Imagine it's the first Saturday in September. The summer holidays are over, the washing machine has already done one load before nine o'clock, you've got a coffee beside you, and for the next couple of hours nobody's asking you for anything. You've signed up for my group coaching for overthinking course, It's Not Just Me, and you're just about to join the first session. There's always that little wobble before you do anything new. A tiny part of your brain is probably already wondering whether everyone else will be far more self-aware than you, have read all the right books, [...]

Here is something I have noticed about people. Some of us move through life as though everything is always the worst it has ever been. Every week is the most exhausting week. Every situation is the most stressful. Every difficulty is a crisis. Every minor inconvenience feels urgent. Always braced for the worst. A delayed reply and suddenly you're writing the ending of the whole relationship in your head. A slightly weird tone and you're convinced something terrible is happening. A bit of tension and the whole body goes: DEFCON ONE. After a while, life starts feeling harder than it [...]

I went for brunch today with my pals in Bollington. There were eight of us on one of those long tables that takes about forty-five minutes to sit down at because everyone's hugging everyone and someone always needs a wee before they've even taken their coat off. We talked about EVERYTHING. The TV series Virgin Island on Channel 4 (don't get me started, I think it's a bit grim and unethical, some of the others thought it was actually quite powerful). A game called I Shouldn't But I Would, which I will not describe to you here but which had [...]

It's November 2015. I'm sitting in a little restaurant in Germany with my wife. We'd moved there a few months earlier from London, and up until then the whole thing had still felt slightly unreal. Like an extended holiday we'd somehow forgotten to leave. The summer had been beautiful. Long evenings in the garden drinking wine and looking for shooting stars. Bread from the bakery down the road. Bike rides. That slightly smug feeling of becoming the kind of people who casually live in Europe. Then autumn arrived. The days got darker. The novelty wore off. Everything started feeling harder. [...]

Here's the thing. Most people looking into life coaching for feeling stuck aren't in bits. They're not in full meltdown, they're not unable to function, they haven't necessarily had some massive dramatic thing happen to them. They're just... fine. Mostly. On paper, anyway. Good job, nice enough life, people who love them, and yet there's this persistent, low-level feeling of "hang on, is this actually it?" that follows them around all day and refuses to feck off no matter how many times they tell themselves to be grateful. Or they keep having the same argument with their partner, just with [...]

A client said something to me recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. "I feel like I can do anything… and nothing at the same time." She laughed when she said it, the kind of laugh that says I know how this sounds but I'm also not joking. And she wasn't. Because when we slowed it down, what she was describing was this: Her brain is full of ideas, possibilities, directions she could go in. She's capable, experienced, has never quite followed a straight line, and she can see clearly that there isn't just one path available [...]

In 2021, during peak covid times, I'd been in and out of hospitals, doctors' offices, and consultants' rooms for most of the year. I was experiencing a whole cluster of symptoms that nobody could quite explain. When nothing obvious showed up in the fairly basic, preliminary tests, the tone would shift: “Maybe you’re just stressed? Have you thought about antidepressants? You might just need to get more rest, try to relax a bit.” It was all said kindly enough, but it left me with an uncomfortable feeling that my experience was somehow up for debate, as if it needed a [...]

Okay so here is something I have noticed about myself and approximately everyone I have ever met, which is that we are all, to varying degrees, sitting in a waiting room of our own making, waiting for things to feel more under control before we get on with the actual business of our lives. And the waiting is always very reasonable: When things are less busy. When the children are a bit more independent. When we've dealt with the thing at work. When we feel less overwhelmed. When we've had a proper holiday and can think clearly again. But things [...]