08/10/2025
Thoughts from the Forest 🌳
This week reminded me how easily the urge can return when life piles up.
Days spent wrestling with behind-the-scenes tech that makes my head spin, stand-up rows with AI over lost work, and getting bullied by Grammarly left me close to tech tears.
By midweek, piles of wet washing, a tumble dryer that had thrown a hissy fit and dramatically died, and grumbling tendonitis that refuses to mend had all joined the list.
Ordinary problems — the kind most people face.
That’s often how tension builds, not from one big thing but from everything stacking up.
At one point I opened the fridge and looked at the rows of Kopparberg cider my son brings home from work and never drinks.
The irony?
I was never a cider girl.
JD was my party drink.
Wine was my sleep medication.
And I thought: This is the wrong reason to have a drink.
All those built-up feelings — frustration, stress, anxiety — were exactly why drinking right then would have been a bad idea.
It’s the question I often ask my clients too, and this time, I used it on myself:
What do I need?
That’s the moment that matters.
The pause.
The choice.
The space where something else can happen.
Fortunately for Arnold, it meant I grabbed his lead and stomped around the woods in the rain and dark, and came home feeling much calmer.
I used to use alcohol to change my emotional state, to muffle or take the edge off uncomfortable feelings.
A walk doesn’t always hit the spot, but it’s about knowing yourself well enough to notice when you’re getting hijacked, and understanding how to soothe what’s really going on.
In the woods, I checked the stories I was telling myself and reframed them into something more helpful.
We all live inside the stories we tell ourselves.
We might as well make them work for us, rather than against us.
👉 When you reach for something, what are you really trying to ease?
