“For my entire career, my work has sat firmly in the world of business psychology.”
Below is an update from Helen, our commander-in-chief and all round superstar. Pay attention everybody.
I’ve spent years helping leaders and teams understand behaviour, motivation and decision-making, drawing on assessment science, behavioural psychology, and more recently, applied neuroscience. The questions are usually framed around productivity, engagement, leadership effectiveness, or performance.
More recently, that same knowledge has been finding a new, and unexpectedly powerful application: supporting people in addiction recovery.
I started volunteering at Exaireo, a charity focused on homelessness and addiction recovery in the East Midlands, in 2024.
At first glance (and certainly to me for my first 6 months when I was more overwhelmed by how little life experience I shared with the residents), the worlds of business psychology and addiction recovery seemed far apart. But when you strip addiction back to its behavioural and neurological foundations, the overlap is striking.
Addiction is not primarily a moral failure or a lack of willpower. It is a learned pattern of behaviour, reinforced by a nervous system that has adapted to survive pain, stress, trauma, or emptiness. The brain does exactly what it is designed to do: repeat what has brought relief, connection, or reward in the past.
This is where business psychology and neuroscience become deeply relevant.
In leadership development, we talk a lot about habit loops, reward systems, cognitive biases, emotion regulation, and the impact of chronic stress on decision-making. In addiction, those same mechanisms are turned up to maximum volume. Dopamine, anticipation, threat responses, avoidance behaviours – these are not abstract concepts. They are lived realities in both business and addiction.
In 2025, I discovered the incredible work of Rebekah Thomas and started working through her True Freedom Programme. True Freedom brings together neuroscience, the Bible and addiction recovery. And I’ve been geeking out hard on all of that ever since!
One of the most transformative insights for many people in recovery is this: you’re not broken: your brain has been trained.
That understanding alone can reduce shame, which is often one of the greatest barriers to change.
Many people in addiction have spent years being told they are weak, selfish, or unmotivated. In reality, they are often highly adaptive individuals whose coping strategies once made perfect sense. Recovery then becomes less about punishment or control, and more about learning new ways to meet the same underlying needs: safety, connection, relief, meaning.
I’ve also been struck by how transferable this work is to the business world. The same principles that help someone interrupt a substance addiction pattern are relevant to compulsive overwork, smartphone addiction and chronic avoidance of the conversations that matter.
This integration of psychology, neuroscience, and recovery work feels like a natural extension of everything I’ve done before – just applied where it arguably matters most.
True Freedom creates a safe, relational space where people can rebuild identity, agency, and hope.
When recovery is framed as retraining the brain rather than fighting it, new options open up. And when people are given understanding instead of judgement, and tools instead of shame, real freedom becomes possible.
