Open Letters #2: Human thinking is the new luxury with Charlotte Horler
Our best work, wildest ideas, and boldest stories won’t come from work on a screen.
Open Letters is a series sharing the lived experiences of people in the nature and climate space, including reflections on what it takes to live a mythic life full of purpose, joy, and ultimately, hope for humanity and the planet.
It’s officially time to creep out of an extended Field Notes hibernation. And who better to fling open the digital windows with than Charlotte Horler?
Charlotte is the founder of Nula, a workforce consultancy that brings green social prescribing into the workplace.
These nature-based programmes protect the energy, wellbeing and focus that performance runs on, helping purpose-driven organisations get the best work from their people without wearing them down or risking long-term sickness.
Because in 2026, I think we can all agree that our work lives and relationship with technology need some reimagining.
As we spoke, it became obvious that when we talk about nature connection, we so often think about a romantic ideal of living close to the land.
The reality is far more pragmatic. Charlotte’s approach is grounded in behavioural science and calls on nature as part of a broader toolkit to facilitate positive psychological change.
When there are so many AI copy-and-paste jobs and exhausted people working against ever-shorter deadlines, human thinking and craftsmanship will become rarer.
And it’s Charlotte’s belief that the businesses and individuals that are able to create and sustain spaces where this type of thinking is encouraged and cultivated, where we can move in a more organic pulse of life, while dancing with life’s challenges and actively restoring ourselves, will be deeply rewarded.
Over to Charlotte.
Whichever camp you fall into when it comes to AI, whether you think it still produces frankly mediocre outputs or will change the world, if AI truly is producing the performance-enhancing wins we’ve been promised, then who’s winning?
Are we reaping the rewards?
Are we getting more time back to rest?
Right now, I don’t think we are.
Over the past century, we’ve seen every performance win attributed back to employers, organisations, and the wider system. Individuals have seen very little of those gains, unless you count a gain as a pat on the back and another task on the to-do list.
It makes sense that when we try to slot nature connection into this century-old system, most people roll their eyes!
Yet, the fact is: so many of us are exhausted.
We are absorbing more information than ever. There’s only so much we can process at any one moment, and we’re simply not allowing our brains to rest and recover.
There is a reason why analogue events and manual work experience are oversubscribed right now. People in their droves, like a colleague of mine who recently left his part-time role to become an ecologist, are looking for manual labour off-screen.
He and so many others are part of this small but rapidly growing movement that makes the disconnect between who people are, what they want, and the system they exist within impossible to ignore.
Human thinking will be the ultimate luxury
For those who continue to practise the craft of original thought, critical thinking, genuine creative connection, and even human mistakes, human thinking and human design will become the ultimate luxury.
The organisations that pile AI efficiency gains back onto already depleted people will inevitably see more generic outputs, flattening words and stripping out nuance.
Yet, for those who continue to practise the craft of original thought, critical thinking, genuine creative connection, and even human mistakes, human thinking and human design will become the ultimate luxury.
If we cast our eyes back to COVID, we saw a massive drive toward nudge-based wellbeing programmes like surveys, apps, and habit-building tools designed to incrementally improve the way we worked – particularly when that work moved online.
Now, many leaders are quite rightly questioning if any of it worked.
The data currently suggests it didn’t.
We’re up against an increasing dose of healthy scepticism, and in the current political climate, wellbeing is no longer seen as cool.
I get the fatigue.
But, I also believe that this has opened a door. If the old ways have closed, there is another way in: one that sees us reclaim time dividends and energy restoration as a strategic unlock to better performance.
Nature as a tool to facilitate better energy and better work
We know that when leaders invest in people, they get results. And we also know that we can’t create great work or drive performance when we are depleted.
And so, the argument naturally follows that if we can decrease our time at work and increase our time for recovery, with that time genuinely enhanced by time in nature rather than in front of another screen, we can focus better and do our best work.
We’ll also be far better at emotionally regulating under stress, building stronger psychological safety within teams, developing a capacity to attune to others and empathise, connecting with customers, understanding them, and ultimately creating better products.
A large part of this is re-remembering how to rest well in between our work and understanding what that looks like for each of us.
When we’re in nature, we enter a state of soft fascination. Our brains register that it’s safe, particularly if surrounded by birdsong, and while we still receive stimulation, we’re not fighting through millions of information bytes per second.
Rest is different for everyone. It might be art, listening to music, reading, lying beneath a tree, or reaching a flow state and becoming completely engrossed in an activity.
And this also doesn’t have to take hours.
Lately, one thing we’ve been trialling at Nula is the idea of moments, not minutes.
Time in nature could be as simple as taking the long way round to the station as I did yesterday, noticing a tree I’d never registered before, a patch of wildness, and a pot stand by the station. These were three bits of joy that I’d never have planned for at the start of the day.
When you can flex that muscle, by adding three minutes onto your walk or taking your coffee outside, you can tune into another form of paying attention that relaxes your nervous system.
Nature connection can happen anywhere
I came into this work without a romantic childhood surrounded in birdsong.
My turning point came when I moved from London, a city of nine million people, to a forest protection site in Kenya with just nine people.
Nature was thrown into my face, literally – and after a shaky start getting tangled in acacia bushes, three and a half years later, I found myself missing elephants when they left on their migration routes. When I came back to London, I then found myself missing the language to describe exactly what had happened.
I worked too hard, I didn’t get outside enough, and I didn’t make space for this thing I’d grown to love.
Eventually, that led to heart palpitations that meant I needed to quit work altogether for a few months. I was in the fortunate position where I could walk the Camino, and that experience – again, being in nature – was when the heart palpitations stopped.
These threads run all through Nula.
I am a firm believer that even the most seemingly tiny, mundane parts of nature, the wildflowers pushing up through the paving cracks or the triangle of blue sky in an office block, are still pathways back to recovery – to better, more creative work, and to healthier, happier workforces.
My mission is to add to the evidence base that turns what we know intuitively – that our best thinking happens off a screen – into a business case.
Nature as part of a strategic toolkit
With businesses being among the last spaces where we’re bringing people together in-person, I believe that change at the individual level is at its most powerful here.
This foundational work matters now more than ever.
For leaders to create great ideas, attract the right people, and navigate this weird and messy era we find ourselves in, they have to proactively lay the groundwork before things break. And with businesses being among the last spaces where we’re bringing people together in-person, I believe that change at the individual level is at its most powerful here.
The question now is whether we can see nature as a tool in a toolkit that brands can use to strategically unlock employee energy, which in turn drives performance and other KPIs.
That’s where we have to start.
Not by opening the conversation by talking about nature connection, but by talking about energy. And importantly, what happens when you lose it.
Where to follow Charlotte
You can follow her work here:
This September, Nula is launching a new 12-week programme for people working in climate and sustainability who are feeling the weight of the polycrisis. We’ll be meeting as a small group once a week in nature, in Bristol or London.
If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, book in a call with Charlotte to learn more and register your interest for the London or the September cohort here.
About Cantadora Field Notes
If you’re new here, welcome! I’m Emma – a fractional content strategist and product marketer, as well as founder of Cantadora: the product storytelling studio for nature and climate.
If you work in nature and climate tech and would like to feature in the next Open Letters, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a note at emma@cantadora.co.uk or get in touch here.
Until then, thank you for being here.
– Emma from Cantadora
Green social prescribing, LOVE this.
What a joy as always to chat to you Em!