Charlotte Arnold

ID: a black and white image of Charlotte, laying on the floor with her hair spread around her. She has dark long hair with a fringe, and a sunbeam is shining over her eyes.

I built into my project, four days to invest in mindfulness and find ways to embed it into my practice. This drive to be more mindful was buoyed by reflection on times I felt overwhelmed, or lost motivation – essentially warning signs of burn out – over the past couple of years. I would dread delivering, often feeling underprepared or low energy, despite my sessions being planned and having a decade of experience to lean on. During sessions, I would doubt myself and imposter syndrome would creep in, and at the end of the day I would be so fatigued that my motivation levels would be low and I would resent going to work. Yes, the obvious suggestion based on this information is to take a break and rest, but the fragility of being freelance, honouring contracts and a mortgage to pay – the flexibility to work like this just isn’t there for me.

The need for mindfulness was twofold. Aside from staving off burnout, I also wanted to carve out processes for dealing with vicarious trauma. Out of the four days I have allocated, I decided to start with my own mindfulness practice and understanding what I need, and then to use the latter part of the time to turn my mind towards vicarious trauma. As such I will discuss this at a later date.

Ideally, I wanted to cultivate a methodology for myself and therefore create a toolbox of ways I can safeguard myself mentally, emotionally and physically within sessions, but also before and afterwards. In that vein, mindfulness and ‘holding myself’ needed to have a wrap around approach – ways that I can be consciously present throughout the day, working week, and weekend as a way to stave off burnout on a micro level, and then be more strategic with taking holiday and looking at my year from a macro lens to ensure I can have dedicated rest that doesn’t affect my financial needs.

Looking at my year from a macro lens, I decided to utilise AI to help me scope out strategic time to take holiday, so that I could book it in already and mentally know when dedicated rest time was coming. As a large proportion of my work is based around academic teaching, I asked it to consider this, as well as giving it a draft of my work calendar to suggest the best times for me to take a break. I also gave it my month to month income over the past three years so it could factor in my earnings to make sure that I wouldn’t take time off when strategically I would earn high (no holiday pay for any self employed/freelance work was the reasoning for this).

AI suggested that I take holiday as follows:
End of March — 7 days (non-negotiable)
Early July — 7–10 days (decompress before exhaustion sets in)
Late October — 5–7 days (interrupt cumulative fatigue before winter)
Christmas — 10–14 days protected (full nervous-system reset)

It identified that my risk of burnout came from “cumulative load” not from individual busy weeks. As such I needed, to have “one planned recovery block per term and one deep reset per year, not lots of long weekends. Long weekends help tiredness. They don’t prevent burnout.”

This conclusion resonated with me when looking back on 2025. I had lots of long weekends over summer, where I could bathe in being outdoors, enjoy good weather and pursue the rosta of hobbies I claim to do, and yet by the middle of December I was practically crawling towards a break. Four dedicated rest periods of a minimum 5 days also equates to about 29 – 38 days of holiday (not differentiating between working weeks and calendar weeks here, as my work often occurs on the weekend), and also inline with statutory holiday entitlement.

Naturally I am yet to take these breaks, but I have now booked them in and will reflect as the year unfolds whether they help to forestall cumulative load. As my work meanders across daytime, evening and weekend work, tethering myself to a set number of days off a year also feels like a wise decision as I can easily work too many days in a row and longer than 8 hour days if I’m not proactive. Finally, as I requested they fit easily around the academic year and align with lower income months it shouldn’t affect cash flow or annual income too much. It seemed reasonable, informed and crucially doable – an easy decision to commit it into my calendar.

Now for the micro lens. What is my mindfulness practice? What actually works for me? How do I know what to embed into my facilitation practice, and how do I know what works best for before, during and after? There seemed so many possibilities and after journalling my way through it, a practice based approach seemed to be the only way I could land on.

I asked myself, “If I was to have the most mindful and nervous system resetting day – what would that entail?”
I wasn’t sure, so I decided to start by brainstorming what I viewed as mindful activities:

I noticed that these fall into two camps: things I can do by myself without external intervention or pre planning, and those that are contingent on thinking ahead or other people to make it happen (in italics). I also felt like they fell into loose categories:

These categories are not exhausted, and I noticed that some activities intersect. There were also things that I recognise calm me, such as having a clean space, being planned and prepared, having a full fridge and money in my account. However, it felt like these fall more into environmental or behavioural factors and thus the key to this is having good processes and habits, they aren’t necessarily small activities I can do as a one off, or as an aside to my working day. They are reliant on consistency – preventative, rather than reactive say. I think there’s some more thought to take with this, but let’s bench it for now.

So, to have the most mindful day possible, I decided to try and do one thing per category, and see how that felt.

My mindful day:
[connection] walked the dog around the nature reserve
[relaxation] read
[creativity] worked on a knitting project
[movement] went to a yoga class
[reflection] journalled
[outside] walked the long way back from yoga

I tried to move slowly, to engage in mindful breath, mindful listening, mindful eating and mindful seeing. I allowed myself to rest when I got back home from yoga and didn’t push myself to achieve above and beyond what I set out to do.

I made conscious choices to try new things, and notice details. I spent a lot of time with Scout, adjusting my rhythm to hers and noticing how and what she was doing with her time.

To conclude, by the end of the night I was on such a go slow that my partner said I was “blissed out”. The range of different activities I had completed (one from each category) meant I had sated my sensory needs, including the lesser recognised proprioceptive sense and my interoception. I felt very in tune with myself. Naturally this was one day, and I would love to repeat this experiment with a different medley of activities to interrogate whether it works conclusively. However, for the first day I felt confident I was moving to a place where I can start to blend within my practice and move it from isolation to integration.

ID: a trail through a nature reserve in early morning. The sun hasn’t quite come up yet so the trees on either side of the path are dark, with a silvery yellow light coming up over the horizon.

Photo credit (header): Tim Dunk
Photo credit (trees): Charlotte Arnold