Hey, I'm Jenn! If you're new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Every Tuesday morning, I share the Wellness Edit, weekly articles linked to a monthly theme where I share grounded reflections and practical insights that help support the body and mind through the healing power of nature. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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The first few mornings of September are the ones I always struggle with the most. After six weeks off work, the alarm goes back on. The house has that felt free and easy all summer suddenly has its sharper edges again. Everyone is once again moving to a tight schedule. I stand at the back door with my tea, like I always do, and I notice the light has changed… Summer is slowly packing her bags.

Something within me knows to get ready to brace. The autumn term is the toughest of them all, after all these years, it never gets easier (in fact, the older I get, I feel like it’s getting harder!). Not only are the days getting shorter, they are getting colder and I feel the world closing in on me once again.

I want to share something that took me a long time to fully understand and appreciate. It isn’t just nostalgia for the lazy morning and long evenings, it’s the part of you that is being called back indoors. The part of you that was never really built to live in here.

Let me explain what I mean…

There’s a field of study called ecopsychology, we have touched on it briefly before but I want to go into more detail because it’s something I don’t think gets talked about enough. The heart of the idea is beautifully simple… essentially, it’s the idea that our minds did not develop in buildings. They developed outside. Over hundreds of thousands of years, under open sky, near water, among trees and weather and other living things. That’s the environment the human nervous system was shaped by. That’s the world it expects.

And then, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, we moved almost entirely indoors. We now spend a fraction of our time outside, compared to our ancestors.

According to recent research, the average British person spends 22 hours indoors equating to around 90% of their day. That’s insane! Some of the reasons are our unpredictable weather (as stated by 45% of people interviewed) and work commitments. There are more devastating statistics in the link provided, if you’re interested. The version of us that evolved to read the sky and the seasons and the movement of animals now spends its days sitting sedentary under strip lighting, reading a screen.

Ecopsychology raises an important question. What if some of what we call stress, or restlessness, or that low flat feeling we can’t quite name... what if some of that isn’t a personal failing at all? What if its homesickness? A body missing the world it was made for.

The problem might not be you. The problem might be that you’ve been kept inside for too long.

This isn’t wishful thinking

I know how that can sound. Lovely in theory, but a bit fluffy in practice. So let me give you the ground it stands on, because the research here is genuinely striking.

There’s a concept that researchers call nature connectedness. It’s a measure of how emotionally close a person feels to the natural world. Not how often they go outside, but how connected they feel to it. And study after study has found that people who score higher on nature connectedness report lower anxiety, better mood, and a greater sense that their life has meaning. Research also suggests that it wasn’t the amount of time outdoors that matters the most, it’s the quality of the attention we pay it.

For those of us with busy lives, this is great news… we don’t all have to put hiking boots on and disappear into the wilderness for hours at a time (although, that would be nice!). It’s about the quality of our time outside and the quality of our noticing.

There’s also some fascinating research being carried out in Japan, where they’ve studied a practice they call shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. Not exercise. Just being present among trees. Researchers have measured real, physical changes afterwards. Lower cortisol, that stress hormone we’ve talked about before. Lower blood pressure. A calmer nervous system. The body settling, simply because it was returned, for a while, to the place it recognises.

What summer gives us, and autumn takes away

I want to start the month here, and here’s why…

For most of us, summer is when we are closest to our outdoor self. We have the doors and windows open, we like to be in the garden or out for a walk, and we like to eat outside! During the summer, I can rarely visit our local park or beach without seeing picnics and bbq’s on the go! We’re more in touch with nature, often without even meaning to be.

And then…autumn arrives and we all hurry back indoors. The nights draw in, we get cosy in our fluffy socks and hot chocolate. And slowly, week by week, we lose contact with nature right at the moment the year is asking more of us.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is often when people start to feel the strain.

So this month, we’re going to try something a little radical! We’re going to stay in contact with nature on purpose. We are going to do our best to find little pockets of time to resist the season’s urge to pull us indoors… and see what happens when we do.

Something to try this week

Once a day, for the next seven days, I’d like you to go outside and give the natural world one minute of your genuine attention. Not while checking your phone. Not while mentally responding to emails. Just one real minute of noticing. When I do this, I like to pay attention to how the trees are changing.

The quality of attention, the quality of noticing is what the research keeps pointing to. Nature is trying to give us a nudge. Over time you may like to build on this time, but for now, one minute is enough.

I’ll be doing it too, every morning with my tea in hand, at my back door while the dogs play.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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Hey, I’m Jenn! If you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Every Tuesday morning, I share the Wellness Edit, weekly articles linked to a monthly theme where I share grounded reflections and practical insights that help support the body and mind through the healing power of nature. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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Welcome back to the Your Inner Landscape series, we’ve covered a lot of ground this month. We have explored noticing parts of ourselves that we may have learned to walk past, trying to offer ourselves the same kind of honest attention we would offer another person. In week two, we learned to let feelings move through as weather rather than gripping them as permanent climate. And last week we gently explored how the land and earth around us has been teaching us about our own terrain the whole time, even though we may not have noticed it.

In our final week of this series, I want to bring those ideas together around a single distinction that I think matters more than almost anything else in this kind of work… The difference between tending something and fixing it.

Why fixing doesn’t actually work here

The idea of ‘fixing’ assumes something is broken and needs to be corrected before it’s acceptable. It may sound appealing because it offers some kind of endpoint… Do the work, fix the problem, and move on. But it isn’t always that simple. Our inner landscape doesn’t function like some sort of faulty appliance. It’s a living system, and living systems don’t get fixed once. They get tended to carefully and repeatedly, for as long as they are alive.

Think of your inner landscape as if it were an actual landscape. You don’t weed it once and forget about it. You wouldn’t consider the job done forever after spending a few hours removing all the weeds. We understand that it’s something we need to keep coming back to. Weeds return because of the conditions that produce them. From the wind that carries the seeds to the soil and the sun that supports the growth. These are ongoing conditions, not one time events. Gardeners who spend years nurturing their garden understand that tending is the whole practice.

The same is true of the patterns we have been exploring this month. The old ways of protecting yourself that we noticed in week one of this series didn’t form in a single moment, and they won’t dissolve in one either. This is where a lot of the wellness industry and self improvement culture sets people up to feel like they’re failing. They promise fixed, permanent transformations (usually aesthetically presented in a 6 week package) and then treat the return of an old pattern as evidence that you didn’t do the work. You must have been doing something wrong, rather than as the entirely expected nature of tending anything alive.

What the research actually says about lasting change

Kristin Neff is a psychologist who has spent much of her career studying self-compassion. She has found that people who treat their own setbacks with the same kindness they would offer a friend, instead of their usual, harsh self criticism, are more resilient and they are more motivated to actually change unhelpful patterns. Not only that, they are also less likely to give up entirely after a setback. Sometimes we can wrongly think self criticism will motivate improvement, in practice it often does the complete opposite. It can trigger the same threat response that we discussed in week two. It can make genuine reflection harder, not easier.

The measure of progress isn’t whether the weeds ever stop appearing. It’s how quickly you notice them now, and how much less charged the noticing has become.

What consistent tending actually looks like

Small and frequent steps beats occasional and intense bursts almost every time and in almost every area of health. A few minutes of walking each day beats one 5k run per month. A few minutes of honest noticing most days will do so much more for your wellbeing and your inner landscape over a long period of time instead of one intense session of self reflection followed by months of avoidance. This is the same, simple principle behind why five minutes outside daily changed more in July than one long walk a month would have.

This does not mean you have to start perfectly right away. It might look like returning to the noticing practice we explored in week one and doing that once a week rather than just once and forgetting about it. It might look like one more walk where you pay proper attention to what the land is mirroring back at you. None of this needs to be scheduled. None of this needs to be dramatic. Small, simple changes can be genuinely effective.

A starting practice

Choose one thing from this month that you connected with the most and decide how you’ll keep a small version of it going into next month. Even if you’re starting small, all of these actions will compound over time and support you in your healing journey.

Ask yourself

Here are a couple of questions for you to think about over the next week:

• Where in my life have I been trying to fix something that actually just needs ongoing tending?

• What would it look like to measure progress by how I notice and respond, rather than by whether the difficulty ever fully disappears?

Thank you for spending this month here with me. It’s been a genuinely different kind of writing for me, and I’ve loved sharing it with you. Next month we’re moving on to something a little different…

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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Hey, I'm Jenn! If you're new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Every Tuesday morning, I share the Wellness Edit, weekly articles linked to a monthly theme where I share grounded reflections and practical insights that help support the body and mind through the healing power of nature. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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Welcome back to Your Inner Landscape…

This week I would like us to go back outside, because the two threads of this month, the inner and the outer, are never really separate. There is a whole field of thought built around exactly that idea, and I think it’s worth a proper introduction…

Ecopsychology is an area I’ve become almost obsessed with in recent years. I completed a course on it recently which solidified my love for this topic. The idea has been around for decades but the term was coined back in 1992 (around the time I was starting secondary school!) by a cultural historian called Theodore Roszak. In his book called The Voice of the Earth, Roszak’s main argument was that industrial culture had created what he referred to as a longstanding gulf between the psychological and ecological, treating the mind as something that exists entirely separately from the living world it developed inside. He wasn’t writing as a therapist. He was writing as someone who studied the history of ideas. What he noticed was that Western psychology had spent an entire century building elaborate (sometimes unfounded) theories of the self while almost entirely ignoring the natural environment the self actually evolved within.

That gap was incredibly important to Roszak, he felt that it mattered because he believed that you couldn’t properly heal the mind while treating it as a separate thing to the ecological system it belongs to. In 1995, he went on to co-edit another book, Ecopsychology, Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind in which he brought together therapists, ecologists and respected thinkers from very different backgrounds to one another who had each been exploring similar ideas and doing a dance around the same conclusion but from different directions. What is important to note here is that some of that thinking had already been underway, long before Roszak gave it a name. A psychologist named Robert Greenway had been teaching something he called psychoecology as early as the 1960’s. He would take his students out into the wilderness to study how the mind and nature interact. Although Roszak wasn’t really inventing the idea, he was naming something that enough people were already interested in and already exploring. He simply gave it a shared language.

This month isn’t about introducing you to something wholly new, it’s about helping you to name and give words to something you have most likely already sensed.

Why the outer world mirrors the inner one

Another interesting idea is the one relating to biology… Scientist E.O. Wilson proposed what he called the biophilia hypothesis, the theory that humans carry an innate, evolved pull towards other living systems, because for almost the whole of our history as a species, reading the natural world accurately was a matter of survival. That instinct didn’t switch off when we moved indoors. It simply went quiet from lack of use. This is an idea I can really get on board with… I feel like the more time we spend with nature, the stronger that pull becomes.

A lot of what gets written about in terms of nature and wellbeing stops at calm. A need to feel calm. We all know that time outside lowers cortisol, slows the heart rate, softens the shoulders (I know, I have written about this a lot!). These things are all true, we have explored them at length, particularly in our July series, Healing Through Nature. But Roszak’s point goes much further than this. Nature doesn’t just soothe our nervous systems, it offers a way of understanding the inner world.

Think about the language we already reach for without even noticing. We may say things like ‘I feel drained’, or that something is weighing on us, or even that we need to let things settle. These aren’t just decorative phrases for the sake of it. They are the mind borrowing the logic of the physical world because a separate language for the inner one was never really invented.

A landscape has seasons, and perhaps so do you if you’re honest about it. A landscape has ground worn into a shape by years of the same path being walked, a shortcut across a field that eventually becomes the obvious route. So does your thinking. The paths you walk most often in your own mind, the assumptions you return to, the same worry worn smooth by repetition, work exactly the same way.

What this looks like in practice

Here’s something I’d like you to try this week… Take one walk with a specific intention rather than to clear your head (which was something you may have practised in July, if you’ve been around for a little while). As you walk, notice something in the landscape that may mirror something true about your current inner state. It may be a worn path where you keep returning to the same thought. It may be a tree bent by the wind that’s still standing, having adapted its shape rather than resisting the wind.

You are not looking for a beautifully neat and profound metapahor to write down and forget, you are simply noticing. The way Roszak and other ecopsychologists argued that we’re actually built to notice. Let whatever arises sit with you, alongside the other ideas we have covered this month so far. Listen without immediately judging what you find.

A starting practice

Choose a walk that you can, ideally, return to more than once this week. It may be a local park, a woodland walk or even your own garden. Try to visit a couple of days apart and notice what has changed and what hasn’t. Then ask yourself the same question about your own inner landscape over that same stretch of days. What shifted? What stayed exactly as it was?

Ask yourself

Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself while you’re on your walk

• What in the landscape around me lately has felt like it was quietly describing something about my own inner world?

• What might it be trying to tell me?

Next week is our final week of exploring Your Inner Landscape, we will look at what it actually means to tend your inner landscape rather than trying to fix it all at once.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

P.S. Any links provided are for your interest and to help you discover resources you may be interested in, they are not affiliate links.

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Hey, I'm Jenn! If you're new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Every Tuesday morning, I share the Wellness Edit, weekly articles linked to a monthly theme where I share grounded reflections and practical insights that help support the body and mind through the healing power of nature. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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Last week we began the Your Inner Landscape series, our focus for this month. We started noticing parts of ourselves that we may have learned to walk past. If you spent even a few minutes sitting with that, you may have noticed that something happened almost immediately once you stopped avoiding. Feelings surfaced. Some of them may have felt quite loud.

This week we will begin to explore what to actually do with these feelings if and when they arrive.

There is an idea I keep coming back to. It almost sounds too simple to be useful until you try living by it, even for a few days. Our feelings are like the weather. They move through us. They change throughout the day and over time. Our feelings are not the climate of who we are.

Why we mix the two up

We may not have thought about the difference. We may not have been taught about the difference. If you grew up around big emotional reactions, or around the opposite, emotions that were never allowed to be shown at all, you may be wary of certain emotions. They may feel dangerous. They may feel like something to manage, suppress or feel the need to immediately explain away before anyone notices.

So, when emotions like anger or sadness show up, the instinct isn’t to notice it. The instinct is to try to fix it, or argue with it or even to decide that it means something permanent about you. You may begin to tell yourself, I’m an anxious person or I’m just someone who gets angry easily. That, my friends, is climate language applied to weather.

In therapy sessions, a person-centred approach to listening asks something different of us. Not judgement, not over-analysis, just genuine attention to what’s actually happening here, right now. If we apply that inward, that means letting our feelings arrive, noticing them fully and then trusting the fact that, like all weather, it will pass through us. We just need to stop fighting it.

What this looks like in practice

Okay, let’s see how this looks in real life… the next time you notice a strong feeling rising from within you, try naming it out loud (or in your head, if that feels more comfortable). State it simply and factually. It’s not about saying ‘I’m furious’, instead try something like, there is anger here within me right now. That tiny shift in language creates a small but very real shift in distance. Think of it like this, you are the sky and the weather is moving through you, you are not the storm itself.

Then, and this is the part that most of us skip (mostly because we aren’t used to this practice), stay with this moment just a little longer than feels comfortable. Not to make it more than it is. Not to intensify the moment… Just to actually let it be witnessed rather than allowing it to be rushed past. Weather that gets acknowledged tends to feel like it moves along faster than the weather that gets fought.

A starting practice

Here’s your task for this week… Keep a small piece of note paper somewhere close (I like to use the back of my phone or a notepad that I carry with me. Alternatively, you could use the notes app on your phone, if it’s easier). Each time you feel a strong emotion, note it down by name and roughly how long it actually lasted once you let it be there rather than pushing it away. You may be surprised by what happens. I find that over time, these emotions don’t stay around very long after they have been named, when we stop bracing for impact.

Ask yourself

Here are a couple of questions for you to ask yourself this week:

• Which feeling do I currently treat as climate rather than weather?

• What would change if I trusted it to pass through on its own?

Next week, we will take this outward again and look at what the natural world can teach us about our own terrain.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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Hey, I'm Jenn! If you're new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Every Tuesday morning, I share the Wellness Edit, weekly articles linked to a monthly theme where I share grounded reflections and practical insights that help support the body and mind through the healing power of nature. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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There’s a place I like to go when my head feels like a browser with too many tabs open and none of them are loading properly. It’s a short walk from my house. The walk itself is just about long enough to start quietening my busy mind but it doesn’t quite bring me to peace. When I reach the bench at my local country park and sit, things start to feel different. I sit on that bench and feel a shift. I start to actually feel calmer.

I just sit.

I don’t try to mentally tick off a to-do list.

That’s the thing about nature. It doesn’t fix your to-do list. It doesn’t resolve the conversation you’re dreading. What it does is a little more magical than that…

Your nervous system evolved outside, For most of human history, green space wasn’t a nice thing to have. It was simply where life happened. Our bodies still carry that wiring, even though we have moved away from that way of living, day-to-day. Many of us now spend our time inside buildings, somewhere between a screen and a ceiling. When you step outside, especially somewhere with trees, water, or open sky, your body picks up on cues that say you’re safe. Your nervous system responds to those cues whether you consciously notice them or not.

Skinrin yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, does amazing things for our minds and bodies. Just twenty minutes among trees (that could be something like I do, sitting in a local park) measurably lowers cortisol (the stress hormone), reduces blood pressure and immune system markers shift in our favour. None of this needs extremes, you can leave out the hiking boots! Any kind of green open space will do.

I think part of the reason why connecting with nature can sometimes get overlooked is that, because it’s so simple, it can feel like we’re not doing enough. We are used to being sold the wellness dream: a programme, a plan, a ton of supplements. When in all honesty, the research is telling us the opposite. Sitting near a tree for a few minutes doesn’t feel like it should count as something beneficial for your mental health, so most of us look for something that feels more productive. But your nervous system is not a teacher grading you on effort. It is simply responding to signals, and green space just so happens to send a very clear one.

Here’s where we get a little more specific, because anxiety, low mood, and mental fatigue don’t all respond to the same lever. Below, I’ve given a list of simple things to support you, depending on what you need:

For anxious energy

• Move outside for a few minutes: instead of sitting with this kind of energy, go for a short walk. Walking engages the same fight or flight energy anxiety produces, giving it somewhere to go instead of just circling your chest.

• Find some water: this can be a river, lake, or even a local fountain. I actually love sitting in my garden listening to my neighbours pond and water feature. Being near water seems to shift the nervous system into a calmer state faster than most other environments.

For a low or heavy mood

• Get outside within an hour of waking: (the quicker the better, as this will also help to regulate your circadian rhythm) you only need a few minutes for this one to be effective. Morning light plays an important role in regulating the mood chemistry your brain relies on throughout the day.

• Notice one living thing: this could be something like watching a bird as it moves nearby or spending a few minutes watching a tree moving in the breeze or how it has changed colour over time. I am lucky enough to have a beautiful, old oak tree outside my bedroom window. When I wake up, I will lay for a few minutes just looking at how it has changed. I have done this for over 20 years… I feel like I know that tree quite well! This one may sound small but it isn’t. Attention on something alive outside your own head interrupts rumination, even briefly.

For mental fatigue

• Look at something green and unfocused: this could be something like a distant tree line or even grass…you only need to do this for a couple of minutes but not only will it give your eyes a soothing break, it gives your directed attention a genuine chance to rest.

• Leave your phone behind: okay, so I’m pushing my luck with this one! I’m not going to ask too much of you. Just a few minutes of uninterrupted time outside, without your phone, changes how restorative that time actually is.

Remember: none of this is about becoming an outdoorsy person if that’s just not you. I’m not suggesting you take up trail running or buy the fleece with all the zips. What I’m proposing is much smaller than that. It’s about noticing that your body already knows how to settle itself, and that nature is one of the fastest, cheapest ways to remind it. If thirty seconds with your face turned up to the actual sky, instead of turned towards a screen, is all you can commit to then that in itself is restorative enough.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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Hey, I'm Jenn! If you're new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Every Tuesday morning, I share the Wellness Edit, weekly articles linked to a monthly theme where I share grounded reflections and practical insights that help support the body and mind through the healing power of nature. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

Last month was our Healing Through Nature series, and honestly, it was one of my favourites to share with you. We spent time outside with our feet on the ground, simply reconnecting with nature. If you worked through some of the practices I shared, you’ll know that nature has an amazing way of settling our bodies even before the mind has caught up.

This month we are going to turn that same quality of attention inwards and take a closer look at our emotions. Paid subscribers, your Growth Guide for August is already in your inbox, it was delivered on Sunday 2nd. If you haven’t already done so, go take a look! If you are not already a paid subscriber and would like access to the growing library of Growth Guides, you’ll find an upgrade button at the end of this article.

In counselling, one of the first things you learn has very little to do with technique. It’s more about how you listen. We are not trying to fix. We are not trying to advise. We are not trying to fill gaps of silence because it feels uncomfortable. We are there to actually hear what is being shared. What’s there, without rushing to change it.

I’m sure, if we’re honest, most of us can say that we have never listened to ourselves in that way.

What an inner landscape actually is

Try to think of your inner world the way you would think of an actual landscape… Perhaps your favourite nature walk. There will be parts you know well, the path you walk each time you visit without even thinking. Then there are parts that feel unfamiliar, maybe they are a little overgrown or have been recently cut back. None of it needs fixing as you walk by, you just need to notice it.

Self-awareness works in a similar way. It isn’t about having a perfect understanding of yourself. It’s closer to that walk in nature. It’s about paying attention to unfamiliar territory. You may move a little more slowly while you find your feet. You begin to pay attention to what is there, directly around you, rather than simply considering what you’d expect to find. When you’re out in nature, you wouldn’t judge the ground for being uneven so handle yourself the same.

Going back to counselling again, just for a minute… this idea has a name and we call it Unconditional Positive Regard. It means to offer someone acceptance without judgement and without any conditions attached. Not because everything they do is okay but because a person is more able to grow and change when they feel safe and not judged. It is usually referred to as something one person offers another, but this month, I want us to try offering it to ourselves. It may not be easy and will most likely take a little time and practice but I promise you’ll feel better for it.

Why this matters

Many of the unhealthy or unhelpful patterns we carry are not there due to cruelty (although, I am fully aware that some are…and if that’s you, I’m sorry). Some were created by self-protection. A child who learns to be quiet to avoid upsetting an already stretched and overwhelmed parent isn’t broken, they are trying to adapt sensibly to what is in front of them. The trouble is that the adaption may very well outlive its usefulness but no-one teaches us how to go back and update it.

It is incredibly hard to update a pattern you refuse to look at honestly. And you can’t look at something honestly if you are busy judging it. It will simply become a vicious cycle that is too difficult to break, and in turn makes healing that much harder.

A starting practice

I’d like to give you something small to work with this week, something that won’t take long and hopefully won’t create overwhelm. If you’ve been around Naturally Healing for a while, you’ll know we play the long game… we’re not here for quick fixes and trends.

Set aside a few minutes this week, even ten minutes will be enough. Find somewhere quiet, ideally where you can still connect with nature. Feeling the outside world close by is important, so even sitting by an open window will be enough.

Gently ask yourself… what have I been avoiding looking at lately? The aim of this is not to try and solve it. You just want to notice what is there, in the same way you would notice a hill in the distance while you’re on a walk. You don’t need to climb that hill today, just know it is there.

If it helps, make notes in a journal with what comes up. It can be as messy as you like, you don’t need to edit or make it sound polished… this is just for you. If nothing comes to mind, that’s okay. That in itself is information too.

Ask yourself

I’ll leave you with a couple more questions for you to ask yourself this week.

• Where in my life have I been offering myself conditions instead of acceptance?

• What would it feel like, even for one week, to meet myself without them?

I’ll be back next Tuesday to look at what to actually do with the feelings that surface once you start listening. In the meantime, be patient with the terrain. It’s been there a long time. It isn’t going anywhere.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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On Tuesday, August begins inside Naturally Healing.

July felt like something opening up as we took our nervous systems outside and let the natural world do what it has always been designed to do. This month is going to feel a little different, we are turning that same attention inward. I want to take things a little closer to home.

Not as a retreat from the world we just spent a month reconnecting with, but as a next step in self awareness. Self awareness is not indulgent, it is one of the oldest and most reliable forms of healing available to us, and most of us walk past our own inner terrain every day without really letting ourselves look.

I’ve spent much of this year on a journey, I’m training to be a counsellor (this will take a while to fully complete) alongside doing further study in ecopsychology. Both of these things have been reshaping how I think about wellbeing. This month is really the first time I’ve let that training properly shape what I write here, and I’m genuinely a little nervous sharing it… in the good way.

We will look at what it actually means to listen to yourself without immediately trying to fix what you find. We will explore why feelings behave more like the weather than climate, and we will also explore what changes once you learn to name these feelings instead of trying to fight them. We will, of course, bring the natural world along for the journey this month because the earth around us often mirrors our inner terrain, even if we haven’t noticed it yet. And finally, we will close the month exploring the difference between fixing something and tending to it.

As a free subscriber, you will gain a deeper understanding of your inner terrain through our weekly articles…sent out every Tuesday.

Paid subscribers have access to the Growth Guide that accompanies this series, a detailed workbook to support you in your healing journey. The August Growth Guide is your practical companion for the whole month. Each week, as a new article arrives, you will have somewhere to take that understanding and make it personal.

It’s set up in a similar way to the July Growth Guide. Inside you will find seven practices, each with the thinking behind why it works and a journalling prompt to help you notice what shifts. You have four weekly check-ins to keep you connected throughout the month. There are four inner landscape journal pages with themed prompts, a personal map page to help you build a picture of your own terrain. There is also a resources section for exploring further. As always, there is an end of month reflection to help you see what has (or hasn’t) changed.

In true Naturally Healing fashion, this is honest without being heavy. It is designed for someone who wants to understand themselves better without it turning into another task on a never-ending to-do list.

Take a look through the guide over the next couple of days just to get a feel for the guide, so that when Tuesday’s article arrives you already feel grounded and ready to get started.

This is a slightly different kind of month for Naturally Healing, and I am genuinely glad you are here for it. Self awareness is one of those things that sounds almost too simple to matter... until you actually try meeting yourself without judgement for the first time and realise how rarely you’ve ever done it. I think August might surprise you too.

Your download is just below.

Jenn x

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Here is the final installment of the Healing Through Nature series. I have really enjoyed writing this series and sharing practical tools that you could use throughout the month and beyond.

We started the month with the science behind the power of harnessing nature to help us heal. We then moved onto how the body heals differently outdoors, especially when you pay attention to it. The most important part of that was working with nature as a partner in the healing process. Then, last week we got a little more practical with specific somatic healing practices that you can take outside with you, anytime you need them. My favourite is always the barefoot grounding… I will remove my shoes at any opportunity! I’m also a huge fan of the slow walk, I find it so calming and peaceful. I can feel my shoulders drop almost immediately. If you tried one of the practices, let me know in the comments how it went.

This week I want to focus on something a little different. I would like to close the month by exploring and asking you what nature does to your life when you let it in.

I have been a huge fan of walking outside for as long as I can remember (confession: I have never really caught the running bug!). Whether it is on my own or with my dogs, Poppy and Charlie and usually with a cup of tea in hand, it’s my go-to when I need peace and clarity. Some of my best ideas come to me when I’m walking. Slow, steady walking outside isn’t dramatic or dynamic but it is intentional. It’s not something you can specifically point to and identify a moment that changed everything. It’s quieter than that. It’s calmer than that. It’s more cumulative. Like water finding its way through stone, it doesn’t happen all at once, it’s steady over time.

More than anything else, nature helps to give me perspective. The kind of perspective that arrives when you aren’t trying to force it. There is something about being in nature that helps to bring perspective when I may not be able to see before I step outside for a quiet walk. Something that may have felt huge at the beginning of the walk, may not feel quite so overwhelming by the time I get home. It’s not that the thing becomes unimportant, its just feels a little smaller and more often than not, more manageable.

I think sometimes, especially considering how modern society moves, we can underestimate how much of our anxiety is a product of scale. We may spend a lot of time inside the detail of our own lives that we can lose sense of the larger context we are held within. Nature has the power to restore that sense without asking a single thing of you. You just have to meet it where it is.

I also think we underestimate the true cost of not being outside. TJ Power states in his book, The Dose Effect, that ‘for most of human history, we spent 85% of our time outside. Whereas, in the modern world, we are spending just 7% of our time outside’. There is a very quiet accumulation of hours and days spent entirely indoors. We can sit for hours under artificial light while staring at screens. We breathe in recirculated air and often have a constant hum of unnatural noise surrounding us. Add to all that the relentless to-do lists and forward momentum of everything that needs to be done. Our nervous systems do not collapse under all this strain, we have survived as a species for over 300,000 years so after all this time our nervous systems have learned to adapt. With all the pressure of modern living, our nervous system learns to function in a constant, low-grade state of alert. Helping us manage, cope and get through everyday stresses. We then come to accept this low-grade state as normal because it is what we have experienced for so long.

Spending time in nature isn’t an instant fix. It won’t take us out of that low-grade state after one walk in the woods. But it will cause a little disruption. It will interrupt the pattern. And a little interruption that is repeated often enough will slowly begin to become something else. We have the power to create new patterns. We can create the environment that helps our bodies to understand what it feels like to soften. And when that happens, that’s when the magic of nature really kicks in. We can train our bodies, not only to soften, but to seek the thing that helps us to soften.

This is what I want for you… Not a dramatic overhaul of your entire life or some fancy (often impossible) new routine. Just a small and steady accumulation of moments spent outside with Mother Nature paying real attention to the beauty around you.

Whether this is:

• Taking a few minutes in the garden or by a window before the day begins

• Sitting somewhere green during your lunchbreak

• Taking a slow walk without any distractions

They may feel small and insignificant at first but over time these tiny changes compound. They are teaching your nervous system what safe feels like… And a nervous system that knows what safe feels like is one that can heal.

I want to take a moment to thank you for joining me for this series, it has been one of my favourites! Partly because I find the research into nature-based healing absolutely fascinating and partly because it is something I live by and believe in whole-heartedly. I have never viewed the connection between the natural world and the health of the human body and mind as a wellness trend, I have been into this before it was trendy! Nature is a powerful healer and I think in the world we are living in right now, reconnecting with it is one of the most radical things we can do.

Looking ahead… During August, we will spend the month exploring Your Inner Landscape; exploring what it means to truly understand our inner world and our emotional landscape.

If you missed any of the articles from this series, you can find them here:

For paid subscribers, there is also a Growth Guide to accompany this series:

Paid subscribers: Your next Growth Guide, for August, will be sent out to you on Sunday 2nd August.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

P.S. Any links provided are for your interest and to help you discover resources you may be interested in, they are not affiliate links.

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Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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Over the last couple of weeks we have been exploring what nature does to the body and why it does it. I hope you have found it useful so far. But this week is different. This week is about actually going outside and doing something with that understanding. So that’s what we’re doing.

None of what follows is complicated. No equipment. No specific location. No prior experience with anything somatic required. What is required is that you actually go outside. That bit matters.

Take your shoes off.

Find a patch of grass, soil, sand, stone... anything natural. Remove your shoes and socks and just stand there for a moment before you do anything else. Feel the temperature beneath your feet. The texture. The way the ground pushes back up against you. This is earthing (you can watch a fantastic documentary here, I have shared this before and probably will again!), and it is genuinely one of the oldest regulatory practices we have access to. Research suggests direct contact with the earth reduces cortisol, lowers inflammatory markers, and nudges the autonomic nervous system toward its rest and repair state. The sensory receptors in the soles of the feet send signals directly to the brain. Grounded signals. Presence signals. For a nervous system that has spent the day hovering somewhere between last week and next Thursday, that is not nothing.

Five minutes. That’s it. You don’t need to do anything else while you’re standing there.

Walk. Slowly though.

Not mindfully slowly in a self-conscious, am-I-doing-this-right way. Just... unhurried. Half your normal pace, arms loose, gaze wide and soft rather than fixed on the ground ahead of you. Let your attention follow your senses rather than your thoughts. The air temperature. Your footsteps. The light. Whatever you can smell. When your mind pulls you back to the thing you forgot to reply to, fine. Just come back to your feet.

Slow bilateral movement helps the nervous system complete what researchers call incomplete stress cycles. Stress literally builds in the body and needs movement to discharge. Walking in nature does two things at once and the effect is different from any treadmill or busy pavement. The slower the better, honestly.

Ten minutes. That’s genuinely enough.

Breathe outside.

You don’t need a meditation cushion or a YouTube video for this. Just go outside and breathe deliberately in the actual air around you. In through your nose for four counts. Out for six or eight, whichever comes without force. The extended exhale stimulates the vagus nerve and slows your heart rate. And outdoors, with the sound of birds or wind or even just the ambient sounds of a garden around you, something extra happens. The brain reads natural sound as safety. That combination... the breath and the sound together... does something neither quite achieves alone.

If counting feels fussy, just make the out-breath longer than the in-breath. Simple as that.

Use your senses properly.

Stop wherever you are outside and move through them. Five things you can actually see, not a quick scan but a real look. Four things you can feel, the air against your skin, the ground or seat beneath you, the temperature of your hands. Three sounds. Two smells. One taste, or just something you notice in the air.

Slow down between each one. The point is not to list them, it’s to actually notice them. When the body is fully occupied with what is real and present, the nervous system goes quiet. Not because you forced it. Because there is genuinely nothing threatening in this particular moment and you are, for once, actually here for it.

Sit. Do nothing.

This is the hardest one for most people and I include myself in that. To go outside without a purpose. Without a podcast or a task or somewhere to be. To just sit near something living, a tree, a garden, a patch of sky with birds moving through it, and let your gaze go soft.

Not meditating. Not journalling. Not achieving anything at all.

Just sitting.

Five minutes of that is not a small thing. Biologically it is actually quite significant. We just don’t tend to believe things that feel that simple.

I know how some of this sounds. I know that standing barefoot in the garden for five minutes and calling it medicine feels a bit... much. But the body does not require drama to respond. It requires attention. And the natural world is exceptionally good at helping you find yours.

Next week we close out July with something more reflective. But this week, if you can manage even one of these outside, start there. That’s enough..

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Somatic Healing, Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

Last week we looked at the science of what nature does to the body... the cortisol reduction, the immune response, the way the nervous system shifts when you move through a green space. This week I want to go a little deeper, into something that I think is often missed in conversations about nature and wellbeing.

Because spending time outdoors is one thing. But what happens when you bring your body’s attention with you?

Most of us go outside still carrying the inside with us. We walk while running through a mental to-do list. We stand in the garden while composing an email in our heads. We are physically present in a natural space but somatically... somewhere else entirely. And that distinction matters more than we tend to realise.

The word somatic simply means of the body. When we talk about somatic healing, we are really talking about something quite simple: learning to listen to what the body is already telling you. The tight jaw you carry from the moment you wake up. The shallow breathing you don’t notice until someone points it out. The way your shoulders creep toward your ears by mid-afternoon. These things are not random, and they are not just inconveniences. They are information. They are your nervous system communicating, and when we learn to receive that communication rather than override it, something begins to change.

Nature makes that listening easier. And there is a reason for it.

When we are indoors, particularly in the kind of screen-heavy, task-oriented environments that most of us inhabit for the majority of our waking hours, our attention is almost constantly directed outward and forward. What needs to happen next. What someone has just said. What we need to respond to. The body, in those moments, tends to become a vehicle for getting things done rather than a living system with its own signals and needs. We stop noticing what is happening inside us because our attention is permanently pointed somewhere else.

Step outside into a natural environment and something quietly shifts. The visual field opens up. The sounds change quality. The air moves differently against the skin. And because the brain is registering these cues as safe, as I wrote about last week, the nervous system begins to settle. And when the nervous system settles, the body’s own signals become audible again. You notice that you have been holding your breath. You feel the tension that has been living in your hips. You become aware of something you can only really describe as your body exhaling.

This is interoception at work. Interoception is the ability to sense and interpret what is happening inside the body... temperature, tension, hunger, ease, the subtle quality of your own emotional state as it lives in physical sensation. Research tells us that people who experience chronic stress often lose connection with their body’s signals over time. Stress builds quietly, unnoticed, until it becomes overwhelming, precisely because the body’s early messages have been tuned out for so long. Rebuilding that awareness is one of the most important and underappreciated parts of genuine healing.

And nature, it turns out, is one of the most supportive environments in which to do exactly that.

There is something about being in a natural space that makes the body feel less like something to push through and more like something to inhabit. Researchers studying attention restoration theory describe it as a quality of fascination that natural environments produce... a gentle, effortless kind of attention that rests the mind without switching it off. In that state of soft noticing, the body becomes more available. More present. More readable, both to you and to itself.

This is quite different from going outside for exercise, which, while valuable in its own way, is often another form of task completion. Another thing to get done, another box to tick, another metric to improve. What I am talking about is something quieter than that. It is going outside with the intention of arriving in your body rather than achieving something with it.

In practical terms this might look like walking slowly enough to feel your feet on the ground. Sitting outside and noticing where your body holds its tension today, and where it finds ease. Letting your gaze soften and widen rather than fixing on a point. Feeling the temperature of the air against your skin. Noticing the quality of your own breath without trying to change it. These are not dramatic practices. They are simply ways of bringing your body’s attention back to itself, in an environment that is actively supporting it to do so.

One of the things I find most quietly profound about this is that the body already knows how to heal. It has always known. The nervous system is not broken, it is responding to the conditions it has been placed in. And when we change those conditions, even briefly, even imperfectly, the body responds. It begins, in its own time and in its own way, to complete the cycles it has been holding open. To release what it has been bracing against. To return toward the steadiness that is, underneath everything, its natural state.

Nature does not fix us. But it gives us back the conditions in which we can feel what is actually there, and that... is where healing begins.

Next week we will look at specific somatic practices you can take outside with you, simple, accessible things that bring all of this to life in a very practical way. And if you are a paid subscriber, your July Growth Guide is waiting for you if you haven’t already worked through it... it ties everything this month together beautifully.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Somatic Healing, Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

There is a moment, if you have ever walked into a woodland or stood at the edge of the sea, where something in your body shifts before your mind has had a chance to catch up. Your shoulders drop a little. Your breath finds its own rhythm. The tight, braced quality that you had been carrying without even noticing it begins, very slowly, to ease.

We tend to dismiss that feeling as simple pleasure. A nice walk. A bit of fresh air. Something to do at the weekend before the real week begins again. But what is actually happening in those moments is far more significant than that, and the science behind it has been building quietly for decades, waiting for the rest of us to take it seriously.

July feels like the right time to slow down and really look at this.

The Japanese have a practice called shinrin-yoku, which translates, quite beautifully, as forest bathing. It has nothing to do with walking fast, counting steps, or achieving anything at all. It simply means spending time in the presence of trees, moving slowly, breathing deeply, and letting the forest do what the forest does. Japanese researchers began studying its effects in the 1980s, and what they found was striking. Time spent in woodland environments measurably reduced cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. It lowered blood pressure and heart rate. It increased the activity of natural killer cells, the immune cells responsible for fighting infection and, in some research, certain types of cancer. And these changes were not subtle. They were physiologically significant, and they were consistent.

What is perhaps most interesting is that the benefits do not require long stretches of time or dramatic landscapes. Studies have shown that even twenty to thirty minutes in a green space, a park, a garden, a quiet stretch of towpath, produces meaningful shifts in the stress response. The body does not need wilderness to begin unwinding. It needs nature. And it responds to it with a reliability that no pill or supplement can quite match.

Part of what drives this is something called the orienting response. When we move through a natural environment, our nervous system enters a particular kind of alert state that is entirely different from the vigilance we carry in busy, urban, or screen-heavy environments. In nature, the eyes soften and widen, taking in peripheral information rather than fixing sharply on a point. The brain registers the environment as safe and navigable. The parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for rest, digestion, and repair, is gently activated. You are not doing this consciously. Your nervous system is doing it for you, because it is responding to cues it has been recognising for far longer than modern life has existed.

There is also something in the sensory quality of natural environments that the body finds inherently regulating. Natural soundscapes, birdsong, wind, moving water, the sound of leaves, are processed differently by the brain than artificial noise. Research has shown that the brain interprets natural sound as a signal of safety, because in evolutionary terms, a birdsong-filled environment meant no predators, no threat, no reason to remain on high alert. Our nervous systems are, in this sense, ancient. They respond to cues that predate us by millions of years, and those cues have not lost their power simply because we now spend most of our lives indoors.

There is something almost quietly sad about that when you sit with it. We have built lives that are in many ways remarkable, full of comfort and convenience and connection, but we have also, without entirely meaning to, cut ourselves off from the one environment our bodies were designed to inhabit. And then we wonder why we are tired. Why we feel vaguely on edge even when nothing is wrong. Why the weekend never quite seems to restore us the way we hoped it would.

Nature is not a supplement to a well-regulated life. For most of human history, it was the context in which a well-regulated life was possible at all.

I want to be clear that this is not about dramatic changes or long retreats or any kind of expensive wellness practice. It is about something much simpler and much more available than that. A short walk somewhere green before the day gets loud. Five minutes in the garden with a cup of tea. Sitting near an open window and letting birdsong come in. These are not small, inconsequential things. They are, in biological terms, medicine. And they have been available to us all along.

This month at Naturally Healing, we are going deeper into what it actually means to heal through nature. Not as a concept, but as a lived, felt, physical practice. Over the coming weeks we will be looking at how the body responds to natural environments in ways the thinking mind cannot replicate, the somatic practices you can take outside with you today, and what begins to shift when you start treating time in nature not as a luxury but as a genuine part of how you care for yourself.

If you are a paid subscriber, your July Growth Guide will have been delivered to your inbox on Sunday 5th July and it is going to give you something beautiful and practical to work with throughout the month. If you have been thinking about joining us as a paid subscriber, July feels like a genuinely lovely place to start.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Somatic Healing, Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

Tomorrow, July begins inside Naturally Healing.

And if June felt like something clicking into place around your energy and the rhythms your body has always been running on, this month is going to feel like something opening up altogether. The kind of opening that happens when you step outside and let the natural world do what it has always been designed to do.

June was about your energy. About understanding that the way you move through your days is not a matter of willpower or discipline but of biology, pattern, and learning to work with your body rather than push past it. If that month gave you a new way of seeing yourself, I think this one is going to take you somewhere that feels even more grounded.

This month, we are going outside.

Not as a metaphor. Actually, physically, outside.

Because nature is not a backdrop to wellbeing. It is one of the oldest and most reliable forms of healing available to us, and most of us walk past it every day without really letting it land. This month at Naturally Healing we are going to change that.

We will look at what the natural world actually does to the body at a biological level, the research is genuinely surprising and I cannot wait to share it with you. We will explore how the body heals differently outdoors when you bring your full attention with you, rather than simply passing through on the way somewhere else. We will get into the somatic practices you can take outside today, simple, accessible things that work with your nervous system rather than demanding more from it. And we will close the month somewhere quiet and personal, with the question of what begins to shift when nature becomes a genuine, regular part of how you care for yourself.

Every Tuesday throughout July, The Wellness Edit will be building on this thread. Week by week, the picture will deepen. But before any of that arrives in your inbox, I wanted to get this into your hands.

Because as a paid member, you do not just get the articles.

You get the guide that runs alongside them.

The July Growth Guide is your practical companion for the whole month. Each week, as a new article arrives, you will have somewhere to take that understanding and make it personal. Your own relationship with nature. Your own body’s responses. Your own quiet healing.

Inside you will find seven outdoor practices, each with the science behind why it works and a journalling prompt to help you notice what shifts. You will find four weekly check-ins to keep you connected across the month, four nature journal pages with themed prompts, a personal nature prescription page to build a picture of what works for you, seasonal notes on what July specifically offers the nervous system, a resources section for going deeper, and an end of month reflection to help you see what has quietly changed.

It is practical without being prescriptive, and designed for someone who wants to feel better without adding more pressure to an already full life.

I would suggest having a gentle read through today, just to get a feel for the shape of it, so that when Tuesday’s first article arrives you already feel grounded and ready to go a little deeper.

This community continues to grow in the most genuinely lovely way and I am really glad you are here for this one. Nature is one of those things that sounds almost too simple to be taken seriously as medicine... until you realise how much the research says otherwise. I think July might surprise you.

Your download is just below.

Jenn x

Subscribe now

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Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

If you have ever pushed hard through a long stretch, held a lot together, carried other people’s needs alongside your own, and then suddenly found yourself on the other side of it, you will know the feeling I mean. It is not quite relief, although relief is part of it. It is more like your nervous system slowly remembering that it is allowed to put something down.

I am writing this at one of those moments. My GCSE students have just sat their final exams and left school, and after months of revision sessions and last-minute questions and the particular kind of emotional weight that comes with genuinely caring whether young people are okay, there is a stillness settling in that I had almost forgotten was possible. The summer holidays are not far behind. And for the first time in a long while, I can feel myself beginning to exhale.

It feels like a good moment to talk about what we have been building towards all month.

The view from here

We started June by asking why so many of us are tired even when we have done nothing obviously wrong. We talked about ultradian rhythms and the cost of overriding our biology, about the hidden drains that nobody puts on a to-do list, about the difference between collapsing in front of a screen and genuinely recovering. And underneath all of it has been a quieter question, one I think is worth naming directly now that we are at the end.

What would it actually feel like to stop running on empty?

Not as a fantasy, not as something that requires a completely different life or a personality transplant or a dramatic restructuring of everything you do. But as a real, lived experience. Something you could actually feel in your body on an ordinary Tuesday.

I think most of us have forgotten that this is even possible. We have normalised the depletion so thoroughly that functioning while exhausted has started to feel like just...being an adult. Like this is simply what life requires of us and the people who seem to have more energy are either lying or have circumstances we do not.

But that is not quite true. And I think somewhere underneath the tiredness, most of us already know that.

What sustainable actually means

Sustainable productivity is one of those phrases that can sound like it belongs on a motivational poster and mean very little in practice. So I want to be specific about what I actually mean by it, because I think the real version is both simpler and more radical than it is usually presented.

It does not mean doing less, although sometimes it does mean that. It does not mean a perfect morning routine or a colour-coded calendar or waking up before the rest of your household to claim an hour of silence, although if those things work for you then wonderful. What it means, in the most straightforward terms I can find, is this: living and working in a way that leaves you with something still in the tank at the end of the day. Not running so close to empty so consistently that any additional demand, any unexpected stress, any moment that requires you to dig a little deeper, finds nothing there.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

And it is worth asking honestly whether that is currently true for you. Not on your best days, not during the holidays or the quiet patches, but on an ordinary week in an ordinary month. Is there anything left? Or are you arriving at the weekend already hoping the next week will somehow be easier, and finding that it rarely is?

The things that actually help

Across this month we have covered a lot of ground, and I want to bring it back to something concrete before we close. Because awareness without application tends to just add another layer of guilt to the pile, and that is the last thing anyone needs.

So here is what the research and my own experience keep coming back to, distilled as simply as I can manage it.

Protect your peak. Whatever your sharpest window is, the time of day when thinking feels most natural and focus comes most easily, guard it. Do not fill it with emails and administration and the things that could happen at any time. Save it for the work that actually requires you to be present.

Name the invisible drains. Decision fatigue, context switching, emotional labour...none of these show up on a calendar but all of them cost you something real. Knowing where your energy is actually going is the first step to making more intentional choices about it.

Let rest be real. Not scrolling, not collapsing, not simply the absence of work. Something that genuinely restores you, however small and however simple. A cup of tea and a book. A garden and two dogs and nowhere particular to be. Whatever it is for you, let it be non-negotiable.

And perhaps most importantly...stop waiting until things calm down. Things do not tend to calm down on their own. The rest has to be built in, not bolted on afterwards.

The second half of the year

We are at the halfway point, which feels like the right moment to acknowledge something. If you have been reading along since March, you have spent four months quietly learning the language of your own body. The nervous system, cortisol, your gut, your energy rhythms...these are not separate topics. They are different windows into the same thing, which is the remarkable, complicated, endlessly patient system that carries you through your life and asks surprisingly little in return.

What it asks for is not perfection. It is not a complete lifestyle overhaul or a commitment to habits you will keep for approximately eleven days before real life intervenes. It is simply to be noticed. To be worked with rather than against. To be given, every now and then, what it is actually asking for.

The summer ahead, for me, feels like an opportunity to do exactly that. To let the mental load of the last few months genuinely dissolve rather than simply go quiet for a few weeks. To be in my garden, and read my books, and walk my dogs, and remember what it feels like to not be running.

I hope you find your version of that too. Whatever it looks like, whatever shape it takes in your particular life...I hope you find it.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Somatic Healing, Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

At some point, most of us absorbed the idea that rest is something you earn. That it sits at the end of a productive day as a reward for having done enough, and that until you have done enough, stopping is a kind of failure. It is one of the most quietly damaging ideas our culture has handed us, and it is worth unpicking, because it is almost certainly costing you more than you realise.

The irony is that most people who feel guilty about resting are not actually resting very much at all. They are collapsing. There is a significant difference between the two, and once you understand it, a lot of things about why you never quite feel recovered start to make a lot more sense.

The collapse trap

Here is what a typical evening looks like for a lot of people. You finish the day exhausted, you sit down, you pick up your phone. An hour passes, maybe two. You have scrolled through things you will not remember tomorrow, half-watched something, responded to a few messages, and somewhere in there told yourself you were resting. Then you go to bed later than you intended, sleep fitfully, and wake up already behind yourself.

This is not rest. This is collapse with a screen in front of it.

And the reason it does not restore you is that genuine rest requires the nervous system to actually downregulate, to move out of the low-level activation that most of us carry throughout the day and into a state of genuine safety and ease. Passive screen consumption does not do that. In fact, the blue light, the unpredictable scroll of information, the way social media is specifically designed to keep your attention slightly stimulated and slightly uncertain, actively works against it. You are not recovering in those hours. You are just pausing.

Research from the University of Gothenburg found that heavy evening screen use was associated not just with poorer sleep quality but with higher levels of mental fatigue the following day, even when total sleep time remained the same. The problem is not the hours in bed. It is what the brain is doing in the hours before.

What rest actually is

Real rest is not simply the absence of work. It is the presence of something that actively restores you, and crucially, that thing is different for everyone.

Psychologist Saundra Dalton-Smith has written extensively about what she calls the seven types of rest, the idea that we need more than just physical recovery, that mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social, and spiritual rest are all distinct needs that can be depleted and replenished independently. You can sleep eight hours and still be emotionally exhausted if you have spent the day holding space for other people’s struggles. You can have a quiet day and still feel mentally depleted if your mind has been running at full capacity without a single moment of genuine stillness.

Understanding which type of rest you actually need on any given day is more useful than simply trying to do less. Because sometimes doing less is not the answer. Sometimes what you need is to do something different...something that feeds you rather than drains you, that asks something of you in a way that feels good rather than costly.

What it looks like in practice

For me, one of the most restorative things I do is also one of the smallest. Every day, without much ceremony, I make a cup of tea, I get cosy, and I read for a little while. It does not need to be long. It does not need to be anything particularly improving or ambitious. It is just a moment that belongs entirely to me, where nothing is being asked of me and my only job is to follow a story somewhere quiet.

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But there is something about the deliberateness of it, the choosing to stop, the warmth of the mug, the unhurried pace of reading rather than scrolling, that does something genuinely restorative that an equivalent amount of time on my phone simply does not.

At the weekends, rest now for me often looks like my garden. I have been quietly building a Japanese maple garden, collecting different varieties of acer over the last few weeks, and there is something about the slow, unhurried work of tending to them that I find deeply settling. Nineteen trees now, each one slightly different, each one requiring a particular kind of attention that is gentle and present rather than urgent or demanding. Charlie and Poppy potter around nearby, doing their own version of nothing very much, and for that stretch of time the mental load of the week just... lifts. Not because I have solved anything or achieved anything particularly measurable. Simply because I have been somewhere peaceful, in my body, in the moment, without an agenda.

That is rest. Not the absence of activity, but the presence of something that genuinely replenishes.

The guilt piece

I want to say something about the guilt, because I think it stops a lot of people from resting even when they know they need to.

If you are someone who carries a lot of responsibility, for other people, for your work, for the many things that would quietly unravel if you stopped holding them together, rest can feel like a luxury you have not quite earned yet. There is always something else that could be done. There is always someone else’s need sitting just ahead of your own.

But here is what I have come to understand, and what the research consistently supports. Rest is not a reward for productivity. It is a precondition for it. The version of you that has genuinely recovered is more patient, more creative, more present, and more capable than the version running on empty, every single time. Resting is not stepping away from your responsibilities. It is how you remain able to meet them.

You are not lazy for needing to stop. You are human. And humans were never designed to run without recovery.

A gentle invitation

This week, rather than trying to overhaul your evenings or restructure your weekends, I just want to invite you to notice one thing. Is there something in your life, however small, that genuinely restores you? Not something that simply fills time, but something that leaves you feeling more like yourself afterwards?

If there is, protect it. Give it space. Let it be non-negotiable, not because you have earned it, but because you need it. And if you cannot think of anything straight away, that in itself is worth sitting with...because everyone deserves to have an answer to that question.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Practitioner. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

There is a version of exhaustion that makes complete sense. The kind that follows a big deadline, a broken night’s sleep, or a week where everything happened at once. You know where it came from, you know what it cost you, and you know roughly what you need to recover.

Then there is the other kind.

The kind that accumulates so quietly and so gradually that by the time you notice it, you cannot quite trace it back to anything specific. You have not done anything particularly dramatic. Nothing has gone obviously wrong. And yet somewhere between Monday morning and Thursday afternoon you have become a person who is running almost entirely on empty, snapping at the people you love, staring at a task you would normally find straightforward and feeling absolutely nothing.

This is the exhaustion that nobody talks about enough. Not because it is rare, but because it is invisible. It does not show up on a to-do list. It does not have a name on your calendar. It is the residue of everything you did that did not get counted.

The decision you didn’t know you were making

By the time most people sit down to do what they would consider their actual work, they have already made dozens of decisions. What to wear, what to eat, how to respond to that message, whether to bring something up or let it go, how to handle the thing that happened yesterday that still has not quite resolved itself. Small decisions, most of them, but decisions nonetheless, and the brain does not really distinguish between a small decision and a large one in terms of the energy it uses to make it.

Researchers call this decision fatigue, and it is one of the most well-documented and least discussed forms of cognitive depletion. A landmark study following Israeli judges found that the quality of their decisions deteriorated significantly across the course of a day, with prisoners appearing before the court later in the session far less likely to be granted parole than those seen first thing in the morning. Not because the judges were bad at their jobs, but because the cumulative weight of decision-making across the day had quietly eroded their capacity for nuanced thought.

Teaching comes with a particular version of this that I think is worth naming honestly. From the moment you walk through the door, you are pulling in multiple directions at once. There are thirty young people in a room who each need something slightly different from you. There are colleagues and emails and logistics and pastoral concerns sitting alongside the actual business of teaching your subject. Every interaction requires a micro-decision about how to respond, how to pitch it, how much to push and how much to hold back. By lunchtime, the decision-making tank is often closer to empty than most teachers would feel comfortable admitting.

The cost of context switching

Alongside decision fatigue sits something equally draining that we talk about even less, and that is the energy cost of constantly shifting between different versions of yourself.

Most of us are not one thing in a day. We are a professional and a parent and a partner and a friend, sometimes within the same hour. We move between tasks that require completely different cognitive and emotional states, between the focused and the relational, the creative and the administrative, the giving and the receiving, and we do it so automatically that we have stopped noticing the gear change at all.

But the gear change has a cost. Neuroscientists refer to this as task-switching cost, the measurable loss of efficiency and cognitive resource that occurs every time the brain has to redirect its attention from one thing to another. A study from the American Psychological Association found that even seemingly minor shifts in focus, moving from one type of task to another, can cost as much as forty percent of productive time when accumulated across a day. We are not just losing the seconds it takes to switch. We are losing something in the quality of attention itself.

The weight of emotional labour

There is one more drain I want to talk about, and it is perhaps the most underacknowledged of all.

Emotional labour is a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1980s to describe the work of managing your own emotional responses in service of others. It is the warmth you bring to a difficult conversation even when you are not feeling warm. It is the patience you extend when your own reserves are low. It is staying regulated so that the people around you can feel safe, even when part of you would quite like to not be the steady one for five minutes.

I have a rule for myself that I will never turn away a student, colleague, family member or friend who asks if they can talk for a minute. I mean that genuinely, and I do not regret it. But I have also learned, sometimes the hard way, that holding space for other people’s struggles has a real cost when it is not balanced with something that restores you. It is not a character flaw to find it draining. It is just biology. The nervous system does not get to clock off simply because your heart is in the right place.

This matters beyond teaching, beyond any particular profession. It matters for anyone who is the person others lean on. The parent, the friend, the partner, the one who always picks up the phone. The capacity to be there for people is a genuine gift, and it is also a finite resource, and pretending otherwise does not make you more caring. It just makes you more depleted.

So what do you do with this?

Awareness is genuinely the first step, and I do not say that as a platitude. Most people are walking around with energy drains they have never even identified, which means they are trying to solve a tiredness problem without knowing where the leak is.

Start noticing where your energy actually goes across a day. Not just the obvious things, the meetings, the tasks, the physical demands, but the invisible ones too. The conversations that leave you feeling lighter and the ones that leave you feeling heavier. The parts of your day where you are switching gears constantly and the parts where you are allowed to just be one thing for a while. The moments where you are giving emotionally and whether there is anything coming back in.

You are not looking to eliminate any of it. Most of it is just life, and a life that matters to other people will always carry some weight. But knowing where the weight is coming from means you can start making more intentional choices about where you recover, and that changes everything.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

P.S. Don’t forget to download your free Nervous System Reset Cards! You canfind them below…

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Practitioner. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

If you have ever noticed that you do your best thinking at a particular time of day, that there is a window, maybe mid-morning, maybe just after lunch, where everything feels a little sharper and more manageable, and then another stretch where no amount of caffeine seems to make a difference, you have already felt your ultradian rhythm at work. You just probably did not have a name for it.

Last week we talked about why so many of us are carrying a kind of tiredness that sleep alone does not fix, and how much of it comes down to repeatedly overriding the body’s natural signals. This week I want to go a step further, because understanding that your body runs on rhythms is one thing. Understanding what those rhythms actually look like across your day is where things start to get genuinely useful.

The ninety-minute map

Your brain does not operate at a steady, consistent level of focus throughout the day. It never has. What it actually does is cycle through periods of higher alertness and periods of lower alertness roughly every ninety minutes, a pattern that continues whether you are asleep or awake. When you are sleeping, these cycles show up as the different stages of sleep. When you are awake, they show up as fluctuations in your concentration, your creativity, your ability to hold complex information, and your general sense of how on top of things you feel.

During the peak of each cycle, your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for focus, decision making, and complex thought, is working at its most efficient. This is the window where deep work actually happens, where problems get solved, where you write the thing or make the call or think through the difficult decision. It tends to last somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes before the brain begins signalling that it needs a break.

That signal does not always feel like tiredness in the obvious sense. Sometimes it shows up as distraction, a sudden urge to check your phone or make a cup of tea. Sometimes it is a kind of mental flatness, where the words stop coming or the task in front of you starts feeling harder than it did twenty minutes ago. Sometimes it is physical, a restlessness in the body, a need to move. These are not signs of laziness or poor focus. They are neurological cues, and they are worth paying attention to.

The problem is that most of us have been taught to push through them.

What pushing through actually costs you

There is a widely held belief that discipline means ignoring the dip and carrying on regardless. That the ability to sit at a desk for six unbroken hours is somehow a marker of productivity or professionalism. But the research tells a different story.

A study published in the journal Cognition found that even brief diversions from a task, moments where attention is allowed to shift, significantly improved the ability to focus over longer periods. The brain, it turns out, is not designed for sustained, unbroken concentration. It is designed for focused effort followed by recovery, in the same rhythm it has always followed.

When we override that recovery signal repeatedly, the quality of our output drops even when the quantity stays the same. We make more errors. We become less creative. Our decision making gets worse as the day goes on, a phenomenon researchers call decision fatigue, where the sheer volume of choices we have processed begins to erode the quality of the ones still to come. And crucially, we end the day feeling exhausted in a way that does not quite match what we actually produced, because a significant amount of our energy went into the effort of overriding our own biology rather than into the work itself.

Finding your own rhythm

Here is where it gets individual, because while the ninety-minute cycle is consistent across human biology, the timing of your peaks and troughs is not the same as everyone else’s. It is shaped by your chronotype, essentially whether you are naturally wired to be more alert earlier or later in the day, as well as by your sleep quality, your stress levels, your age, and a number of other factors that make your energy map uniquely yours.

What this means in practice is that the most productive thing you can do is spend a little time actually noticing your own pattern rather than borrowing someone else’s. The person who swears by their five AM deep work session is not more disciplined than you. They may simply have a chronotype that makes early morning their sharpest window. If yours is mid-morning, or mid-afternoon, working against that is always going to feel like wading through something.

A useful starting point is to pay attention, without judgement, for just a few days. Notice when thinking feels easy and when it feels effortful. Notice when you are reaching for distraction and when you are genuinely absorbed. Notice when your body wants to move and when it feels settled. You are not looking for a perfect schedule. You are looking for a pattern, and most people find one within a few days of actually paying attention.

Working with the dips rather than against them

Once you start to see your pattern, the question becomes what to do with the lower points in your day rather than how to override them. And this is where I think the biggest shift happens, because it requires letting go of the idea that every hour of your day should look the same.

The dips are not wasted time. They are recovery time, and what you do in them matters. A genuine ten-minute break, one where you step away from screens, let your mind wander, move your body a little, or simply sit quietly, restores cognitive capacity in a way that pushing through simply does not. Research from the University of Illinois found that the brain’s ability to sustain attention is directly linked to the opportunity to disengage from a task periodically. Rest is not the opposite of productivity. It is the thing that makes productivity possible in the first place.

This does not require a perfectly structured day or the freedom to work entirely on your own terms. Most of us have commitments and schedules that are not entirely within our control, and that is just the reality of real life. But even within a fixed structure there is usually more flexibility than we think. Protecting your sharpest window for your most demanding work, saving the administrative and lower-stakes tasks for your natural dip, and actually taking a proper break rather than eating lunch while answering emails — these are small shifts that cost very little and tend to make a noticeable difference.

What this week is really about

Your body has always had a schedule. It has been running quietly in the background of every day you have ever lived, signalling when to focus, when to rest, when to move and when to be still. Most of us were just never taught to listen to it.

That is not a small thing to reclaim.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Practitioner. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

Tiredness can be hard to explain.

Not the tired you feel after a long day on your feet, or the satisfying exhaustion that follows a big project or a late night with people you love. It is quieter than that, and more confusing. It is the tired that is there when you wake up. The tired that sits underneath everything, even on the easy days. The tired that makes you feel like you should be fine, because nothing is technically wrong, and yet.

If that sounds familiar, I want you to know something before we go any further. That kind of tired is not a character flaw. It is not laziness, or weakness, or a sign that you need to push harder and think more positively. More often than not, it is your body trying to tell you something very specific. And this month, we are going to learn how to listen.

Energy is not a personality trait

One of the most quietly damaging things the productivity world has sold us is the idea that some people are just naturally high-energy and some are not. That if you are someone who crashes by three in the afternoon, or who needs significantly more recovery time than the people around you, there is something fundamentally different about you.

There isn’t.

What there is, is a body that runs on rhythms. Biological rhythms that rise and fall throughout the day, governed by hormones, light, temperature, nervous system state, and dozens of other signals that most of us were never taught to pay attention to. Your energy is not fixed. It is not a personality trait you were born with. It is a pattern, and patterns can be understood.

The most well-known of these rhythms is the circadian rhythm, the roughly twenty-four-hour cycle that regulates your sleep and wake patterns. But sitting inside that larger rhythm are shorter cycles called ultradian rhythms, which repeat approximately every ninety minutes throughout the day. During each cycle, your brain moves through a period of higher alertness and focus, followed by a natural dip that signals a need for rest. Research from sleep scientist Peretz Lavie in the 1980s first mapped these cycles in detail, and what has followed since has been decades of evidence suggesting that when we override these natural dips, which most of us do, repeatedly, every single day, we accumulate what researchers call homeostatic sleep pressure, a kind of fatigue debt that quietly builds in the background of our lives.

That afternoon slump you reach for caffeine to fix? It is almost certainly your ultradian rhythm asking for something you are not giving it.

The cost of running against your own biology

Here is what happens when we consistently ignore the body’s requests for rest. Cortisol, the hormone that helps us stay alert and respond to demands, stays elevated for longer than it is designed to. Over time, this flattens the natural cortisol curve that should rise sharply in the morning, giving you focus and energy, and gradually taper through the day, allowing you to wind down and sleep. When that curve gets disrupted, you end up with a pattern that many people will recognise immediately. Wired in the evening when you want to sleep. Flat and foggy in the morning when you need to function. Exhausted by midday and relying on stimulants to keep going.

It is not a willpower problem. It is a rhythm problem.

And the particularly frustrating thing about rhythm problems is that they tend to be invisible. You cannot see a disrupted cortisol curve. You cannot feel an ultradian cycle the way you can feel a pulled muscle. So we dismiss the signals, push through the dips, and wonder why we feel so permanently behind ourselves.

What modern life is actually doing to your energy

The honest answer is quite a lot, and most of it is so normalised that we have stopped noticing.

We wake up and immediately hand our attention to a screen. We eat lunch at our desks while answering emails. We move between tasks without pause, treating every transition as dead time to be filled rather than as a natural moment of reset. We stay available long past the point where our brains have anything useful left to give, and then we wonder why we cannot switch off in the evenings. The stimulation is relentless and the recovery is almost non-existent, not because we are lazy about rest, but because we have genuinely forgotten what real rest looks like or feels like in the body.

There is also the matter of what researchers call cognitive load, the cumulative mental weight of decisions, notifications, background noise, and half-finished thoughts that we carry around all day. A 2011 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that even the presence of a mobile phone on a desk, not in use, just sitting there, was enough to reduce available cognitive capacity. We are doing more mental work than ever before, in environments that were not designed for human nervous systems, and we are doing almost none of the recovery that would make that sustainable.

Tired and tired are not the same thing

This is something I think deserves more attention, because once you understand it, a lot of things start to make more sense.

Physical tiredness, the kind that comes from being on your feet all day or not sleeping enough, is relatively straightforward. You rest, you sleep, you recover. But the exhaustion that many people are carrying around is a different animal entirely. It is the kind that accumulates from sustained emotional effort, from managing relationships and responsibilities and the invisible work of keeping everything running. From the mental load of never quite switching off. From giving a great deal of yourself, day after day, without much coming back in.

This kind of tired does not always respond to sleep, which is part of why it is so disorienting. You can have eight hours and still wake up feeling like you have had four. You can have a quiet weekend and still arrive at Monday already behind yourself. That is not a sleep problem. It is a depletion problem, and it needs something more nuanced than an early night.

Recognising the difference matters because it changes what you actually need. Physical tiredness needs rest and sleep. Mental and emotional exhaustion needs genuine restoration, time without demands on your attention, moments that feel replenishing rather than merely inactive. The two are related, but they are not the same, and treating one when you are actually experiencing the other is part of why so many people feel like they have tried everything and nothing is working.

What this month is about

June, for me, is about something I have been thinking about for a long time. Not productivity in the sense of doing more, but sustainability. The kind of energy that is actually available to you at the end of the week, not just at the beginning of it.

I spent years operating the way I think a lot of people do. Pushing through, catching up at the weekend, telling myself I would rest when things calmed down. Things did not calm down, and I did not really rest, and I became someone who was functional but not flourishing. Getting through the days rather than actually living in them.

What changed things was not a new morning routine or a better to-do list. It was understanding that my body had a logic of its own, and that working with it was always going to feel easier than working against it.

This month we are going to explore what that actually looks like in practice. We will look at how to identify your own energy patterns, what is quietly draining your reserves without you realising, how to build real rest into a real life, and what sustainable productivity feels like when it stops being a concept and starts being something you can actually feel in your body.

It is not about doing less. It is about doing things in a way that leaves you with something left over.

That feels worth knowing.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Somatic Healing, Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they’ve taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

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Tomorrow, June begins inside Naturally Healing.

And if May felt like finally giving your body something it had been quietly asking for, this month is going to feel like something shifting at a deeper level...the kind of shift that changes not just how you feel, but how you move through your days.

May was about your gut. About understanding that what happens in your digestive system reaches far beyond digestion itself, touching your mood, your energy, your sleep, and your stress response in ways most of us were never taught to expect. If that month opened something up for you, I think this one is going to build on it in a way that feels very natural.

This month, we are going somewhere that I have been thinking about for a long time.

Your energy.

Not in the way the productivity world talks about it, with optimised morning routines and colour-coded schedules and the quietly exhausting message that if you just tried a little harder you would feel better. But honestly, biologically, and in a way that actually makes sense for the life you are already living.

Because your energy is not a personality trait. It is not something you either have or you don’t. It is a rhythm. A living, shifting pattern that your body has been running on every single day of your life, asking to be worked with rather than overridden. And most of us were simply never taught to listen to it.

This month we will explore what that actually means in practice. We will look at the biological cycles that govern your focus, your mood, and your capacity across the day. We will name the things that quietly drain your energy that never make it onto any to-do list. We will talk honestly about what genuine rest looks like versus what most of us are doing in the evenings and calling rest. And we will explore what sustainable productivity actually feels like in a real body, in a real life.

Throughout June, every Tuesday The Wellness Edit will be building on this. Week by week we will look at why you are tired even when nothing has gone obviously wrong, how your body’s natural productivity schedule works and why it bears no resemblance to a nine to five, the hidden energy drains that accumulate invisibly across your day, and what it means to rest in a way that actually restores you rather than simply pausing you.

But before any of that lands in your inbox, I wanted to get this into your hands.

Because as a paid member, you don’t just get the articles.

You get the guide that runs alongside them.

The June Growth Guide is your practical companion for the whole month. Each week, as a new Tuesday article arrives, you will have somewhere to take that understanding and make it personal. Your own rhythms. Your own patterns. Your own energy map.

Inside you will find a clear, accessible introduction to how your energy actually works and why it rises and falls the way it does, a diagnostic page to help you identify which kind of tiredness you are actually carrying right now, a self-mapping exercise to help you begin seeing your own energy pattern rather than borrowing someone else’s, four pillars of sustainable productivity that are principles to return to rather than rules to follow perfectly, a daily rhythm framework with morning, midday, afternoon and evening anchors, your own personal energy map tracker, four weekly check-ins each with a micro-journal prompt, and an end of month reflection to help you notice what has quietly shifted as June has unfolded.

It is practical without being prescriptive, and designed for someone who wants to feel better without adding more pressure to an already full life.

I would suggest having a gentle read through today, just to get a feel for the shape of it, so that when Tuesday’s first article arrives you already feel grounded and ready to go a little deeper.

This community continues to grow in the most genuinely lovely way and I am really glad you are here for this one. Energy is one of those topics that sounds almost too simple until you realise how much of your daily life it touches. I think June might surprise you.

Your download is just below.

Jenn x

Read more

Welcome to Naturally Healing. I’m Jennifer, and this is a sanctuary for people who want to understand their minds and bodies a little better and feel genuinely well, without the overwhelm.

Real wellbeing isn’t complicated. It’s built slowly, through understanding, small shifts, and a little more kindness toward yourself. That’s what we’re here for.

What you’ll find here

Naturally Healing publishes every Tuesday and the last Thursday of every month. Here’s how it all works:

For everyone (free subscribers):

• Every Tuesday: The Wellness Edit: Grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Think of it as a letter from a knowledgeable friend, not a clinical briefing.

• Monthly: Authenticity Unfiltered: A more personal piece. I write about life, growth, and the messy, honest reality of trying to live well. This is where I step out from behind the science and just talk to you.

For paid subscribers:

• Monthly Growth Guides: Each month we explore one area of health in depth. The Growth Guide is your hands-on companion, beautifully designed, practical, and made to sit alongside that month’s articles so you can take what you’re learning and make it personal to your own body and life. Guides so far have covered the nervous system, cortisol recovery, and gut health foundations, with new themes arriving each month throughout the year.

• The Resource Library: Every Growth Guide and downloadable resource, all in one place. Yours to keep, return to, and work through at your own pace.

• Community Chat: A gentle space to connect, ask questions, and work through things alongside others who are on the same path.

  Get 7 Day Free Trial

A few favourite posts:

Here are a few articles that will give you a real feel for what Naturally Healing is about:

A little about me

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Somatic Healing, Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Two roles that have shaped me in the same way. Both have taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them genuinely usable, rather than overwhelming.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here.

Jenn x

Share

Subscribe now

Hello, I’m Jenn, if you’re new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. Each Tuesday I share The Wellness Edit, grounded reflections and practical insights on nourishing the body and mind through nature, nutrition, slow living, and everyday habits that support wellbeing. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly in-depth Growth Guide to accompany each series and additional resources to gently support your mind and body healing journey. Within this space, I also write Authenticity Unfiltered, where I share more personal reflections on life, growth, and the messy reality of trying to live well. Thanks for reading 🤎

Subscribe now

I’ve carried this story for a long time. Long enough that I couldn’t talk about it, and for years I didn’t even know why. It wasn’t until recently, sharing it with a psychology class as we discussed the neuropsychology and impact of neurological damage over time, that something shifted. I realised I needed to tell this story out loud. Not just to explain it.

To finally go back for her.

September 1988. I was six years old.

One evening I could hear my parents talking in the kitchen, their voices low, trying to work something out. I padded through to see what was going on. My dad had a job interview that clashed with school pick-up time, and my mum would be at work. My older brother was at a different school, the other side of our town so that wouldn’t work. There was a problem, and nobody had a solution.

So I offered one.

I told them I was old enough to walk home by myself. It was only a short walk. There was only one road to cross, and there was a lollipop lady to help me do it safely (I’m not even sure we call them that anymore, but in 1988, she was very much a lollipop lady). After a little deliberation, and more than a little persuasion, they agreed. They showed me how to work the key in the front door.

I was so excited. I felt like such a big girl.

That excitement had a uniform. My favourite coat: a puffy red coat that I adored with the particular intensity only a six-year-old can have for a piece of clothing. It made me feel grown up. Capable. Ready. I tucked my little purse containing the key into my pocket, and all the way to school the next morning, I kept patting it. Through the gates. Through morning lessons. Through playtime. A small, secret reassurance. It’s still there. I’ve got this.

I gave it one final check as I left school that afternoon.

Then I got to the main road.

And I made a decision.

I didn’t need the lollipop lady. I was a big girl. I had been taught how to cross the road properly. I didn’t need someone to help me do something I was perfectly capable of doing myself (especially as I was convinced she could barely see anything anyway, she always wore the biggest, darkest sunglasses…what good were they at helping children across a busy main road?!).

I stood at the edge of the kerb. I followed the rules exactly as I’d been taught. Look right. Look left. Look right again.

All clear. I stepped out.

I saw the white car coming towards me.

And then I don’t remember anything else.

I don’t remember the impact. I don’t remember being thrown across the road, or ending up in a crumpled, mangled heap on the other side, or being thrust face-first into a metal fence.

The first thing I was aware of was a taste. Metallic. Gritty. I didn’t like it.

And then, somewhere in the distance, I could hear a little girl screaming. It was incessant. Blood-curdling. All I could think was: why is that little girl screaming? Why isn’t someone helping her? At one point I felt frustrated. Why wouldn’t she just stop?

It would take me many years of slowly piecing my memories together to understand that the little girl I could hear was me.

Kind faces appeared above me, telling me everything was going to be okay. I had no idea what they were talking about. I was lifted, moved, rushed somewhere huge and unfamiliar. I was placed in a large bed on wheels and hurried through corridors, people swarming around me, inspecting the damage. Voices passed over my head in a language I couldn’t follow, words that belonged to adults in a world I didn’t recognise. Into bright rooms where others stepped behind screens to take pictures of different parts of my body.

Eventually I was brought to a nicely decorated room where other children lay in the same kind of beds. I looked at the murals on the walls.

At some point I must have drifted off to sleep.

I woke up to crying. Heart-wrenching sobbing.

My mum, my dad, and my brother were sitting at the end of my bed, looking at me.

I smiled at them. I told them I was okay.

I couldn’t see what they were seeing.

Among my injuries, I had fractured my skull in a way that would shape the rest of my life. I was told I would always have to be careful. That if I hit my head again, it could kill me. There was memory loss too, significant and disorienting, that took a long time to recover from.

I spent quite a while in hospital. I even won a writing competition while I was there and came home with a pile of books. My class teacher visited with a huge card full of messages from my friends and an enormous fruit basket.

The world, it seemed, had kept going.

But before any of that, before the slow return to school and the long weeks at home, there was a moment I have never forgotten.

Leaving the hospital, someone handed me a carrier bag. There was a beat of silence. I looked down at it. Inside, in a clear bag, was a small red bundle.

I already knew what it was.

I didn’t need to take it out. I just looked at it: my coat, the one that had made me feel so brave, so big, so ready, rolled into a little ball, like something the world had finished with.

I had lost my brave somewhere on that road. Standing there holding that bag, I felt a vulnerability I hadn’t known before. I felt so, so sad.

For a few years after the accident, if anyone mentioned it, I would lash out. Snap. Get angry in a way I couldn’t explain and didn’t understand. The anger was just there, hot and sudden, and then it was gone, leaving me confused by my own reaction.

It wasn’t until I was older, as the memories slowly came back and I was able to hold them properly for the first time, that the anger found its shape. I began to understand something that a six-year-old couldn’t: I was too little. I was too young. I should never have been walking home alone.

I was angry for a long time. I want to be honest about that, because pretending otherwise would be a disservice to the little girl who deserved someone to be angry on her behalf. But I also know, with the perspective I have now, that the grief underneath the anger was always bigger than the anger itself. Grief for what happened. Grief for what was lost. Grief for a child who was just trying so hard to be a big girl.

Then I became a mother.

When my youngest daughter reached a similar age, she had always been a carbon copy of me, right down to the way she moved through the world. There were mornings on the school run when I would button up her coat and just stop.

She’s too little to do this by herself.

I was never entirely sure, in those moments, whether I was thinking about my daughter or her, the little girl in the red coat.

I have felt so sorry for that little girl for such a long time. The one who was screaming on the road while I, somewhere outside of myself, couldn’t understand why no one was helping her. The one who came home in a clear bag. The one who lost her brave and spent years carrying something she didn’t have the words for.

Telling this story, out loud, first in that classroom, and now here, is my way of finally going back for her.

She was just a little girl in a red coat, trying so hard to be enough.

She was always enough.

As always, thanks for reading.

Take care,

Jenn x

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A little about me…

I’m Jennifer, the voice behind Naturally Healing.

I’ve spent most of my life quietly drawn to understanding how the body works and what it needs to feel well. What started as a personal interest has grown into nearly three decades of learning, exploring, and gently refining what actually supports health in a real, sustainable way.

Along the way, I’ve trained in Diet & Nutrition, Aromatherapy, Herbalism and Plant Medicine, alongside Anatomy and Physiology, with studies across both the UK and the US. But more than anything, it’s the combination of lived experience and years of learning that shape what I share here.

Alongside this, I work as a Psychology Teacher and Holistic Wellbeing Educator. Both parts of my work have shaped me in the same way — they've taught me how to take complex ideas about the mind and body and make them simple, clear, and actually usable in real life.

Naturally Healing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding your body a little better, working with it rather than against it, and building small, steady habits that support you over time.

I’m really glad you’re here. 🤎