Thrive with Lucy Wood

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Thrive with Lucy Wood

The Thrive Programme is an exciting and empowering training programme that teaches people how to tak

10/11/2025

Hey, you…no, not the overthinking, striving you…I’m talking to the soft, scared, beautiful part of you who needs a hug.

I know what it feels like to keep going, keep pushing yourself, keep ‘doing’, and yet still feel like you’re falling short. I know how loud that inner voice can be - the one that says, “You should be further along by now.” “You know what to do, so why can’t you do it?” “Other people can do it, why can’t you?”

That inner you - the part of you that feels small, anxious, or unseen - deserves love. It deserves compassion. It deserves patience and understanding.

Here’s the thing: none of this is your fault. You didn’t choose to think in this way. You didn’t deliberately sign up for self-judgment or constant pressure to perform. You learned this pattern to protect you - created it at a time to try and feel safe. It’s not your fault.

You can offer yourself forgiveness. You did your best. You have always done your best. You can never ask for any more than your best.

And you can begin to wrap yourself in patience and kindness instead of criticism. You can look at yourself through a loving lens - a lens that sees you as more than enough. A lens that allows you to be human, doesn’t expect you to be perfect at everything, and gives you permission, patience and space to learn.

Freedom doesn’t come from ‘fixing’ yourself. It comes from treating yourself with the same compassion you extend to others. By holding your own hand through your own storms. By choosing to love the part of you that has been most desperate for it. 🧡

🏷️ Save this for the days you need a reminder. And DM me “enough” if you’re wanting a helping hand. This is what I teach my clients 🌟

07/11/2025

If you’re struggling with emetophobia, OCD, agoraphobia, health anxiety…it’s likely you’ve been anxious for a while (months, years, decades) and you will have tried so hard to ‘fix’ it.

But what if - through no fault of your own - your clever, analytical, problem-solving thinking habits that work so successfully for ‘outside’ problems, are actually the key driver that keep you stuck?

Quite often, the trying hard - the effort - the problem solving - the fixing - the pressure - the judgement - the managing of it - actually becomes the cause. 🤯

How many of these ‘fixing’ traps do you fall into?
👉 Treating anxiety as a problem that needs solving every day.
👉 ‘Doing’ things to try and achieve calm (breathing techniques, meditation, “self-care”
👉 Putting pressure on yourself to not feel anxious, scared, stressed
👉 Judging yourself harshly when you do
👉 Trying to find ways to fix how you feel

Well let let me tell you about the rule of opposites. The backwards law. The law of reversed effort. Where less effort is more. Where anxiety isn’t fixed or managed, it’s just not created in the first place. Where it feels easy, not hard. Simple, not complicated.

Feeling calm isn’t actually something you have to work hard for. It’s your natural baseline - it’s the place you come home to - the state that exists in the absence of the fight.

What if you stopping trying, stopped putting effort in, stopped doing, fighting, managing, ruminating…and let go. Let yourself come back to calm. What if nothing is wrong? And nothing is wrong with you? Nothing needs fixing. There are no problems to solve - simply experiences to experience.

Can you feel your chest lightening? Your jaw unclenching? Your stomach relaxing? Your mind clearing? That’s what happens when you give your nervous system permission to settle.

Tell me how does that feel?

28/10/2025

If you’re struggling with anxiety right now, you need to know this: thoughts and emotions are not facts, they’re just information about how you’re currently thinking 🤓

Just because you think something like:
“I’m not safe.”
“I can’t handle this.”
“Something awful is about to happen.”
- doesn’t make it true.

And just because you feel anxious, doesn’t mean something is wrong.
It just means your thinking made your body react as if it was.

You see, your brain doesn’t fact-check your thoughts - it just thinks in accordance with your beliefs.

👉 The emotion is real.
But the story behind it might not be.

Save this post to remind you how to fact-check your thoughts and feelings:

Remember:
💭 thoughts are not facts
😏 emotions don’t reflect the reality
❓ask yourself, where’s the evidence? (‘what if’ thoughts and emotions are not evidence 😜)
🫶 remind yourself, “nothing bad is happening. My body is just reacting to my thoughts.”

You can stop getting tricked by anxiety by stopping seeing it as the truth and starting treating it like data.

✨ Thoughts are just suggestions.
✨ Feelings are just feedback.

You get to decide which ones deserve your belief.

27/10/2025

Every time you avoid something you find hard - a journey, a place, a feeling - you send your brain a powerful message:

“I can’t handle that.”

It feels like safety, but it’s really training your brain to fear it even more next time.

Avoidance doesn’t protect you - it actually tricks you into thinking and believing that you can’t cope.

And the more you repeat it, the stronger that belief becomes.

But you know what? Confidence is learned the exact same way - just in the opposite direction.

Every time you face something rather than avoid it, however small, you update your evidence:

“I can handle it. That was hard but I can do hard things.”

That’s how you grow your confidence - one brave step at a time.

✨ Every moment you avoid, you’re training fear.

🧡 Every moment you act, you’re training freedom.

Which are you training today - fear or freedom?

21/10/2025

🌟 Sam overcomes emetophobia and agoraphobia 🌟

14/10/2025

If you struggle with emetophobia, you will notice you often see things in extremes - things are safe or dangerous, clean or contaminated, fine or about to be sick.

This is called black-and-white thinking (or all-or-nothing thinking). It’s your brain’s attempt to create certainty in a situation that feels uncertain. The problem is that life is grey. Very few things in life work in absolutes.

When your brain is in the habit of black and white thinking, you’ll hear:
• “If I don’t wash my hands, I’ll definitely catch a bug.”
• “If I feel even slightly nauseous, it means I’m going to be sick.”
• “If someone around me has been ill, I can’t go near them - it’s too risky.”

This black-and-white filter affects how you feel and behave:
• It ramps up anxiety, because your brain believes danger is everywhere.
• It leads to rigid safety rules (washing, checking, avoiding) that momentarily reduce fear - but reinforce the idea that you aren’t safe unless you follow them.
• It stops you from learning that most of those ‘middle ground’ situations - where you didn’t wash again, or you felt a bit off but nothing happened - are actually safe.

Shifting out of black-and-white thinking starts with noticing it. Ask yourself, “am I thinking in an all-or-nothing way?”, “what are the levels of grey here?”

Learning to see the greys in life helps calm your nervous system, build trust in your body, and gradually reduce the power emetophobia has over your life 🧡

11/07/2025

Only one session in and already gaining far more insight and understanding into his emetophobia than in the past 30 years 💪

07/07/2025

Want to feel good enough? Start here 👇🏼

When you’re stuck in the habit of never feeling good enough, your brain is really good at pointing out what you haven’t done, what you should have done, or how you didn’t do something perfectly.

And that constant mental nitpicking chips away at your confidence and self-worth.

But here’s the shift:
🔎 Train your brain to notice what you have done.
Every day write a simple ‘done’ list - all the small wins.
✔️ The times you handled feeling anxious today.
✔️ The effort you put in to keeping yourself calm.
✔️ The little things you did to create some enjoyment in your day.

This isn’t just a feel-good exercise - it’s how you start proving to yourself that you are capable, you do have power over your day, you are enough.

Because you don’t build self-worth by waiting to feel perfect. You build it by acknowledging your effort and backing yourself daily.

Have you tried this? Drop a 💬 or 🧡 if you’re going to start your ‘done’ list today.

Address

Wokingham

Telephone

+447976534331

Website

https://www.thriveprogramme.org/lucy-wood/

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Learn to Thrive with Lucy

The Thrive Programme is mental health training that teaches people the skills and resources to fully overcome mental health issues and learn to thrive. Based on over 30 years’ clinical experience treating thousands of people around the world, and is thoroughly research-backed and evidence-based. Quite simply, it teaches you how to completely re-wire how you think, feel and behave.

Thriving people have a skillset that makes them more robust, resilient and confident...they feel powerful and more in control of their lives...they are less prone to stress, anxiety and depression. Thriving people find it easier to resist social pressures, take more responsibility for their physical and mental health and live a more positive and active life.

The programme is simple, accessible and affordable for all ages aged 8 upwards. It takes around 6-8 weeks to complete and contains everything you need to overcome your mental health symptom and learn to thrive.