mode rather than discovery mode. One open question is better than ten structured ones. Try: What am I not saying? or What does my body know that my mind is avoiding?

2. Choosing convenience over nature. Sitting in your backyard with the neighbour’s lawnmower audible is not the same as a quiet forest path. You don’t need to travel to the Pyrenees (though it helps). But genuinely seek out an environment where the sensory input is predominantly natural. Your nervous system knows the difference.

3. Writing to an imaginary audience. This is the sneaky one. We write as if someone will read it, and so we write the version of ourselves we can defend. Notice if your entries sound like a reasonable person explaining their reasonable feelings. Then try again, without the imaginary audience.

4. Stopping when it gets uncomfortable. The moment you want to close the journal and check your phone is usually the moment something real is about to arrive. You don’t have to go further than feels safe. But pause, breathe, look up at the sky or the water, and give it thirty more seconds before you decide.

5. Doing it once and deciding it didn’t work. A single session may crack something open (it did for Elise). Or it may feel awkward and unproductive. Either is fine. This is a practice, not a procedure. Give it a week before you evaluate. Your nervous system has been in protective mode for months or years. It doesn’t fully exhale in one afternoon.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Before You Write

This takes five minutes. Do it standing outside, before you open your journal.

Place both feet flat on the ground. Feel the earth or grass or stone beneath you. Really feel it.
Take three slow breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale.
Look up. At sky, at treetops, at whatever is above you. Let your gaze soften.
Say, quietly or to yourself: “I am not here to perform or to fix or to explain. I am here to listen to myself.”
Open your journal to a blank page. Write the date, and then write the first true thing that comes, however small.

That’s it. That’s the whole exercise.

Going Deeper: The Purpose Pivot Protocol

The storytelling circle that Elise was part of at the retreat was working through my Purpose Pivot Protocol online course, a structured process for people at life’s crossroads who need more than inspiration, they need a map. The course combines nervous system education, values clarification, narrative reframing, and practical strategies for designing the next chapter of your life with intention. If a week in France isn’t possible right now, the Protocol is a powerful place to start.

The Purpose Pivot Protocol – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access

5 FAQs: What You Need To Know

Honest answers to the questions you might feel slightly embarrassed to ask

Q: I’m not a “writer.” Will journalling in nature still work for me? Yes. Journalling as a healing practice has nothing to do with writing ability. You’re not being assessed. No one will read it. If you can write “I don’t know where to begin,” you have, in fact, begun. The nervous system doesn’t care about your vocabulary. It responds to honesty.

Q: How long do I need to be outside for this to make a difference? Research suggests that even twenty to thirty minutes in a natural environment produces measurable physiological changes. That said, the quality of your presence matters more than the clock. Half an hour of genuine attention, feet on the ground, eyes off the screen, is worth more than two hours of distracted nature-adjacent sitting.

Q: What if I start writing and can’t stop, or it gets too overwhelming? This is a real possibility, and it’s worth knowing in advance: you are in charge of the pace. If something difficult surfaces, you can write “I need to stop here” and stop. You can look up. You can breathe. You can walk. Nature journalling is not an excavation exercise designed to unearth everything at once. It’s a conversation with yourself, and like any good conversation, you can change the subject when you need to.

Q: My life is genuinely chaotic right now. Is this the right time? Possibly the best time. When everything external is in flux, developing an internal anchor, a practice that helps you hear your own signal through all the noise, is particularly valuable. You don’t need calm circumstances to begin. You need five minutes, somewhere green, and a pen.

Q: How is this different from just going for a walk? A walk is wonderful. A walk is also relatively easy to do while staying completely inside your own head, replaying conversations, planning ahead, managing mentally. Writing interrupts that loop. It asks you to slow down, to translate experience into language, and that translation process is where self-awareness lives. The combination of physical movement and written reflection is distinctly more powerful than either alone.

Conclusion

You did what you needed to do to get through. You managed. You adapted. You sourced your safety from wherever you could find it, from being indispensable, from being agreeable, from making sure no one around you felt uncomfortable, and it worked, after a fashion, for as long as it needed to.

But you’re here now. Past the acute crisis. Standing at the edge of something new, and wondering, perhaps, why you don’t feel relieved.

The safety you were looking for was never out there to begin with. Not really. It was always supposed to live in here, in your own body, your own knowing, your own capacity to trust your own experience. Life interrupted that capacity. Now is when you begin to rebuild it.

“The next chapter doesn’t begin when everything finally feels safe. It begins the moment you decide that your own truth is worth more than everyone else’s comfort.” , Dr Margaretha Montagu

A Gentle Invitation: An Esprit Meraki Camino de Santiago Retreat

Perhaps you’re ready for something more than an afternoon in the park.

Imagine walking ancient pilgrim paths through the extraordinary landscape of southwest France, the golden light, the quiet vineyards, the long views that put everything, somehow, in proportion. Every evening, a storytelling circle with other thoughtful, capable people who have also been through something real, and who are also, like you, ready for what comes next.

This retreat is not a walking holiday with some workshops attached. It’s a structured, supported, carefully held space. People like Elise. People like you. You’ll walk, write, reflect, and reconnect, with yourself, with others, and with the quiet inner knowing that’s been waiting patiently underneath all the “fine.”

And Finally: A Question Worth Sitting With

What is one thing your body has been trying to tell you that your mind has been very politely ignoring?

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
Hunter, M. R., Gillespie, B. W., & Chen, S. Y.-P. (2019). Urban nature experiences reduce stress in the context of daily life based on salivary biomarkers. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 722.
Smyth, J. M., Johnson, J. A., Auer, B. J., Lehman, E., Talamo, G., & Sklar, N. J. (2018). Online positive affect journaling in the improvement of mental distress and well-being in general medical patients with elevated anxiety symptoms: A preliminary randomised controlled trial. JMIR Mental Health, 5(4), e11290.
Bratman, G. N., Anderson, C. B., Berman, M. G., Cochran, B., de Vries, S., Flanders, J., Folke, C., Frumkin, H., Gross, J. J., Hartig, T., Kahn, P. H., Jr., Kuo, M., Lawler, J. J., Levin, P. S., Lindahl, T., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Mitchell, R., Ouyang, Z., Roe, J., Scarlett, L., … Daily, G. C. (2019). Nature and mental health: An ecosystem service perspective. Science Advances, 5(7), eaax0903.

09/04/202603/05/2026

How to Spot Fake Friends: The Signs You’ve Been Ignoring (And What to Do Next)

Learn how to identify toxic friendships, protect your energy, and build the real connections you need.

From the warning signs to the recovery plan, this guide helps you navigate fake friendships.

What this is: A warm, witty, evidence-informed guide to identifying fake friends, understanding why they exist, protecting your mental health, and building the kind of genuine friendships that actually sustain you.

What this isn’t: A bitter rant about people who’ve wronged you, a manifesto for cutting everyone out, or a beginners’ lesson in “what is a friend.”

Read this if: You’ve recently noticed that some of your friendships feel more exhausting than energising, you’re trying to cope with a major life change and your social world feels shaky, or you’re craving connections that are honest, deep, and real.

5 Key Takeaways

Fake friends aren’t always villains. Some are simply in pain from their own unhealed wounds — but that doesn’t mean you’re required to put up with their behaviour.
The cost of fake friendships is real and measurable. Stress hormones, immune function, and mental health are all affected by toxic connections.
Major life transitions are prime time for friendship audits. Divorce, illness, grief, and world upheaval all change who shows up — and who doesn’t.
Authentic friendships can be built at any age. Intentionality, vulnerability, and shared experience are the building blocks — and they’re available to you right now.
Your environment matters more than you think. Who you spend time with, and where, profoundly shapes your capacity for real connection.

Introduction: The Friend-Shaped Hole in Your Life

You’ve just been through something hard — a diagnosis, a divorce, a redundancy, a slow-burn disillusionment with the world as it currently is. You pick up your phone to call a friend. And then you hesitate. Because somehow, you already know that what you’ll get back won’t quite be what you need.

That hesitation? Worth paying attention to.

We live in an era of unprecedented connectivity and epidemic loneliness, and one of the most quietly damaging contributors to that paradox is the fake friend: the person who occupies the space where a real friend should be, without actually filling it.

This article is your guide to seeing clearly. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll know how to identify the fake friends in your life, understand what drives their behaviour, be able to protect yourself from the damage they cause, and, most importantly, now how to build the kind of friendships that actually hold you up when life gets heavy.

Which, right now, it rather is.

The Hidden Cost of Fake Friendships: Claire’s Story

Claire Beaumont had always been the kind of person people described as “so easy to be with.” Warm, funny, reliably available with a cup of coffee and a sympathetic ear. At forty-three, she had a full address book, a rich social calendar, and a deep, gnawing feeling that she was profoundly alone.

The feeling had been creeping in for months, gaining momentum the way a slow puncture does, until one Tuesday morning in October it arrived fully formed at her kitchen table.

She’d just received her biopsy results. Not the terrifying kind — “watchful waiting,” the consultant had said, the medical profession’s elegant way of suggesting nothing and meaning everything. But still. She sat there in the particular silence of unexpected news and reached, instinctively, for her phone.

She thought of Dominique first. They’d been friends since university — twenty years of birthday dinners, holiday WhatsApps, and the kind of conversational shorthand that only decades can build. She typed the words, then stopped. Dominique would make it about Dominique. She always did. Last year, when Claire’s mother died, Dominique had listened for approximately four minutes before pivoting to her own estrangement from her father. Claire had ended up consoling her.

She thought of Harriet, bright and effervescent Harriet, who would absolutely come over — bearing artisan croissants and a new anecdote about her renovation project — and somehow make Claire feel, by the end of the visit, as though she’d been interviewed rather than heard.

She thought of Priya, who had been conspicuously absent since Claire’s marriage ended eighteen months earlier, presumably because Claire was now inconveniently single in a world of couples.

She put her phone face-down on the table.

The kitchen smelled of coffee and last night’s rain through an open window. Outside, the oak tree her daughter had climbed as a child was beginning its slow, magnificent surrender to autumn, each leaf letting go with the kind of unhurried certainty Claire suddenly envied deeply. It knows what it’s doing, she thought, irrationally.

She sat with the quiet for a moment. And in it, something became undeniable.

She had a full life and almost no one to call.

It was her GP — a woman she’d always liked for her tendency to treat patients as intelligent adults — who first suggested the word “depletion.” Not burnout, not depression exactly, but a kind of chronic relational depletion. “You give a lot,” she said. “Do the people around you give back?”

The question sat with Claire for weeks. She began, tentatively, to pay attention — not with suspicion, but with the curious honesty of someone who has decided that clarity, however uncomfortable, is preferable to comfortable fog.

What she noticed: Dominique contacted her primarily when something good had happened and she needed an audience, or when something bad had happened and she needed rescuing. The in-between, the ordinary Tuesday of Claire’s life, held little apparent interest.

Harriet, she realised, never asked questions she was genuinely curious about. Her enquiries were conversational bridges back to herself.

Priya had been a fair-weather friend all along, and Claire had simply never stress-tested the friendship before.

There was also Marcus, who had befriended her in the aftermath of her divorce with a warmth that had initially felt like a lifeline, and who she gradually recognised was collecting her vulnerability the way some people collect art — not to cherish, but to display.

None of them were monsters. That was the strange part. They were people, with their own histories and hurt and blind spots. But they were, Claire slowly understood, not actually her friends.

The turning point came in late spring, when a colleague mentioned a reading retreat she’d attended in southwest France, somewhere in the rolling hills of Gascony.

Claire, who had loved books since childhood but had somehow lost the habit of reading them — along with the habit of stillness, and the habit of her own company — signed up on a mild impulse that felt, in retrospect, less like impulse and more like instinct.

She arrived carrying a suitcase, a battered copy of Middlemarch, and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been performing “fine” for rather too long.

What she found there: cool mornings walking an ancient path through vineyards and flowering meadows, the smell of the earth after rain, conversations with strangers who had no investment in who she used to be. A bookcase with pre-loved books. Long afternoons of uninterrupted reading. A journalling practice that asked her, gently but relentlessly, to look at her own life without flinching.

And, quietly, in that space: the beginning of what she now calls “the recalibration.”

She came home knowing which friendships to water and which to let go. She came home knowing what she actually wanted in a friend. She came home, for the first time in years, with the distinct sensation of fully occupying her own life.

The takeaway: Sometimes it takes physical distance, genuine stillness, and a change of landscape to see the people in your life clearly. Not because they look different from far away, but because you do.

How Can You Tell Who’s a Fake Friend?

What Does “Fake Friends” Actually Mean?

A fake friend isn’t necessarily someone who has set out to deceive you. The term covers a wide spectrum, from the mildly self-absorbed to the actively manipulative, but what they share is a fundamental imbalance: the friendship costs you more than it gives you, consistently and over time.

Dr. Judith Orloff, psychiatrist and author, describes these relationships as “energy vampires” — people who leave you feeling drained rather than replenished after time together. You might recognise this feeling as the mild dread before meeting someone, the strange exhaustion that follows what should have been a pleasant afternoon, or the creeping realisation that you edit yourself significantly in someone’s presence.

Key signs to watch for:

They’re only present during your highs or your lows — they love your successes (as reflected glory) or your crises (as opportunities to advise), but have no appetite for ordinary life.
Conversations are imbalanced. You leave knowing everything about their life and feeling unseen and unheard in your own.
They’re competitive rather than collaborative. Good news from you triggers comparison rather than celebration.
They share your confidences with others. This one is a bright red flag and non-negotiable.
They make you feel vaguely guilty for having needs.
You feel, consistently, that you’re auditioning for the friendship rather than simply being part of it.

Why Are Some People Fake Friends?

What Drives Inauthentic Friendship?

People are rarely fake friends out of malice. More often, it’s a function of their own unmet needs, unresolved wounds, or limited capacity for reciprocal intimacy.

Attachment theory offers useful insight here. People with anxious attachment styles may cling in ways that feel suffocating; those with avoidant attachment may pull away precisely when closeness is needed. Neither is villainous — both can be extremely painful.

Other drivers include:

Narcissistic traits. Not all fake friends are narcissists, but narcissistic individuals tend to treat friendships as supply chains rather than mutual connections.
Social anxiety. Some people perform friendship rather than inhabit it because genuine vulnerability feels too risky.
Transactional worldviews. In a culture that commodifies everything, some people unconsciously apply a cost-benefit calculus to relationships — you are useful until you aren’t.
Fear of genuine intimacy. It’s paradoxical but true: some people surround themselves with shallow connections precisely because deep ones feel dangerous.

Understanding this doesn’t mean tolerating the impact on your own wellbeing. But it can dissolve some of the bitterness, which, frankly, is worth something.

What Are the Different Types of Fake Friends?

A (Slightly Wry) Taxonomy of Inauthentic Friendship

The Fair-Weather Friend. Present for champagne, absent for chemotherapy. Easily identified by their sudden scheduling conflicts when your life gets complicated.

The Competitive Friend. Can’t hear good news from you without immediately one-upping it. Your promotion becomes a reminder of theirs. Your new haircut invites a commentary on theirs.

The Gossip. Brings you compelling stories about other people’s lives, which is enjoyable right up until you realise you’re in their stories too.

The Emotional Vampire. Every conversation circles back to their needs, their crises, their feelings. They are exhausting in the way of a leaking tap — not dramatic enough to fix immediately, but steadily depleting.

The Status Friend. Interested in you as a social accessory — your connections, your accomplishments, your postcode. Watch what happens to their availability if any of these change.

The Frenemy. The classic. Delivers criticism disguised as concern, damns with faint praise, and seems genuinely more comfortable when you’re struggling than when you’re thriving.

The Social Media Friend. Energetically present in your digital life — every post liked, every milestone heart-reacted — and nearly impossible to actually reach when you need them.

How Do Fake Friendships Harm Us?

What Does the Science Actually Say?

The damage is not merely emotional — it is physiological, and it’s well-documented.

A landmark study published in PNAS (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2003) found that chronic loneliness — the kind experienced even within superficially populated social lives — is associated with elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, compromised immune function, and accelerated cardiovascular decline. The key insight: it’s not the number of social connections that matters, but their quality.

A 2022 study in Nature Human Behaviour found that high-quality social relationships are among the most robust predictors of both longevity and subjective wellbeing — more significant, in some analyses, than exercise, diet, or even smoking status.

Fake friendships are not neutral. They create the physiological illusion of social support while delivering its opposite — a particularly insidious kind of stress, because it comes wrapped in the packaging of “connection.”

Additional possible damage includes:

Erosion of self-trust. Chronic gaslighting and emotional manipulation — even low-level varieties — can corrode your confidence in your own perceptions.
Reduced capacity for authentic connection. People who’ve been burned by false friends often become guarded in ways that inadvertently push away genuine ones.
Opportunity cost. Time, energy, and emotional bandwidth spent on depleting friendships are unavailable for nourishing ones.
Identity diffusion. Long-term exposure to a friend who doesn’t truly see you can eventually make it harder to see yourself.

How Can This Realisation Change Not Just Your Life, But Those Around You?

When you begin to audit your friendships honestly — not with cruelty, but with the compassionate precision of someone who has decided their own wellbeing matters — you don’t just change your own experience. You change what you model for others.

The colleague who watches you begin saying no to draining social obligations and yes to the walk, the book, the quiet evening that restores you. Your daughter, who notices that you’ve started choosing friends who laugh at your jokes instead of at you. The friend who, seeing you draw a gentle boundary with someone exhausting, finally feels permission to do the same.

Authentic self-regard is, at its heart, a gift to the community. When we stop tolerating what diminishes us, we raise the standard for what connection can be — not just for ourselves, but for everyone in our orbit.

This is particularly true during times of collective stress, when the instinct is to clutch at whatever is familiar rather than question whether it’s good. The world is currently delivering uncertainty in generous quantities. In that climate, the temptation to settle for the comfort of known faces, however unreliable, is real and understandable.

But the cost of settling is also real. And it compounds.

My Reconnect with Nature on the Camino de Santiago guests often describe the same experience: they arrived thinking they needed rest, and discovered they also needed renegotiation — a quiet, unhurried reassessment of what and whom they were supporting, and why.

Walking the ancient Camino de Santiago path through the hills, bookended by long afternoons of reading and reflection, creates the conditions for a particular kind of honesty. The kind that is difficult to access in the midst of ordinary life, with its noise and its obligations and its thousand small distractions.

How to Handle Fake Friends: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

What Not to Do When You Realise a Friendship Isn’t What You Thought

Mistake 1: Confronting immediately, impulsively, and without clarity. The urge to fire off a message the moment you’ve had an insight is understandable and almost always counterproductive. Give yourself time to distinguish between a genuinely toxic dynamic and a temporarily difficult patch. Not every bad week makes someone a bad friend.

Mistake 2: Expecting them to change if you just explain clearly enough. Fake friendships are rarely cured by honest conversations, however well-conducted. Change requires self-awareness, motivation, and sustained effort. You cannot supply any of these on behalf of another person.

Mistake 3: Going cold without explanation. The silent fade — while sometimes preferable to confrontation — leaves both parties without closure and can create unnecessary confusion and hurt. If the friendship matters enough to grieve, it matters enough to acknowledge its ending, however briefly.

Mistake 4: Replacing them immediately with new people. The impulse to fill the space left by a lost friend is natural and nearly always premature. Time alone — or in good company with yourself — is where the recalibration happens. Rushing into new social obligations before you’re clear about what you want is how fake friendships get replaced with different fake friendships.

Mistake 5: Concluding that all friendship is this complicated. It isn’t. Genuine friendship — the kind built on mutual curiosity, honest affection, and reciprocal care — exists, is available to you, and is worth everything it takes to find it.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

Think of the people you call friends. For each one, ask yourself these three questions without analysis — just notice your first honest response:

After spending time with this person, do I generally feel better, worse, or the same?
Am I fully myself with them, or do I perform a version of myself I think they’ll accept?
If I were in real trouble — the 3am kind — would I call them?

You don’t need to act on what you notice today. Simply noticing, with honesty and without judgment, is the beginning.

5 FAQs About Fake Friends

Q1: Can a friendship become fake, even if it started as real? Absolutely — and this is perhaps the most painful variety. People change, circumstances shift, and what was once a genuine connection can curdle over time into something habitual and hollow. Recognising this doesn’t erase the real history; it simply acknowledges the present reality.

Q2: What if my fake friend is a family member I can’t avoid? This is genuinely harder, and deserves its own article. The short version: you can limit the intimacy you share with someone without removing them from your life entirely. Managed distance — warm but boundaried — is a legitimate option.

Q3: Is it possible to call out a fake friend without destroying the relationship? Sometimes. If the relationship is worth it, and if you can approach the conversation with curiosity rather than accusation — “I’ve noticed I often feel [x] after we talk; can we explore that?” rather than “you always make everything about you” — genuine dialogue is possible. Be prepared for the fact that they may not receive it well.

Q4: How do I make new friends as an adult? With more intentionality than in youth, and more patience. Shared sustained activity — classes, walks, retreats, book groups — creates the repetition and mild vulnerability that genuine connection requires. Proximity, frequency, and small shared experiences: these are the building blocks.

Q5: How do I know if I’m the fake friend? This is a courageous question and the very fact that you’re asking it probably means you’re not the worst offender. But reflection is useful: Do you ask questions and actually listen to the answers? Do you show up consistently, not just when it’s convenient? Are you honest with your friends, even when honesty is uncomfortable? If any of these are challenging, they’re worth working on.

Conclusion

There’s a reason the friendships we form during times of upheaval so often become the most enduring ones. Stripped of the ordinary social scaffolding, something more honest emerges. You meet people as they actually are, and you meet yourself the same way.

The world is in a peculiar season right now — anxious, fragmented, and loud in ways that make stillness feel almost radical. In that climate, the quality of who you spend your time with is not a luxury consideration. It’s a mental (and physical!) health one.

“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.” — Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen

A Gentle Invitation

If you’re feeling the particular exhaustion of a life that looks full but doesn’t feel it — if you’re craving connection that’s honest, conversation that goes somewhere real, and a few days of glorious, guilt-free reading in the company of people who actually see you — then the 5-Day Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in the south-west of France might be exactly what you need next.

You’ll walk an ancient pilgrimage path through the most beautiful landscape in Europe, read deeply without apology, and return home knowing something about yourself that you didn’t know when you left. Dr. Margaretha Montagu, physician, life transition coach, NLP master practitioner, and retreat host for over 15 years, has created a space where real friendship — the kind you’ve been missing — tends to happen naturally. Come with a book and an open mind. Leave replenished.

What’s Next?

If this article has you nodding, wondering, or quietly rearranging something in your mind, you might find it illuminating to take Dr. Montagu’s Turning Point Quiz — a short, revealing assessment designed for people who sense they’re at a crossroads and want a little clarity about which way to go next. Access this quiz by signing up to my newsletter.

Here’s a question worth sitting with: If you could design a friendship from scratch — built entirely around who you actually are now, not who you used to be — what would it look like? And is there anyone in your current life who comes close?

References

Cacioppo, J. T., & Hawkley, L. C. (2003). Social isolation and health, with an emphasis on underlying mechanisms. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 46(3), S39–S52.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
Umberson, D., & Montez, J. K. (2010). Social relationships and health: A flashpoint for health policy. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(S), S54–S66.
Qualter, P., Vanhalst, J., Harris, R., Van Roekel, E., Lodder, G., Bangee, M., Maes, M., & Verhagen, M. (2015). Loneliness across the life span. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 250–264.
Yang, Y. C., Boen, C., Gerken, K., Li, T., Schorpp, K., & Harris, K. M. (2016). Social relationships and physiological determinants of longevity across the human life span. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(3), 578–583.

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.

07/04/202603/05/2026

How to Make Friends With Introverts: Introvert Friendships vs Extrovert Friendships

The surprising science of quiet connection, a warm, witty, and genuinely useful guide for anyone craving real connection in a noisy world

What this is: A practical guide to understanding how introverts form friendships, what makes those friendships different, and how to build genuine connection with someone who’d rather discuss the meaning of life than the weather.

What this isn’t: A social skills course disguised as an article. Not a “10 easy steps to crack the quiet person” guide. Not the kind of advice that ends with you feeling like you need a spreadsheet to manage your relationships. And absolutely not a pep talk that ends with you downloading another app and wondering why human beings are so exhausting.

Read this if: You’re an introvert wondering why friendship feels harder than it looks on other people’s Instagram feeds. Or you’re an extrovert baffled by your quieter friends. Or you’re someone craving real, meaningful connection in a world that’s loud, anxious, and frankly exhausting right now.

5 Key Takeaways

Introvert friendships are built on depth, not frequency. Quality time beats constant contact. A single three-hour conversation means more than a hundred casual check-ins.
Introverts signal interest differently. They won’t always reach out first, but they remember everything you told them six months ago. That’s friendship, introvert-style.
Shared experience in a low-pressure environment is the fastest path to introvert trust. Think: walks, books, meaningful activities, not crowded parties or relentless small talk.
Friendship between introverts tends to be resilient, loyal, and remarkably low-drama. Long silences are not awkward. They are comfortable. That is the idea, anyway.
If you’re currently stressed, overwhelmed, or going through a major life change, you may benefit from having an introvert friend. The kind of connection that will actually help you might look very different from what you’ve been chasing.

Introduction: Are You Tired of Friendships That Feel Supeficial?

You know that particular exhaustion, the one after a social event where you technically had fun but somehow feel emptier than when you arrived? Where you smiled, nodded, and said “we must do this again soon” to three different people you will never see again?

If so, I’ve written this article for you.

We are living through stressful times. World events scroll past in an endless, anxiety-inducing loop. Relationships are becoming frayed. People who once felt certain about who they were and what their life meant are standing in the ruins of old assumptions, quietly wondering what comes next.

And in the middle of all this, many of us are lonely in a way we can’t quite explain, surrounded by people but somehow invisible.

This article is about a different kind of connection. The kind that introverts have been quietly perfecting while the rest of us were networking.

By the end of this piece, you will understand what introvert friendships actually look like (spoiler: they’re extraordinary), how to build them, how to tell the difference between a friendship rooted in depth versus one rooted in habit, and, perhaps most importantly, what it means to finally be known by someone, rather than simply noticed.

Sophia’s Story: Or, How a Woman Who Thought She Was “Bad at Peopleing” Finally Found Her People

The Problem

Sophia Annesley had 3847 Facebook friends and felt, on most Sundays, profoundly alone.

That faint, persistent ache, like a room in her life she kept the door firmly closed on.

At 52, newly divorced, and armed with a CV that sparkled just enough to dazzle and deflect, Sophia had mastered the art of being impressive at a distance. At dinner parties, people leaned in. They admired. They nodded. They rarely asked anything that might require her to answer honestly.

Her laugh helped. It arrived promptly, did its job, and slipped away before it could overstay its welcome.

“Brilliant at the surface of things,” her ex-husband had once said, half admiring, half weary.

What he hadn’t added—and what Sophia was beginning, reluctantly, to suspect—was that she had spent her entire life skimming lightly, never quite landing.

The Struggle

She arrived at the Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago walking retreatin southwest France with a suitcase full of carefully chosen comforts: four well-loved novels she had no intention of being challenged by, a pristine journal she had been “meaning to start” for approximately six years, and a brightness that felt, even to her, a little over-polished.

The October air met her first—cool, clean, edged with woodsmoke. The Pyrenean foothills glowed in shades of amber and honey, as though the landscape itself had decided to slow down and savour things. The farmhouse smelled faintly of rosemary, old stone, and something baking that made her instantly, irrationally nostalgic.

Somewhere inside, someone laughed. Not loudly. Not performatively. Just… easily. The kind of laugh that didn’t need witnesses.

Sophia straightened slightly, as if preparing for an audition.

Her roommate, Nadia, listened to Sophia’s cheerful, slightly breathless account of the drive from the airport—the traffic, the turns, the heroic endurance of two uninterrupted hours behind the wheel—and then said, gently:

“That sounds like you needed a pit stop.”

Sophia paused, mid-performance.

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t stop once,” Nadia said. “I think you needed a break.”

It should have felt like a correction. It didn’t. It felt like someone had, quite unexpectedly, adjusted the focus on a lens Sophia didn’t know she was looking through.

The Turning Point

Nadia was quiet in a way that was not absence but presence. She didn’t fill the space—she seemed to deepen it. Being near her felt like sitting beside a fire: steady, unhurried, faintly hypnotic.

That first walk along the Camino path unfolded beneath chestnut trees dappling the ground with shifting light. The earth was soft underfoot, still holding the memory of recent rain. The air carried that unmistakable autumn sharpness—the kind that makes you breathe a little deeper without meaning to.

Sophia had arrived with conversational strategies. Backup topics. Emergency anecdotes. She used none of them.

Instead, they walked.

Boots against gravel. Leaves shifting overhead. A distant church bell marking time in a way that felt less like a schedule and more like a suggestion.

“I don’t usually like silence,” Sophia admitted eventually. “It makes me think.”

Nadia glanced at her, not unkindly. “You don’t do much of that?”

Sophia almost laughed—almost deflected—but something in the question stopped her. It had been a very long time since anyone had been curious about what was happening beneath the surface.

That evening, after a dinner that unfolded slowly—good food, soft conversation, no one rushing to fill gaps—Dr. Margaretha Montagu invited the group into reflection. Not in a heavy, clinical way. More like someone opening a window and suggesting, gently, that fresh air might be worth noticing.

“Set aside what you think you should need,” she said. “Just for a moment. And ask yourself what you actually do.”

Sophia sat with her untouched journal for a long time.

Then she began.

Six pages later, her hand aching slightly, she stopped and read the first line again:

I think I have been imitating friendship my entire adult life.

The words felt both shocking and… relieving. Like finally telling the truth in a room where no one was going to argue with you.

The Solution

Over the following days, something subtle and significant began to shift.

Nadia didn’t rush to respond. She let silences settle, like snow, undisturbed. She asked questions that didn’t corner Sophia, but somehow invited her forward—questions that assumed she had answers worth finding.

She remembered things. Small things. The name of Sophia’s daughter. A passing comment about a book she loved at twenty-three. The way Sophia took her coffee.

And she communicated with a kind of quiet precision. A poem slipped across the table. A photograph of a sky that looked almost painted. A single sentence that arrived at exactly the moment it was needed—no sooner, no louder.

Sophia began to notice how different this felt.

There was no performance required. No cheerful buffering. No need to prove she was interesting enough, easy enough, enough enough.

Mornings unfolded in companionable quiet—coffee warming her hands, the sound of pages turning, the gentle presence of others doing exactly the same.

Walks stretched into hours where very little was said and yet something unmistakable was exchanged.

For thirty years, Sophia had believed friendship was built on frequency, availability, a kind of relentless brightness.

Here, in the soft golden light of southwest France, among books, long walks, and women who seemed entirely comfortable being themselves, she discovered something altogether different.

Friendship, real friendship, wasn’t louder.

It was deeper.

It looked like someone asking, “What do you think?” and actually waiting for the answer.

It looked like silence that didn’t need fixing.

The Takeaway

Sophia flew home with all four of her carefully chosen novels still unread.

Instead, she carried two books from the shared library, both gently annotated in pencil, their margins filled with thoughts she hadn’t realised she’d been storing for years. She had long conversations she could still feel echoing. She had the beginnings of something that felt suspiciously like honesty and a started a letter, an actual handwritten letter, to Nadia that she finished on the plane. She also, for the first time in several years, did not dread going home.

How Do Introvert Friendships Actually Work? (And Why They’re Nothing Like What You’ve Been Told)

What’s the Real Difference Between Introvert and Extrovert Friendships?

To understand introvert friendships, it helps to start with what introversion actually is, which is not shyness, not antisocial behaviour, and emphatically not a personality flaw to be corrected. Introversion, at its core, is about where you get your energy. Extroverts recharge in the company of others. Introverts recharge alone, or in very small, very trusted groups.

This single difference shapes everything about how introverts approach connection.

Extrovert friendships tend to be wide networks, maintained through regular contact, group activities, and shared social experiences. They are warm, energetic, and enthusiastically social. They thrive on spontaneity and novelty.

Introvert friendships are, by contrast, deliberately narrow and extraordinarily deep. An introvert doesn’t want twenty friends. They want two or three people who know their entire interior world, who have earned the right to that knowledge through patience, consistency, and the willingness to have authentic conversations.

Why Does This Matter for People Going Through Major Life Changes?

When life shakes us, when divorce comes, or illness, or grief, or the quiet unravelling that happens when the world outside mirrors the uncertainty we feel inside, what we crave is not more company. We crave being understood

The research is illuminating. A 2021 study in the Journal of Personality found that introverts report higher relationship satisfaction when they prioritise depth over breadth, fewer, intenser connections predict wellbeing better than large social networks. When we are stressed, overstimulated, and frightened, what most of us actually need is less noise and more presence.

This is why so many people going through major life transitions find themselves, unexpectedly, craving quiet. Craving nature. Craving the company of people who will sit with them in the hard stuff without trying to fix it or cheer it away.

How Do You Actually Make Friends With an Introvert?

Here is the beautiful truth about introverts: they are not hard to befriend. They are just hard to impress. Which means the usual tools, charm, wit, charisma, breezy social momentum, don’t do much. What works instead is something more demanding, and infinitely more rewarding.

Show up consistently. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just reliably. Introverts trust slowly, but once they trust you, it tends to be for life.

Ask real questions. Not “how are you?” but “what have you been thinking about lately?” Not “what do you do?” but “what are you reading?” The introvert who comes alive in a conversation about ideas is the same person who looked bored senseless at the party.

Respect solitude. If an introvert cancels, don’t catastrophise. It is rarely about you. It is almost always about energy. Send a gentle “no worries, let me know when you’re up for it,” and mean it.

Create low-stimulation environments. A walk, a shared meal, a reading afternoon, activities with a purpose and a natural rhythm. The Camino de Santiago, walked in companionable near-silence through ancient French landscapes, is, as it turns out, very nearly the perfect introvert-friendship incubator.

Reciprocate depth. The fastest way to lose an introvert’s trust is to ask them deep questions and then deflect when they ask you the same. Introverts don’t share easily, but when they do, they need to feel the risk was worth taking.

How Can One Person’s Introvert Friendship Ripple Outward?

This is where it becomes genuinely interesting. When someone learns to make, keep, and truly inhabit a friendship, something shifts not just in them but around them.

The person who discovers they can be fully understood by even one other person begins to show up differently in all their relationships: more present, less performative, less afraid. They stop wasting energy on surface connections and begin investing in the durable kind. They become, slowly, the sort of friend who asks the question nobody else asked, and means it.

And communities where that quality of presence becomes normal are remarkable places. They are less driven by comparison, less addicted to drama, more genuinely supportive. They produce the kind of belonging that makes people resilient in ways that no amount of social media connectivity can replicate.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Befriending an Introvert

Are You Accidentally Pushing Your Introvert Friend Away?

1. Overwhelming them early. The most common mistake. You meet someone intriguing and quiet, you feel the spark of real connection, and you text them four times in a week, suggest plans for Tuesday and Thursday, and forward them six articles you think they’d enjoy. The introvert, quietly overwhelmed, begins to feel managed rather than met. Slow down. Let them set the pace.

2. Interpreting silence as rejection. An introvert who hasn’t responded to your message is probably thinking, recharging, or genuinely absorbed in something. An introvert who has gone quiet after a difficult conversation is processing, not retreating. Give them the gift of unhurried time.

3. Trying to bring them out of their shell. There is no shell. The quietness is not a protective layer to be dissolved with enough joviality. It is the actual person. Work with it, not against it.

4. Prioritising shared activities over shared meaning. Introverts will happily attend your book club, your walking group, your retreat. They will not happily attend your loud birthday dinner where they sit next to someone they’ve never met and discuss house prices for three hours. Shared meaning, shared interest, and shared quiet are the building blocks. Not just shared presence.

5. Expecting extrovert relationship maintenance norms. If you haven’t heard from your introvert friend in three weeks and then receive a long, thoughtful message at 11pm, that is not a lapse in friendship. That is an introvert friendship working exactly as designed. Adjust your expectations and you’ll find the relationship exponentially more nourishing.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The One Thing

Before you move forward with any new friendship, introvert or otherwise, try this.

Ask yourself, gently: What do I most want another person to actually know about me, that I haven’t yet told anyone?

Write it down. You don’t have to share it with anyone. But hold it in mind. Because the friendship worth having, the one that will actually sustain you, is the one where that thing can eventually be said out loud, and met with curiosity rather than alarm.

A Note About Nature and Why Your Nervous System Might Need Something Different

One of the most powerful tools for rebuilding genuine connection, both with others and with yourself, is reconnecting with the natural world. This sounds simple. It is actually profound.

As part of the Book Lovers’ Binge Reading retreats, guests receive complimentary access to my Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses, an online course that uses the extraordinary emotional intelligence of horses as a lens for understanding your own responses, boundaries, and relational patterns.

You can explore the standalone course here.

Horses, as any introvert will tell you, are superb judges of authenticity. They don’t care about your credentials or your performance. They respond to your actual nervous system. Working with that reality, even through guided reflection, has a way of cutting through the noise and returning you to something true.

5 FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking Right Now

1. “Can an extrovert and introvert really be close friends?”

Absolutely, and often spectacularly well. The key is mutual curiosity rather than mutual expectation. The extrovert brings energy, spontaneity, and the willingness to initiate. The introvert brings depth, loyalty, and the extraordinary gift of full attention. When each stops trying to make the other more like themselves, something remarkable often happens.

2. “How do I know if an introvert actually likes me?”

They remember things. Specific things. The name of your childhood dog. What you said you were afraid of, three conversations ago. They send you something, an article, a quote, a photograph, that is clearly, specifically for you. Introvert affection is not loud. It is precise. Learn to read it.

3. “Why do I feel drained after social events even though I’m not an introvert?”

Stress and major life transitions have a way of temporarily shifting us toward introversion. When our nervous system is overwhelmed, it needs protection, not more stimulation. If you’re currently going through a hard time and suddenly craving quiet, cancelled plans, and long walks alone, you are not antisocial. You are self-regulating. Honour it.

4. “How do I make friends as an adult when everyone already has their people?”

Shared experience in a low-pressure environment. Not speed networking events. Not apps. Experiences that involve doing something real together, walking a path, reading in the same book, cooking a meal, where conversation can emerge naturally from activity rather than being the point of the exercise.

5. “Is it normal to feel lonelier now than I did ten years ago, even though my life looks fuller?”

Not only is it normal, it is arguably epidemic. Research by Dr Vivek Murthy, former US Surgeon General, identifies loneliness as a public health crisis. The solution, consistently, is not more connection in quantity, but a radical improvement in quality. One real friendship is worth a thousand polite acquaintanceships.

Conclusion: The Quiet Ones Are Usually the Ones Worth Cultivating

There is a reason the Camino de Santiago has been walked by pilgrims for over a thousand years. Not all of them were religious. Not all of them were in crisis. Many were simply people who understood, in some wordless way, that the answers they were looking for required a different kind of attention than their ordinary life permitted.

Walking through ancient landscape, in companionable silence, surrounded by people who have also chosen to slow down and show up, is one of the most introvert-friendly, soul-restoring, genuinely friendship-building experiences available to the stressed modern human.

The best friendships don’t announce themselves. They flourish in shared silences and honest conversations and the particular ease of being with someone who asks nothing from you except that you be real.

“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” , Rumi

That, perhaps, is the ultimate secret of introvert friendship. It requires us to become, even briefly, quiet enough to actually hear each other.

And in a world currently doing everything it can to drown that out, that is nothing short of revolutionary.

Are You Ready to Start Connecting?

Imagine five unhurried days in the rolling landscapes of southwest France. Morning walks along the ancient Camino path, the air smelling of pine and possibilities. Afternoons curled up with a book you’ve been meaning to read for three years. Evenings with a small, carefully chosen group of interesting people who are also, like you, going through something real and looking for something genuine.

My Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats are designed for exactly the kind of person who has read this far, the thoughtful, curious, slightly world-weary soul who suspects that what they need is not another strategy, but a genuine change of atmosphere.

If the relentless noise of current events is fraying your edges, if your friendships feel more exhausting than nourishing, if you’re craving the kind of deep conversation that only happens when everyone has slowed down enough to mean it, this retreat might be the most restorative thing you do this year.

If you’d like more of this, the kind of warm, research-informed, gently no-nonsense thinking about life transitions, friendship, nature, and the art of going deeper, sign up for the newsletter. No noise. No spam. Just good thinking, when it matters.

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.

Here is a question worth sitting with:

If you stripped away all the friendships you maintain out of habit, geography, or obligation, and kept only the ones where you feel truly known, how many would you have?

And if that number is smaller than you’d like, what would it take to change it, not by adding more people, but by going deeper with one?

Stop second-guessing yourself. Start owning your success. This book gives you the step-by-step roadmap to break free from imposter syndrome, build unshakable confidence, and finally believe you deserve every bit of your success. You ARE Good Enough!

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.

References

Mund, M., & Neyer, F. J. (2019). “Loneliness effects on personality.” European Journal of Personality, 33(4), 359–374. Examines how introversion and loneliness interact over time and what personality traits predict relationship satisfaction.
Swickert, R. J., Hittner, J. B., Harris, J. L., & Herring, J. A. (2002). “Relationships among Internet use, personality, and social support.” Computers in Human Behavior, 18(4), 437–451. Explores how introverts use social platforms differently and the implications for genuine connection.
Helgeson, V. S. (1994). “The effects of self-beliefs and relationship beliefs on adjustment to a relationship stressor.” Personal Relationships, 1(3), 241–258. Foundational work on how relationship depth, rather than breadth, predicts psychological resilience during life stress.
Murthy, V. H. (2020). “Work and the loneliness epidemic.” Harvard Business Review.The former US Surgeon General’s analysis of loneliness as a public health crisis, with implications for how we build and maintain connection.
Asendorpf, J. B., & Wilpers, S. (1998). “Personality effects on social relationships.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1531–1544. Landmark longitudinal study on how introversion and extraversion shape the formation, quality, and maintenance of adult friendships.

Dr Margaretha Montagu, MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, and Life Transition Coach, has spent over 20 years as a physician with a specialist interest in stress management, and more than 15 years hosting transformational retreats where guests walk the Camino de Santiago in southwest France. She is the author of 8 non-fiction books on divorce, loss, unexpected illness, and navigating crisis.

06/04/202603/05/2026

How to Make Friends as an Adult

Because “just put yourself out there” is the worst advice ever given, and how intentional connection can change everything

What this is: A frank, warm, occasionally cheeky guide to building genuine adult friendships, grounded in psychology, lived experience, and the radical idea that connection thrives when you change your environment.

What this isn’t: A listicle of apps to download, a lecture about going to more networking events, or a pep talk that pretends it’s easy.

Read this if: You’re a thoughtful adult who has watched your social circle quietly shrink, who misses the easy intimacy of younger friendships, who is tired, a little anxious about the state of the world, and secretly suspects that what you really need is not another productivity hack, but a proper change of scenery and some people who actually get it.

5 Key Takeaways

Proximity and repetition are the twin engines of adult friendship — you cannot manufacture closeness; you have to engineer the conditions for it.
Stress and isolation form a vicious cycle. The more overwhelmed you feel, the harder connection becomes, and the lonelier you are, the more overwhelmed you become. Breaking the cycle requires a deliberate interruption.
Shared experience, especially in nature, accelerates trust in ways that coffee-shop small talk never will.
You are not too old, too introverted, or too busy. You are simply in the wrong environment.
The most transformative friendships of your adult life are still ahead of you. That is not a cliché. That is neuroscience.

Introduction: A practical, no-fluff guide for smart people

You are at a dinner party, surrounded by perfectly nice people, and somewhere between the entrée and dessert it dawns on you that you could not call a single person in this room at 11pm if things went sideways. Not really. Not in the way that counts.

You are not friendless. You have contacts, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours who wave. You have people you follow and people who follow you. But genuine, soul-nourishing, tell-them-anything friendship? That particular species has become alarmingly rare.

And you are not alone in noticing. A 2023 survey by the Survey Centre on American Life found that one in eight adults has no close friends at all. In the UK, a pre-pandemic study by the Co-op found that nine million people described themselves as lonely on any given day. These numbers have not improved. If anything, three years of pandemic-induced social rewiring, followed by a news cycle that seems engineered for maximum anxiety, has made adult friendship feel even more elusive.

So what actually works?

This article is about that. It is about why adult friendships are structurally harder to form, what the research tells us about what actually creates connection, the five mistakes that keep smart people stuck, and, crucially, why changing your physical environment might be the single most underrated friendship strategy available to you.

By the time you finish reading, you will have a clearer map. And possibly a compelling reason to lace up your walking boots.

Story: The woman who became invisible, even to herself.

Sophie Marchand was fifty-three years old, moderately successful, perfectly competent, and profoundly lonely in a way she hadn’t yet admitted to herself.

She had the external architecture of a full life: a house in Lyon, a consultancy business she’d built from scratch, a grown daughter who called on Sundays, a husband who was kind but tired, as she was kind but tired. She had a book club that met four times a year and a WhatsApp group from university that generated GIFs but no actual conversations.

What she did not have was anyone to sit with in comfortable silence. Anyone who knew the version of her that existed before she became responsible for everything.

The world was not helping. Every morning she made the same mistake of opening the news before breakfast: floods here, elections there, rising prices, rising temperatures, the low-grade hum of collective dread that had become the ambient sound of modern life. By 8am she was already braced for impact. By midday she was running on cortisol and caffeine. By evening she was too depleted to be anyone’s friend, let alone her own.

She’d read somewhere that adults make most of their close friends before the age of twenty-five. She’d filed this under Depressing Facts and moved on. She wasn’t looking for a retreat. She was looking for a good book and something that wasn’t the news.

That was, in fact, exactly what she found.

A friend, the kind who forwards things with a note that just says this is you, sent her a link to a five-day reading and walking retreat in the Gers region of southwest France. The Camino de Santiago. Books. Small group. Someone else cooking. Sophie stared at it for three days before booking.

She arrived on a Tuesday evening in October, rolling a suitcase rather too large for five days because she’d packed as though leaving forever. The farmhouse smelled of woodsmoke and something with garlic. There were three other women around a long table and someone was laughing before Sophie had even put her bag down.

She did not immediately relax. That is not how Sophie worked. She catalogued: a retired art therapist from Glasgow, sharp and silver-haired; a teacher from Cork with reading glasses pushed up on her head like a headband; a French-speaking Canadian who’d come specifically because she missed speaking French in a context that wasn’t a conference call. One had brought six books and read the spines of everyone else’s with the unselfconscious nosiness of a lifelong reader. Sophie felt her shoulders relax and drop approximately two centimetres.

The next morning, before breakfast, she pulled on walking boots she hadn’t worn since pre-pandemic and followed the group down a pale dirt path through sunlit vines. The light was that particular buttery October gold that exists mostly in photographs and, apparently, here. The air smelled of damp earth and something faintly herbal. Her feet found a rhythm. Her mind, which was usually composing tomorrow’s to-do list by 7am, went quiet.

They walked for two hours. They did not talk the whole time. Nobody filled every silence, which Sophie realised she had been doing for years, stuffing every conversational pause like a draught under a door. Here, the silence was productive. It was the kind that meant everyone was noticing things.

At a stone chapel that looked as though it had been forgotten in the best possible way, the teacher from Cork sat down on a wall and said, out loud, to no one in particular: “I haven’t felt this present in about three years.”

Sophie had not spoken to this woman for more than ten minutes total. She said, without thinking: “I know exactly what you mean, and I wasn’t expecting to.”

That was it. That was the beginning.

By day three, Sophie had discovered that the art therapist had a catastrophic and hilarious ex-husband story that unfolded in stages, like a novel. She had stayed up until midnight arguing about a book. She had cried, briefly, by a river, and nobody had made it awkward. She’d shared a packed lunch on a hillside with the Canadian woman who also happened to know Lyon, and who’d said something about loneliness that made Sophie feel less like a failure and more like a person navigating common human terrain.

She had laughed, properly, from her stomach, at least twice a day. She had forgotten, for long stretches, to check the news.

And on the last morning, walking the final stretch of a path lined with oak trees, she noticed something: she felt like herself. Not the organised, responsible, braced-for-impact version. The other one. The funny one. The curious one. The one who had opinions about books and liked to talk until late.

She had not lost that person. She had just needed the right conditions to find her again.

She swapped numbers with all three women. She was not under any illusion that they would all become lifelong confidantes. But two of them, she was pretty sure, were going to be in her life for a long time. She could feel it in the particular quality of ease that had grown between them, the way you know a book is going to stay with you before you’ve reached the last chapter.

On the train home, she didn’t check the news. She opened her book.

The Deeper Truth About Adult Loneliness and Why It Matters More Than You Think

Sophie’s story is fictional, but her situation is not. Researchers at Harvard, who have been running the longest study on human happiness ever conducted (since 1938, if you want to feel the weight of that), have concluded with remarkable consistency that the quality of our relationships is the single strongest predictor of wellbeing — more than wealth, fame, intelligence, or career success. Not quantity. Quality.

The problem is structural. As adults, the three ingredients that sociologists identify as necessary for friendship formation — proximity, repetition, and a context that encourages openness — are largely designed out of our daily lives. We live in cars, work in offices or on screens, shop online, and spend our leisure hours consuming rather than creating. The accidental, repeated proximity of school and university simply does not happen in adult life unless you deliberately engineer it.

Add to this the current climate of collective anxiety. Chronic stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, which, among other things, down-regulates our social engagement system. In plain terms: when you are stressed, your brain is less capable of the attunement, curiosity, and openness that friendship requires. You become more defended, less present, more likely to interpret ambiguity as threat. The world is currently producing a lot of people who are neurologically less able to connect at precisely the time they most need to.

This is not a character flaw. It is biology. But biology can be interrupted.

Nature is one of the most powerful interruptions available. Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that walking in a natural environment significantly reduces activity in the part of the brain associated with rumination — that repetitive, anxious thought loop that is the hallmark of modern stress. When you are walking in the Gascon countryside, your nervous system is literally, measurably, doing something different. You are more present. You are more open. You are more available to connection.

This is why retreats that combine movement, nature, and shared intellectual interest are not an indulgence. They are a specifically optimised environment for exactly the kind of connection that adult life systematically removes.

And the downstream effects are not just personal. When one person in a community rediscovers genuine connection — when they return lighter, more present, more themselves — that ripples. Marriages improve. Parenting improves. Colleagues feel it. Children feel it. The person who goes away to find herself comes back and becomes someone it is better to be around. That is not small. That is, in its quiet way, transformative.

5 Mistakes That Keep Adults Stuck in Loneliness

1. Waiting Until You Feel Ready

You will not feel ready. Anxiety is not an excuse for staying home; it is an argument for leaving. The moment you wait for will not arrive.

2. Trying to Make Friends in the Wrong Environment

Speed-networking events, corporate socials, and one-off workshops produce acquaintances, not friends. Friendship needs time, repetition, and a container that allows for real conversation. If the environment cannot sustain depth, neither can the relationship.

3. Confusing Vulnerability with Oversharing

Real connection requires being real, not performing a confessional monologue. It is about showing up honestly, not laying everything on the table at once. The woman who says “I know exactly what you mean” is doing something brave and specific. She is not delivering a TED talk.

4. Underestimating Shared Activity

Talking about things builds rapport. Doing things together builds trust. Walking the same path, reading the same book, navigating the same landscape — these create the neurological markers of shared experience that conversation alone cannot replicate.

5. Expecting Instant Results

Friendships worthy of the name take time, the way good bread does. A five-day retreat will not guarantee a lifelong friend, but it will, with remarkable consistency, create the kind of beginning from which one can grow. Trust the process. Do not demand the harvest before the seeds have settled.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

Before your next social situation, large or small, try this. It takes less than five minutes. Ask yourself:

Breath 1: What kind of person do I want to show up as today? Breath 2: What is one quality I’d like to bring into this space, curiosity, warmth, humour, honesty? Breath 3: What am I willing to let someone else see today?

You do not need to answer aloud. You do not need a plan. You simply need an intention. Intention changes the quality of your attention, and attention is what friendship is made of.

Reconnect with Nature: The Free Gift Inside the Retreat

One of the things that makes the reading retreat experience genuinely different is the Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses online course, included free with every booking. Created to support exactly the kind of inner shift that makes connection possible, it uses the extraordinary perceptiveness of horses as a mirror for self-awareness, guiding you through reflections that help you arrive more open, more present, and more ready to receive what the retreat offers.

You do not need experience with horses. You need only curiosity and a notebook.

5 Sharp FAQs

Q: Is it normal to feel embarrassed about wanting more friends as an adult? Yes. And also completely unfounded. The longing for connection is one of the most human things there is. The embarrassment is cultural conditioning. The need is biological. Trust the biology.

Q: What if I’m an introvert — does this kind of retreat work for me? Often better, actually. Introverts are not antisocial; they are selectively social. A small group, an immersive environment, and a shared activity like reading or walking tends to produce exactly the depth of conversation that introverts find energising rather than draining. There are no networking events. Nobody is handing out business cards.

Q: How long does it actually take to form a real friendship? A study by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found that it takes approximately 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and around 200 hours to form a close friendship. A five-day retreat does not deliver 200 hours, but it does something more useful: it compresses the quality of early experience in a way that can halve those timelines. The intimacy of shared meals, long walks, and late-night conversations accelerates the chemistry.

Q: What if I go and don’t click with anyone? You will have walked the Camino in one of the most beautiful corners of France, slept well, eaten magnificently, read books you loved, and returned to yourself in some essential way. There is no scenario in which that is a wasted week.

Q: Can I really make lasting friends in just five days? Yes. Not guaranteed, but yes. Research on intense shared experience, particularly those combining physical challenge, natural beauty, and intellectual engagement, consistently shows that the bonding that occurs in these contexts is qualitatively different from what happens over months of casual contact. It is about depth, not duration.

Conclusion

The world is noisy right now. It is anxious and fragmented, and it has, with great efficiency, engineered a kind of existence in which we are theoretically more connected than ever and actually more isolated than at any point in modern history. That is a real problem. But it is not an unsolvable one.

The deepest human need, underneath all the ambition and the busyness and the very good reasons we give for being too tired, is to be known. To sit with someone who is glad you exist. To laugh until your face hurts. To walk somewhere beautiful with someone beside you who is also walking somewhere beautiful.

You are not past the age for this. You are not too complicated, too introverted, too out of practice. You are simply, perhaps, in the wrong environment.

Change the environment.

“The antidote to exhaustion is not rest. It is wholeheartedness.” — David Whyte

A Gentle Invitation (Definitely Worth Reading)

You have been running on empty for too long. The doomscrolling, the depleted weekends, the friendships that have drifted to a few likes and a voice note you haven’t got around to answering. What if five days could genuinely reset that?

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the glorious southwest of France is five days of walking ancient pilgrimage paths, eating food that actually tastes of something, reading in a farmhouse with oak beams and good wine, and being surrounded by people who also chose books over brunch. Small groups, intentionally curated. Guided by someone who understands what you need, which is not a schedule, but a space. Included in your retreat: the Reconnect with Nature journaling course, a guided journey into presence and self-awareness inspired by horses. It is, in the most practical sense, an investment in the quality of the rest of your life.

Ready to Find Your People?

Sign up for the newsletter and take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz to discover which retreat experience is your best next step. Your nervous system already knows the answer.

References

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. Demonstrates that inadequate social relationships are associated with a significantly increased risk of mortality, comparable to risk factors such as smoking.
Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. Provides neurological evidence that walking in natural environments reduces ruminative thought and associated neural activity, directly relevant to the retreat context.
Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278–1296. The foundational study quantifying the hours of shared time required to move from acquaintance to close friend, cited in the FAQ section.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Hawkley, L. C. (2003). Social isolation and health, with an emphasis on underlying mechanisms. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 46(3 Suppl), S39–S52. Examines the physiological and psychological mechanisms through which social isolation impairs health, supporting the article’s discussion of the stress-loneliness cycle.
Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1045–1062. Demonstrates that positive emotional states broaden an individual’s awareness and encourage social bonding, supporting the article’s argument that changing environment and emotional state creates the conditions for new friendship.

Here is a question worth sitting with today: When did you last feel genuinely, effortlessly yourself in the company of someone who was not already part of your established life?

05/04/202603/05/2026

Emotionally Declutter Your Mental Attic

Or: Taking a good look at everything you’ve been meaning to deal with that is rusting or rotting in the rafters of your mind.

This article first appeared on my Substack, Margaretha Montagu’s Stories.

There is a particular kind of horror that only reveals itself in an attic.

Not the horror of spiders, though they are certainly present and clearly thriving. Not even the horror of how much you can accumulate in a lifetime of enthusiastic collecting. No, I’m talking about the deeper, stranger horror of lifting a cardboard lid and discovering that time is not, in fact, linear — that 2009 is apparently right here, in this box, wedged between a broken fondue set and a dress you bought in a moment of optimism that the receipt, typically, firmly states is non-refundable.

I’ve been decluttering my attic here at my little farmhouse in the southwest of France. This is the kind of project you undertake with a brisk, practical energy that lasts approximately forty minutes, at which point you find a letter, or a photograph, or — in my case this week — a handmade birthday card from someone who is no longer alive, and you sit down on a dusty floor to confort your emotions.

This is what the minimalism gurus don’t put on their Instagram grids: that physical clutter and emotional clutter are not two separate problems. They are the same problem, wearing different outfits. Every box is a filing cabinet of unprocessed feelings. Every “I’ll deal with this later”, whether it applies to the broken fondu set or the unresolved grief, you store in your attic, inexplicably heavier every time you try to lift it.

I am an enthusiastic hoarder of emotional experience. I collect feelings the way other people collect commemorative plates: with initial enthusiasm, then habit, then a vague sense that it’s too late to stop now and at least it fills the empty shelves. I keep the resentments that should have been composted years ago. I keep the grief I never quite processed. I keep the guilt about the things I said, and the guilt about the things I didn’t say, and the guilt about not feeling guiltier about either.

Do you to that too?

It’s not surprising that we’re all exhausted.

The technical term for all of this is emotional clutter: the accumulated weight of unprocessed feelings, unresolved conflicts, suppressed emotions, and psychological furniture we’ve been rearranging rather than removing. Unlike the fondue set, it doesn’t sit still and wait patiently. It surfaces at 3 am with remarkable reliability, demanding its moment on stage just when you were desperate for a full night’s sleep.

The good news is that emotional clutter can be cleared. It just requires something slightly more inconvenient than a bin bag and a strong cup of tea. It requires, infuriatingly, that you actually pay attention to it.

Which brings me to Sophie.

Sophie had the slightly bewildered air of someone who had booked one of my Camino de Santiago walking retreats six months ago, in a moment of decisive clarity, and was only now as she arrived in Gascony, beginning to wonder what exactly she’d been thinking.

“I’m not really a walking person,” she told me. “My therapist suggested it. She said I needed to process. I don’t actually know what she meant.”

When I collected her atthe end of her first day’s walk, she was sitting on a low stone wall outside a tiny Romanesque chapel, boots off, looking at her feet with the particular expression of someone who has been crying and has decided to be very casual about it.

“Good walk?” I said.

“Illuminating,” she said, which is a word that means a lot happened and I’m not ready to talk about it yet.

This is normal, I should say. The sheer relentless beauty of the landscape that insists that you pay attention to it, eventually brings you to the door of your mental attic.

Over the next four days, Sophie’s story came out in bits and pieces, the way the best stories always do. Not as a tidy narrative with a beginning and a middle and a lesson, but sideways, in fragments, the way you’d unpack a long forgotten box: holding each thing up to the light, deciding what to do with it.

What was in Sophie’s attic?

There were memories of her mother, for a start.

Her mother had died three years ago, after a long illness that had required Sophie to be extremely competent and extremely present and not, at any point, fall apart, because someone had to manage things, and Sophie was the one who always managed things. She had arranged the funeral with impressive efficiency. She had been a rock. Everyone said so. She had not, in any meaningful sense, grieved, because there had not been a moment designated for it, and afterwards life had simply kept going in its relentless way, and she had kept going with it, and the grief found its way the attic. Into the box labelled later.

“I cried for forty minutes walking between two villages today,” she told me, on day two, matter-of-factly. “I think it was the poppies. They were so very, very red.” She paused. “I think I’ve been meaning to do that for three years.”

There was also her ex-business partner. The friendship and working relationship that had ended badly, in a way that still, four years later, required Sophie to take a specific route through her professional network to avoid ever encountering him at events. She described this detour with the fluency of someone who had rehearsed the neutral version so many times it had become the only version — and then stopped, mid-sentence, on day three, and said: “Do you know what? I am still absolutely furious about that. I thought I’d dealt with it. I haven’t dealt with it at all. I’ve just been carrying it around dressed up as ‘moving on pomptly.'”

She put down her coffee.

“He was genuinely dreadful,” she said, with some satisfaction, and for the first time all week, she looked like a woman who had finally cleared a very dark corner of her mental attic.

There was the matter of her children — adult now, scattered, living lives she was proud of and also occasionally baffled by. She had a particular way of talking about her son’s career change: the careful, supportive language of a mother who had done her very best and was still, in the small hours, wondering if she’d said the wrong thing, at the wrong moment, during a conversation she could recite from memory but still couldn’t quite interpret. Was I too critical? Not critical enough? Did I project? Am I projecting now about whether I projected? Arrrgh!

This is what guilt does. It doesn’t sit still. It metabolises into anxiety, which metabolises into a desperate need to control, which metabolises into exhaustion, which brings you, eventually, to a walking retreat in Gascony asking a near-stranger why you can’t seem to stop feeling guilty.

And then — this one arrived quietly, on the last evening, after dinner, the kind of conversation that happens when good food, good conversations and millions of stars conspire — there was the version of Sophie’s life she had meant to live. The painting she loved, once. The months painting in Italy that never materialised, because something more urgent always had to come first.

“I’m not sure I’ve allowed myself to have dreams of my own,” she said, “in quite a long time.”

“Well,” I said. “It seems like you’ve got some mental decluttering to do.” Always pointing out the obvious, that’s me.

Sophie is not a case study. She is a composite of dozens of guests, and also, frankly, a composite of most people I’ve met, because this is not unusual. This is the standard-issue internal condition of a person who has been living a full, demanding life and doing the entirely normal thing of dealing with urgent before important, and outer before inner, and later before now.

The Japanese concept of Yutori (ゆとり), which means “creating room to breathe,” inspired me to start decluttering my attic. Yutori is the gentle art of creating space in your life, physically, but as I soon discovered, also emotionally.

It seems to me that emotional decluttering can create yutori: room to think, feel, and respond rather than react. When your mind is crowded with unfinished thoughts, worries, and emotional residue, there is simply no room left for yutori.

What you can do to clear some space in your mental attic:

Name the emotion. Vague discomfort has enormous power. Specific discomfort is manageable. “I’m stressed” is not manageable. “I’m still carrying resentment about a friendship that ended badly and I’ve been pretending it’s resolved when actually I’m just avoiding it” — that you can work with.

Feel it. The reason emotional clutter accumulates is that we are collectively very talented at reframing, repressing, and keeping busy. The feeling doesn’t go away; it just moves deeper into storage. Grief needs to be grieved. Anger needs to be addressed. Cry, if you need to cry. Rage if you need to rage.

Forgive. Forgiveness is the most misunderstood item in the emotional decluttering toolkit, because people think it means acceptance. It does not. It means evicting a memory from the penthouse apartment it has been occupying in your head, rent-free, for years. Because carrying resentment is genuinely exhausting and you have better things to do with your energy.

Close the open loops. There is a peculiar tax levied on all unfinished business. The conversation you’ve been putting off. The apology you keep meaning to make. The decision you’ve been holding in ‘pending’ for so long the folder has started to smell – like a blocked drain, not a camembert. Every open loop costs you — inability to concentrate, sleepless nights, a low-level hum of dread that you’ve stopped noticing because it’s always there.

Revisit your dreams. This one is underrated. Emotional clutter isn’t only the heavy negative material — it’s also the dreams that got shelved, the desires that were deemed impractical, the creative self that got set aside when the mortgage materialised. Acknowledging what you actually want, even if you can’t act on it immediately, is not self-indulgence. It’s maintenance.

Stop refilling your mental attic. The relationship that consistently costs more than it gives. Scrolling that leaves you feeling worse. That obligation you so bitterly resent. What comes in matters as much as what you clear out.

At the end of Sophie’s retreat, she wasn’t fixed — that’s not how this works, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But she was lighter. She’d opened some boxes. She’d looked at the contents properly, in decent light, and made some decisions about what needed to stay and what definitely needed to go.

Walking the Camino de Santiago helps declutter your inner world by stripping life down to its essentials—as you walk, your mind naturally settles and what once felt heavy becomes lighter. Far from the daily demands and distractions of everyday life, you gain perspective on what truly matters, while the physical act of walking helps release emotions stored in the body. Without forcing anything, thoughts surface, feelings are processed, and unnecessary burdens fall away.

If you’re carrying the ever-increasing exhaustion of someone who has been saying “I’m fine” for a bit too long—and if the idea of walking an ancient pilgrimage route sounds like less of a pipedream and more of a return to sanity—I’ve created my Camino de Santiago hiking retreats with you in mind. Even a single day can Even a one-day retreat can clear more mental space than a week of overthinking ever could.

You can find out more here, or simply reply to this post to check availability.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Crossroads Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

04/04/202603/05/2026

Surrounded by People, Yet Utterly Alone? It Might Be Your Friends

What stress research tells us about toxic connections, emotional depletion, and the life-changing power of real friendship

What this is: A frank, warm, occasionally eyebrow-raising look at why you might feel profoundly lonely even when surrounded by people who claim to care about you — and what to do about it.

What this isn’t: A guilt trip about cutting people off, a checklist of “red flags,” or yet another listicle about “narcissists” that sends you spiralling down a rabbit hole at midnight.

Read this if: You’re going through a major life change (divorce, illness, job loss, bereavement, a world that feels increasingly unhinged) and have a sneaking suspicion that some of your friendships are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Five Key Takeaways

Loneliness within relationships is real and measurable — and it is often more damaging to your health than being genuinely alone.
Major life transitions act as a filter, revealing which friendships are built on shared history versus genuine care. The results are sometimes jaw-dropping.
Tolerating energy-draining friendships during a crisis is not loyalty — it is a form of self-neglect that compounds your stress exponentially.
The antidote to toxic connection is not isolation — it is intentional, quality connection, ideally in a context that strips away the noise.
You don’t need dozens of friends. Research consistently shows that two or three deeply authentic connections are profoundly more protective than an entire address book of acquaintances.

Introduction: The Loneliest Room You’ve Ever Been In

The science of toxic friendships, the art of letting go, and the surprisingly peaceful path back to yourself

You’re sitting in a restaurant surrounded by people who’ve known you for years. Someone is telling a funny story. Glasses are clinking. And somewhere beneath the noise, a quiet thought surfaces: Nobody here actually sees me.

You push it down with a sip of wine. But it comes back.

If that moment feels familiar, you are not having a breakdown. You are having a reckoning.

Major life changes — divorce, serious illness, bereavement, career collapse, or simply the cumulative weight of living through what the world has become — do something remarkable to our social landscapes. They act like a tide going out, and quite suddenly, you can see exactly what’s been lurking beneath the surface all along.

Some friendships, it turns out, were only ever suited to the sunnier version of you. The one who didn’t need too much. The one who made everyone feel comfortable. The one who kept it together.

In this article, you’ll gain clarity on why certain relationships feel so depleting during life’s hardest chapters, how to identify the friendships that are quietly making things worse, and what it looks like to begin building the kind of connection that genuinely sustains you. Including, perhaps, a rather unexpected invitation to walk an ancient pilgrimage path in south-west France.

Why Your Social Circle Might Be Making Your Life Crisis Worse Clio’s Story

The invitation had been sitting in Clio’s inbox for three weeks. She’d opened it twice, closed it both times, and gone back to managing her current implosion.

Fifty-seven years old. Recently separated. Her mother had died eighteen months ago, and her cancer diagnosis, caught early, thank God, had arrived six months after that. She was, by any objective measure, going through a lot.

Her friends had rallied, initially. There had been casseroles. WhatsApp messages. One particularly memorable afternoon when her friend Debbie had driven forty minutes to sit on Clio’s sofa, spend forty-five minutes talking about Debbie’s marital problems, and driven home again.

The casseroles stopped after about six weeks. The messages became more sporadic. And Clio, a woman who had spent a lifetime being the competent one, the one people rang in a crisis, found herself completely unable to ask for help and surrounded by people who seemed quietly relieved she wasn’t asking.

She was exhausted in a way she couldn’t explain to her GP. Not tired, exactly. More like hollowed out.

The email she kept opening was from a retreat called The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in south-west France. A friend-of-a-friend had sent it. “You like books,” the friend had said, with the devastating understatement of someone who had never seen Clio’s ever-increasing reading stacks. “And you like walking. This seems like you.”

Clio had not walked the Camino. She had never been on a retreat. She had very strong opinions about groups of strangers talking about themselves. She booked it anyway, at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday night, slightly surprised by herself.

She arrived in France in late September, when the light slants gold and the air carries something almost medicinal in it, the smell of pine and warm earth and something she couldn’t name, old and clean at once. Her fellow guests were a collection of women she might never have encountered in her ordinary life: a retired architect from Edinburgh, a recently widowed teacher from Dublin, a management consultant from Berlin who had left her job without another one lined up and was either having a breakdown or a breakthrough, possibly both at the same time.

Nobody performed wellness. Nobody gave unsolicited advice. Nobody said, “At least you caught the cancer early,” which was, Clio had discovered, the sentence she now hated most in the English language.

On the second morning, they walked. Not hurriedly, not competitively, not with podcasts plugged into their ears. The path curved through ancient oak forest, dappled and quiet, and Clio became aware, somewhere around the second kilometre, that her shoulders had dropped approximately three inches from where they’d been living for the past eighteen months.

That evening, they sat with books and wine and the sound of crickets, and Clio found herself in a conversation with the management consultant from Berlin, Petra, about what it meant to have spent forty years being useful to everyone except yourself. It lasted three hours. Neither of them noticed.

The hollowed-out feeling, Clio realised, wasn’t grief exactly. It wasn’t the cancer, or the separation, or even her mother. It was the particular exhaustion of performing okayness for people who needed her to be okay, people whose own comfort depended on her composure.

She had confused company with connection. She had confused loyalty with love.

On the last morning, walking alone along a ridge above the valley, the autumn light turning the distant hills to amber, Clio started to cry. Not the gasping, apologetic crying she’d been doing at home, alert for the sound of her daughter on the stairs. Just quiet, unhurried tears, the kind that mean something is releasing rather than breaking.

She thought about Debbie. About the WhatsApp threads she’d been maintaining with the cheerful energy of a woman not in crisis. About the dinner parties she’d attended because refusing felt like admitting things weren’t fine.

She thought: I am very, very tired of my social life.

And then, almost immediately after: I am not tired of this, though.

Why Does This Happen? The Deeper Picture

Why Do Major Life Transitions Expose Toxic Friendships?

There is a reason the research on social connection becomes particularly urgent during periods of crisis. When life is stable, we can absorb the cost of friendships that are mildly draining, reciprocally imbalanced, or simply built on proximity and habit rather than genuine resonance. We have the reserves.

During a major life transition, we don’t.

Stress, whether from divorce, illness, bereavement, job loss, or the cumulative anxiety of living in a world that seems to be coming unmoored, depletes what psychologists call our “allostatic load capacity,” our ability to adapt to and absorb further demands. And demanding friendships — the ones that require emotional management, careful performance, constant reassurance, or the suppression of our actual experience — place a genuine physiological burden on our systems.

Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s landmark research at Brigham Young University established that the quality of social relationships matters significantly more than the quantity. High-quality social connection is associated with a 50% increase in survival odds. But here is the part that often gets lost in translation: low-quality, stressful social relationships can be actively harmful, more damaging, in some studies, than being genuinely alone.

This matters. It means that if you are surrounded by people who consistently leave you feeling worse about yourself, more exhausted, more invisible, more managed, this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a measurable health concern.

What Does “Toxic” Actually Mean in a Friendship?

The word “toxic” has been somewhat overused to the point of losing precision. For our purposes, a toxic friendship during a life transition is not necessarily a friendship with a bad person. It is a friendship that consistently:

Costs more than it gives, particularly when your resources are already depleted
Requires you to perform a version of yourself that isn’t truthful to what you’re experiencing
Centres the other person’s comfort over your actual need
Responds to your vulnerability with competition, advice, minimisation, or withdrawal
Leaves you feeling lonelier after the conversation than you were before

That last one is the most reliable indicator. If you hang up the phone or leave the coffee feeling more alone than when you arrived, pay attention.

How Can This Realisation Ripple Beyond One Person?

Here is what is worth sitting with: when you begin to make more intentional choices about your social connections, the effects rarely stay limited to you alone.

The people around you, particularly your children, your colleagues, and your wider community, absorb the quality of your presence. A chronically depleted, emotionally performing version of you is giving everyone a fraction of what you’re capable of. When you stop pouring your limited energy into connections that drain rather than restore, something becomes available, not just for you, but for everyone whose life yours touches.

There is also a cultural dimension worth naming. We are living through a period of collective anxiety — about politics, climate, technology, the future in general — that is straining even healthy relationships. When individuals do the work of becoming clearer about what genuine connection looks and feels like, they bring that clarity into families, workplaces, and communities. This is not small work. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of quietly radical act the world currently needs more of.

Five Mistakes to Avoid When Navigating Toxic Friendships During a Life Crisis

Mistake 1: Assuming Loyalty Obligates You to Continue

Long-term friendships carry history, and history is precious. But history is not the same as health. You can honour someone’s place in your past without continuing to invest in a dynamic that is actively harming your present. Loyalty is not a life sentence.

Mistake 2: Waiting for the Other Person to Change

This is the most common and most expensive mistake. You cannot restructure someone else’s capacity for empathy. What you can do is stop extending your energy toward a deficit account and redirect it somewhere that returns something.

Mistake 3: Cutting Everyone Off and Calling It Boundaries

Wholesale social withdrawal, while temporarily appealing in its simplicity, tends to deepen the problem rather than solve it. The antidote to depleting connection is not isolation. It is better connection. These are not the same prescription.

Mistake 4: Performing Gratitude for Friendships That Cost You

There is an exhausting cultural pressure, particularly for women, to express gratitude for any attention received during a hard time, regardless of whether that attention was actually helpful. You are allowed to notice the difference between a friend who showed up and a friend who performed showing up. These are different things.

Mistake 5: Trying to Figure All of This Out in Your Usual Environment

Context shapes cognition. The same relationships that feel intractable at home often become remarkably clear when you have genuine physical and mental space, particularly in natural settings that quiet the nervous system and make room for honest reflection. There’s a reason the Camino has been a site of personal reckoning for eight hundred years. Walking does something to thinking that sitting simply cannot replicate.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The Before-and-After Test

Find a quiet moment and a piece of paper. Think of three people you’ve spent time with in the last fortnight.

For each person, complete these two sentences:

Before I saw them, I felt: (note your physical and emotional state)

After I saw them, I felt: (be honest, not kind)

Now look at what you’ve written without judgment. You are not looking for evidence to prosecute anyone. You are looking for honest data about where your energy goes and what it returns. That information belongs to you.

Five FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking

FAQ 1: “How do I know if a friendship is toxic or if I’m just going through a hard time and being unfair?”

Both can be true simultaneously. A useful distinction: are you consistently depleted by this person’s presence regardless of your overall state, or only when you’re already running low? The former is worth examining carefully. The latter may simply mean you need to protect your limited resources more fiercely during this season, with everyone, including people you love.

FAQ 2: “Do I have to end friendships, or can I just change them?”

You can absolutely change them — by being more honest about what you need, by spending less time in certain dynamics without formal announcement, and by simply investing less energy where it isn’t returned. Formal endings are rarer than popular culture suggests. Most friendships quietly recalibrate when the energy shifts.

FAQ 3: “I feel guilty for even thinking this way. Is something wrong with me?”

No. The guilt is evidence of your capacity for loyalty and care, which are good qualities. But loyalty applied indiscriminately, particularly during a crisis that is genuinely depleting you, is not noble. It’s unsustainable.

FAQ 4: “Won’t I end up more isolated if I pull back from friendships?”

Only if you pull back without moving toward anything. The movement matters. Pulling back from connections that drain and actively seeking connections that nourish creates a net gain, not a loss. The transition period can feel lonely, yes. It is worth tolerating.

FAQ 5: “I’m already overwhelmed. Is a retreat really the right time for more self-reflection?”

Counterintuitively, yes. Trying to do this work within your normal environment, surrounded by the same triggers, social obligations, and noise, is like trying to read in a room with the television on. A genuinely well-designed retreat doesn’t pile on more reflection. It creates the conditions in which reflection becomes possible rather than exhausting.

Conclusion

There is a particular kind of loneliness that belongs exclusively to people who haven’t been alone. It arrives in the middle of dinner parties and WhatsApp threads and relationships that have been on the calendar for years. It is the loneliness of being unseen, in plain sight.

Major life transitions tend to make this visible, brutally and usefully, because they strip away the easier explanations. When you can no longer maintain the performance, you discover with startling clarity who in your life was actually watching you, and who was watching their own reflection in you.

This is not a tragedy. It is, if you’re willing to let it be, a beginning.

A Gentle Invitation

If some part of this article has felt uncomfortably accurate, you might be ready for something different.

Dr. Margaretha Montagu’s 5-Day Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats in south-west France are designed for intelligent, capable, quietly exhausted people who know something needs to shift but haven’t yet found the conditions in which that shift becomes possible.

Here, the days are structured around walking an ancient pilgrimage path through remarkable landscape, reading deeply, and talking honestly, in a small group of people who are there for the same reasons you are. There are no performance requirements. No wellness theatre. Just good books, extraordinary countryside, nourishing food, and the kind of company that reminds you what it felt like to be genuinely accompanied.

Ready for a Retreat? Take the Quiz

Here’s a question worth sitting with:

If you stripped away every friendship that requires you to perform rather than simply be — what, and who, would remain? And what might become possible in that cleared space?

References

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Hawkley, L. C. (2009). Perceived social isolation and cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(10), 447–454.
Umberson, D., & Montez, J. K. (2010). Social relationships and health: A flashpoint for health policy. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(Suppl), S54–S66.
Steptoe, A., Shankar, A., Demakakos, P., & Wardle, J. (2013). Social isolation, loneliness, and all-cause mortality in older men and women. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), 5797–5801.
Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness matters: A theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 40(2), 218–227.

03/04/202603/05/2026

Book Review: Quiet by Susan Cain

As an introvert who slow-down-and-reconnect-with-nature retreats, I read Quiet with the particular relief of someone who’s spent years quietly suspecting that the world’s preferred operating system might be a touch… overwhelming. Susan Cain validates the introverted way of being; it feels a bit like being handed a cup of tea in a room full of energy drinks. In my work, I see daily how much people benefit from permission to slow down. This book articulates what my Camino de Santiago retreats try to offer in practice: a gentler, more spacious way of engaging with life, where depth beats volume, and the nervous system is finally allowed to exhale. It’s both a comfort and a quiet (naturally) rebellion—and I appreciate it for putting into words what many of us have been living, and perhaps defending, all along.

Book Review: Quiet by Susan Cain

Quiet

Susan Cain

Quiet

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Susan Cain · 2012 · Crown Publishing

Psychology Self-help Sociology Business Nonfiction

A warm, rigorously-researched love letter to anyone who has ever been told they’re “too quiet” — and a politely devastating critique of everyone who said it.

The Big Idea

Susan Cain’s central thesis is deceptively simple: roughly a third to a half of the population are introverts, and modern Western culture — with its open-plan offices, mandatory team brainstorming, and extroversion-as-virtue ideology — has been systematically squandering their gifts. Quiet is her 352-page, footnote-heavy, deeply humane attempt to do something about that.

Cain, a former Wall Street lawyer turned writer who describes herself as an introvert who spent years pretending otherwise, brings formidable research credentials and a flair for the telling anecdote. The result is a book that manages to be both a work of popular science and a quietly radical manifesto. It is, in the most literal sense, a book that argues for its own right to exist: careful, considered, deeply researched — qualities the world tends to undervalue in favour of louder things.

The book is structured in four parts, moving from the cultural history of introversion, through its biology and psychology, into practical territory about work, school, love, and parenting. This architecture is well-chosen. Cain earns her prescriptions by grounding them first in history and science, so that by the time she starts advising you to negotiate for a quieter workspace, you are already convinced she knows what she’s talking about.

“There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.” — Susan Cain, Quiet

The Culture of Personality

The book’s most intellectually satisfying stretch covers the early chapters, in which Cain traces the rise of what she calls the “Culture of Personality” in 20th-century America. Before the industrial revolution, she argues, character was the prized commodity — inner virtue, moral seriousness, earnest self-improvement. Then the economy shifted from agriculture to commerce, people flooded into cities, and suddenly you were no longer selling grain to your neighbours; you were selling yourself to strangers. The ideal American ceased to be the quiet, upright citizen and became the magnetic, persuasive, irresistible salesman.

This is a genuinely fresh way to look at a familiar cultural anxiety, and Cain handles it with the confidence of someone who has done her homework. Dale Carnegie appears as a kind of original sinner, peddling the gospel of likability over substance. Harvard Business School emerges as a later chapter of the same story — an institution so committed to confident self-presentation that it has physically designed its classrooms to punish those who think before they speak. One professor there, Cain reports with barely concealed horror, grades students on participation, essentially marking them on their willingness to hold court in front of strangers. For introverts, this is not a learning environment. It is a performance-anxiety machine.

What makes this history land so effectively is that Cain never lets it become merely academic. She keeps returning to the human cost: the gifted analyst who is passed over for promotion because she doesn’t dominate the room; the student who has the answer but freezes before he can raise his hand; the engineer whose best ideas come during solitary focus, not during the enforced jollity of an away-day brainstorm. History, here, is a way of explaining why so many people feel, as Cain puts it, like imposters in their own lives.

The Science of Sensitivity

Cain devotes considerable space to the neuroscience and psychology of introversion, and these sections are among the book’s most fascinating — and its most contested. She explores the work of developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan, whose decades-long research suggested that high-reactive infants — those who respond intensely to novel stimuli — are more likely to grow into introverted adults. The implication is profound: introversion isn’t a social accident or a failure of nerve. For many people, it is hardwired.

She also examines the work of Elaine Aron on “highly sensitive persons” — a concept that overlaps substantially with introversion but isn’t quite identical — and digs into research suggesting that introverts and extroverts process dopamine differently, with introverts needing less external stimulation to reach optimal arousal. This neurological framing is clearly important to Cain’s broader project: if introversion is biological rather than merely habitual, it becomes much harder to dismiss as something that could and should be trained away.

The science here is genuinely interesting, but it’s also where the book shows some strain. Cain is a fine science writer, but she is writing for a general audience, which means she occasionally sands the edges off findings that are, in the academic literature, considerably more uncertain. The line between “introvert” and “highly sensitive person” is blurrier than the book sometimes implies; the neurological research is suggestive rather than conclusive; and the definition of introversion itself — preference for low-stimulation environments versus shyness versus sensitivity to social cues — is never quite pinned down. These are not fatal flaws, but readers who subsequently follow the citations will find a more complicated picture than the text conveys.

The Myth of Brainstorming

Perhaps the single most satisfying chapter in Quiet is Cain’s demolition of the brainstorming session — that sacred cow of modern corporate culture, the open-plan office’s primary sacrament. Drawing on decades of research in organisational psychology, Cain demonstrates with quiet relish that group brainstorming sessions consistently produce fewer and lower-quality ideas than the same number of people working independently. The explanations are now well-established: social loafing (people contribute less in a group than alone), evaluation apprehension (fear of looking foolish), and production blocking (you can only say one thing at a time, while in your head you could be generating ideas continuously).

And yet, Cain observes, the brainstorming session endures — indeed, it has spread and mutated into the very architecture of modern work. Open-plan offices, hot-desking, agile sprints, stand-up meetings: the entire infrastructure of contemporary business is premised on the assumption that proximity and noise generate ideas, when the research says the opposite. This is Cain at her most trenchant, and it’s hard to read without both laughing at the absurdity and quietly grieving for all the excellent ideas that have been drowned out by the loudest person in the room.

The chapter is also a good example of Cain’s structural gift: she is never content to leave a critique in the abstract. She follows the indictment of brainstorming with practical suggestions — hybrid approaches that give individuals time to generate ideas solo before bringing them to the group, anonymous digital idea submission, and simply recognising that “the best speaker” and “the best thinker” are not synonymous. These feel like genuinely useful recommendations rather than filler.

Quiet Heroism

One of the book’s most enduring passages concerns Rosa Parks, whom Cain repositions with characteristic care. In the popular mythology, Parks is a spontaneous heroine — a tired seamstress who one day simply refused to give up her seat, setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott by accident. Cain gently dismantles this account. Parks was in fact a trained activist, a member of the NAACP, someone who had been preparing for precisely this kind of confrontation for years. She was not impulsive; she was patient, strategic, and determined. She was, in other words, an introvert — and her introverted qualities were precisely what made her effective.

The reframing matters because it challenges one of the most persistent myths about introverts: that they are passive. Cain’s Parks is not passive. She is deliberate. There is a world of difference. And this distinction — between passivity and deliberateness, between silence born of fear and silence born of discipline — runs through the whole book like a quiet thread. Other figures make similar appearances: Gandhi, whose reserved manner Cain argues was fundamental to his moral authority; Warren Buffett, who attributes much of his investment success to his ability to sit alone and think rather than being swept up in market hysteria; and Eleanor Roosevelt, who overcame crippling shyness to become one of the most publicly active first ladies in history, not by abandoning her introversion but by learning, carefully and strategically, to perform extroversion when the moment demanded it.

Living Introversion: Relationships and the “Free Trait”

The book’s final section moves into more personal territory — introversion in relationships, in parenting, in the daily business of getting through a world that wasn’t designed with you in mind. Cain introduces the concept of the “Free Trait,” borrowed from psychologist Brian Little: the idea that we can, with effort and for the sake of something we deeply value, act out of character for a period. An introvert can give a rousing speech, lead a team, work a room — as long as they understand that this is a performance, one that carries a real cost and requires genuine recovery time afterwards.

This is probably the most practically useful idea in the book, because it dissolves a false binary that has made many introverts miserable. You do not have to choose between being yourself and functioning in an extroverted world. You can choose, deliberately and purposefully, to stretch — and then you can choose, equally deliberately, to retreat and restore. The key is understanding your own nature clearly enough to manage the energy budget. Cain illustrates this with warmth and specificity: the introvert who thrives in a demanding public-facing role because it connects to their deepest values, but who absolutely must have two hours alone before dinner; the couple where one partner needs to debrief every social event and the other needs to sit quietly and decompress, and how they negotiate this without either feeling blamed.

The chapter on raising introverted children is particularly tender. Cain is careful to distinguish between shyness that causes a child distress (which may warrant gentle intervention) and introversion that simply reflects a preference for depth over breadth, quiet over noise. The message to parents is: resist the urge to fix what isn’t broken. An introverted child who reads voraciously, plays with only one or two close friends, and prefers thinking to chattering does not need to be enrolled in more team sports. They need to be understood.

Where It Strains

No review written in good faith can avoid a few caveats. The most persistent is the introversion/shyness conflation. Cain announces early on that introversion (preference for low stimulation) and shyness (fear of social judgment) are different things, and then proceeds to blur this line with some regularity. The case studies she uses are sometimes more illustrative of social anxiety than of introversion per se, and readers who are shy but not introverted, or introverted but entirely socially confident, may find the book occasionally speaking past them.

There is also a cultural narrowness that goes largely unexamined. The book is, broadly, a critique of American extroversion culture, and while Cain briefly visits East Asia to note that different cultures value quiet differently, this feels like a detour rather than an integration. A more rigorous examination of how introversion functions across cultures — including the ways that “introversion” as a Western psychological construct may not map neatly onto how other societies understand temperament and self-presentation — would have strengthened the argument considerably.

And then there is the nagging sense, towards the book’s end, that extroverts are getting slightly a raw deal. They didn’t choose their temperament either. The open-plan office isn’t just a conspiracy to oppress introverts; it also reflects genuine extrovert needs for collaboration, energy, and social connection. A truly balanced account would grapple more directly with how both types can design environments and institutions that work for everyone, rather than tilting quite so firmly toward a corrective for one side.

These are real limitations. They are also the kinds of limitations you find in most ambitious popular-science books, and they do not substantially undermine the overall achievement.

Scores

Writing

Warm, precise, readable

Research

Thorough, some stretch

Originality

Reframes the familiar

Practicality

Genuinely actionable

Who Should Read It

✓

Any introvert who has wondered why the world feels slightly exhausting — you will finish this book feeling understood, probably for the first time.

✓

Managers and team leaders, especially those who conflate confidence with competence, or who believe the person who speaks first in a meeting is probably right.

✓

Parents of quiet children, who will find the chapter on schooling and temperament both validating and practically useful — and who may recognise themselves in the process.

✓

Extroverts curious about half the people in their lives — this is a patient, non-accusatory guide to a different way of being in the world.

✓

Anyone who has ever been told to “come out of their shell” and wanted a polite but devastating evidence-based response.

✗

Those seeking rigorous academic treatment — the popular-science gloss will frustrate readers who want the raw studies unmediated.

✗

Readers looking for an equally sympathetic account of extroversion — this book has a point of view, and it is not neutral.

Final Verdict

More than a decade after its publication, Quiet has aged remarkably well — which is itself a small miracle in a genre where most titles feel stale within three years. The pandemic-era shift to remote work, the growing critique of open-plan offices, the gradual rethinking of meeting culture: all of it looks, in retrospect, like the world slowly catching up to what Cain argued in 2012. She got there first, and she got there with grace.

What makes the book endure is not its research, impressive as that is. It is its fundamental warmth. Cain is not angry — she is too careful, too considered for that, too introverted, one suspects, to sustain outrage at length. She is, instead, deeply sympathetic: to introverts who have spent years performing a version of themselves they don’t recognise; to extroverts navigating a world that never asked them to question their advantages; to parents and teachers and managers who are simply trying to do right by the varied, complicated people in their care. The book achieves what the best popular non-fiction does: it gives its readers language for something they have felt but couldn’t name. It makes them feel less alone.

That is no small thing. In a world that can’t stop talking, Quiet found a way to be heard.

A written with such evident warmth and intelligence that its imperfections scarcely matter. I highly recommend it. Margaretha Montagu

Once a month, I write a newsletter, and in it I chat about my life here, about the challenges I face, and about what I learn while trying to cope with these challenges. What I learn, I share with my newsletter subscribers. It would be a great way for us to stay in contact with you once you have finished the retreat, to remind you of what you learned while you were here and maybe to continue to make a difference in your life, in future. So if you feel that way inclined, I’d be very grateful if you would subscribe. If you don’t find it useful, you can immediately unsubscribe.
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For the exhausted, the overwhelmed, the overstimulated, and the quietly desperate for a different kind of life

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction

Part One: The Story of Andrew Garnier, or How a Man Who Fed Everyone Finally Fed Himself

A Retreat in the French Pyrenees, Late October

Part Two: So, What Actually Is a “Slow Year”?

What a Slow Year Actually Looks Like in Practice

The Ripple Effect

Part Three: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Trying to Live More Slowly

1. Treating “slow” as a binary switch

2. Waiting for permission

3. Going it alone

4. Confusing slowness with passivity

5. Ignoring your body

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Your Slow Year Manifesto

Recommended Reading: 5 Books for Your Slow Year

5 FAQs: Real Questions, Honest Answers

Conclusion: The Year Ahead

An Invitation

But Are You Ready for a Retreat?

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: You Are Not Broken. You Are Just Under-Befriended.

The Story: How Sophie Marchand Accidentally Found Her Herself

So What Exactly Is Slow Friendship? And Why Does It Matter So Much Right Now?

How Slow Friendship Ripples Outward

5 Mistakes to Avoid on the Path to Slow Friendship

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The Friendship Inventory

Further Reading: Books Worth Bringing on the Trail

5 FAQs About Slow Friendship

Conclusion: The World Is Rushing Blindly Ahead. Slow Down.

Take the Quiz: Are You Ready for a Retreat?

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introductionn: The Quiet Emergency Nobody’s Talking About

The Story of Vivienne Marsh

A Story in Four Movements

The Science of Wandering, Wondering and Writing

5 Journalling Mistakes to Avoid on the Camino

Because Good Intentions and Wrong Approaches Are a Waste of Good Scenery

Before You Put One Foot on the Path

Further Reading

5 FAQs About Journalling on the Camino de Santiago

Conclusion: Ancient Technology for Modern Problems

Your Invitation: Five Days That Could Change Everything

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading & Camino de Santiago Retreats

Take the Quiz: Are You Ready for a Retreat?

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Problem With Being Fine

Elize’s Story: The Woman Who Froze in the Middle of the Path

Why Does This Actually Work? The Deeper Picture

What’s really happening when we take our pain outside?

How this ripples outward

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Journalling in Nature

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Before You Write

Further Reading

What should you read alongside your journal?

Going Deeper: The Purpose Pivot Protocol

5 FAQs: What You Need To Know

Conclusion

A Gentle Invitation: An Esprit Meraki Camino de Santiago Retreat

And Finally: A Question Worth Sitting With

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Friend-Shaped Hole in Your Life

The Hidden Cost of Fake Friendships: Claire’s Story

How Can You Tell Who’s a Fake Friend?

What Does “Fake Friends” Actually Mean?

Why Are Some People Fake Friends?

What Drives Inauthentic Friendship?

What Are the Different Types of Fake Friends?

A (Slightly Wry) Taxonomy of Inauthentic Friendship

How Do Fake Friendships Harm Us?

What Does the Science Actually Say?

How Can This Realisation Change Not Just Your Life, But Those Around You?

How to Handle Fake Friends: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

Further Reading: 5 Books on Friendship, Authenticity, and Human Connection

5 FAQs About Fake Friends