05/07/2026
So… I guess this story didn’t actually begin in 2023.
It probably began years earlier.
Back in 2009, I was in a car accident. I wasn’t seriously injured, but something shifted. My body lost its alignment, and, in many ways, so did I.
I was building a career in the fitness industry and studying health. Movement was my life. Then one very old-school spinal surgeon looked at my scans and said something I’ll never forget.
“It would’ve been easier if you’d broken your spine. We could’ve put it back together. This is much more complicated.”
Then he told me I’d probably never run again. As a young athlete, that landed like a brick. So, naturally… I did what I always do. I became curious. I wanted to understand the body. I wanted to know why it heals, why it doesn’t, and what happens in between. Somewhere in my twenty-something brain I also decided I was basically going to become Captain Planet. (Anyone born in the 80s will understand.)
So I listened to it. I trained differently. I learned. I adapted. By the time I turned thirty, I was running again. I felt strong. Looking back now, though, strength and recovery aren’t always the same thing. Then, in 2013, I lost my dad. Grief changes you. It doesn’t always arrive as tears. Sometimes it arrives as productivity. You become the person who keeps going because stopping feels impossible. That became me. Always busy. Always smiling. Always capable. Until one day… I wasn’t.
In 2020, I fainted on a flight home from Málaga. By then my body had been collecting stress for years. Old injuries, grief, running a business, family health issues, hormones, never really switching off. It was becoming the perfect biological cocktail. And yes… welcome to your forties 😅 For the record, I genuinely love getting older. I wouldn’t go back. But nobody tells you that your nervous system keeps receipts. Looking back now, I can see I was experiencing clinical burnout.
Burnout isn’t just “being tired.” It’s recognised as an occupational syndrome caused by chronic, unmanaged stress. It affects your brain, hormones, immune system, sleep, memory, emotions, and eventually even your ability to feel like yourself. The strange part? You often don’t realise it’s happening while you’re living it. So I did what every health researcher would probably do. I researched everything. Cold water swimming. Saunas. More Yoga. Meditation. Strength training. Breathwork. Every nutrition rabbit hole imaginable. Every supplement with promising evidence. Some things genuinely helped. Others… absolutely did not.
Ashwagandha made my heart race. Valerian wasn’t for me. My daily constants became our Mylk, chamomile tea, good food, and simply trying to create enough safety for my nervous system to exhale. But underneath all of that, I was still trying to solve the problem. What I hadn’t realised yet was that my body wasn’t asking for another solution. It was asking me to stop. Then Easter 2023 arrived. That was the moment everything finally caught up with me. I was taken to A&E after my body refused to do anything. It was just in pain. I couldn’t really walk. I barely spoke. Food felt overwhelming. Sleep disappeared completely. The hardest part wasn’t even the exhaustion. It was losing my intuition.
People often ask me how, with everything I knew about health, I didn’t see it coming. The honest answer? I think intuition is one of the first things survival mode steals from you. When your nervous system is simply trying to get through the next hour, it doesn’t leave much space for instinct, creativity, or joy. It becomes beautifully efficient at surviving. Living is another story.
Ironically, just after Easter, we were offered the opportunity to expand Karma Coast into the beautiful community space many of you now know. And… we said yes 😅 Looking back, I genuinely laugh. Because I clearly had absolutely no idea how exhausted I really was.
Eventually, something shifted. I simply stopped trying to outrun what my body had been telling me for years. I stopped saying yes to everything. I stopped believing productivity was the same thing as purpose. I embraced JOMO 😑, the joy of missing out, which honestly feels hilarious to write because younger me would’ve rolled her eyes so hard. But slowing down saved me.
There are so many people who carried me through that season. Family, friends, customers, practitioners, and complete strangers who showed me kindness without expecting anything back. One day I’ll properly thank every single one of them. Because healing, I’ve realised, is almost never something we do alone.
Next time, I’ll share the things that genuinely helped me rebuild my health. The research, the routines, the science, the mistakes, and the small daily habits that slowly brought me back to myself.
