Journal
Time for a Reset? Question the Labels You’ve Given Yourself
The sun stands still twice a year.
Well, not literally. But for about 12 days around each solstice, something interesting happens. If you watch from the same spot each morning or evening, the sun appears to rise and set at nearly the same place on the horizon. It’s barely moving. Less than one-sixtieth of its own diameter per day.
This is where the word “solstice” comes from: Latin sol (sun) + sistere (to stand still).
We tend to think of the solstice as a single moment—the shortest day, the longest night. Here in Scotland, that’s about 7.5 hours of daylight on the winter solstice. But the standstill is longer than that. It’s the entire period when the sun appears motionless along the horizon. About six days either side of the solstice itself. Twelve days total.
And if you look at our winter traditions, they cluster around this number. The twelve days of Christmas. Twelfth Night. The Yule log—an enormous branch that would be brought into the house and burned slowly over twelve days, moved along in the hearth as it burned down.
People have always understood this as a threshold. A bridge from one part of the year to another.
What the monuments tell us
Five thousand years ago, Neolithic communities built massive stone monuments aligned to this moment. Not just to the solstice itself, but to the entire standstill period.
At Maeshowe in Orkney, the entrance passageway is positioned so that for these twelve days, when the sun sets on a clear day (not always guaranteed in Scotland), the light travels all the way along the passage and into the womb-shaped chamber. The passage was deliberately shortened at the entrance to create the most spectacular ribbon of light possible—focused, concentrated, flooding the back wall.
The same at Clava Cairns near Inverness. Passage tombs, carefully aligned, engineered to capture this specific light at this specific time.
We don’t actually know what they were doing there. We have no idea what their beliefs were. Was it about gathering to honor ancestors? A private ritual for the dead? Something to do with death and rebirth? We don’t know. We’ll probably never know.
But we know it mattered. It mattered enough to move massive stones, to calculate precise alignments, to gather there year after year for thousands of years.
And I think it should still matter to us. Not because we need to recreate Neolithic rituals, but because at heart, we’re the same people. We respond to seasonal shifts, to darkness and light, to thresholds and turning points. We just have houses and cars and electric lights to insulate us from feeling it as urgently as they did.
The box I’ve been living in
I’ve been thinking a lot about boxes lately. Labels. Binary categories we put ourselves into.
I realized recently that I describe myself as an “extreme introvert.” Not just someone who needs alone time to recharge—extreme. Someone who is depleted by social interaction, who does best work in solitude, who fundamentally needs to be away from people.
And I think... some of that is true. I do benefit from silence and solitude when I need to replenish. But I’m not sure the extreme part is actually accurate. I think it might just be conditioning.
Because when I trace it back, the “extreme” bit started during COVID. I was shielding for a year—high risk, staying inside, not seeing anyone. And my nervous system adapted. Inside my house, away from other people, doing my own thing, mixing with the world through screens—that became safe. Outside my house, where I couldn’t control proximity, where other people might be carrying something dangerous—that became unsafe.
That was a realistic response to real circumstances. But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of it as “my nervous system has adapted to threat” and started thinking of it as “this is just who I am.”
The label became comfortable. It explained why I didn’t want to go out. Why I preferred my own company. Why social situations felt hard. “I’m an extreme introvert” is so much simpler than “I got out of practice being around people and my nervous system now reads normal social interaction as threat.”
But here’s the thing: our brains are plastic. They change. We change them. What was true in 2020 doesn’t have to stay true forever. And I think this label—this box I’ve put myself in—might be limiting me more than it’s serving me.
The wider pattern
And I don’t think I’m alone in this.
I think a lot of us have accepted binary labels about ourselves without questioning whether they’re still accurate. Or whether they ever were.
I’m not a morning person. So you never try getting up earlier, even though your circumstances have changed.
I’m not creative. So you never make anything, because people who “aren’t creative” don’t do that.
I’m not sporty. So you’ve stopped moving your body entirely.
I need to be busy. So you never let yourself rest, because that’s “not who you are.”
These labels are comforting. They simplify decision-making. They explain why we do what we do. But what if they’re wrong? What if we’ve evolved past them, but we’re being held in place by boxes we put ourselves into years ago for reasons that no longer apply?
The standstill as invitation
This is why I keep coming back to the solstice. To that period when the sun appears motionless.
The sun appears still, but it has already turned. The physics have changed even though you can’t see it yet. That’s exactly the kind of moment when you can question what seems fixed.
Thresholds are good for this kind of work. The new year. A birthday. The start of a season. The solstice. Any moment that feels like a turning point, even if you’re the only one marking it.
A small experiment
Here’s what I’m suggesting:
Pick one binary label you’ve given yourself and gently test whether it’s still true.
Not to prove yourself wrong. Not to force yourself to become someone you’re not. But to gather information. To see whether this box you’re in is actually the right size, or whether you’ve just gotten comfortable there.
For me, it’s been deliberately putting myself into social situations I’d normally avoid “because I’m an extreme introvert.” Not forcing extroversion, but testing whether I actually need as much isolation as I think I do.
For you, it might be different:
- Try getting up earlier if you’ve decided you’re “not a morning person”
- Spend 10 minutes a day drawing if you’ve told yourself you “can’t draw”
- Do absolutely nothing for 20 minutes if you think you “need to be busy”
- Join a group activity if you’ve decided you “prefer to be alone”
Pick something that would be out of character for someone with your label. Something small. See what happens.
Give yourself a timeframe—the traditional twelve days works well, or a week, or a month. Long enough to gather real data, short enough to commit to.
Nothing has to stay fixed
The experiment won’t necessarily transform you. But it will give you information. You’ll know: Was that label actually true? Or was it just a story I’ve been telling myself?
Our brains are remarkably adaptable. Even in midlife, even after years of settled patterns, we can learn new responses. We can question old categories. We can discover that the person we thought we were is just one version of who we could be.
The sun stands still twice a year. But nothing else has to.
What labels have you given yourself? What would it mean if they weren’t actually true?
A Year of Simplifying My Life (And Why I Didn’t Start With My Wardrobe)
I’ve just finished a year of simplifying my life, and I’m honestly a bit surprised by how it turned out.
Each year, I choose one aspect of my life to focus on. Then over twelve months—twelve new moons—I commit to a different experiment each month. Small things. Just for those four weeks. But by the end of the year, significant changes have happened. Sometimes you can’t see how far you’ve come until you look back.
Last year I focused on nurturing my body after realising I’d become disconnected from it. (I have a chronic illness and had stopped treating myself particularly well.) This year, at the end of 2024, I was feeling overwhelmed. My work felt never-ending, like my brain was constantly cluttered.
So I decided to spend a year simplifying things.
What people expected me to do
When I announced this project, lots of people—knowing I’m very messy and find clutter difficult—thought I’d be doing a massive decluttering project. You know, the Marie Kondo thing. January wardrobes. Cupboards. All of that.
But that wasn’t what I was aiming for at all.
What I wanted to get rid of was the feeling of heaviness. This sense of never being done.
Where I actually started
I thought the best place to start was with my work. I have three strands: The Studio (an online creative community), life coaching, and a natural dye garden where I dye embroidery threads. All of those are manageable things. Importantly, they all fill me up. It’s work I’ve chosen because I love it.
So I had this feeling that maybe the problem wasn’t the actual work.
When I sat for a few days looking at what I was spending my time on, I discovered something uncomfortable: I was spending 60-70% of my time responding to emails from people who weren’t working with me at all.
People asking about paint colours. Whether I could help them set up a YouTube channel. Where I get my cardigans from. They were travelling to Scotland and wanted hints on where to go.
And I was replying to it all.
Of course, more kept coming in because people wanted pen-pal relationships. This was completely my fault. I’m a people pleaser. I’d built good boundaries face-to-face, but I hadn’t noticed that online I’d let them slip completely.
Month One: Learning to say no (online)
So in January, I stopped responding to 90% of emails that weren’t to do with my work.
This has been one of the most difficult things all year. I still feel terrible about it.
But it’s also been one of the most transformative things—recognising that I’m here to do particular work, and if I spend my limited time and energy doing other things, I’m actually doing down the people who pay me. And doing down myself.
What was really interesting: so many of those emails said “I don’t join memberships” or “I’m not interested in The Studio” or “I don’t have time for The Studio.” They weren’t wanting to connect with my actual work. They just wanted a shopping list or an itinerary.
The internal clutter
Having dealt with the flood of incoming stuff, I realised I hadn’t dealt with the things I initiate that also clutter up my time.
My phone stats were shocking. I had a really bad problem with Instagram addiction.
Month Two: Breaking the Instagram habit
I used an app called Screen Zen that blocked Instagram in a way I couldn’t get around the back door. Took my usage down to 10 minutes a day. That was enough to break the addiction.
After a month, I realised how dull it was. Full of adverts. Full of people putting on a veneer—vulnerable veneer, showing-off veneer, I’m-so-busy veneer. It gave me the same feeling that small talk does, and I really don’t like small talk.
Instagram was small talk. So I came off completely.
As a side note: I thought I needed to be on Instagram for my business because that’s what people who sell courses about Instagram tell you. But once I stopped being on Instagram, my newsletter open rates went up. My newsletter sign-up rates went up. My YouTube views went up. The number of people joining The Studio went up.
It’s almost as though by always being on Instagram, there was never any push to really connect more meaningfully. I was just another scroll.
Month Three: Actually moving
I’d freed up time by dealing with external and internal clutter, and I decided to use it to tackle activity.
I’m not naturally sporty. I don’t like exercise. I hate group activities. So unless I keep an eye on it, my activity levels drop because I prioritise other things.
I used my Apple Watch to set an activity aim. I could do anything to fulfil it. That worked really well. Nice and simple.
Month Four: A spacious work schedule
Because I’d freed up time, I noticed I could have a work schedule that was much more spacious.
I have chronic fatigue symptoms—some days I’m fine, some days I’m not. If I’ve got a busy day, I need a couple of really quiet days either side.
I’m not very good at batching things, so I decided to theme days in the week:
- Monday: Forward planning, writing, admin
- Wednesday: Record YouTube, write blog, newsletters
- Thursday: Production day—samples, dyeing threads, creative work
- Tuesday and Friday: Gap days
Those gap days are incredibly useful. They give me confidence that even if I don’t get things done on one of my set days, I’ve got space.
Month Five: Flowers on the table
This newly spacious way of working made me aware that the writing space upstairs has a bad habit of becoming piles of paper and clutter. When that happens, I can’t write clearly.
So in May, I decided that every night I’d clear that table and put a bunch of flowers in the middle. It was about the flowers—picked from the garden, smelling nice, looking nice. It felt civilised.
That helped me keep my space simple and let creativity flow.
Then life happened
In June, life threw some life at us. My dad fell, had a bleed on his brain, spent three months in hospital. He died at the end of August.
Had I not simplified my workload and workflow, I would have found it incredibly difficult to spend the amount of time I wanted with him. But I had less cluttery work to do. I had a schedule with actual space in it. I just stopped doing the embroidered threads for the year—that was fine.
I could show up in the ways I wanted to. I felt that to be an incredible privilege. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for something I’d done in retrospect.
When the physical decluttering finally happened
While all of this was going on—going back and forth to the hospital, dealing with incredibly stressful family situations—that’s when the actual physical decluttering kicked in.
It started with my wardrobe.
I didn’t do the whole taking-everything-out, trying-everything-on thing. I just went through my overstuffed rails and decided: if I’ve got several similar dresses, how many do I actually need? What are the top three or five? Get rid of the rest.
And somehow—I think because I’d done so much mindset work with the people-pleasing and social media addiction—it was easy.
There was no shame. No shame about having bought things I hadn’t worn or having things I no longer fitted. It was unemotional and easy.
Some things went to charity shops. Others I sold—sold enough to fund a trip to London for the two of us.
Gradually that spread to the rest of the house. Every cupboard, every drawer. People were becoming uneasy because this was not my character.
Part of it was that I could control this when I couldn’t control what was happening elsewhere. But also, I think having picked away at the threads of clutter and overwhelm, you just get into a flow.
What I learned
I am not a minimalist. Minimalist spaces make me anxious. I’m surrounded by things I love in my house.
What I was doing: I didn’t want to get rid of anything I actually liked or loved. I wanted to get rid of the things obscuring what I loved. The pens that don’t work. The junk mail. The things you’re not quite sure where they came from.
This month—December—I’ve ended up in the studio where I have so much stuff. Things kept for “they might come in useful” (and often they do, but it was overwhelming).
When I’ve tried in the past, I’ve started, made more of a mess, become overwhelmed, and shoved things to one side. I’m now four or five days into sorting my studio and it’s already really different. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any guilt or muddle or emotions involved. It’s just clearing so I get back into the flow.
The lesson I’d give
Really lean into your character.
If you’re not a neat and tidy person, if that isn’t going to immediately give you a thrill, then maybe look at sorting out some of the clutter in your brain before you tackle your physical surroundings.
People always say: declutter your wardrobe and you’ll feel so much lighter and freer. That may well be the case.
But I found that by decluttering my mind, sorting out my overwhelm, somehow my wardrobe became much more decluttered, free, joyous.
Not everybody works the same way. But for me, the mind came first. The wardrobe came last, almost like an afterthought. And when it did, it was easy.
Now I’ve got a couple of weeks to think about what I’ll be doing from this winter solstice into 2026. When I’ve decided, I’ll let you know.
December Walk
A December walk through frost and mist, noticing what emerges when the landscape strips back - lichen colours on bare bark, tangerine brightness against grey skies, the way light sits in the valley at dawn.
This is the kind of work we do in The Studio - slow, seasonal making where paying attention matters as much as the finished thing. Where you notice what’s changing, gather what interests you, and see what happens when you work with it.
If you’d like to join us, The Studio has a waiting list here. I’ll let you know when there’s space.
Why Winter Rituals Matter (and what they do to your nervous system)
I was doing some boring website analysis last week - tracking where people find me, which Pinterest pins are getting clicked - when I noticed something odd.
One pin was getting thousands more saves and clicks than anything else. The image was nice enough - an atmospheric autumn scene - but nothing special compared to the others. Yet people kept clicking.
Then I saw it: when you’re scrolling past, only three words of the description are visible.
Women. Midlife. Ritual.
That’s what people were reaching for. The word ritual.
The hot chocolate ritual
This made me think of something from my childhood. When I was seven or eight, I’d go to a friend’s house after school for an hour before my parents picked me up. There’d be five or six of us kids, and we all had jobs.
While the mum heated milk for hot chocolate, my job (with another child) was to close all the curtains in the house. It was a big old house with tall windows - proper linings, the works. Once we’d finished, we’d come down to the kitchen for hot chocolate and biscuits, then start our homework.
Not very much, is it? Just a sensible chore. A way to dispatch kids while making drinks.
But I still remember it almost 50 years later.
What Elizabeth knew
That woman - Elizabeth Chalmers Watson - understood something about everyday rituals. She was creating a threshold: school from home, daytime from nighttime, outside from inside, anxiety from safety.
School was unpredictable and busy and often stressful. This ritual was the antidote.
And I think that’s why thousands of people are clicking on pins about midlife rituals right now.
When everything feels unpredictable
Life is horribly unpredictable at the moment. Climate change, wars, politics, finances - things we know about but feel powerless to change. We can’t predict what’s happening day to day, sometimes minute to minute.
And here’s the thing: our brains are prediction machines.
They look for patterns. They use those patterns to predict what happens next. When life becomes unpredictable, our brains get exhausted trying to find patterns that aren’t there. This is what stress and anxiety and burnout actually are - your brain working overtime because nothing is behaving the way it’s supposed to.
The antidote
Rituals - rhythms, seasonal patterns, predictable repeated actions - are the antidote.
They’re things your brain can predict. Things you’re in control of. Patterns your brain can recognize and go: “Ah yes, I know what happens next. I can relax here.”
Your nervous system doesn’t need to be on high alert. It can settle.
My winter rhythms (not prescriptions)
I’m not going to prescribe rituals for you - other people’s patterns rarely work. But here’s what I do:
Morning: Every single day starts the same. Cup of tea, watching the birds, a bit of knitting. My brain knows that for the next half hour, nothing novel is happening. We’re just settling in.
Dusk: Soon as it starts getting dark (which is appallingly early in Scotland in winter), I close the curtains and draw the blinds. It’s a nod to my childhood. A feeling of drawing in, creating separation between outside chaos and inside safety.
Evenings: At weekends in the living room, I light candles. That’s the signal: this is evening time, domestic time, predictable relaxed time.
Small things. Inconsequential, really. But they create pockets of predictability when everything else feels uncertain.
What I’m suggesting
You probably already have these rhythms in your life. Small repeated actions you do with a bit of ceremony. Things that feel easy, that you want to do - like stroking a cat the right way.
Find them. Notice them. Lean into them.
Let your brain know: this bit is predictable, this bit you control, here you can settle.
When the world outside is chaotic, these small spheres of predictability aren’t indulgent. They’re how we create resilience. They’re how we keep ourselves company through the dark.
What are your winter rhythms? What small repeated actions are already anchoring you? I’d love to know in the comments.
You’re Not Lazy: Why Restarting Is Harder Than You Think
Hello and welcome. Today I’m talking about what we can do when we’ve let something slide - a project, a habit, something we really want to continue with but are finding difficult to get back into.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this is personal. If you’ve been following along, you might remember that back in February I came up with a very simple way of tracking my daily activity and exercise - filling the activity rings on my Apple Watch. This worked brilliantly for five months. Every single day I filled those rings. I was upping the goals, feeling really good, noticing improvements in my mood and fitness levels. All was going well.
But then over the summer, my dad was very ill in hospital. He died at the end of August. That period was very stressful and involved a lot of driving to visit him. And the part of my life that I completely abandoned was anything to do with exercise, activity, and moving. There wasn’t a single day over those three months that I filled the activity rings.
Now that’s fine. Life is very lifey. I would not make any decision differently. But what interested me is that right through September and October and most of November, I still hadn’t taken up something that I enjoyed, that I found worked, that was really simple, that I knew helped my mood and fitness.
So I started to look at exactly what was happening.
Why Women Stop (And What We Stop)
The first thing I discovered was that what I did was really common. Women, when faced by some kind of caring or support situation - children, grandchildren, parents, other relatives, community, whatever - are twice as likely to use the time they used to spend on self-care or personal hobbies to support others.
This is clearly a lovely trait. In many ways it’s a privilege to be able to do these things. But what’s interesting is that it’s specifically the time from self-care that has to go. We don’t take time from housework or other things we see as social responsibilities. We take time from things that are almost discretionary - from creativity, from seeing friends, from personal exercise.
The Real Problem: Shame vs Guilt
This leads to why I was finding it so difficult to restart. At the bottom of most of these blockages - this resistance to starting something, this resistance to the energy of creation or activity or living - it’s often shame and guilt.
Here’s the crucial difference:
Guilt is saying, “I didn’t go for a walk today. That was a bad thing.”
Shame is saying, “I didn’t go for a walk today. I am a bad thing. I am a lazy lump that just sits around.”
It is shame, not surprisingly, that is the most appalling corrosive thing in our lives. If I got you to do anything it would be to try and distance yourself from shame as much as possible.
I was clearly feeling shame over not having taken any exercise for three months. And of course that has a lot of history in it for me - I’ve never liked exercise, I was always the last person picked for teams at school. It’s self-fulfilling, these things. So it’s a trigger point for me.
How I Knew It Was Shame
I noticed several things that were indicating I was feeling shame over this. One was the voice in my head. That “lazy lump” quote? That was a voice inside my head. “It’s a late evening. There’s plenty of time to go for a walk and here you are just sitting around like a lazy lump. What is wrong with you?” That’s the kind of thing that had been going through my head.
The second, more visible thing was that I took those activity rings off the front of my watch. Normally they’re behind the clock face so I have a feeling of how much I’d been moving during the day. But I hid them. I hid them because I was ashamed of them. Every time I saw those activity rings not really moving very much, I felt bad. And therefore I distanced myself from it. I distanced myself from the possibility of restarting.
Because the longer that shame goes on, the more difficult it is to go back. It’s often very low-lying and not very obvious. It’s only because I went in there and picked away at it that I could say, “Aha, this is another problem with shame.”
How to Actually Restart
So that actually makes it relatively straightforward to start again. Here’s what I’m doing:
1. Just Say What Happened
The first thing I’m doing is just saying to myself: this is what happened. I did something for five months. Life came along. I stopped doing it. Now I’m in a position to pick it up again. No emotions, no shame. This is what happens. This is what life is like.
2. Start Fresh
Second thing - I am starting fresh. I’m not trying to pick it up where I left off. I’m not going “right, I’m going to get back to my old goals.” Instead, I’m starting fresh with the enthusiasm and energy of a new thing. I’ve reset everything. I brought it back to my watch face. I chose a new watch face. It’s all about saying: right, this is it, we are back to it.
3. Reset Your Goals Really Low
Third, I’ve reset all of my goals. Because for me, the most important thing at the moment is to achieve those daily goals. The actual goals don’t matter - I’m not in training for anything. I just need to be able to tick them off because it’s that ticking off, that completing the rings, that gives me the energy, the boost, the “I have done it” feeling.
If you’re wanting to get back to a creative project, for example, you can just decide you’re doing it for a very small amount of time a day. Set goals that are really small so you’re always going to surpass them, because you can always put them up later. I can always increase my goals later and I’ll feel a bit of patting myself on the back when I do that.
4. Tell Somebody
Next thing: tell somebody. Find a way of involving others. Some things could be very obvious - you might want to exercise with friends, or tell people about something you’re making. You might just want to journal about it. But get it out of your head. Make it something that is not just you in your personal thing.
Even if your friends never mention it again, just you having told somebody that this is your aim - actually, not even an aim, this is what you ARE doing, isn’t this neat, isn’t this wonderful - just the telling of somebody makes it much more likely that you will actually do it.
What I’m Doing Now
So what am I doing? I said: life happened. Wasn’t I lucky to be able to be there with my family? Now I am going to be filling my activity rings. I reset the rings. I put them on the front of my watch. I am celebrating every day that I meet them. I am committing here that this is something I am building into my life.
And what I am protecting around that is the momentum and the energy and the doing - that feeling of keep going forward.
Now, I know that at some other point in the future, life may get in the way again. And really what I’m wanting from this experience is to get my restarting muscles more active so that I don’t feel that if I’ve fallen off whatever it is that I wanted to do - healthy eating, reading more, writing something, anything that requires daily input over a long time - I want to be able to say: right, I stopped that for a while, here I am starting it, without that guilt, without that shame creeping in and making everything so much more difficult.
Over to You
I would love to hear if you have any suggestions on restarting projects, getting back to routines, beginning again. Leave them in the comments.
And me? I’m off for a walk.
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