A six-month programme to understand what's influencing your mood and support your mind and body as you reduce or come off antidepressants.
Beyond the Low Mood
You're done with the quick fixes, the guesswork, and the feeling that you're a broken machine that needs constant maintenance.
Personalised nutrition and functional medicine support for midlife women considering, reducing or coming off antidepressants.
You've tried the diets, the supplements that promised to fix your focus, your energy, your patience. You've sat through enough therapy sessions to know the theory, but you're still waking up feeling like a stranger in your own body.
Your GP is talking about medication, and you've probably wondered whether you just need to try a bit harder, be more disciplined or find the thing that finally works.
But if no one has ever helped you understand why you feel the way you do, how are you supposed to know what will actually help?
Your biology, your nervous system and your history can all be part of the picture, annd for a long time, you haven't had the right translator.
I'm Nicola. I spent twenty years living in the high-frequency static of someone who was doing everything "right" while being completely disconnected from how my body actually felt, panic attacks and overwhelm included. It took a long time to realise my body wasn't failing me, it was trying to communicate in a language I didn't know how to read. We aren't going to "reset" you. We are going to map your specific biology so you can finally stop surviving your midlife and start living it.
N.B. Beyond the Low Mood works alongside medically supervised antidepressant tapering; it does not replace the care of your GP, psychiatrist or prescriber.
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Who I work with
You're done with the "quick fix" noise.
You're in your 40s or 50s, and you're feeling a shift that doesn't make sense. You've spent years performing "fine," on paper, in your blood work, and in your daily life, but the reality is that your mood, your energy, and your focus are slipping through your fingers.
Maybe you're navigating antidepressants and looking for the support the standard system doesn't provide. Maybe you're feeling the weight of perimenopause and you know there's more to the story than just "it's your hormones."
You don't need more advice from people who haven't looked at your whole picture. You need someone to help you make sense of what your biology is actually doing, and understand why you may be feeling the way you do.
If you are ready to stop managing your symptoms and start translating them, we'll do our best work together.
About Nicola
Why I do this work:
I spent twenty years navigating the internal grind of my own nervous system.
I was the woman who looked confident in the boardroom while secretly being afraid to be alone. I was the woman who hit a wall at 27 and was handed a prescription for antidepressants that I instinctively knew wasn't the answer, not because I was against medicine, but because I knew my own story wasn't just a chemical imbalance.
I grew up watching my mother struggle for decades with the same ‘chemical depression,’ and I remember the quiet realization that if I followed the standard path, I’d be living in that same bubble of turmoil for the rest of my life.
So, I went looking for a different language.
Sixteen years later, I’ve combined my background in nutritional therapy, functional medicine, and mindset work to create the bridge I wish I’d had back then. I don’t treat you like a symptom list or a file to be processed. I treat you like a human being whose biology has been trying to talk to you for years.
If you want to hear how I think about this, and how I move from the clinical data to the human reality, you can listen to my conversation on RNZ Sunday Morning.
I work with women who are done with the performance. You aren't too complex. You haven't run out of options. You’ve just been looking for an answer in a system that wasn’t designed to hear your story.
I don't work from a set protocol or assume that there's one explanation for why you feel the way you do.
My role is to help you make sense of your own health picture.
We'll bring together what you already know about yourself, your symptoms, health history and life experiences, with what we can learn from your nutrition, lifestyle, blood results and functional testing where appropriate.
Then I'll help you translate all of that information into something useful: what might be influencing how you feel, where we can make changes, and what deserves our attention first.
We're not trying to overhaul your life. We'll work with the foundations - food, sleep, stress, hormones, gut health and your nervous system - making changes that are realistic enough to become part of everyday life.
There are six areas we'll explore together:
1. Nutrition & blood sugar
What and how you eat can influence your energy, concentration and mood. We'll look at your current nutrition, eating patterns and blood sugar and identify where relatively small changes could help support more stable energy and mental wellbeing.
2. Sleep & your body clock
Sleep and mental health are closely connected, but knowing you need more sleep doesn't necessarily help when you're lying awake at 3am. We'll look beyond generic sleep advice to understand what may be disrupting your sleep and what we can realistically do to support it.
3. Stress & your nervous system
If you've spent a long time feeling stressed, anxious or on high alert, that becomes an important part of the picture. We'll look at the demands on your nervous system and find practical ways of supporting it that fit into your life rather than giving you another list of things you “should” be doing.
4. Hormones & midlife
For many women, changes in mood, anxiety, sleep and concentration appear or become more noticeable during perimenopause and menopause. We'll consider where changing hormones may fit into your wider health picture and what nutritional and lifestyle support may be helpful.
5. Your gut & brain
Your digestive health doesn't sit separately from your mental wellbeing. We'll explore your digestion, gut health and nutrition, and where appropriate use functional testing to investigate whether factors such as the gut microbiome may be relevant to how you're feeling.
6. Your history & the patterns we notice
Your health didn't begin with the symptoms you're experiencing today. We'll also consider your wider history: periods of stress, previous health problems, medication, significant life events and patterns that have developed over time.
This isn't about looking backwards for something to blame. It's about recognising the connections that can help us understand why your health picture looks the way it does now.
Because when you understand your own health better, the changes we make together start to make much more sense.
Making sense of your whole health picture
"Patients no longer need to suffer from the limitations and inadequacies of traditional one-size-fits-all approaches… Lasting recovery is possible." – James Greenblatt, MD
At the heart of Beyond the Low Mood is a functional medicine approach that looks at your whole health picture, your symptoms and health history alongside your nutrition, lifestyle and individual biochemistry.
Rather than following a set protocol, we'll use that information to understand the factors that may be influencing how you feel and build a personalised approach around you.
01 - Clarity Call
We start with a 30-minute Clarity Call. This gives us time to talk about what's been going on, what you're hoping to achieve and whether Beyond the Low Mood feels like the right fit for you.
02 - In-depth assessment
We begin the programme with a 90-minute session where we'll explore your health history, current symptoms, nutrition, lifestyle, medication, sleep, stress and anything else that may be relevant to how you're feeling. We'll start joining the dots and identify our initial priorities.
03 - Your personalised plan
Following your sessions, you'll receive clear, practical recommendations based on what we've discussed. These may include nutrition, lifestyle and supplement recommendations, with functional testing considered where appropriate. We'll introduce changes gradually so they're realistic and manageable.
04 - Support between sessions
You'll have regular check-ins and voice-note support between appointments, giving you somewhere to ask questions, share what's changing and get guidance when you need it — rather than having to wait until your next session.
05 - Five follow-up sessions
We'll meet for five 45-minute follow-up sessions across the six months. These give us time to review how you're getting on, discuss what's changing, make sense of any new information or test results and adapt your recommendations as we learn more about you.
Your programme may also include
Functional testing
Where it could provide useful additional information or influence our recommendations, we may discuss functional testing with you. Testing costs are additional to the programme fee and will always be discussed with you first.
Supplement Guidance
Where supplements are appropriate, I'll explain what I'm recommending, why I've chosen it and how to take it. Supplements are purchased separately, with a 10% discount on products recommended through the programme.
Communication with your medical team
Where helpful and with your permission, I can write to your GP, psychiatrist or other healthcare professional so they understand the nutritional and functional medicine support we're putting in place.
The six-month Beyond the Low Mood programme is £2,250.
Pay in full or in six monthly payments of £375.
How Beyond The Low Mood works
IMPORTANT NOTE ON MEDICATION
This programme does not replace medical care. I do not prescribe, start, stop or change your antidepressant medication.
Any decisions about starting, tapering or adjusting medication are made between you and your prescribing doctor or psychiatrist, ideally with a gradual, collaborative plan in place.
With your consent, I can write to your prescriber and share relevant information, so we are all working together as a team. The focus of this programme is to support your body and mind through nutrition, lifestyle and functional medicine so that, whatever you decide about medication, you feel more supported, more informed, and more resilient.
"Nicola knows her stuff, and she knows yours too. Only you don't know it, yet. Make an appointment. Because she can't keep it to herself, can she?"
Fiona, East London