UPSTREAM THINKING
Tools and rituals for more clarity and flow, distilled weekly.
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Splash of the Week
Entering our relational era.
Hi friends,
We are in the season of rethinking the performance game.
As I explore relational ontologies in my DPhil and study belonging through the Core Social Motives Theory, I keep returning to one question:
What would it look like if coherence replaced the dogma of optimisation (management) and control?
I work full-time at a bank in London, part-time PhD-ing in Oxford, and build Upstream Thinking and the Claudiclouds Cultural Hydration Studio on the side, so yes, I’ve researched how to “optimise my days.”
Reading The One Thing last summer was a reset (I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago). I now choose one focus for each project and cut the noise. After years of watching morning-routine reels and reading up on “science-backed” hacks, I realised the last thing I need is more data to make me feel like I am not optimising enough or I am behind “my own” schedule.
I now live by a rhythm: fun, untracked, alive.
I went back to the basics: Eat your water. Structure days around sleep. Move for flow. Seek sunlight. Do one thing. Play always.
It’s been a journey started in a season of despair in 2018, elevated by a 2021 Pandemic life in Eri (What a sparkly life we had together) and which culminated in a one year 2023/24 water retreat between Meadows and the Med, the jungle (miss you Colombia) and the desert (Dakhla and weekly Human Design insights by Anna), reading about water (Oxford libraries) and playing in water (Ocean waves).
As I started sharing my water-wellness life and reflections, many of you asked me to write more, to host retreats and workshops, to keep flowing together, to join the Splash & Play. Your curiosity and support have shaped this path more than you know.
And together, many of us have been practicing our Rauhnacht Rituals since 2020, a Germanic and Celtic tradition I’ll start sharing more on this again on November 24!
In the meantime, as I close out 2025, I’m reflecting on what it means to live water-intelligently.
Here are my Rituals:
Protect Your Sleep
Structure your day around sleep.
Eight hours to rest. One to unwind. One to rise. When my energy dipped recently, I realised I’d let my sleep block slide. Restoring it recalibrated everything.
If something in your day no longer fits around your sleep schedule, THAT is the thing that doesn’t belong.
At an Oxford talk I attended months ago, a dream researcher quietly suggested that some colleagues in the field are exploring the asleep state as our truest consciousness or truest awake state. Either way, sleep is the most natural portal back to yourself.
The One-Item Success List
One thing a day is enough.
Choose it. Commit. Deliver. Move. Sleep.
Repetition builds flow; flow builds coherence.
Relate to Yourself
Who are you when nobody’s watching?
We create experience through what we choose to think; your cells are always listening.
Your aura isn’t a five-minute morning ritual: it’s your baseline frequency.
Flow doesn’t come from copying routines.
It comes from living at your own pace and protecting it.
The Deeper Shift
I feel a shift and many of you have mentioned it to me too.
We’re moving beyond endless tweaks and optimisations.
A deeper current is reshaping consciousness, personal and collective.
Even science and business are starting to speak in new languages:
circadian rhythm, biology of belief, neuroplasticity, epigenetics.
The systems are catching up to what intuition has always known.
People are asking better questions.
Not “What’s the quickest fix?” but “What’s the cost of staying out of sync?”
Not “How can I make myself do this?” but “What would life feel like if it didn’t need forcing?”
The moment you stop forcing habits, you remember you were already well beneath the noise.
In Upstream Living, that shift looks like this:
“Drink more water.” → “You are water.”
“Protect nature.” → “You are nature.”
“Take more supplements.” → “You can’t out-supplement a polluted watershed.”
And for all of us:
“You can’t meditate your way out of burnout culture
without changing how you live, relate, and participate.”
Living well now means fluency in your own signals, and those of your environment.
💞 The Relational Era
This isn’t about being better.
It’s about being with yourself, others, the water, the world.
And that kind of change doesn’t need pushing.
It pulls you in, quietly, like a current.
And it’s already here.
See you upstream,
Clouds
Upstream Thinking → A modern philosophy for more clarity, rhythm and flow.
A Final Thought
Notes from the Meadow
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Landed here by chance? Stick around, we make everything way more fun. Hit subscribe for tools, stories, philosophy and upstream thinking. Hydration for cells & mind.
Disclaimer: This newsletter does not provide medical or nutritional advice. The content shared here is for informational and educational purposes only. To inspire a more mindful and empowered relationship with water, and yourself.