27/11/24
5 tips to stay healthy this winter
Winter can be a challenging season for maintaining your physical and mental health, but with the right strategies, you can thrive through the colder months. From invigorating outdoor walks or wild swims to setting meaningful goals for the year ahead, staying active, well-rested, and mindful of your diet are key to keeping both body and mind in balance. This blog shares five practical tips to help you embrace winter with energy and purpose — so you can feel your best while planning for the brighter days to come.
Motherhood is a wild mix of love, exhaustion, guilt, and stress, with moments of pure awe and joy sprinkled in between. It’s a constant balancing act—how to do right by myself, while being everything my children need me to be. Sometimes I wonder how we humans survive with so many complex emotions running through us all at once!
In my twenties I was bulimic, depressed, overweight, drank too much and had no way to regulate my emotions healthily. I was working long hours on charter superyachts, partying far too hard and my time was not my own. I was a functioning, unwell woman. Since those dark depths, I have prioritised time and money on my health and wellness above all else, even before my children. I know that if I am not well, how can I possibly look after them? I invest in myself now so that I can then be a better person to everyone in my life. 
Towards the end of September I have been able to really put in some great miles in the water. Being by the sea and having the time to swim has been glorious and I have loved every minute of swimming outside. For me swimming is pure meditation. As the season starts to shift to Autumn and the water temperature begins to drop it becomes harder and harder to keep that habit going. The impermanence of great swim conditions is part of the beauty of open water swimming and I always have a strong pull to keep that September swimming feeling going, even though I know it can’t last. The water temperature gets too cold and the choice is to either squeeze into a wetsuit or you stay in your skin and don’t stay in as long. I will always choose the latter. 
I have spent the past twenty years chasing health. Health comes in many forms; mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and your health is tested at every different stage of life. There was a period when I had to lean heavily into physical healing after my broken back and that in turn led to a spiritual healing path. After a relationship break up, even though it was hard, I knew I had to focus on my emotional healing in order to move on. Worrying set backs in work have encouraged me to focus on my mental resilience and post giving birth has been an explosive dive into healing all of the above. 
The summer holidays are in full swing. If you don’t have children or your children have grown up, the summer holidays might be a time to relax and have fun, but as a parent of three young children, it’s a period of time where anything other than looking after your children has to fall by the wayside and your every focus is on entertaining them. For the children it’s idyllic, 6 weeks of no school, but for the parents it’s another endurance event. It can honestly start to feel like quite a strain. 
I don’t know about you but as the days got darker and shorter I have really struggled to find motivation to exercise and I love exercise! I have been observing the way the Winter has been effecting me, the slowing down, the less energy and I am actually surprised and how I have not reacted to this and forced myself to be a perpetual Summer. Instead I have found myself falling into the flow of Winter and enjoying it.
The festive period can be a stressful, heavy time of year for many. So read on for Laura’s top tips for keeping the season light and bright.
I often wonder why do we need to retreat? Why bother taking time out for yourself? Is it just a way to while away a few days or is it far more important than that? It always fascinates me how every year, by law, we have to have our cars MOT’d: if they’re not road worthy we find the money to fix them to get them back on the road. But when it comes to ourselves, we don’t have mandatory MOT’s (which by the way I think we should) and we often keep running ourselves into the ground without stopping… 