About five years ago something in me shifted. An awakening if you like to the fact that I’d been sleepwalking through what is the biggest crisis of our time — climate change.

The thing is I was busy. And when you’re busy it’s easy to ignore things. For the previous decade I was content with the fact I was doing a worthwhile job working for the NHS — not a bank or a fossil fuel company. I was based in a hospital, sharing stories of the amazing work that healthcare workers do day to day, getting involved in healthcare campaigns aimed at improving people’s lives.

I was busy. Not busy like a doctor or someone on a zero hours contract working round the clock shifts but 5 days a week with a young child busy, living for the weekend busy, in need of light and fluffy downtime busy, eating low effort meals busy, spending no time working out what I already owned and being too quick to buy new busy, taking the car when I could have cycled or walked. Sound familiar?

What I only realised after the awakening is that I was on a hiding to nothing. Even if your main concern is money (increasingly so for more people), the fact is the busier I was, the more I spent on things I didn’t need and the unhealthier I was. I also wasn’t fully taking part in community activities that would make where I live a better place or conscious enough of my effect on the environment.

The awakening as I like to call it happened when I stepped off the treadmill. When I returned to my busy job after maternity leave, it turns out it had got even busier and much less rewarding and stressful. I jumped into a different job but what I really wanted and needed was a career break.

It felt like a scary thing to do. I’d brainwashed myself into thinking the way I’d been working was the only way. Somewhere along the way I’d lost some of my imagination and free spirit, I’d got bogged down with paying a mortgage and living a more complicated and expensive life than I needed to be.

It was about the time the media was waking up to the damage us humans were doing to the planet. I was already well aware of it because it turns out when I was a lot less busy and travelling around the US in my early twenties I’d read this copy of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance which affected me deeply and had been on my shelf ever since.

Life changed after that. I’ve never been a big consumer of things and have always loved buying secondhand but it turns out that the simple fact of being less busy made me not want to buy anything new at all. Instead, I finally took the time to browse through all those cookery books sitting on the shelf for years and started cooking proper meals for my family.

We started to grow fruit and veg in our garden, got a compost bin and water butts. We went from a two car household to one, turned our front driveway into an edible garden, and made a pledge to fly less. When my closest supermarket chopped down all the trees surrounding it, I boycotted it publicly and never set foot inside it again.

We visited zero waste shops for all the essentials and our local greengrocer and farmers markets. I had more time to read and listen to people’s stories about how our lives have been affected by mass consumerism, cementing my abhorration for large corporations like supermarkets.

I took a bit of work as a tv researcher looking at in-work poverty, volunteered at a foodbank and visited a homeless shelter and met some amazing people. I helped to organise some local community events and did a permaculture course.

As a family we took to the streets in support of the youth climate strikes and I got involved in local climate action groups offering my communications skills and experience wherever it was needed. It was through this that I came across Zero Waste Leeds one of SBB’s (Social Business Brokers) most high profile projects and loved what they were doing in the city so I volunteered for them and it’s where I am now. Two plus years later, I can safely say it’s the most rewarding job I’ve ever had and I’m so proud of our work.

Why am I telling my story? What we do at SBB is to find solutions to social and environmental problems and specifically in my role, find ways to engage people in a way that encourages them to makes changes that benefit their lives, their communities and the planet. And I don’t just mean individual changes but systemic changes too.

The thing is 5+ years ago I wasn’t doing very much to help the planet. Arguably I’ve been fairly low impact but that’s not good enough anymore. What I needed was the time and head space to be able to make a difference. Some people manage to do it all and I respect them for it but if we want more people to be able to imagine a different way of living that is good for them, their families and the planet, I believe we need time.

It’s why I’m a big supporter of the 4 day working week. When trialled in Iceland it resulted in significant health and wellbeing benefits working less means more time spent with family, for hobbies, passions, interests or simply for rest. The media tended to only pick up on the fact that productivity levels stayed the same and in most cases increased but what they don’t mention are the massive benefits to people’s lives and the space it gave them to contribute to society.

In my blogs I’ll be exploring what this all means in greater detail, the impact it has had on me and my family, and the impact we can have as individuals in our communities and the world at large.