Margaretha Montagu - Dr Margaretha Montagu

09/04/202603/05/2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

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

Introduction: The Friend-Shaped Hole in Your Life

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

That hesitation? Worth paying attention to.

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

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

Which, right now, it rather is.

The Hidden Cost of Fake Friendships: Claire’s Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

She put her phone face-down on the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Can You Tell Who’s a Fake Friend?

What Does “Fake Friends” Actually Mean?

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

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

Key signs to watch for:

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

Why Are Some People Fake Friends?

What Drives Inauthentic Friendship?

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

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

Other drivers include:

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

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

What Are the Different Types of Fake Friends?

A (Slightly Wry) Taxonomy of Inauthentic Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do Fake Friendships Harm Us?

What Does the Science Actually Say?

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

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

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

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

Additional possible damage includes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Handle Fake Friends: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

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

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

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

5 FAQs About Fake Friends

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

A Gentle Invitation

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

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

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.

What’s Next?

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

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

References

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

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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.

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

07/04/202603/05/2026

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

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

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

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

Introduction: Are You Tired of Friendships That Feel Supeficial?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Struggle

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

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

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

Sophia straightened slightly, as if preparing for an audition.

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

“That sounds like you needed a pit stop.”

Sophia paused, mid-performance.

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

The Turning Point

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

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

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

Instead, they walked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophia sat with her untouched journal for a long time.

Then she began.

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

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

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

The Solution

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

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

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

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

Sophia began to notice how different this felt.

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

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

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

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

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

Friendship, real friendship, wasn’t louder.

It was deeper.

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

It looked like silence that didn’t need fixing.

The Takeaway

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

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

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

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

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

This single difference shapes everything about how introverts approach connection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Actually Make Friends With an Introvert?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Can One Person’s Introvert Friendship Ripple Outward?

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

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

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

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Befriending an Introvert

Are You Accidentally Pushing Your Introvert Friend Away?

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

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

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

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

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

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The One Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can explore the standalone course here.

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

5 FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking Right Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Quiet Ones Are Usually the Ones Worth Cultivating

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are You Ready to Start Connecting?

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a question worth sitting with:

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

06/04/202608/08/2026

Practical Suggestions on How to Make Friends and Maintain Friendships

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

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

So what actually works?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was, in fact, exactly what she found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was it. That was the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Mistakes That Keep Adults Stuck in Loneliness

1. Waiting Until You Feel Ready

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

2. Trying to Make Friends in the Wrong Environment

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

3. Confusing Vulnerability with Oversharing

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

4. Underestimating Shared Activity

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

5. Expecting Instant Results

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

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

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

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

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

Reconnect with Nature: The Free Gift Inside the Retreat

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

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

5 Sharp FAQs

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Change the environment.

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

A Gentle Invitation (Definitely Worth Reading)

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

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

Ready to Find Your People?

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.

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

“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

References

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

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

05/04/202608/08/2026

Enthusiastic Hoarders of Emotional Experience: It’s Time to 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 confront 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 do 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.

04/04/202603/05/2026

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

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

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

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

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

Five Key Takeaways

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

Introduction: The Loneliest Room You’ve Ever Been In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Does This Happen? The Deeper Picture

Why Do Major Life Transitions Expose Toxic Friendships?

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

During a major life transition, we don’t.

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

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

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

What Does “Toxic” Actually Mean in a Friendship?

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

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

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

How Can This Realisation Ripple Beyond One Person?

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

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

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

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

Mistake 1: Assuming Loyalty Obligates You to Continue

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

Mistake 2: Waiting for the Other Person to Change

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

Mistake 3: Cutting Everyone Off and Calling It Boundaries

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

Mistake 4: Performing Gratitude for Friendships That Cost You

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

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

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

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

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

For each person, complete these two sentences:

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

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

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

Five FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

A Gentle Invitation

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

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

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

Ready for a Retreat? Take the Quiz

Here’s a question worth sitting with:

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

References

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

03/04/202603/05/2026

Book Review: Quiet by Susan Cain

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

Book Review: Quiet by Susan Cain

Quiet

Susan Cain

Quiet

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

Susan Cain · 2012 · Crown Publishing

Psychology Self-help Sociology Business Nonfiction

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

The Big Idea

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

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

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

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

The Culture of Personality

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

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

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

The Science of Sensitivity

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

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

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

The Myth of Brainstorming

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

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

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

Quiet Heroism

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

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

Living Introversion: Relationships and the “Free Trait”

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

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

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

Where It Strains

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

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

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

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

Scores

Writing

Warm, precise, readable

Research

Thorough, some stretch

Originality

Reframes the familiar

Practicality

Genuinely actionable

Who Should Read It

✓

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

✓

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

✓

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

✓

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

✓

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

✗

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

✗

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

Final Verdict

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

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

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Friend-Shaped Hole in Your Life

The Hidden Cost of Fake Friendships: Claire’s Story

How Can You Tell Who’s a Fake Friend?

What Does “Fake Friends” Actually Mean?

Why Are Some People Fake Friends?

What Drives Inauthentic Friendship?

What Are the Different Types of Fake Friends?

A (Slightly Wry) Taxonomy of Inauthentic Friendship

How Do Fake Friendships Harm Us?

What Does the Science Actually Say?

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

How to Handle Fake Friends: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

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

5 FAQs About Fake Friends

Conclusion

A Gentle Invitation

What’s Next?

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: Are You Tired of Friendships That Feel Supeficial?

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

The Problem

The Struggle

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

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

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

How Do You Actually Make Friends With an Introvert?

How Can One Person’s Introvert Friendship Ripple Outward?

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Befriending an Introvert

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The One Thing

Further Reading: 5 Books That Will Change How You Think About Friendship and Introversion

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

5 FAQs: What People Are Actually Asking Right Now

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Quiet Ones Are Usually the Ones Worth Cultivating

Are You Ready to Start Connecting?

References

5 Key Takeaways

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

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

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

5 Mistakes That Keep Adults Stuck in Loneliness

1. Waiting Until You Feel Ready

2. Trying to Make Friends in the Wrong Environment

3. Confusing Vulnerability with Oversharing

4. Underestimating Shared Activity

5. Expecting Instant Results

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise

Reconnect with Nature: The Free Gift Inside the Retreat

Further Reading: 5 Books on Friendship, Connection, and Belonging

5 Sharp FAQs

Conclusion

A Gentle Invitation (Definitely Worth Reading)

Ready to Find Your People?

References

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?”