About Charles.

Where it started

Where this started, for me.

My dad died when I was 17. He drowned on holiday. I was about to start A-levels in chemistry, physics, and biology, planning to follow him into medicine. After he died, I changed everything and switched to psychology. It took me five years to finish a three-year degree. I spent most of it ashamed I wasn't keeping up.

What I didn't know at the time was that my brain was running on five concurrent thought streams. Not one at a time, switching between them. Five at once, all day. One trying to work out the meaning of life. One in critical mode, replaying everything I'd ever got wrong. One doing maths I hadn't asked it to do. The others, I can't remember. I assumed everyone's brain was like this, because how would I know any different.

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was in my thirties, working in brain injury rehabilitation. It explained a lot.

Finding occupational therapy

Occupational therapy saved my life.

I'm not being dramatic when I say that. In the years after my dad died, the only thing that kept me here was my friends pulling me out of the house to play football, go to the pub, do anything that wasn't sitting alone with my thoughts. Doing things, with other people, was the difference.

That's what occupational therapy is, in a way. The clinical definition is longer, but the heart of it is helping people get back to doing the things that matter to them, with the support they need.

I qualified, worked for ten years in busy NHS hospital settings, and was exhausted by most of them. The sensory environment of an acute ward — the lights, the noise, the smells, the stress of people in the worst moment of their lives — drained me in a way I couldn't articulate at the time.

Finding the thing that helped

Finding the thing that helped.

In my thirties I did an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course. I didn't expect much of it. Sitting still had never been my thing.

It worked. Not because it was magic, but because it slowly retrained how my attention worked, and gave me a quieter relationship with the parts of my brain that wouldn't stop trying. I started meditating daily. I still do.

Over the next ten years I trained more formally, worked with hundreds of people in brain injury rehabilitation, and slowly built what became the Mindfulness-Informed Fatigue Management course. It's been refined with input from the people who've been through it, including peer specialists who've lived through brain injury themselves.

The book

The book.

In 2026, the course became a book. It's published as Mindfulness-Informed Fatigue Management, and it carries endorsements from people whose work I deeply respect — Tina Vaughan, Ellie Sturrock, and Professor Birgit Gurr, my clinical lead through much of my NHS career.

Birgit is the reason a lot of this exists. She nurtured generations of clinicians through their education, encouraged us to grow, gave us the space to develop courses, and provided expert support without ever needing to take credit for the work that came out of it. Most of what I know about being a clinician, I learned from her.

The other things

The other things.

I write poetry, sometimes I perform it. I play guitar badly and write songs. I have a young family. I take my daughter bouncing on the trampoline most days. I meditate for about an hour every morning, before everyone else is up.

I care about homelessness. I worked for a year and a half as a mental health practitioner in homeless health, and it's stayed with me. One of the long-term hopes for this work is to train people with lived experience — including people who've come through homelessness — to deliver fatigue management to others in the same position.

Credentials, properly

Credentials, for the people who want them.

• HCPC registered occupational therapist.
• Member of the Royal College of Occupational Therapists.
• Member of BAMBA, the British Association of Mindfulness-Based Approaches.
• 0 years in NHS neurorehabilitation.
• Internal Family Systems-informed practitioner (12-day foundation training).
• Author of Mindfulness-Informed Fatigue Management (2026).

A note of thanks

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

None of this work is mine, really. The principles go back thousands of years in contemplative traditions. The clinical translation owes everything to people like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Richard Davidson, Zindel Segal, Judson Brewer, and Kristin Neff. My own teachers, and the peer specialists I've worked alongside, taught me more than anyone.

I'm a guide. The path's been there a long time.