Margaretha Montagu - Dr Margaretha Montagu

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 Walking 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 finding your way to a brighter future.

“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

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

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.

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?

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.
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

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.

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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02/04/202603/05/2026

Why Your Inner Circle Is Your Greatest Resource in a Crisis (And How to Build One That Actually Works for You)

Science-backed strategies for introverts who need real connection, not just a crowded room and how meaningful connection, not small talk, is the secret weapon every introvert needs to survive uncertain times

What this is: A warm, honest, evidence-backed exploration of why the people around you matter enormously when life gets complicated, and why this is doubly true for introverts who are quietly carrying more than anyone suspects.

What this isn’t: A chirpy manifesto about extroversion, a listicle on “how to make friends as an adult,” or any advice that involves a mixer, a name tag, and a bowl of crisps that’s somehow supposed to fix your loneliness. We will not be suggesting you smile more, complain less, fake enthusiasm for small talk, or force yourself into rooms that drain you just to prove you’re trying. You’ve tried. You’ve stood at those parties with your drink as a prop, nodded at people whose names you immediately forgot, driven home wondering why you feel emptier than when you left.

Read this if: You’re someone who’s thoughtful, self-aware, and currently navigating a world that feels increasingly uncertain, and you’re wondering whether the isolation creeping in at the edges is helping or hurting you.

5 Key Takeaways

The quality of your connections, not the quantity, determines how well you weather a storm. Three people who truly see you are worth more than thirty who barely know your name.
Introverts are not anti-social; they are selectively social. The distinction matters enormously when you’re building the kind of support network that will actually sustain you.
Isolation during times of global uncertainty is not self-care; it’s slow erosion. The world feels chaotic enough without shrinking your world to the size of your sofa.
Shared experiences, especially in nature, are one of the fastest ways to create genuine connection. There’s something about walking the same ancient path, literally and figuratively, that dissolves the careful walls we build around ourselves.
Who you become during a crisis is shaped by who walks alongside you. The right companions don’t just help you survive, they help you become a better version of yourself.

Introduction: The Quiet Crisis Nobody’s Talking About

Are You Trying to Survive the Current World Chaos Alone, When You Don’t Have To?

You’re slowly sipping your morning coffee, scrolling through the news, and somewhere around the third headline, a quiet dread settles into your chest like fog. The world, it seems, is spectacularly good at producing reasons to worry. Climate. Politics. Economics. The vague, persistent sense that the ground beneath everything is slightly less solid than it used to be.

You close the app. You manage your day. You hold it together beautifully, because that’s what capable people do.

And then, somewhere around 11pm, alone with your thoughts, you wonder: How is everyone else coping with this?

If you’re an introvert, that loneliness has a particular flavour. It’s not that you want a crowd. You’ve never wanted a crowd. What you want, what you actually need, is the rare and specific relief of being genuinely understood by the right people. And right now, in a world that feels increasingly fractured, that kind of connection can feel very far away.

This article is about why that connection is not a nice-to-have. It’s about why the people you surround yourself with are, quite literally, part of your survival kit during difficult times. And it’s about how to find them, nurture them, and let them matter to you, even if your entire nervous system is suggesting you’d be fine on your own.

You won’t be. None of us are. But the good news is, you don’t have to be.

The Story of Helena Voss: What Happened When She Finally Let Someone In

Can One Week Change the Way You See Yourself?

Helena Voss had always been the most competent person in any room she walked into.

She’d learned early that competence was currency, and she’d spent forty-three years investing wisely. Senior editor at a respected publishing house. A flat in Edinburgh she’d renovated herself, mostly. A reputation for being unflappable, incisive, and reliably, almost annoyingly, competent.

Then came the year everything fell apart, politely but thoroughly.

Her marriage ended, not with a dramatic argument, but with a quiet conversation over dinner in which her husband explained, with the measured calm she’d always admired in him, that he had been deeply lonely for most of their marriage. The words landed in her chest like stones dropped into still water. She hadn’t known. She thought they were both just busy. She thought that was what grown-up love looked like.

The redundancy came three months later. Publishing, reorganised. Her role, dissolved.

And then, in May, her mother was diagnosed with early-stage dementia.

Helena did what Helena always did. She managed. She made lists. She researched care facilities at 2am. She returned calls promptly and answered “I’m fine” with such conviction that people stopped asking. She was fluent in ‘being fine.’ She’d been perfecting it her whole life.

What she didn’t do, couldn’t do, was tell anyone the truth. That she was frightened. That the silence in her flat had begun to feel less like peace and more like evidence. That she would sometimes stand in the shower until the water went cold because it was the only place she could cry without feeling watched.

She heard about the retreat almost by accident, a mention in a bookshop newsletter. Five days in southwest France. Walking the Camino de Santiago. Books. Small group. A physician who understood what it meant to be at a turning point.

Helena’s first instinct was immediate and characteristic: No. Absolutely not. I don’t do group things.

Her second instinct, quieter, more persistent: You are disappearing. Something has to change.

She booked it on a Tuesday evening, had a minor panic on Wednesday, and arrived at the farmhouse in the Lot Valley on a bright September morning, suitcase in hand, armour fully intact.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. Thyme, mint, old roses and something earthy she couldn’t name, warm in the late-summer air. The second thing she noticed was that the other three women arriving that morning all looked, beneath their composed exteriors, exactly as wrung out as she felt.

She recognised it immediately, the careful way they held themselves, the polite deflection in their introductions. We are all very fine, their posture announced. We are all completely managing.

The walking started gently, which she hadn’t expected. She’d prepared herself for a gruelling march, another test to pass. Instead it was contemplative. The ancient path beneath her feet, the light through oak trees, the sound of her own breathing. And beside her, Cécile, a retired teacher from Lyon who had recently lost her son, who talked about him so matter-of-factly and with such fierce love that Helena found herself, without planning it, talking about her mother.

Really talking. Not the competent summary she gave to colleagues. The actual, untidy, frightened truth of it.

That evening, during supper, the kind of conversation that happened when people have spent a day walking in a beautiful landscape together, Helena noticed something unusual. She wasn’t performing. She wasn’t managing the room. She was just, to her profound surprise, present.

There were books, of course. Rich, nourishing, carefully chosen books that gave language to experiences she’d been carrying wordlessly. There was the Reconnect with Nature journaling course, which she’d rolled her eyes at privately, and then found herself using at dawn on the third morning, sitting on the terrace with a notebook, writing things she hadn’t known she needed to say.

By day four, Helena cried properly for the first time in two years. Not in the shower. In the company of women who didn’t flinch, didn’t fix, didn’t rush her back to fine.

On the last morning, walking the final stretch before the village, she thought about what had changed. Not her circumstances, those were waiting patiently at home. But something inside had shifted. She’d been reminded of something she’d forgotten so thoroughly she’d stopped knowing it was missing: that she was not alone, had never been required to be alone, and that letting herself be witnessed, truly witnessed, by the right people was not weakness.

It was, she thought, stepping into the sunlight, the bravest thing she’d done in years.

Why Your People Are Your Greatest Resource in Difficult Times

What Does Science Tell Us About Human Connection and Resilience?

Helena’s story is not unusual. In twenty years of working with people navigating major life transitions, as a physician with a long-standing interest in stress management, and as a host of transformational retreats for more than fifteen years, I have watched the same pattern repeat itself with remarkable consistency.

The people who recover well from difficult periods, and not just recover, but genuinely thrive afterwards, are almost never the ones who white-knuckle it alone. They are the ones who, somewhere in the process, allow themselves to be genuinely supported.

This is not fluffy thinking. The research on social connection and resilience is robust and rather startling in its clarity. Chronic loneliness is associated with elevated cortisol levels, disrupted sleep, and immune suppression. Social isolation, particularly during periods of high stress, literally changes the way our brains process threat. We become more vigilant, more reactive, more likely to interpret neutral events as dangerous.

Conversely, the presence of even one genuinely supportive relationship has been shown to buffer the physiological impact of stress significantly. One study found that holding a stranger’s hand during an anticipated shock was enough to reduce neural threat responses. A stranger’s hand. Imagine what a trusted friend can do.

For introverts, this research has a particular edge. Because the introvert’s instinct when things get difficult is almost always to retreat. To process alone. To manage internally. And while solitude is genuinely restorative for introverts in a way it isn’t for everyone, there is a crucial difference between chosen solitude and habitual isolation born of fear or exhaustion.

The former restores you. The latter hollows you out.

What introverts need is not more people. They need deeper connection with fewer people in supportive environments.

This is partly why nature is such a powerful setting for building those connections. Shared experience in natural environments, particularly walking, reduces the social pressure that makes introverts want to exit every room after twenty minutes. When you’re walking together, side by side, looking at the same horizon, conversation becomes possible at a different level. You’re not performing connection. You’re just having it.

The Camino de Santiago has, for centuries, operated as a kind of social solvent. Something about the shared effort, the beauty, the physical rhythm of walking day after day, dissolves pretence with startling speed. People who would never have spoken their truth over a dinner table will tell you everything on a mountain path.

I’ve witnessed it hundreds of times, and I never stop being moved by it.

The Ripple Effect

What happens to a Community when One Person flourishes?

There is something else worth saying, and it tends to surprise people when they first hear it.

The work you do to emerge from difficult times, the courage it takes to seek genuine connection, to allow yourself to be supported, to step back into life rather than retreating further from it, that work doesn’t stay contained to you.

People are part of systems. Families are systems. Workplaces and communities are systems. When one person within a system shifts, the whole system recalibrates.

Helena, going home to Edinburgh with her quieter centre, her new friendships, her reinvigorated relationship with books and nature, didn’t return to the same world she’d left. She returned to the same circumstances, but she was now a different variable within them. Her mother noticed. Her colleagues noticed. Her sister, who’d been watching her manage from a careful distance for two years, finally felt she could call and ask how Helena actually was.

And when Helena answered honestly, the conversation that followed was the most real they’d had in fifteen years.

This is what genuine transformation does. It gives other people permission to stop pretending too.

When you choose, against every well-trained instinct, to let people in, you become, whether you intend to or not, an invitation. Not a loud one, not a lecture about vulnerability. Just a quiet demonstration that it’s possible, and safe, to be known.

Your community, your family, the people who love you and have been watching you disappear into your competence for years, they’re waiting for that invitation. They might not even know they’re waiting. But they are.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Support Network in Difficult Times

What Trips People Up, Even When They Know Better?

Mistake 1: Confusing quantity with quality. Having many acquaintances who know only the surface of you is not the same as having three people who know your whole story. Don’t measure your support network by headcount. Measure it by depth. One honest conversation is worth forty pleasant ones.

Mistake 2: Waiting until you’re in crisis to invest in relationships. The time to build genuine connection is before the flood, not during it. If you’re currently in the middle of a difficult period, start anyway. But resolve, as you emerge, to tend your relationships as regularly as you tend anything else that matters.

Mistake 3: Surrounding yourself with people who confirm your fear rather than expand your vision. There is a particular type of well-meaning company, and many of us have been guilty of seeking it, that keeps us neatly anchored in our worst interpretation of our situation. Isn’t it terrible, yes it is, pass the biscuits. Choose people who uphold your potential even when you can’t see it yourself.

Mistake 4: Expecting digital connection to substitute for embodied presence. Text messages are lovely. Video calls are better than nothing. But there is something about being physically present with another human being, sharing the same air, the same light, the same landscape, that has no digital equivalent. Your nervous system knows the difference, even if you tell yourself it doesn’t.

Mistake 5: Dismissing group experiences because you’re an introvert. Small, thoughtfully facilitated groups of people with shared values are not the same as cocktail parties or networking events. Many introverts have described retreats, particularly in nature, as some of the most genuinely connective experiences of their lives, precisely because the environment removes the elements they find most draining: performance, small talk, and the relentless management of first impressions.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Who Do You Want Beside You?

On a piece of paper, or in your journal, write the answers to these three questions. Don’t overthink them. Write what comes.

When I am at my most frightened or overwhelmed, who do I instinctively want to call? (If no one comes to mind, that itself is important information, not a verdict on your worth, but a signal about where to direct your energy.)
What would I need to feel safe enough to let someone see me struggling? (Notice what comes up. Safety? Shared experience? Physical distance from daily life? Nature? This tells you something about the environment in which connection becomes possible for you.)
Who in my life have I been letting in, and who have I been keeping at arm’s length out of habit, fear, or the belief that needing people is a burden? (Write a name or two. You don’t have to do anything with them yet. Just acknowledge them.)

There are no correct answers. Only honest ones.

The Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses

One of the things I’ve seen transform retreat guests who’d nearly given up on themselves is the simple, grounding act of spending time with horses. Not riding them. Just being with them.

My Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses is an online course that uses equine wisdom and guided journaling prompts to help you find your way back to yourself, gently, in your own time. Horses, as it turns out, are extraordinarily perceptive sounding boards for human emotional states, and being prompted to observe and reflect on them produces insights that more conventional approaches can take months to reach.

This course is included free for all guests at my Camino de Santiago retreats. For everyone else, it’s available online and it is, I’m told, rather startling in the best possible way.

5 FAQs People Are Asking Right Now About Connection and Resilience

What Do People Most Need to Know?

Q: I’m a lifelong introvert and I’ve always recovered better alone. Are you really saying that’s wrong?

Not at all. Solitude is genuinely restorative for introverts, and dismissing that would be as unhelpful as dismissing your need to eat. What I’m suggesting is that there’s a difference between chosen, intentional solitude, which restores you, and avoidant isolation, which depletes you slowly and quietly. The question worth sitting with is: Am I choosing this aloneness, or am I hiding in it?

Q: The world feels so unstable right now. Is it any wonder I’ve retreated?

No. It makes complete sense. When the external environment feels threatening, the instinct to contract is ancient and adaptive. But here’s the catch: prolonged contraction, especially social contraction, makes us more sensitised to threat, not less. The antidote to a world that feels out of control is not further isolation. It’s regulated, safe, genuine connection.

Q: I’ve been hurt by people I trusted. How am I supposed to open myself up again?

Slowly, and in environments that earn it. You don’t open the door all at once. You find contexts, a small group, a shared purpose, a skilled facilitator, where the conditions for trust are more carefully created than in everyday life. And you notice what happens. Not every group will feel right. But that’s information, not evidence that connection is impossible for you.

Q: Can a retreat really make a difference if my problems are still waiting at home?

Yes. Not because the retreat removes your problems, but because it returns you to yourself, and a different version of you handles those same problems very differently. The circumstances are the same. The variable that changes is you. I’ve watched it happen hundreds of times.

Q: I don’t know if I need a retreat or just proper therapy. How do I know which?

They’re not mutually exclusive, and sometimes the answer is both. A good retreat is not therapy, though it can be deeply therapeutic. It’s a context for reflection, nature, community, and reconnection. If you’re carrying something that requires clinical support, please seek that too. But don’t use the existence of deeper work as a reason to postpone all nourishment. You’re allowed to be helped now, not only once you’ve fixed everything.

Conclusion: The Bravest Thing

In twenty years as a physician, I watched the sickest people in my consulting room be sustained, not by the cleverest treatment plan, but by whether there was someone with them or waiting for them at home. And in fifteen years of hosting people through life transitions at my retreats, walking the ancient path of the Camino de Santiago, I have seen the same truth again and again: we are not built to do the hard parts alone.

The world is complicated right now. Perhaps more than at any point in living memory. And if you are someone who feels things deeply, who thinks carefully, who carries the weight of awareness without an obvious place to put it, then the question of who is beside you matters enormously.

Not who fills your social calendar. Not who you perform your finest self for. But who, when you are frightened or lost or quietly undone, you could call at midnight without editing yourself first.

If that list is shorter than it should be, that’s not a failing. It’s a starting point.

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity, but you’ll need someone to help you find it.” — Adapted from a principle I return to again and again, with grateful acknowledgement to the hundreds of retreat guests who taught me its truth.

Could Five Days in the French Countryside Be the Turning Point You’ve Been Circling?

If any of this has resonated with you, if you’ve recognised yourself in Helena’s story, or felt the ache of carrying more than you’d like to admit, I want you to know about something.

My 5-Day Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France is designed precisely for people like you: intelligent, thoughtful, stressed, and in need not of fixing, but of space. Space to breathe. To walk. To read books that nourish you. To be in the company of a small group of remarkable people who, like you, came because something needed to shift.

Gascony in southwest France is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful places I know. An ancient path, golden light, the particular silence of landscapes that have held human stories for centuries.

Small groups. Expert facilitation. And the Reconnect with Nature journaling course, included free.

You don’t need to be in crisis to come. You just need to be ready for something different.

Discover the retreat here →

If you’re not quite ready to pack a bag for France (yet), subscribe to my newsletter: Practical, warm, never preachy reflections on navigating life’s transitions, with books, science, and the occasional dose of French countryside thrown in. No spam. Just genuine company in your inbox and take the Turning Point Quiz: not sure where you are in your transition, or what you actually need right now? My Turning Point Quiz will help you get clearer, quickly. It takes about five minutes and the results are genuinely useful.

Take the quiz here →

References

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.
Eisenberger, N. I., Taylor, S. E., Gable, S. L., Hilmert, C. J., & Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Neural pathways link social support to attenuated neuroendocrine stress responses. NeuroImage, 35(4), 1601–1612.
Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.
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.
Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310–357.

What would change in your life if you gave yourself permission to be genuinely accompanied through this next chapter? I’d love to know.

Dr Margaretha Montagu, MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, and Life Transition Coach, has spent more than twenty years helping people find their way through the moments that change everything. She is the author of eight non-fiction books and has hosted transformational retreats on the Camino de Santiago for more than fifteen years.

25/03/202603/05/2026

The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How to Rewrite the Narrative That’s Making You Miserable

What this is: A practical, warm-hearted exploration of why your inner narrative might be your biggest source of stress, and what you can actually do about it, starting today.

What this isn’t: Another “just think positive!” pep talk. No toxic positivity. No worksheets asking you to “visualise your best self living your best life.”

Read this if: The world feels relentlessly heavy right now, you’ve noticed that your own thoughts are making things worse, and you’re ready to do something genuinely useful about it.

Key Takeaways

Your brain is a storytelling machine, not a recording device. What you believe about your life is not necessarily the same as what is actually happening.
Stress multiplies when your inner narrative catastrophises. The story isn’t the event. The story is about how you interpret the event.
Creating a nurturing narrative is a learnable skill, not a personality trait you either have or don’t.
Nature, stillness, and story (in books and in life) are among the most evidence-backed tools for rewiring unhelpful thought patterns.
Small, consistent practice beats dramatic transformation every time. Ten minutes a day, reliably, changes more than a weekend retreat once a decade, though a retreat does give you a rather extraordinary head start.

Introduction: The Voice in Your Head

Here is something that no one tells you clearly enough: the most stressful thing in your life right now might not be the state of the world. It might be the running commentary you have about the state of the world.

You wake up. Before your feet hit the floor, the internal monologue has already started. Everything is falling apart. I can’t cope with this. It’s only going to get worse. By the time you’ve made the coffee, you’ve lived through three imaginary catastrophes and a vague but persistent sense of dread. And the day has barely begun.

This is the story. Not the news. Not the economy. Not the uncertainty. The story you are telling yourself about all of those things.

This article will show you how, drawing on neuroscience, lived wisdom, and the kind of practical insight that comes from more than two decades of working with people in the middle of the hardest chapters of their lives. By the end, you’ll understand why your inner narrative has such power over your wellbeing, what mistakes most people make when they try to change it, and how to begin doing something genuinely different.

Let’s start with someone you might recognise.

What Does It Actually Look Like, When Your Story Is Running//Ruining Your Life?

Eleanor’s Story

Eleanor Marsh had always considered herself a capable woman.

She had built a career she was proud of, raised two children largely on her own after her divorce, and navigated her fifties with the kind of quiet resilience that people tend to describe as “remarkable” at funerals but never quite say out loud while you’re still living it. She had read all the right books. Done the therapy. Understood, intellectually, that she was “doing well, all things considered.”

And yet.

On the evening she arrived at the small farmhouse in the Gers region of south-west France for a five-day reading retreat, she sat down at the dinner table, looked out over the tree tops, and burst into tears. Not delicate, photogenic tears. The ugly, shuddering kind, the kind that had clearly been waiting a very long time for permission.

“I don’t even know what I’m crying about,” she told the small group of women gathered around the rough-hewn table, clutching her café au lait like a life raft. “Nothing is technically wrong. Everything is technically fine.”

The smell of warm bread hung in the air. Outside, somewhere in the oak trees, a wood pigeon was stating its case with cheerful repetition. The morning felt impossibly gentle.

“Tell me,” said the retreat host quietly, “what does the voice in your head say? The first one. The one that wakes you up.”

Eleanor opened her mouth to say something measured and appropriate. What came out instead was this:

“It says I’ve missed it. That I spent so long surviving that I forgot to actually live. That the world is too broken to fix and I’m too tired to try. That it’s too late.”

She said it almost matter-of-factly, as though reading from a report. But her hands were shaking.

That voice, as it turned out, had been narrating Eleanor’s life for years. Not loudly. It was too clever for that. It whispered. It dressed itself up as realism, as pragmatism, as being a grown-up. It said things like “don’t get your hopes up” and “you know how this ends” and “best not to want too much.” It called itself wisdom. Eleanor had believed it.

The first afternoon of the retreat, they walked. Not far, just along the ancient pilgrim path that wound through sunflower fields and past crumbling chapels, the same path that pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago had worn smooth over centuries of seeking. Eleanor walked in silence for most of it, and somewhere between a field of spent sunflowers and a hamlet with a fountain that still ran cold and clear, something shifted.

She couldn’t name it exactly. The air smelled of warm earth and distant rain. Her feet found their rhythm. The voice, for once, had nothing useful to add to the landscape and so, somewhat surprisingly, it went quiet.

That evening, they read. Each woman had brought a book that mattered to her; they read alone and together, in the garden, in the deep armchairs by the fire, on the old stone steps with the last of the sun warming their backs. Eleanor had brought a novel she’d been meaning to read for three years and hadn’t, because she’d told herself she didn’t have time. That night, she read until midnight. Her shoulders, she noticed, had descended from somewhere around her ears to their actual anatomical location.

Over the following days, something quietly remarkable happened. Not a dramatic transformation, nothing cinematic. But in the combination of walking, reading, conversation, the extraordinary ordinariness of meals shared with strangers who became friends, and what she later described as “the particular mercy of being somewhere breathtakingly beautiful with no agenda,” Eleanor began to hear her inner narrative differently.

Not as truth. As a story. And stories, she knew, because she had always loved reading and writing, can be edited.

By day four, she had started a journal. Not a gratitude list (she had always hated those, finding them faintly coercive). Just an honest account of what the voice said, followed by a simple question: “Is that actually true, or is that just the story I’ve been telling myself?”

More often than not, the answer was: just the story.

She left on the fifth day with the same life she had arrived with. The same uncertainties, the same world news, the same challenges waiting at home. But she had a different relationship with the narrator. And that, it turned out, changed rather a lot.

Why Do Our Inner Stories Have So Much Power Over Us?

What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain?

Eleanor’s experience is not unusual. In fact, it is almost boringly common, which in no way makes it less painful.

The human brain is a prediction machine. Its primary job, evolutionarily speaking, is not to make you happy. It is to keep you alive by anticipating threat. It does this by constructing narratives, stories about who you are, what the world is like, and what is likely to happen next, and then treating those narratives as fact.

This was brilliant when the threat was a predator. It is considerably less helpful when the “threat” is a 24-hour news cycle, a difficult relationship, an uncertain economy, or the generalised ambient anxiety that characterises modern life. The brain doesn’t distinguish much. It picks up a signal, builds a story around it, and files the story under “established fact.”

The trouble is that once a narrative is established, the brain actively looks for evidence to confirm it, a phenomenon psychologists call confirmation bias. If your story is “I can’t cope,” you will find evidence for that every single day. You will be extraordinarily good at finding it, and remarkably blind to anything that contradicts it.

This is not a character flaw. It is literally how the brain works. The good news, and this is where twenty years of research and clinical work become genuinely exciting, is that the brain is also neuroplastic. It can change. Narratives can be rewritten. New pathways can be built. And the conditions most likely to support that rewriting include reduced stress, increased safety, contact with nature, meaningful human connection, and engagement with story, including the stories in books.

In other words: the antidote to a harmful inner narrative is not more thinking. It is a change of environment, pace, and perspective. It is, perhaps, a week in south-west France with a good book and a pilgrim path underfoot.

How One Person’s Story Change Ripples Outward

Here is what tends to get overlooked in conversations about personal growth: the way you narrate your own life affects everyone around you.

When Eleanor returned home, her daughter noticed within a week. Not because Eleanor had announced any great revelation, but because the low-level static of chronic anxiety that had infused their conversations for years had softened. Eleanor was more present. Less reactive. She laughed more easily. She stopped finishing her daughter’s sentences with the worst possible ending.

This is not sentimental speculation. Research consistently shows that emotional regulation in one person positively affects the nervous systems of those in close proximity, through what neuroscientists call co-regulation. When you become calmer, more grounded, and less driven by fear-based narratives, you become, quite literally, a regulating presence for others.

Your children, your partner, your colleagues, your friends, your community. The ripple is real.

A person who has learned to question their inner narrative, to ask “is this true, or is this the story I’m telling?” before reacting, becomes a different kind of citizen. More thoughtful. Less tribally reactive. More capable of nuance in a world that is desperately short of it.

In this sense, doing this inner work is not self-indulgent. It is, arguably, one of the most genuinely useful things you can do in the current climate.

What Are the 5 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Trying to Change Their Inner Narrative?

Mistake 1: Trying to Silence the Voice Rather Than Understand It

The instinct is to fight the narrative. To tell yourself to stop being negative, to force better thoughts, to perform positivity until you believe it. This almost never works, because you are arguing with a narrator that has been practising its script for decades. You cannot silence a story. You have to process it.

The more useful move is to get curious. Where did this story come from? Whose voice does it sound like? What was it trying to protect you from, originally?

Mistake 2: Doing It Alone, in the Same Environment

Trying to change your thinking while remaining in the exact conditions that formed it is like trying to write a new chapter while someone is repeatedly reading you the old one at top volume. Environment matters enormously. New landscapes, new rhythms, new company all give the brain permission to try something different.

Mistake 3: Confusing Insight With Change

You can understand something perfectly and still not change. Many intelligent people have read every self-help book ever written and remained precisely as they were. Understanding the problem is just the beginning, not the solution. Change requires practice, repetition, and the kind of embodied experience that engages the whole self, not just the intellectual mind.

Mistake 4: Expecting It to Be a One-Time Event

There is no single moment when the inner narrative is permanently fixed. It is ongoing work, and that is actually fine, because maintenance is so much lighter than crisis management. A daily ten-minute practice is worth infinitely more than a once-a-decade breakdown followed by an emergency course of therapy.

Mistake 5: Underestimating the Role of Nature

This sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but access to natural beauty in particular, is one of the most consistently undervalued tools for psychological change. Research on what is called awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and wondrous, shows that it reliably reduces self-referential thinking, shrinks the inner narrative’s grip, and restores a sense of perspective. A sunflower field at dawn will do more for your nervous system than an hour of cognitive restructuring, and you need not choose between them.

A Short and Powerful Intention-Setting Exercise

Ask yourself, honestly: What story am I telling most often right now? What do I say to myself about my life, my future, the state of things?

Write it down. One or two sentences. The unvarnished version.

Now ask: Is this a fact, or is it an interpretation? And if it is an interpretation, is it the only possible one?

Write a second sentence. Not a forced positive version. Just a different possible story. One that is also plausible.

Notice how your body feels when you hold the second story alongside the first.

That noticing is where change begins.

A Note on the Online Course Included With all my Retreats

Every guest at my reading retreats receives complimentary access to my Reconnect with Nature: An Online Journaling Course Inspired by Horses. This online course uses horses as mirrors and nature as the medium to help you hear your inner narrative more clearly and begin to question what has been running on autopilot. It can be worked through before, during, or after the retreat, and many guests find it invaluable for continuing the work when they return home.

5 Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I already know my thoughts are the problem. Why can’t I just think my way out of it?

Because insight and change are not the same thing, as much as we might wish they were. Understanding a pattern cognitively activates a different part of the brain than actually rewiring it. Lasting narrative change requires repeated new experience, embodied practice, and often a change of environment. Knowing is the starting point. It is not the destination.

Q: Is this about positive thinking? Because I genuinely cannot cope with positive thinking.

Absolutely not. This is about accurate thinking, which is quite different. Positive thinking asks you to replace a difficult story with a pleasant one, regardless of evidence. What we’re talking about is learning to recognise when your story is not just difficult but also not true, and finding one that is both honest and less catastrophic. That is a very different exercise.

Q: I’m an introvert. Will a group retreat suit me?

This is asked regularly, and the answer is yes, with a caveat. Retreats are designed with significant time for solitude, individual reading, and private reflection. There is no enforced bonding or relentless group activity. The walking sections of the Camino allow for as much or as little conversation as you choose. Many of the most enthusiastic guests identify as introverts who have never felt so at ease in a group setting.

Q: What if I’m not a big reader?

You’ll find books you love, perhaps for the first time in years. The retreat creates the conditions in which reading becomes a pleasure again rather than another item on the to-do list. No one is quizzed. No one has to report on their progress. You read what you like, at the pace that suits you, in conditions that make it easy.

Q: How long does it take to see a real change in your inner narrative?

Honestly? Most people notice a shift within a few days of committed, supported practice. The retreat itself, five days of walking, reading, nature, good food, and genuine reflection, is enough to begin the process meaningfully. Sustaining it requires ongoing small practice at home. Hence the ten-minute-a-day approach. Rome was not built in a day, but it was built, steadily, by people who showed up consistently.

Conclusion

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl

You have been living inside a narrative for as long as you can remember. Some of it was given to you by circumstances, by other people, by a culture that profits from your anxiety. Some of it you constructed, carefully and understandably, to survive things that needed surviving.

But you are not required to keep living inside a story that is no longer serving you.

The world is difficult right now. That part is true. What is also true is that the way you narrate that difficulty determines almost everything about how you experience it, how you respond to it, and what you are able to offer those around you.

The story can change. It starts, as all the best stories do, with a decision to begin.

Could a Week in South-West France Help You Change Your Story?

The 5-Day Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in the Gers region of south-west France is designed for exactly the kind of person who has been carrying a story that has grown too heavy.

Here, on the ancient pilgrim path, among sunflower fields and stone chapels, with a stack of books, good food, and the particular silence that beautiful places offer, something reliably happens. The inner narrative loses its grip. The breath deepens. Perspective returns.

Hosted by Dr Margaretha Montagu, physician, life transition coach, NLP master practitioner, and author of eight books on navigating life’s hardest chapters, the retreat offers the rare combination of genuine clinical insight and extraordinary natural setting. With more than 15 years of transformational retreats and 30+ guest testimonials, this is a space where real change happens, quietly, without drama, and rather beautifully.

If the story you’re living needs a new chapter, perhaps it’s time to find a better setting in which to write it.

Stay Connected: Your Next Step

If you found this article useful, you might want to take the Turning Point Quiz (https://margarethamontagu.com/lqsc/), a short, insightful tool designed to help you identify where you are in your life transition and what kind of support would serve you best right now. It takes five minutes and offers surprisingly honest results and it includes a subscription to my Newsletter, where I share practical insights on navigating life transitions, managing stress in a difficult world, and finding your way back to a life that feels genuinely yours.

References

Garland, E. L., Farb, N. A., Goldin, P., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2015). Mindfulness broadens awareness and builds eudaimonic meaning: A process model of mindful positive emotion regulation. Psychological Inquiry, 26(4), 293–314.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.
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.
Porges, S. W. (2009). The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76(Suppl 2), S86–S90.

What story have you been telling yourself most often lately, and how would today look if you chose a different one?

20/03/202603/05/2026

The Loneliness Epidemic: Why Do I Feel Lonely Even When I’m Surrounded by People?

The Loneliness Nobody Talks About: When You’re Never Alone But Always Lonely

One crisp spring night, somewhere along the Camino de Santiago, in the southwest of France, a small group of reading retreat guests sits in a clearing around a fire.

By the time Lisa speaks, both hands wrapped around her mug, her tea has gone cold.

“I feel lonely,” she says. “Even when I’m not alone.”

No one rushes in to answer. The silence holds. As the words settle, she feels a strange, unsteady relief of saying something that has been true for so long it feels part of her.

“Last month,” she says, “my husband had a dinner party.”

She pauses. Starts again.

“There were twelve people. The table was so full someone brought in chairs from the kitchen. There was music, candles, good wine. Everyone was in it, you know? That moment when a room turns into its own little world.”

Her thumb traces the rim of the mug.

“I went into the kitchen. Started rinsing a glass that didn’t need rinsing. From the doorway, I could see all of them. My husband was laughing, actually laughing, head back, eyes closed. Someone was telling a story with their hands, and I—”

She stops.

The fire crackles and spits.

“It felt like I was watching through a thick glass wall. Like I could press my hand against it and it would be cold.”

Across the circle, a woman pulls her knees to her chest. Someone else looks down.

“There’s nothing wrong with my life,” Lisa says, quickly now, needing to get it right. “That’s what makes it so hard to explain. My husband loves me. My friends are good people. I went back to the table. Someone refilled my glass. I laughed, and still there was something between me and all of it. All of them. Between me and my own life.”

She looks deep into the glowing heart of the fire.

An owl calls somewhere in one of the ancient oak trees. One note, then silence again.

“I kept thinking the answer was more. More people, more plans, more noise. Like it was a void I could fill.” A small, humourless breath of a laugh. “But I can’t fill it. It’s too deep. It’s like being cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. You can stand in a warm, crowded, beautiful room and still feel cold.”

She sets the mug down. Her hands hover, unsure where to go.

“I think I’ve been lonely,” she says slowly, as if testing the words, “my entire adult life.” She looks up. “And I was ashamed to say it. Because I have a husband. A daughter. Friends who would come if I called. I have more than most people. So I thought the loneliness meant there was something wrong with me. Something missing. Something broken that everyone else got and I didn’t.”

Her gaze moves around the circle, face to face.

“I’ve been lugging it around like it was a flaw,” she says.

The woman beside her, someone she met that morning over coffee and small talk about the drive, reaches out and rests a hand on Lisa’s knee.

Lisa looks at it.

Then back at the fire.

What This Is: A candid, warm, and occasionally witty exploration of why so many thoughtful, connected people feel profoundly lonely in the middle of their own busy lives, and what might genuinely help.

What This Isn’t: A lecture about putting your phone down. A list of affirmations. A cheerful nudge to “just get out more.”

Read This If: You have a full diary and an empty feeling you can’t quite name. The state of the world is grinding you down and you’re not sure where you went in the noise. You’ve tried the usual fixes and they haven’t stuck.

5 Key Takeaways

Feeling lonely in company is not a character flaw. It’s an important message.
Modern stress, especially collective anxiety about world events, amplifies isolation even in the middle of crowds.
Superficial connections can actually intensify loneliness. More social media does not equal less loneliness. Often it’s the reverse.
Meaningful communities are not luxuries. They are biological necessities for nervous systems under chronic stress.
This kind of loneliness is often a turning point, the beginning of a more intentional, sustaining, and connected life.

Introduction: Loneliness Creeps Up On You

The loneliest moments of your life might not hit you in an empty flat on a Friday night. They might happen at a dinner table surrounded by people you love, or in an office full of colleagues, or scrolling through a phone full of notifications that somehow make the silence louder.

If you’ve felt that particular loneliness, the kind that sits quietly in the middle of your full life and doesn’t have a polite explanation, this article is for you.

You’re not ungrateful. You’re not weak. And you’re definitely not alone (though I know that phrase probably makes you want to roll your eyes right now, given the circumstances).

What you might be is overstimulated, under-nourished, and running on a kind of connection that looks like the real thing but isn’t. Especially now. With the world doing what the world is currently doing.

By the time you finish reading, you’ll understand why this happens, what makes it worse, what actually helps, and why this particular kind of loneliness, painful as it is, might be pointing you somewhere rather remarkable.

Sophie Laurent Had Everything.

Sophie Laurent was, by any reasonable metric, doing brilliantly.

At 47, she had a good job in publishing, a flat in Lyon she’d renovated herself tile by tile, a WhatsApp group for every conceivable social occasion, and a weekend farmers’ market she attended with religious devotion. She had a sister who called every Sunday, a book club on Thursdays, and a yoga class she’d been meaning to go back to since 2022.

She also had, tucked somewhere behind her sternum, a hollow feeling she couldn’t explain to anyone without sounding utterly ridiculous.

It started, if she was honest with herself, around the time the news became something she had to manage rather than simply consume. The slow drip of anxiety about things large, distant, and completely beyond her control. Climate reports she read with one eye closed. Political headlines that made the world feel like a place she no longer quite recognised. The background hum of collective dread that had quietly moved into her nervous system and started rearranging the furniture.

She didn’t feel sad, exactly. She felt thin. Like a photocopy of herself. Present but invisible.

At book club one Thursday, sitting in a warm kitchen that smelled of red wine and someone’s excellent cheese selection, she looked around the table at six women she’d known for years. She could hear laughter. She could feel the rough grain of the wooden chair beneath her. She could smell the candles and the rain outside and someone’s new perfume that was probably too young for them, but then, who cares?

And she felt, with a clarity that was almost comical in its impertinence, completely alone.

Not unloved. Alone.

She smiled when she was supposed to smile. She laughed at the right moments. She even contributed what she later thought was quite a perceptive comment about the novel’s use of unreliable narration. And then she drove home through wet streets, let herself into her beautiful flat, sat on her sofa in her coat, and just… stayed there for a while.

What is wrong with me? was the thought she couldn’t quite keep out.

The answer, it turned out, was: nothing that couldn’t be addressed. But she didn’t know that yet.

Sophie had begun doing what many thoughtful, high-functioning people do under sustained stress. She had retreated to the surface. She was present in every room she entered but available in none of them. The anxiety about the world had created a kind of low-grade hypervigilance that kept her scanning the horizon rather than inhabiting the moment. She was perpetually braced for the next thing, which is exhausting, and which makes genuine connection, the kind that requires you to actually arrive somewhere, almost impossible.

The books helped, she noticed. Always had. When she read, really read, she forgot to brace. She went somewhere else entirely. She felt, strangely, less alone.

It was her sister, in one of their Sunday calls, who mentioned a retreat she’d stumbled across. Walking, somewhere in France. Books. A small group. Lasting silence and lingering conversation. Something about the Camino de Santiago and a doctor who’d been hosting these things for fifteen years and clearly believed that the combination of ancient paths, good literature, and the particular therapy of walking in beautiful countryside was not merely pleasant but genuinely transformative.

Sophie, who had a healthy scepticism about anything that used the word “transformative,” was nevertheless curious. She’d read enough to know that nature genuinely alters brain chemistry. She knew walking was one of the most effective interventions for anxiety that science had reliably produced. She knew that the kind of conversation that happens when people are away from their ordinary lives and walking through landscapes that dwarf their daily concerns tends to be the kind of conversation that matters.

She was tired. She was hollow. She was, despite all evidence to the contrary, lonely.

She booked it before she could talk herself out of it.

The retreat was five days in south-west France. The group was small, four women and two men, all somewhere in the middle of their lives, all carrying something. The walking was steady, not punishing, through countryside that had the quality of a long exhale. The books were the starting point for conversations that kept going long after dinner and deep into evenings that smelled of lavender and woodsmoke.

And something shifted. Not dramatically, not in a way she could have put into words. But the hollow feeling, the sense of being present without being there, began to ease. She found herself talking, really talking, in the way she hadn’t in years. She found herself listening, really listening, without composing her reply while the other person was still speaking.

On the third morning, walking along a path flanked by old oaks, dew on the grass and the world still quiet, she started crying and didn’t know why and didn’t feel she needed to know why.

Later, she thought it was simply relief. The relief of being, for once, genuinely present. Of feeling the ground under her feet, the cool air on her face, and the particular warmth of people nearby who weren’t performing anything, because out here, there was nothing to perform for.

She came home different. Not fixed, not transformed in any evangelical sense. But more solid. More herself. The hollow feeling had not vanished entirely, but she knew now what fed it and what didn’t. She knew the difference between connection and its imitation.

That, as it turned out, was the most useful thing she’d learned in years.

Why Does This Happen? And Why Does It Matter?

Is Modern Loneliness a Personal Failing or a Collective Crisis?

What Sophie experienced has a name, or rather several. Researchers call it “social loneliness,” distinct from physical isolation. You can be surrounded by people and still experience the neurological and emotional signature of loneliness, the sense of not being truly seen, known, or met.

This is not a fringe experience. It is, increasingly, an epidemic.

A 2023 report from the US Surgeon General described loneliness as a public health crisis of the first order, with health implications comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The UK has had a Minister for Loneliness since 2018. And this was all before the anxiety cocktail of recent years, a pandemic, rolling geopolitical chaos, economic instability, and the peculiar modern affliction of being more informed about global catastrophe than any previous generation, while being less equipped to do anything about it.

The nervous system under sustained threat moves into a kind of protective crouch. We scan for danger rather than savouring presence. We perform rather than participate. We manage our interactions rather than inhabiting them. We are there without being there.

Add to this the particular loneliness of living through genuinely frightening world events, the background anxiety about things we cannot control, and what you get is a generation of people who are technically more connected than any humans in history and feeling it less.

Shallow connection, it turns out, can make loneliness worse. A scroll through social media gives us the shape of belonging without its substance. We see evidence of other people’s lives without entering them. We present curated versions of ourselves without being known. The dopamine hit is real; the nourishment is not.

What Does Genuine Connection Actually Require?

Genuine connection requires presence, vulnerability, and shared experience. It requires, in some sense, showing up, not as the managed version of yourself but as the actual one.

This is hard to do in ordinary life, where we are tired, where there is always something else demanding attention, where the performance of being fine is so habitual it’s almost unconscious.

It is easier to do in extraordinary circumstances. In places that are beautiful enough to pull you out of your head. On paths walked by millions before you, where the perspective that comes with landscape and distance has a way of loosening the grip of whatever you were holding too tightly. In the company of people who are also, for a few days, choosing to be real.

And this matters beyond you. When one person breaks through genuine isolation and finds their way back to authentic connection, it changes how they show up for everyone around them. The friend who listens better. The partner who is actually present. The colleague who doesn’t just perform. The parent, the neighbour, the community member who is there, who has, somehow, come home to themselves.

Authentic presence is contagious in the best possible way. And in a world that desperately needs it, the personal act of healing your disconnection is, quietly, also a political act.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Feeling Lonely in Company

Are You Making Things Worse Without Realising It?

1. Treating more social activity as the solution. Being busier socially is not the same as being more connected. If the connection is shallow, adding more of it doesn’t help. Sometimes it actively makes things worse, because it fills the time you might otherwise use to notice what you actually need.

2. Scrolling to feel less alone. It makes sense as an instinct. It almost never works as a strategy. Social media delivers the outline of connection without its content. It tends to reinforce the feeling that everyone else is flourishing while you’re quietly hollowing out.

3. Dismissing your loneliness as ingratitude. “I have so much, I shouldn’t feel this way” is one of the most effective ways to ensure you can’t address what’s actually happening. Loneliness is not a comment on your gratitude. It’s information about your needs.

4. Waiting until you feel better to reach out. Loneliness contracts us inward. It makes reaching out feel impossible precisely when it’s most necessary. The solution is not to wait until you feel ready. It’s to reach out anyway, even imperfectly, even briefly.

5. Confusing familiar with nourishing. Some of our habitual company, the same conversations, the same dynamics, the same social choreography we’ve been performing for years, is comfortable without being nourishing. Loneliness is sometimes a signal that we’ve outgrown certain configurations of our lives and need to find our people again, or for the first time, differently.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

.Ask yourself, gently, without pressure for a clever answer:

“When did I last feel genuinely present? Genuinely met? Genuinely myself?”

Let whatever comes, come. A memory, a place, a person, a specific moment when the hollow feeling wasn’t there.

Notice what was different about that moment. Was it the setting? The kind of conversation? The absence of performance? The presence of beauty, or quiet, or movement?

You don’t need to fix anything right now. You just need to remember that you know the difference. Between presence and its imitation.

Navigating Loneliness: Further Reading

1. Lost Connections by Johann Hari Hari’s work is one of the most readable and rigorously researched explorations of why so many people in connected societies feel profoundly disconnected. He identifies nine causes of depression and anxiety, most of them social and environmental, and the research he uncovers will rearrange how you think about what you actually need. Essential.

2. Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam A foundational text on the collapse of community and social capital in modern life. Dense in places, but the core argument, that we have systematically dismantled the structures that gave us genuine belonging, is as relevant now as when it was written. Illuminating.

3. The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown, specifically because Brown addresses the way shame and the performance of being fine prevent genuine connection. Her research on belonging versus fitting in is particularly useful for people who are surrounded by others and still feel unseen.

4. Solitude by Anthony Storr A beautifully argued case for the value of being alone with oneself, distinct from loneliness, and the creative and psychological richness that genuine solitude offers. Useful if you’re trying to understand the difference between chosen aloneness and the unchosen hollow kind.

5. The Nature Fix by Florence Williams The science of what nature actually does to human brains and bodies is compelling, and Williams writes about it with both rigour and warmth. If you’ve ever noticed that you feel different, more present, more solid, after time outdoors, this book will explain precisely why, and make a persuasive case for prioritising it.

PS: I’d also gently point you toward my own book, Embracing Change, in 10 Minutes a Day (available here), which I wrote specifically for people navigating significant life transitions with limited time and considerable weariness. It’s practical, it’s honest, and it’s designed to be used in the margins of a busy life rather than requiring you to carve out hours you don’t have.

If you’re beginning to sense that nature might be part of what you’re missing, I’ve developed an online course, Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses, that uses equine wisdom and guided journaling to help you rebuild that connection from the inside out. It’s included free for guests who join my reading retreats, and it makes a gentle and surprisingly powerful starting point for anyone beginning this work at home.

5 Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: Is it normal to feel lonely even when you’re with people you love? Completely. Feeling lonely in company is one of the most common and least-discussed experiences of modern life. It doesn’t mean you don’t love the people around you, or that there’s something wrong with your relationships. It often means that you are not fully present, usually because chronic stress has pulled you into a kind of hypervigilant scanning mode that makes genuine contact difficult. It’s a signal about your nervous system’s state, not a verdict on your relationships.

Q2: Why does anxiety about world events make loneliness worse? Because chronic stress narrows our window of tolerance and keeps us braced for threat rather than open to connection. When we’re anxious, we manage our interactions rather than inhabiting them. We’re present in body but not in being. The collective anxiety of living through turbulent world events, particularly when we feel helpless, is uniquely corrosive to the sense of belonging and presence that genuine connection requires.

Q3: Can social media make loneliness worse even when it’s supposed to help? Yes, and the research is fairly consistent on this. Social media provides the form of connection without its substance. It creates a kind of pseudo-belonging that can actually increase awareness of what we’re lacking. Passive scrolling in particular, as opposed to active, intentional interaction, is reliably associated with increased loneliness and decreased wellbeing.

Q4: What’s the difference between loneliness and needing more solitude? This is an important distinction. Loneliness is the painful awareness of a gap between the connection you have and the connection you need. Solitude is the chosen, nourishing experience of being alone with yourself. Many people who feel lonely in company actually need more genuine solitude, time to return to themselves, not more social activity. The two are not opposites. Often, the ability to be genuinely present with others depends on first being genuinely present with yourself.

Q5: What actually helps when you’re feeling lonely in the middle of a full life? The evidence points fairly consistently toward a few things: meaningful, deep conversation (as opposed to social performance), time in nature, physical movement, shared purposeful activity, and community with genuine common ground. Which, not coincidentally, is rather a good description of what a Camino de Santiago walking and reading retreat offers.

Conclusion

What actually helps? Not more people. One person. One authentic exchange — even brief, even imperfect — where the mask slips half an inch and the other person doesn’t flinch. That’s it. That’s the whole antidote. Not a crowd, not a calendar full of occasions, not the relentless accumulation of activities.

Connection is not a volume game. It is a depth game. And the difference between the two is exactly the distance between standing in a packed room feeling invisible, and sitting across from one other person at a kitchen table at midnight, sharing what truly matters to you.

If this article touched a nerve, I’d love to stay in touch. You can sign up for my newsletter for insights on navigating change, stress, and the business of building a life that actually feels like yours. If you wonder if you are ready for a retreat, take my Retreat Readiness Quiz (right here). It takes ten minutes and has a way of naming things you’ve been circling around for longer than you’d like to admit.

References

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Hawkley, L. C. (2009). Perceived social isolation and cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(10), 447–454.
Twenge, J. M., Haidt, J., Joiner, T. E., & Campbell, W. K. (2020). Underestimating digital media harm. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(4), 346–348.
Li, Q., Morimoto, K., Kobayashi, M., Inagaki, H., Katsumata, M., Hirata, Y., & Kawada, T. (2008). Visiting a forest, but not a city, increases human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins. International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, 21(1), 117–127.
Murthy, V. H. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr Margaretha Montagu, MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, and Life Transition Coach, has spent over twenty years as a physician with a specialist interest in stress management, and more than fifteen years hosting transformational retreats where guests walk the Camino de Santiago. She is the author of eight non-fiction books on navigating life’s most demanding passages. Read what her retreat guests say about their experiences here.

17/03/202603/05/2026

What Great Books Reveal About Troubled Times

When the World Feels Like It’s Unravelling, Open a Book: Literature’s Timeless Guide to Turbulent Times

From the trenches of existentialism to the marching fields of the civil rights movement, great writers have always known how to hold a candle in the dark

What this is: A literary tour through some of history’s most gloriously turbulent minds, and a gentle argument that the best therapy for modern anxiety may have been sitting on your bookshelf all along.

What this isn’t: A reading list you’ll feel guilty about not finishing. Nor a lecture on the death of Western civilisation. Nor a suggestion that you simply “read more” as though that’s a novel idea you hadn’t considered.

Read this if: You’re a thoughtful person who finds the current state of world affairs somewhere between deeply unsettling and outright alarming, you’ve already tried the deep breathing and the digital detox, and you suspect that somewhere in the pages of Camus or Baldwin there’s a sentence that will make everything make sense again. Or at least feel less lonely.

5 Key Takeaways

Great literature was almost always written during, or in response to, chaos. The books we call classics weren’t born in comfortable armchairs. They were written through wars, pandemics, exile, and personal collapse.
Reading literary fiction during times of stress isn’t escapism. It’s a form of sophisticated emotional processing. Research in cognitive neuroscience supports what thoughtful readers have always suspected: inhabiting other minds on the page builds emotional resilience.
The writers who survived their eras did so by developing what we might now call intentional narrative. They wrote themselves into meaning. You can do something similar, even without a publishing contract.
Disconnecting from noise and reconnecting with nature and story has measurable, lasting effects on stress and perspective. This isn’t woo. It’s physiology.
You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through uncertain times alone. History’s greatest writers were, in a very real sense, writing to you. Specifically you, reading this, right now, wondering if the world has always been this strange.

Introduction: The Books That Hold a Torch in the Dark

Why does reading feel like the only sane response to an insane world?

You open the news and close it again. You’ve read enough think-pieces to wallpaper your hallway. You’re not uninformed. You’re not naïve. You are simply, and quite reasonably, exhausted.

And yet, something keeps pulling you toward your bookshelves.

There is a peculiar comfort in that instinct, and it turns out it’s not nostalgia or avoidance. It’s wisdom. Because the writers whose work has endured, Virginia Woolf finishing Mrs Dalloway in the shadow of her own fragile mental health. Albert Camus writing The Plague during the Nazi occupation of France. James Baldwin crafting his searing essays whilst America burned around him. Anton Chekhov documenting the quiet despair of a society in slow collapse, were not writing from positions of safety and certainty. They were writing from inside the storm.

And here you are, reading them, from inside your own.

This article is an invitation to look more closely at what these writers were really doing, and why their words feel, with startling frequency, as though they were composed specifically for this moment in history. It is also, quietly, a reminder that the most powerful thing you can do when the world feels unmanageable is to step away from it long enough to find your own signal in the noise.

By the time you finish reading, you will have:

A fresh understanding of how great literature functions as emotional and psychological medicine
A handful of specific writers and works to turn to when current events feel overwhelming
Permission, fully backed by evidence, to prioritise slow reading, nature, and intentional solitude
A sense that you are not as alone in your anxiety as the algorithm has led you to believe

Let’s begin.

The Story: What Elena Vasquez Found on Page 247

Could a dog-eared paperback really change a life?

Elena Vasquez was fifty-three years old when she realised she had stopped reading.

Not stopped entirely. She still consumed things: news scrolls, email threads, reports, meeting agendas, the labels on wine bottles at 10pm when she was too wired to sleep and too tired to do anything useful. She consumed words constantly. But she had not read, not really, not with that particular quality of attention she remembered from her thirties, when she used to disappear into a novel for entire Sunday afternoons, emerging blinking and slightly disoriented, as if she’d briefly inhabited someone else’s nervous system.

She couldn’t quite say when it had happened. Somewhere between the promotion that required her to be available at all hours, the slow unravelling of her twenty-year marriage (polite, then awkward, then achingly sad, then finally, officially over), and the particular ambient dread of watching the world outside her London flat grow louder and stranger and harder to parse, she had simply…stopped having the attention span for narrative.

She knew it was a loss. She felt it the way you feel a missing tooth: not constantly, but whenever you pressed against it.

It was her friend Gillian who suggested the retreat. Not a spa, not a yoga thing, not a digital detox with green juice and enforced silence, though Elena had briefly considered all of those. A reading retreat. Five days in the south-west of France, walking the Camino de Santiago in the mornings and reading in the afternoons. Structured conversation about books in the evenings. The kind of thing Elena would have dismissed as indulgent six months earlier. But six months earlier, she had still believed she was coping.

She packed four books. She almost didn’t pack Camus.

The farmhouse where they stayed smelled of lavender and thyme. The mornings were pale gold, the kind of light that makes everything look like it belongs in a film about someone who has their life together. Elena didn’t have her life together. But she laced up her walking boots on the first morning and followed the path anyway, because there was something about putting one foot in front of another on an ancient road that felt, if not exactly healing, then at least honest.

She was a surgeon. She had spent twenty years keeping other people functional under conditions of extreme stress. She knew, intellectually, all the things a physician knows about cortisol and chronic stress responses and the importance of recovery. She had given that talk. She had not, it turned out, taken it.

On the third afternoon, she opened Camus. The Plague. She had read it at university and remembered thinking it was bleak and important, the way you think things are bleak and important at twenty-two.

She was not twenty-two now.

She read for four hours without stopping. The light shifted from gold to amber to rose. Somewhere outside, she could hear the faint bells of a church and the rustling of the oak trees that lined the path she’d walked that morning. She could smell the coffee someone had made downstairs and feel the slight roughness of the old linen cushion against her bare arm.

And on page 247, she found the sentence that undid her.

“There are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

She read it three times. Then she put the book down, looked out of the window at the French countryside going quietly golden in the afternoon, and cried. Not unhappily. Something more complicated than that: the specific release of someone who has been holding something tightly for a very long time and has finally, carefully, set it down.

The world was still complicated. Her divorce was not undone. The news was not fixed. But somewhere in those four hours, in Camus’s quarantined city, watching his characters move through fear and loss and strange solidarity, Elena had found something she hadn’t known she was looking for.

She had found herself in good company.

Dr Margaretha Montagu, who has been hosting these walking and reading retreats in south-west France for more than fifteen years, sees this moment of recognition often. After two decades as a physician with a particular interest in stress management, and as the author of eight non-fiction books exploring life’s most disorienting transitions, she has observed something consistent: people arrive at the retreat carrying the weight of a world that won’t slow down, and they leave having remembered, often for the first time in years, how to be still inside a story.

“Literature is one of the most sophisticated tools we have for processing experience,” she notes. “When we read, we don’t just encounter information. We inhabit perspective. And inhabiting perspective, especially the perspective of someone navigating chaos with grace and humour and honesty, changes the reader at a neurological level. It genuinely does.”

Elena would agree. She went home with six books she hadn’t arrived with, a slightly different posture, and a renewed sense that the world, however baffling, was also full of people trying their best in interesting ways. She started reading again on Sunday afternoons.

It turned out that was not a small thing at all.

How did literature’s greatest writers transform chaos into clarity?

The common assumption is that great literature emerges from suffering, which is only half true and rather misses the point.

What these writers did was more active than that. They were imposing narrative on chaos. And that, it turns out, is one of the most powerful things a human being can do.

Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse whilst managing the recurring breakdowns that would eventually take her life. Her prose, with its radical interiority, its refusal to privilege external event over internal experience, was not merely a stylistic choice. It was a form of insistence: the inner life matters. The texture of a single day matters. A woman walking across London matters. In a world that had just survived the First World War and was still processing its own incomprehension, this was a radical act.

Albert Camus wrote The Plague not as allegory (though it functions magnificently as one) but as a direct response to the experience of occupation, isolation, and collective dread. The genius of the novel is that it refuses simple morality. Nobody in it is purely heroic. The plague itself is indifferent. And yet, somehow, that indifference becomes the ground from which human solidarity grows. The message that we now read as timely, because it always will be, is not that suffering ennobles us, but that the choice to show up for one another in the face of suffering is always available, regardless of the circumstance.

James Baldwin wrote because silence was not an option. His essays, The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, are not comfortable reading. They are not meant to be. But they model something extraordinary: the ability to hold rage and love simultaneously, to speak truth about injustice without losing faith in humanity. Baldwin understood that the alternative to speaking the difficult truth was a particular kind of internal corrosion. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” he wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” For anyone navigating a world where the difficult truths keep accumulating, this is not just wisdom. It is instruction.

Chekhov is perhaps the most underrated read of the four. His stories are quiet, unheroic, and devastatingly human. Nobody in a Chekhov story makes a dramatic gesture. People miss each other, long for things just out of reach, muddle through, commit small kindnesses, fail in small ways. And somehow this is enormously consoling, because it is true. During the collapse of tsarist Russia, with revolution gathering on the horizon, Chekhov was writing about a man who plants a cherry tree. About a woman who keeps a lap dog. About the enormous significance of ordinary life.

Which is, ultimately, what all four of them are saying to us now:

The world has always been unstable. Stability was always illusory.
The inner life is not a side room. It is the engine room.
Story is how human beings process experience. This is not metaphorical. This is neurological.
The community of readers, those who have sat with these books across decades and centuries, is a genuine community. You are not reading alone.

How can one person’s literary reconnection ripple outward?

What happens when one stressed, depleted person takes five days to read deeply and walk slowly is not only personal. Elena’s story does not end with her. She went back to her hospital. She started recommending novels to patients navigating difficult diagnoses. She began a book group for junior doctors, who, it turned out, were as depleted as she had been. She talked differently about what she was going through with her adult children, with a new specificity and openness that she traced directly to the language she had been inhabiting all week in France.

This is how transformation works when it is genuine. It does not stay private. It radiates.

Communities that read together, that share literary language, have access to a kind of collective meaning-making that is genuinely protective. Book groups, reading retreats, literary conversations are not frivolous social activities. They are acts of civic and relational health. When you return from a week of reading Camus by firelight with a small group of thoughtful strangers who have become, unexpectedly, friends, you bring something back with you. Not just a reading list. A new perspective.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Using Literature as a Lifeline

What are the most common ways well-intentioned readers go wrong?

1. Reading for information rather than immersion. If you’re skimming literary fiction the way you skim a news article, extracting plot points and putting the book down to check your phone, you are not getting the benefit. The neurological and emotional gains from literary reading come from sustained, immersed attention. Slow down. You are not behind.

2. Choosing books that confirm your existing despair. There is a version of reading that is actually a sophisticated form of rumination: choosing the bleakest possible literature to confirm your bleakest possible suspicions about humanity. Camus is not bleak. Chekhov is not bleak. They are honest, which is different. Be discerning about what you’re actually doing when you pick up a book.

3. Reading in isolation without processing. Literature works best when it has somewhere to go. Whether that’s a journal, a conversation, a book group, or a retreat setting, the act of articulating what a book has done to you is part of the benefit. Don’t let insights dissolve unexamined.

4. Treating literary reading as a weekend activity. Fifteen to twenty minutes of literary reading per day has measurable effects on stress, empathy, and cognitive flexibility. You don’t need a whole Sunday afternoon (though those are wonderful). You need consistency. A chapter before bed. Ten pages over your morning coffee.

5. Waiting until you’re calm enough to read. Many people say they “can’t concentrate enough to read right now.” This is precisely the wrong time to give up on books. The act of reading, the sustained attention it demands, is itself a form of cognitive and nervous system regulation. Start with something accessible. Start short. Just start.

Intention-Setting Exercise

Find a quiet place, even five minutes will do. Sit comfortably, put your phone face down.

Take three slow breaths. Then ask yourself, honestly, one question: What do I most need to feel right now?

Not what you need to fix or understand or decide. What you need to feel.

If the answer is connection: reach for Baldwin or Chekhov. If the answer is courage: reach for Camus. If the answer is permission to be complex and interior and unresolved: reach for Woolf. If the answer is something you haven’t named yet: walk to your bookshelf, run your fingers along the spines, and pick the one that makes your hand stop.

A Note on Reconnecting with Nature

One of the things I know with certainty, after twenty years as a physician and fifteen years as a retreat host, is that reading alone is powerful. Reading outside, or after walking, is something else entirely.

There is a physiological reason why the retreat format combines the Camino with books. Walking in nature reduces cortisol. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It quite literally changes the brain’s capacity for attention and openness. Which means you bring a different reader to the book.

My online course, Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses, offers a gentler first step: a structured invitation to bring contemplative attention to the natural world around you, guided by the particular wisdom of horses, which, as any horse person will tell you, are extraordinarily good at detecting when you’re not being honest with yourself.

This course is included free for all retreat guests.

5 Razor-Sharp FAQs

What are people really asking about literature and difficult times?

Q: Is it really possible to feel better by reading fiction when real things are going wrong? A: Yes, and this is not wishful thinking. A landmark study from the New School for Social Research (Kidd & Castano, 2013) found that reading literary fiction measurably improves Theory of Mind, our capacity to understand the mental states of others. Separately, research in bibliotherapy has demonstrated that reading specific literary works reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression. The caveat is that this is literary fiction, not just any reading. The complexity of character and perspective is the active ingredient.

Q: I haven’t read a whole book in years. Where do I even start? A: Short stories. Chekhov’s short stories are often under ten pages. Baldwin’s essays can be read in twenty minutes. Start small. The attention muscle, and it is a muscle, rebuilds quickly with use. Don’t begin with Woolf if it’s been a while. Begin with something that pulls you forward by the collar.

Q: Isn’t reading a very solitary response to a problem that might need community? A: The two aren’t in opposition. Some of the richest community I’ve ever witnessed has formed around books: around the shared experience of having been changed by the same words. Reading retreats, in particular, combine solitary reading with deeply connective conversation. You walk the same path, read the same pages, and find that strangers become companions remarkably quickly.

Q: Do I need to walk the Camino to get the benefit of a reading retreat? A: The walking and the reading work synergistically, but neither requires you to be an athlete. The sections of the Camino walked during my retreats are chosen for their beauty and accessibility. The point is movement in nature, not endurance sport. People with very modest fitness levels attend and describe the walking as one of the most powerful parts of the experience.

Q: Is this kind of retreat appropriate for people in real crisis, not just general stress? A: My retreats are not a substitute for clinical care, and I would always say so clearly, with twenty years of medical training behind the statement. However, they have been attended by people navigating divorce, bereavement, serious illness, burnout, career collapse, and major life transitions. More than thirty guest testimonials on my website speak to this directly. Many guests describe the retreat as the moment they turned a corner, not because it fixed anything, but because it gave them the clarity, community, and restoration to begin doing that themselves.

Conclusion

What does literature actually tell us about coming out the other side?

There is a line near the end of The Plague that Camus almost didn’t include. His narrator, Rieux, having witnessed everything, having lost people he loved, having worked until he could barely stand, looks out over the city and thinks this:

He knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

To be a healer rather than a saint. To do what has to be done. To refuse to bow, while acknowledging that the fight will continue.

This is not a motivational poster. It is a compass.

You are not required to be unafraid. You are not required to have all the answers. You are required, if you choose to accept the invitation, only to show up, to keep reading, to keep walking, and to bring what you find back to the people around you.

That is, when you think about it, quite enough.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin

Attend a Reading Retreat

If some part of this article has made you want to get back to reading, I’d like to tell you about my 5-Day Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in the south-west of France.

Morning walks on one of the world’s most ancient pilgrim routes. Long afternoons with brilliant books in a beautiful old farmhouse. Evening conversations that tend to go on rather later than planned, because it turns out that people who love reading have a great deal to say to each other.

It is for people who are clever and kind and a little bit wrung out by the world. People who remember what it felt like to lose themselves in a story and would very much like to do that again, somewhere with good wine and better light.

You don’t need to have a plan. You just need to pack a few books and show up. The path, as it has a habit of doing, will take care of the rest.

Find out more and reserve your place here.

If you’re not yet ready for a retreat, or you’d simply like a quiet place to begin, two invitations:

📩 Join the newsletter for regular book reviews, reflections on navigating life’s more interesting moments, and news of upcoming retreats, all delivered at a civilised pace, without algorithmic urgency.

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.

References

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712.
Billington, J., Carroll, J., Davis, P., Healey, C., & Kinderman, P. (2013). A literature-based intervention for older people living with dementia. Perspectives in Public Health, 133(3), 165–173.
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.
Stuckey, H. L., & Nobel, J. (2010). The connection between art, healing, and public health: A review of current literature. American Journal of Public Health, 100(2), 254–263.

Dr Margaretha Montagu, MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, and Life Transition Coach, has spent twenty years as a physician and fifteen years as a host of transformational retreats walking the Camino de Santiago. She is the author of eight books on navigating life’s most disorienting turning points. She believes, with some conviction, that the right book at the right moment is one of the most reliable treatments available.

16/03/202603/05/2026

Overthinking Can Make You Blind to Opportunities

The mental habit that keeps smart, capable people stuck, and the surprisingly simple shift that changes everything.

What this is: A candid, research-informed look at how overthinking, especially during times of stress and uncertainty, actively blinds you to the opportunities that could change your life. Practical, warm, occasionally irreverent.

What this isn’t: A collection of platitudes dressed up as insight, or another well-meaning reminder that gratitude journals exist. It won’t tell you that your anxiety is simply a mindset problem, or that the solution is a green smoothie and an earlier bedtime. You are too smart for that, and frankly, you have already tried most of it.

Read this if: You are a thoughtful person navigating a stressful, uncertain world; someone who suspects your mind is working overtime and under-delivering; or someone who has ever thought, “There must be more than this,” but keeps getting interrupted by your own brain.

5 Key Takeaways

Overthinking is not planning. It is the brain stuck in a loop, consuming energy that should be directed toward noticing, deciding, and acting.
Opportunity rarely announces itself loudly. It tends to appear quietly, at the edge of your attention, precisely where chronic overthinking refuses to look.
The state of the world is genuinely stressful. Acknowledging that is not a weakness. But letting it colonise every corner of your mind is a cost you can choose not to pay.
Nature, stillness, and story are scientifically supported tools for resetting the over-activated mind and restoring the clarity that opportunity-spotting requires.
The answers you are looking for are rarely found in another hour of analysis. They tend to show up on a quiet walk, in the margins of a good book, or in a conversation you weren’t expecting to need.

Introduction: Is Your Mind Too Full to Let Anything New In?

When did you last notice something delightful that you were not already looking for?

A stranger’s kind gesture. A path you had never explored. A conversation that opened a door you did not even know existed. A feeling, however fleeting, that something good was starting to happen.

If you are struggling to remember, you are not alone. And you are not broken. You are, in all likelihood, simply exhausted. Overwhelmed by a world that has become, in recent months, genuinely difficult to process. The relentless news cycle, the ambient anxiety, the sense that the ground keeps shifting, quietly and without warning.

When the brain is chronically stressed, it narrows. This is not a character flaw. It is biology. But the cost, over time, is significant. You stop seeing what is new. You stop trusting what is good. You become, without quite noticing, blind to the very opportunities that could help you move forward.

This article is about that blindness. What causes it, what it costs you, and, more importantly, what you can actually do about it. You will find here a story that might feel familiar, some hard-won wisdom, five common mistakes to avoid, and a handful of tools and resources, including a retreat in the southwest of France that has already enriched the lives of more than two decades’ worth of guests.

What Has Overthinking Already Cost You, Without You Noticing?

The Story of Miriam Voss

Miriam Voss was the kind of person you would describe, admiringly, as someone who had her life together.

Senior project manager at a respected architecture firm. Owner of a sensibly mortgaged flat in Edinburgh. Regular gym-goer, conscientious voter, reliable friend. The person at the dinner party who always knew the context behind the headline.

She was also, at the age of forty-four, quietly unravelling.

It had started, as these things often do, not with a single dramatic event, but with an accumulation. A restructure at work that left her role technically intact but spiritually gutted. A long-term relationship that had ended, not badly, but with the particular sadness of two people who had simply started moving in different directions. A mother whose health was declining. And then the world, doing what the world had been doing with increasing insistence: delivering a daily drumroll of uncertainty that felt impossible to tune out.

Miriam did what high-functioning, intelligent people do when the pressure mounts. She thought longer and harder.

She made spreadsheets. Not one, several. Spreadsheets about her career options, her financial projections, her relationship patterns, her health habits. She listened to podcasts during her commute, during her runs, during her lunch breaks. She read articles, bookmarked newsletters, kept a notes app that had swollen to four hundred and sixty-three entries and was, she admitted to herself at 2 am on a Wednesday, beginning to resemble a conspiracy board.

She was, in her own words, “trying to think my way to certainty in an uncertain world.” And it was not working.

What she had not noticed, because she was too busy analysing everything else, was that opportunities had been presenting themselves with some regularity. A colleague had mentioned, twice, an opening in a small sustainable design studio that would have suited Miriam’s quieter, more creative ambitions perfectly. She had filed it under “things to look into” and never looked. A friend had forwarded details of a five-day reading and walking retreat in France, the kind that combined the company of books and fellow travellers with long mornings on ancient paths through the French countryside. Miriam had opened the email, thought “that sounds lovely,” and immediately opened a spreadsheet about her Q3 budget instead.

Her mind was full of good ideas. It was too noisy to hear them.

The turning point came, as turning points often do, when the noise simply became too loud to ignore. It was a Tuesday in November. Miriam was on her third coffee, in a meeting she had not needed to attend, watching herself contribute nothing while her mind ran its usual marathon. And she thought, clearly, for the first time in months: I am tired of my own brain.

She went home, did not open the laptop, did not turn on the news. She made soup, the old-fashioned way, chopping things slowly, smelling the onions and rosemary, letting the kitchen fill with warmth. She noticed, for the first time in a very long time, what her kitchen actually smelled like. She sat at the table and ate, without her phone.

And into that small silence, uninvited, came a thought: What if I actually went?

She went. The retreat, five days of reading, walking ancient paths, sleeping well, turned out to be the beginning of something she could not have predicted. Not a solution, exactly. But a reorientation. A recalibration of what she was actually paying attention to.

Within six weeks of returning, she had applied for the studio position. Within four months, she had the job. Not because the retreat had handed her a plan, but because it had given her back the mental space to notice one.

How Does Overthinking Actually Blind Us to Opportunity?

The neuroscience, here, is both sobering and clarifying.

When the brain perceives threat, whether from a predator or a punishing news cycle, it activates the amygdala and narrows attentional focus. This is adaptive, in the short term. In a genuinely dangerous situation, the last thing you need is to be distracted by a beautiful sunset. You need tunnel vision.

The problem is that chronic stress, the low-grade, persistent kind that many of us have been living with for several years now, keeps that narrowing mechanism activated long after the immediate danger has passed. The brain, unable to distinguish between a tiger and a difficult quarterly review, maintains a state of heightened vigilance that is exhausting, self-perpetuating, and, crucially, opportunity-blind.

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory (see below) offers the counterpoint. Positive emotional states, she has shown, literally broaden the scope of attention and cognition. You see more. You connect more dots. You notice the colleague’s offhand comment, the email that sat unopened, the path you had not considered. Positive states, in short, are the conditions under which opportunity becomes visible.

Overthinking, by its very nature, is not a positive state. It is a state of low-grade alarm, dressed up as productivity.

This matters not only for the individual, but for the communities and families around them. The person who breaks free from chronic overthinking does not simply feel better. They show up differently. They are more present in their relationships, more creative in their work, more open to collaboration, more willing to take the kind of considered risks that generate genuine change. A mind released from the tyranny of the loop is a resource for everyone it touches.

There is a particular poignancy, worth naming, in the fact that so many of the people most likely to overthink are also the most thoughtful, most conscientious, most capable. The very qualities that make them assets to their families and communities are the ones that, under sustained pressure, tip into paralysis. The world, right now, does not need its most thoughtful people to be paralysed.

What Are the Five Most Common Overthinking Mistakes?

Mistake 1: Confusing analysis with action

uThere is a seductive logic to the idea that if you just think about something long enough, you will arrive at the perfect decision/solution. You will not. At some point, continued analysis is simply a way of avoiding the discomfort of uncertainty. Decide with the information you have. Adjust as you go.

Mistake 2: Asuming worry helps you prepare

Many chronic overthinkers believe, at some level, that worrying is what caring people do. If they stop worrying, something bad will happen and they will not have been prepared. This is magical thinking in a sensible coat. Worry does not protect you or the people you love. Presence does.

Mistake 3: Seeking certainty in an uncertain world

The world is, right now, genuinely uncertain. No amount of news-consumption, scenario-planning, or spreadsheet-building will make it otherwise. The capacity to tolerate ambiguity is not a weakness. It is one of the most sophisticated cognitive skills available to us.

Mistake 4: Waiting until you feel ready

Readiness is a feeling, and overthinking is very good at preventing that feeling from arriving. People who make significant positive changes in their lives rarely report feeling ready before they made them. They report feeling ready afterwards, once they had moved.

Mistake 5: Underestimating the value of environmental change

The brain, somewhat inconveniently, tends to reproduce the same thoughts in the same environments. If you want to think differently, consider going somewhere different. Ancient pilgrimage routes exist, in part, because our ancestors understood this. Walk a different path, and a different mind tends to show up for it.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

Find a quiet place. You do not need long. Five minutes will do.

Sit comfortably, close your eyes if that is comfortable, and take three slow breaths. On the exhale, let your shoulders drop.

Now, ask yourself, without rushing to answer: “What have I been too busy to notice?”

Do not analyse the question. Simply hold it. Let whatever surfaces, surface. It might be a person, a feeling, an idea, a door you have been walking past. Write it down, without judgement.

What Can You Read to Understand This Better? A Reading List

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman’s foundational work on the two systems of thought, one fast and instinctive, one slow and deliberate, is essential reading for anyone who suspects their mind may be working against them. It explains, with precision and wit, why we overthink, why our conclusions are often wrong, and what better thinking actually looks like. A masterclass in cognitive humility.

2. The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thích Nhất Hạnh

Gentle, profound, and quietly revolutionary. Thích Nhất Hạnh offers the simplest possible antidote to overthinking: full attention to what is in front of you. Washing the dishes. Drinking tea. Breathing. This is not about spirituality, unless you want it to be. It is about the science of presence, and its extraordinary rewards.

3. Quiet by Susan Cain

For the introverted overthinker, and there are many, Quiet is both a mirror and a lifeline. Cain’s exploration of introversion challenges the assumption that the loudest, most decisive voice in the room is the wisest one. It validates the deep thinker while gently pointing toward the costs of thinking alone, in circles, without outlet.

4. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Van der Kolk’s groundbreaking work on trauma and the nervous system explains, in compelling detail, why we cannot simply think our way out of stress. The body holds what the mind circles. Walking, nature, movement, and creative engagement are not optional extras for the chronically stressed. They are medicine.

5. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

For the overwhelmed high-achiever who has confused busyness with purpose, Essentialism is a necessary disruption. McKeown argues, persuasively, that the ability to focus on what matters, and to let go of what does not, is not a luxury but a survival skill. Particularly useful for those who overthink because they are trying to do everything, rather than the right thing.

P.S. My own book, Embracing Change, in 10 minutes a day, was written specifically for people navigating major life transitions under pressure. Drawing on two decades of clinical practice and more than fifteen years of hosting transformational retreats, it offers practical, compassionate, ten-minute daily practices for moving through change without being consumed by it. Short enough to actually use. Substantial enough to actually help.

If you are someone who finds that your thinking clarifies outdoors, you are not imagining it. Research consistently shows that time in natural environments reduces cortisol, lowers rumination, and restores directed attention, the very capacity that overthinking depletes.

My online course, Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses, explores this connection through the lens of equine-inspired reflection and guided nature journaling. Horses, as any horse person will tell you, do not overthink. They are exquisitely present. Spending time with them, even metaphorically through guided reflection, has a way of recalibrating our own relationship with the present moment.

This course is included free with all my reading retreats. Guests consistently tell me it was one of the most unexpected and valuable parts of their experience.

5 FAQs People Are Asking About Overthinking

Q1: Is overthinking a mental health condition?

Overthinking itself is not a diagnosable condition, but it is a well-documented symptom of anxiety, depression, and chronic stress. If your overthinking is significantly disrupting your daily life, sleep, or relationships, it is worth speaking to a healthcare professional. As a physician with a longstanding interest in stress management, I would say this: if you are asking the question, the answer is probably “yes, seek support.”

Q2: Why do intelligent people overthink more?

Research suggests that higher intelligence is associated with a greater capacity for abstract thinking, which is the same cognitive function involved in worry and rumination. Essentially, a powerful mind with insufficient direction turns on itself. This is not a character flaw. It is a management challenge.

Q3: Can overthinking damage your health?

Yes. Chronic rumination is associated with elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, impaired immune function, and increased risk of anxiety and depression. It is not a harmless quirk. After twenty years in clinical practice, I can tell you that the body keeps a very accurate account.

Q4: What is the fastest way to stop an overthinking spiral?

Change your physical state. Stand up. Go outside. Splash cold water on your face. Walk around the block. The brain cannot sustain the same thought pattern when the body is doing something different. This is not a permanent solution, but it is a reliable circuit breaker, and sometimes that is exactly what you need.

Q5: How long does it take to change an overthinking habit?

It depends on the depth of the habit and the tools you use. In my experience, both clinically and as a retreat host, meaningful change often begins during a period of significant environmental shift, away from the ordinary. The brain, given new inputs and reduced pressure, is remarkably responsive. The question is not how long. It is whether you are ready to give it the conditions it needs.

Conclusion: What Does Your Life Look Like When You Stop Overthinking?

“You can’t see the view from inside the maze.”

This is the quiet truth at the heart of overthinking. The mind, when it is circling, cannot also be witnessing. And witnessing, it turns out, is how we find our way.

You are, in all likelihood, a person of genuine capability and depth. You have already navigated more than most. And precisely because you care, because you take the world seriously, because you feel the weight of uncertainty rather than simply brushing past it, you are also vulnerable to the particular trap of over-analysis.

The world will not become less uncertain if you think about it too long. But your relationship to it can become less fraught if you give yourself, regularly, the conditions under which a calmer, clearer, more opportunity-awake version of you can emerge. It is arguably the most important thing you can do, for yourself, and for the people around you.

Is It Time to Step Outside Your Head, and Into Something Extraordinary?

Five days. Ancient paths. Good books. Unhurried conversation. And the particular magic of the southwest of France in its golden seasons.

My Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat was designed for exactly the kind of person described in this article. The thoughtful one. The capable one. The one who has been thinking very hard and getting, somehow, nowhere. You walk trails that people have walked for a thousand years. You read, deeply and without apology. And you return home not with answers, precisely, but with the clarity to start finding them. With more than thirty guest testimonials speaking to the power of this experience, and fifteen years of refinement behind it, this retreat has become, for many guests, the turning point they had been circling for years.

If that sounds like something you need, it probably is.

If this article has resonated, I would invite you to do two things.

First, sign up for my newsletter, where I share regular reflections, research, and practical wisdom on life transitions, stress, and the quiet art of moving forward.

Second, take my Turning Point Quiz. It is a short, thoughtfully designed quiz that helps you identify where you are in your transition, and what you actually need right now. Not what the internet thinks you need. Not what your most anxious inner voice insists. What, given your particular situation and strengths, is most likely to help.

It takes about five minutes. It tends to be quietly illuminating.

The opportunities you have been missing have not gone anywhere. They are still there, at the edge of your attention, waiting patiently.

References

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424.
Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526.
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.
Andreatta, M., & Pauli, P. (2022). Anxious overthinking and distorted beliefs: Neural and behavioural correlates of chronic worry. Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews, 134, 104509.

15/03/202615/03/2026

Why a Reconnect with Nature Retreat in the southwest of France Might Be the Smartest Thing You Do This Year

An Esprit Meraki Stress-Reducing Retreat Could Be Your Most Powerful Reset in These Uncertain Times

What this is: A grounded, honest look at why attending a stress-reducing retreat during a period of sustained political uncertainty is genuinely useful, not indulgent. We’re talking neuroscience, narrative, and the particular magic of walking the Camino de Santiago in south-west France with Friesian horses for company.

What this isn’t: A suggestion to simply “unplug for a while” and hope the world sorts itself out. Advice that assumes your anxiety is a personal failing rather than a reasonable response to an unreasonable amount of global noise. Anything that uses the phrase “just focus on what you can control” without acknowledging how exhausting that instruction has become.

Read this if: The relentless churn of political uncertainty has been quietly eroding your concentration, your sleep, and your sense of what’s actually solid. You’re thoughtful, informed, and have already tried most of the standard remedies. You’re not looking for distraction. You’re looking for genuine restoration.

5 Key Takeaways

A retreat is a strategic pause, not an abdication of responsibility. Stepping out of the noise is often the only way to gain the perspective you cannot find inside it.
Political stress is physiologically real, and sustained exposure to uncertainty activates the same stress pathways as any other chronic threat. The body does not distinguish between personal and global.
Walking is not just exercise, it is a time-honoured tool for processing anxiety, quieting mental noise, and arriving at clarity that sitting still, or sitting in front of a screen, rarely offers.
Community matters more than we admit. Shared honest conversation with people who understand the particular weight of this moment can shift something that isolation cannot.
Retreating is not giving up. You return more grounded, more clear-headed, and more genuinely useful to everyone around you than you were when you left.

Introduction: Why Right Now Is Exactly the Right Moment to Stop

Here is something worth admitting out loud: the idea of booking a retreat when the world feels like it’s mid-unravelling can seem spectacularly self-indulgent.

The world is in turmoil. You have opinions, responsibilities, a newsfeed that refreshes every four minutes with something new to absorb and react to. And somewhere underneath all of that, a quiet, exhausted voice that whispers, what if I just… stopped. For a minute.

That voice is not a weakness. That voice is wisdom.

The world right now is changing. Political instability, collective anxiety, the erosion of certainties that once felt permanent, the relentless noise of a global information environment designed to keep you activated and alarmed, all of it accumulates. Not dramatically. Quietly. In the quality of your sleep, the length of your attention span, the way you snap at the people you love for no reason you can clearly identify, the vague but persistent sense that you are perpetually braced for something.

This is what chronic low-grade existential stress actually does to a person. And it is doing it to a great many people simultaneously, which makes it both more understandable and, paradoxically, harder to address. When everyone around you is equally stressed, the stress starts to feel like the weather. Just the way things are.

It is not just the way things are. It is a physiological state with measurable effects and evidence-based remedies.

What you’ll find in this article: a clear-eyed, evidence-informed case for why an intentional, nature-based stress management retreat might be one of the most strategically sound decisions you make this year. Not an escape from the world. A return to yourself, so that you can engage again from a position of genuine strength rather than accumulated exhaustion.

The Story: How Claire Desmarais Found Solid Ground Again

Claire’s Story: When the Noise Gets Too Loud to Hear Yourself Think

Claire Desmarais had always been the kind of woman who stayed informed.

Not obsessively. Responsibly. She read serious journalism. She listened to thoughtful podcasts on her commute. She voted, gave to causes she believed in, had considered opinions about things that mattered. For twenty-two years, being a well-informed, engaged citizen had been part of how she understood herself.

And then, somewhere in the past two years, it had curdled into something else entirely.

She couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment. It wasn’t a single headline. It was the accumulation, the slow drip of instability, the sense that the floor of things she’d assumed were solid, institutions, norms, the basic predictability of how the world worked, was less solid than she’d thought. She still read the news every morning. She just no longer felt better informed afterward. She felt insecure, and then read more, and felt more insecure, in a loop that had its own grim momentum.

She was sleeping badly. Her concentration at work, previously one of her great professional assets, had developed holes in it. She’d find herself mid-sentence in a meeting, having lost the thread. She’d start a book and abandon it after two pages. Her youngest had asked her, with the blunt precision only a fifteen-year-old can deploy, whether she was “always going to be this tense from now on.”

She’d laughed. It hadn’t entirely felt like a laugh.

She tried the obvious things. She set limits on her news consumption. She went to the gym with more regularity. She had dinner with friends where they agreed not to talk about current events, which lasted approximately twenty-five minutes before someone said “I know we said we wouldn’t, but did you see…” She tried meditation, which she found useful in the way that a plaster is useful on a wound that really requires stitches.

Her colleague sent her a link. “This is either exactly what you need or completely mad,” she said. “Possibly both.”

The link was to a five-day Camino de Santiago retreat in south-west France. Hosted by a retired physician, Dr Margaretha Montagu, who had spent more than fifteen years guiding people through exactly this kind of sustained inner turbulence. Walking the Camino de Santiago. Storytelling circles. Friesian horses. Small group. Ancient path. A deliberate, held pause in a landscape that predated every current crisis by approximately a thousand years.

Claire booked it before she’d finished reading the page, then immediately worried this was too impulsive. Then decided impulsive was probably fine, given the circumstances.

She arrived in France on a Sunday evening in October, when the light was doing that particular golden thing it does in the south-west, slanting through chestnut trees at an angle that seemed personally designed to make you feel something other than dread. She smelled woodsmoke, dry earth, and something faintly floral she couldn’t name. Her shoulders, which had been residing somewhere near her ears for the better part of eighteen months, dropped approximately two centimetres.

There were three other participants. A secondary school teacher who described himself as “constitutionally incapable of switching off” and had the eye bags to prove it. A retired civil servant who had spent four decades working in institutions she now watched being dismantled, and didn’t quite know what to do with the grief of it. A freelance writer who’d found that the anxiety she’d once channelled productively into her work had started, recently, to simply be anxiety.

They were all, in their own way, running on fumes and not admitting it.

On the first morning, they walked ten kilometres through farmland and forest, mostly in silence. Claire noticed she kept waiting for the urge to check her phone and was surprised to discover it didn’t come. The path demanded something from her feet, and her feet demanded something from her attention, and her attention had no room left over for the static.

The light through the trees was specific and unhurried. Her boots on the path made a sound she found unexpectedly comforting. A bird she couldn’t identify called from somewhere to her left. She had no idea what it was, and for the first time in a long time, that felt completely fine.

In the storytelling circle that evening, Dr Montagu asked a question Claire later described as the most useful thing anyone had said to her in a year: not how are you coping with everything, but what does the noise drown out, and is that the thing you actually need to hear?

Claire thought about that question for six kilometres the next day.

The horses, two enormous Friesians with the calm authority of creatures entirely unbothered by the geopolitical situation, were very present on the third day. Claire found herself standing next to the larger one, who was warm against her shoulder, breathing slowly and deliberately, like a gentle instruction. She matched her breath to the horse’s. Something in her chest, tight for longer than she could accurately remember, loosened by about a quarter turn.

By day four, she had slept, properly, for three consecutive nights. She had cried once, from simple relief at the quiet. She had laughed, genuinely, at something the retired civil servant said about her attempts to explain algorithmic news feeds to her eighty-year-old mother. She had arrived at a clarity about what she actually valued, and what she was actually afraid of, that two months of anxious scrolling had entirely prevented her from accessing.

She didn’t come home fixed. She came home different. Quieter in the places that had been loudest. More able to engage with the world thoughtfully rather than reactively. And in possession of something she hadn’t expected: a sense of her own ground, something stable to stand on, that the noise hadn’t managed to erode.

Why Does Political Uncertainty Hit So Hard, and What Can Actually Help?

What does sustained political stress actually do to us?

Let’s be specific about this, because “stress is bad for you” has been said so often that it has almost stopped meaning anything.

When the brain perceives threat, whether immediate and physical or ambient and political, it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and releases cortisol. This is useful in short bursts. It is not useful when it becomes the permanent background state of daily life.

Sustained cortisol elevation disrupts sleep architecture, impairs the hippocampus (affecting memory and the ability to contextualise new information), reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for nuanced judgment, long-term thinking, and the ability to tolerate ambiguity), and increases the amygdala’s reactivity, making you quicker to alarm and slower to reason your way back from it.

In other words: chronic political stress systematically impairs exactly the cognitive and emotional capacities you most need in order to think clearly about a complex world. It is, neurologically speaking, spectacularly counterproductive.

This is not a character flaw. It is a physiological response to an environment that is genuinely more uncertain, more noisy, and more relentlessly demanding of your attention than the one human nervous systems were designed for.

Nature exposure and rhythmic movement, on the other hand, reduce cortisol measurably. Green space lowers rumination and activates parasympathetic nervous system function. Long-distance walking in natural environments has been shown to facilitate what researchers call “involuntary attention,” a form of soft, effortless focus that allows the deliberate, effortful attention system to rest and recover. It is, in effect, a reboot of the exhausted mind.

Dr Margaretha Montagu, MBChB, MRCGP, NLP Master Practitioner, Medical Hypnotherapist, and Life Transition Coach, has spent over twenty years observing and facilitating this process. As a physician with a specialist interest in stress management, and as the host of transformational Camino nature retreats for fifteen years, she has accompanied dozens of guests through the particular modern exhaustion of feeling perpetually braced against a world that won’t stay still.

“The Camino has been walked by people carrying enormous mental weight for over a thousand years,” she observes. “It knows what to do for a troubled mind. You just have to keep walking.”

Why does walking in nature specifically help?

The evidence is robust and growing. Research published in Scientific Reports found that spending at least two hours per week in natural settings was significantly associated with better health and wellbeing outcomes. Studies on nature-based stress reduction consistently find that natural environments lower cortisol, reduce rumination, and activate the parasympathetic nervous system in ways that urban or indoor environments do not.

The Camino de Santiago, walked through its original landscape of forest paths, river valleys, and ancient stone villages in south-west France, offers something beyond generic “green time.” It offers a route with meaning and purpose, paths worn by centuries of people who were also, in their own historical moments, navigating uncertainty. There is something in that lineage that many people find quietly steadying, the knowledge that difficulty is not new, that people have always found their way through it, and that the path goes somewhere.

Why we need the support of our community

One of the quieter revelations of a well-facilitated group retreat is discovering that you are not, in fact, the only person who has been quietly hollowed out by the accumulated weight of the current moment.

Political stress, unusually among stressors, carries a particular social isolation. People disagree. Conversations feel loaded. There is a reluctance to admit just how much it is affecting you, in case that sounds dramatic, or alarmist, or insufficiently resilient.

The storytelling circles at the heart of Dr Montagu’s retreats create something specific and valuable: a space in which honesty is the norm rather than the exception. The neurological term for what happens in such a group is “co-regulation,” the way that calm, honest, attuned human presence helps regulate an overactivated nervous system. The human term is simpler. I felt less alone.

Why Your Reset Matters to Everyone Around You

It is tempting to frame a retreat as a self-indulgent act, particularly when the world seems to require constant engagement.

Here is a more accurate frame: you are the nervous system that other people are regulated by.

Your children, your colleagues, your friends, they read your quality of presence before they process your words. When you are operating from a state of chronic low-grade alarm, that state is contagious. Not metaphorically. Neurologically. The people around you pick it up and carry it.

When someone returns from a genuine process of restoration, the effects do not stay contained within them. They bring a different presence to their relationships. They make decisions from a less reactive, more considered place. They model, for everyone watching, what it looks like to remain grounded when the world is not, which is, it turns out, one of the most useful things a person can do right now.

The ripple effects are real. A person who returns from a retreat quieter, steadier, and more genuinely present is not less engaged with the world. They are more usefully engaged with it. There is a difference between anxious attention and clear attention. Only one of them actually helps.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Considering a Stress-Reducing Retreat

Mistake 1: Confusing information with insight

Consuming more news does not produce more clarity. It produces more activation. The assumption that staying constantly informed is a form of civic responsibility has become, for many thoughtful people, a very effective way of staying stressed while feeling very productive.

Mistake 2: Choosing a retreat based on luxury rather than substance

Lovely as a spa weekend is, it is not the same as a structured, professionally facilitated experience designed to help you actually process sustained stress. Look for retreats that combine evidence-based approaches, skilled facilitation, embodied practice, and genuine community. The quality of the facilitation matters enormously. With over twenty years of medical and psychological expertise, and nearly fifteen years hosting transformational retreats, Dr Montagu brings a depth of understanding to this work that goes well beyond wellness industry aesthetics.

Mistake 3: Waiting until the world calms down

The world is not going to calm down on a schedule that is convenient for your wellbeing. Waiting for a stable moment to invest in your own restoration is a form of optimism that the current environment does not reward. The time to address chronic stress is not after it has extracted its full cost.

Mistake 4: Going it alone when you could go supported

There is a meaningful difference between taking a holiday alone to decompress and attending a structured, facilitated retreat with a trained professional and a small group of equally thoughtful people. The former can be restorative. The latter can be genuinely transformative. The presence of skilled facilitation means that what arises in the space between people is held, worked with, and integrated, rather than simply experienced and left unprocessed.

Mistake 5: Underestimating the physical element

The body is where political stress actually lives, in the tension in your shoulders, the shallowness of your breathing, the way your jaw is probably clenched right now. Movement in nature is not incidental to the retreat experience. It is central to it. Walking, particularly long and rhythmic, through a landscape that asks nothing of you except your attention, is one of the most reliable ways available to shift what the thinking mind alone cannot reach.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise Before You Decide

Find five quiet minutes. Preferably outside, or at least with a window. Without your phone.

Sit, and bring to mind what your attention has been most absorbed by in the past two months. Notice how that absorption feels in your body. Notice where it lives. Notice whether it is energising you or depleting you.

Now ask yourself, honestly: when did I last feel genuinely quiet? Not distracted, not numbed, but actually still?

And then: what would become possible if I gave myself several intentional days to stop absorbing the noise of the world and instead hear what I actually think, feel, and need?

Write down whatever comes. Don’t edit it. Just notice.

That noticing is your starting point.

5 FAQs About Stress Management Retreats: Real Questions, Honest Answers

FAQ 1: Isn’t retreating from the news irresponsible when things actually matter?

This is the most important question, and it deserves a direct answer. Retreating for several intentional days does not make you less informed or less engaged. It makes you less reactive and more capable of genuine discernment. There is a meaningful difference between anxious, cortisol-driven news consumption and calm, considered engagement with the world. A retreat helps you access the latter. It does not ask you to stop caring. It asks you to care from a more sustainable place.

FAQ 2: I’m not fit enough to walk the Camino.

The retreats are designed for regular people, not athletes. Daily walks are manageable, meaningful, and paced for the group. The goal is presence and process, not performance. If you can walk for a few hours at a moderate pace with occasional rest, you can participate fully.

FAQ 3: What makes this different from just taking a holiday?

A holiday is about stepping away from your life. This is about stepping into yourself more clearly. The combination of skilled facilitation, structured reflection, honest storytelling, equine interaction, and intentional movement creates conditions for genuine restoration that a lovely week somewhere warm, however well earned, typically doesn’t produce. You return from a holiday rested. You return from a well-facilitated retreat changed.

FAQ 4: I’m worried this isn’t a good use of money when things are uncertain.

Chronic stress has measurable costs: in productivity, in health, in the quality of your relationships, in decision-making. The question is not whether you can afford to address it. The question is whether you can afford not to. A retreat is an investment in the asset that everything else in your life depends on. That is not an indulgence. That is maintenance.

FAQ 5: What’s the actual evidence that retreats help?

It is robust and growing. Research on nature-based interventions, mindfulness retreats, and somatic movement practices all point consistently in the same direction: structured, nature-based, community-supported experiences reduce cortisol, lower rumination, improve mood and cognitive flexibility, and support longer-term resilience. The combination of walking, professional facilitation, and honest group storytelling offered on Dr Montagu’s retreats draws on all three evidence streams simultaneously, and the over thirty guest testimonials on her website offer the kind of first-hand evidence that research papers, for all their value, cannot quite replicate.

Conclusion: You Cannot Think Your Way Out of Nervous Exhaustion

Here is what is genuinely difficult about political stress: it is diffuse, ongoing, and largely unresolvable by individual action. Unlike a concrete personal problem, it does not respond to problem-solving. Unlike a specific fear, it does not respond to reassurance. It just sits there, underneath everything, quietly consuming resources you needed for other things.

The answer is not more information, more discussion, more analysis, or more determined attempts to “stay positive.” The answer is a physiological reset, sufficient in depth and duration that the nervous system actually returns to baseline rather than simply pausing momentarily before resuming its alarm.

A well-designed retreat, held by someone who genuinely understands both the neuroscience and the human experience of what you’re carrying, in a landscape that the noise of the modern world cannot follow you into, is one of the most effective means available of achieving that reset. And returning from it not as a person who has opted out, but as a person who has, finally, opted back in to themselves.

“You cannot think clearly from inside the noise. Sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is walk somewhere quiet and listen for what you already know.”

Ready to Walk Away From the Noise? (Quite Literally.)

Imagine five or seven days in the sunlit landscape of south-west France, walking ancient Camino paths through forests and farmland that have absorbed a thousand years of human footfall, waking up to birdsong instead of breaking news, and spending your evenings in honest, warm conversation with a small group of remarkable people who are also, quietly, looking for solid ground.

Dr Margaretha Montagu’s Crossroads Camino de Santiago Retreats combine daily guided walks, structured storytelling sessions working through the Purpose Pivot Protocol, individual reflection, and the quietly extraordinary company of Friesian horses. Designed for people who are thoughtful, capable, and running on empty in a world that won’t stop demanding more, these 5 and 7-day retreats offer something genuinely rare: experienced medical and psychological expertise, ancient landscape, and warm, honest community, held together by someone who has spent nearly fifteen years helping people find their footing again.

If the noise has been too loud and your own signal has become hard to find, this is where you walk back toward it.

References

White, M.P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B.W., Hartig, T., Warber, S.L., … & Fleming, L.E. (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 7730.
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.
Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping. Henry Holt and Company. (Key supporting work on chronic stress and allostatic load.)
Leka, S., Griffiths, A., & Cox, T. (2003). Work organisation and stress: Systematic problem approaches for employers, managers and trade union representatives. World Health Organisation.
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.

12/03/202616/03/2026

The Doctor Who Couldn’t Breathe Part 4

As you may know, I host Camino de Santiago walking and writing retreats and belong to a delightfully creative band of scribblers called the Wordweavers in the southwest of France writing group, and at one of our meetings, held on Friday the 13th of February 2026, which felt appropriately theatrical—I read the story you’re about to finish reading.

This is part 4 of the story of a doctor who spent years teaching other people how to breathe… and only much later discovered that she herself had forgotten how. Dr. Anna Vermeer was a competent, respected, thoroughly overworked physician who could diagnose stress in her patients within minutes and prescribe sensible solutions with great confidence. Every day people arrived in her office with tight chests, racing thoughts, insomnia, and the quiet sense that life had become a little too much.

Anna listened carefully, reassured them, and encouraged them to slow down.

Meanwhile, she ran through her own life at a pace that suggested the building might catch fire at any moment. She believed this was normal. Responsible people carried heavy loads. Dedicated professionals stayed busy. Doctors, after all, were supposed to take care of everyone else.

Until the afternoon she discovered—quite unexpectedly—that when she told a patient to take a deep breath… she couldn’t.

What followed was not a dramatic collapse or a sudden bolt of enlightenment. It was something quieter: a retreat in the countryside, a sunrise she almost missed, and a phone that, for the first time in years, was switched off.

Part 4

The clinic, it turned out, had been running perfectly well without her constant supervision. This was not a conclusion she had expected to reach. For years Anna had operated under a very sensible professional assumption: that if she relaxed her grip on things — even slightly — the entire system might unravel like a badly knitted sweater.

Patients would suffer.

Charts would multiply.

Emails would form colonies.

Civilisation itself might disintegrate.

Yet here she was, driving home through the quiet countryside after seven days of what could only be described as not doing very much, and the world appeared remarkably intact.

The retreat had been strange in the best possible way. Not dramatic. No thunderbolts. No profound revelations delivered by mysterious gurus wearing linen trousers. Just small things. Walking slowly through fields while mist rose from the grass. Listening to birds whose entire job description appeared to consist of singing enthusiastically for hours on end.

And breathing.

At first, the breathing had been slightly awkward, like reconnecting with an old acquaintance you hadn’t spoken to in years. But by the second morning, Anna had discovered something astonishing. Her lungs were perfectly capable of filling to full capacity.

The real miracle, however, had happened in her mind. When she switched off her phone that first morning and walked into the fields, something curious occurred. Nothing happened. No emergencies. No frantic messages. No patients collapsing dramatically in supermarket aisles because their doctor had dared to take a sunrise walk.

The world continued rotating in a pre-ordained, planetary manner. And Anna discovered a quiet but radical truth: stress had never been proof of responsibility. It had simply been a habit. A very persistent one.

The real test, of course, began on Monday morning. Anna arrived at the clinic at her usual time. The building looked exactly the same. The faint scent of disinfectant still floated in the corridors. The coffee machine still sounded mildly dyspeptic. And the waiting room was already filling with patients who carried the familiar invisible backpacks of modern life. For a moment Anna stood in the hallway. Her old routine tugged at her immediately — open email, check messages, rush. Her brain had already begun its familiar morning sprint.

But then she remembered the valley at sunrise. The quiet. The long, slow breath that had reached all the way down to her ribs. So she did something unusual. She stopped, right there in the hallway, just for a moment. She took a slow breath.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The clinic did not collapse.

Encouraged by this evidence, she tried something even more radical. She did not open her email immediately. Instead, she walked to her consulting room, set down her bag, and sat for thirty quiet seconds before the first patient arrived. It felt vaguely rebellious, like skipping school. The patient knocked and entered — a young man with headaches and fatigue. Anna listened carefully, asking questions the way she always had. But something about her presence had shifted. She was not leaning forward toward the next task. She was actually there. Fully. Listening. The consultation lasted the usual fifteen minutes, but when the patient left he looked noticeably calmer. Anna noticed something else. She did not feel drained.

Over the next few weeks, Anna conducted a series of highly sophisticated personal experiments.

The first: stop answering emails after 8 p.m. This initially caused mild psychological distress. Her fingers would hover near the phone around 10:30 p.m., wondering whether an extremely urgent message might be hiding there. But after several evenings of not checking, she discovered something extraordinary. Almost none of the emails required attention at 10:30 p.m. In fact, many problems had mysteriously solved themselves by morning.

The second experiment: eat lunch sitting down. This was revolutionary. Previously, lunch had consisted of coffee and possibly a biscuit consumed while standing near a printer. Now Anna took twenty minutes — actual minutes. She sat outside when the weather allowed and noticed things. Trees. Clouds. Occasionally a pigeon with radical opinions about breadcrumbs. Her nervous system seemed to appreciate this development enormously.

The third experiment: one deep breath between patients. Just one, before the next knock on the door. Inhale. Exhale. At first it felt like inserting a tiny pause in a machine that had been running nonstop for years, but gradually those breaths became small islands of calm scattered through the day.

Her colleagues began noticing subtle changes. “You look different,” one of them said over coffee.

Anna considered this. “Different how?”

The colleague shrugged. “Less… like you’re about to solve ten problems simultaneously.” Anna smiled. Progress.

The most significant change, however, appeared in her consultations. Patients with stress and burnout were still arriving in steady numbers — modern life had not yet improved its scheduling policies — but Anna now spoke to them with a slightly different authority. When she said “your body is asking for rest,” she meant it. When she said “try slowing your breathing,” she had tested the method herself. And occasionally she told them a story. Not a dramatic one. Just about a doctor who once discovered she had forgotten how to breathe properly.

Patients usually laughed.

Then they tried the breathing exercise. Sometimes the room would grow very quiet.

Of course, Anna did not become a perfectly serene human being overnight. She was still a doctor. Her days still contained urgent situations, difficult diagnoses, and the occasional administrative form that seemed designed by philosophers interested in suffering. But something fundamental had shifted. Stress no longer sat permanently in the driver’s seat. Instead, it appeared occasionally — like an overly enthusiastic backseat driver. When that happened, Anna knew what to do. She paused. Breathed. Stepped outside if necessary. The clinic garden, she discovered, contained a surprisingly charming apple tree she had never noticed before. It had probably been there for decades.

One evening, several months later, Anna left the clinic just before sunset. The sky glowed in shades of amber and rose. She stood beside her car for a moment, breathing in the cool air. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Old reflexes stirred briefly — check the message, respond immediately.

But Anna simply smiled. The message could wait. Instead she looked up at the sky. Birds crossed the fading light in loose, unhurried formations. Somewhere nearby someone was cooking dinner, and the warm scent of garlic drifted faintly through the air. Anna took a long, slow breath.

It occurred to her that freedom was a curious thing.

For years, she had imagined it required immense courage, dramatic changes, escaping responsibilities, running away to remote islands, writing philosophical books about balance. Instead, it had arrived quietly, through small decisions — turning off a phone, taking a breath, walking outside to watch the sun rise. The secret, she now realised, had been surprisingly simple.

Freedom was not about doing less important work. It was about carrying less unnecessary tension while doing it. Stress had once felt like proof of dedication. Now it looked more like excess baggage.

And Anna had finally discovered the courage to let it go.

Sometimes people read Anna’s story and smile a little ruefully, because they recognise something of themselves in it. The constant pressure. The quiet exhaustion. The strange feeling of always being busy and yet never quite arriving anywhere. Modern life has a remarkable way of filling every available space in our days, until breathing deeply begins to feel like a luxury instead of something essential.

But every so often, someone decides to step out of that current for a few days. They come here, to this quiet corner of southwest France, where the Camino winds through vineyards and open fields, and where mornings begin not with notifications but with birdsong and pale gold light spreading slowly across the hills.

And something very simple happens. People walk. They talk a little. Sometimes they write. Sometimes they sit under a tree and do absolutely nothing at all. Their phones stay mostly quiet. Their breathing becomes deeper. Their thoughts begin to settle like dust after a long journey.

By the time they leave, many of them carry something home that Anna discovered that morning in the valley: the quiet understanding that freedom is not something you chase. It is something that appears when you finally give yourself permission to pause, breathe, and let the unnecessary weight fall away. And sometimes, all it takes to begin is a few quiet days on the Camino.

Unique Walking Retreats

Five Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Loneliest Room You’ve Ever Been In

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

Why Does This Happen? The Deeper Picture

Why Do Major Life Transitions Expose Toxic Friendships?

What Does “Toxic” Actually Mean in a Friendship?

How Can This Realisation Ripple Beyond One Person?

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

Mistake 1: Assuming Loyalty Obligates You to Continue

Mistake 2: Waiting for the Other Person to Change

Mistake 3: Cutting Everyone Off and Calling It Boundaries

Mistake 4: Performing Gratitude for Friendships That Cost You

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

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

Further Reading: Five Books on Finding Your People

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?”

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

A Gentle Invitation

Ready for a Retreat? Take the Quiz

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Quiet Crisis Nobody’s Talking About

Are You Trying to Survive the Current World Chaos Alone, When You Don’t Have To?

The Story of Helena Voss: What Happened When She Finally Let Someone In

Can One Week Change the Way You See Yourself?

Why Your People Are Your Greatest Resource in Difficult Times

What Does Science Tell Us About Human Connection and Resilience?

The Ripple Effect

What happens to a Community when One Person flourishes?

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Support Network in Difficult Times

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Who Do You Want Beside You?

Further Reading: Five Books That Will Change How You Think About Connection and Resilience

The Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses

5 FAQs People Are Asking Right Now About Connection and Resilience

What Do People Most Need to Know?

Conclusion: The Bravest Thing

Could Five Days in the French Countryside Be the Turning Point You’ve Been Circling?

References

Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Voice in Your Head

What Does It Actually Look Like, When Your Story Is Running//Ruining Your Life?

Eleanor’s Story

Why Do Our Inner Stories Have So Much Power Over Us?

What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain?

How One Person’s Story Change Ripples Outward

What Are the 5 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Trying to Change Their Inner Narrative?

Mistake 1: Trying to Silence the Voice Rather Than Understand It

Mistake 2: Doing It Alone, in the Same Environment

Mistake 3: Confusing Insight With Change

Mistake 4: Expecting It to Be a One-Time Event

Mistake 5: Underestimating the Role of Nature

A Short and Powerful Intention-Setting Exercise

Further Reading: 5 Books That Will Help You Rewrite Your Story

A Note on the Online Course Included With all my Retreats

5 Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Could a Week in South-West France Help You Change Your Story?

Stay Connected: Your Next Step

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: Loneliness Creeps Up On You

Sophie Laurent Had Everything.

Why Does This Happen? And Why Does It Matter?

Is Modern Loneliness a Personal Failing or a Collective Crisis?

What Does Genuine Connection Actually Require?

5 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Feeling Lonely in Company

Are You Making Things Worse Without Realising It?

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

Navigating Loneliness: Further Reading

5 Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Books That Hold a Torch in the Dark

Why does reading feel like the only sane response to an insane world?