Dr Gibson

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Medical doctor, GP, passionate about using lifestyle and living well to achieve good health.

I aim to find the balance between modern general practice and lifestyle medicine.

18/09/2026

When people talk about autistic literal thinking, they often use examples such as taking “it’s raining cats and dogs” literally.
For me, it’s usually much subtler than that.
It can mean hearing “we’ve agreed that you’ll do this” and assuming that means I should go away and do it. Then discovering that everyone else understood an unspoken process involving another email, a conversation with someone else and possibly another meeting first to check everyone is happy before the thing is done.
The words made sense. The social context surrounding them was where the meaning became less clear.
And once I realise I may have missed something, the second-guessing begins. Have I done the wrong thing? What was I supposed to understand? What will everyone think now?
Clear, explicit communication makes such a difference. If there are steps before the thing, please tell me what they are. Otherwise, there is a fairly good chance I’ll toddle off and do exactly what we agreed.

14/09/2026

The Gibson girls.
Proud mama moment yesterday, all three of us playing in the same hockey team on the pitch together. About a year ago I played with my eldest daughter for the first time, and this year my youngest is old enough to join us too 💛🖤💛🖤💛🖤

We were all very proud to be part of the new Barney dev team at Durham City Hockey Club💛🖤💛 and even more delighted that the new team won our very first ever match 4:2.
Huge thanks to Alan Fisher and Charlie Galvin for all their support and making the Barney team happen, it’s brilliant!!🤩 looking forward to lots of fun this hockey season 🏑

12/09/2026

AuDHD life thoughts… conferences - brilliant but also really hard work. Bit tired now!

10/09/2026

BSLM Conference 2026 is here!
I’m in Warwick this week for a few days of Lifestyle Medicine conversations, learning, catching up with colleagues and, at some point amongst all that, getting up on stage myself.
I’m speaking on Coaching Skills for Lifestyle Medicine, looking at some of the practical skills that can help us turn our knowledge of Lifestyle Medicine into useful conversations with the people sitting in front of us.
Coaching has become a huge part of my work over the years, so getting 10 minutes to talk about it at the BSLM conference is both a challenge (I could happily talk about this for several hours…) and a real pleasure.
If you’re at the conference, do come and say hello. And if you’re coming to my session, I’ll see you there!

09/09/2026

Here's a sneak peek ... I've been working on something new behind the scenes…

Dr Andrea Whitehead and I are developing neuro-affirmative coaching training for qualified coaches, and we're excited to let you know that we’ll soon be able to open our course for bookings.

If you’d like to support neurodivergent clients with greater confidence and develop a more neuro-affirmative coaching approach, you can register your interest now and be among the first to hear more when dates and details are released:
https://www.lifemedonline.com/page/704751-neuro-affirmative-coaching-cpd-sign-up

07/09/2026

I LOVE coaching.
I love what happens when we stop trying to give people all the answers and get really good at listening, asking useful questions and helping them work out what matters to them.
It’s why I wrote the BSLM online Health Coaching course, and why so much of our work at LifeMed is about helping healthcare professionals take coaching skills off the page and put them into real-life practice.
And this week I’ll be speaking at the BSLM Conference 2026 about Coaching Skills for Lifestyle Medicine: practical skills we can use in everyday consultations to support meaningful, sustainable change.
Because knowing the evidence for Lifestyle Medicine is one thing. Knowing how to have conversations that help people actually use it is a skill in itself.
Very looking forward to talking about one of my favourite subjects this week!

06/09/2026

After the summer break I thought it might be a good time to reintroduce myself.
I’m Caroline. I’m a GP, Lifestyle Medicine Physician, coach and coaching supervisor, and I’ve been working in and around the NHS for more than 20 years (and yes that does make me feel old!)
A lot of my work sits somewhere in the overlap between health, behaviour change, coaching and the reality of being a human being who doesn’t necessarily do all the things she knows are good for her.
I’m particularly interested in how we actually make changes in real life. How we look after our health when life is busy. How we develop confidence without pretending we have everything sorted. How coaching helps us think differently. How we can use lifestyle medicine to support health in a broken NHS system that doesn’t work for complex multifactorial conditions. And how all of this looks through a neurodivergent lens.
I’m neurodivergent, AuDHD – officially diagnosed just a couple of years ago, which has explained quite a lot about how my brain works, how I work, and why some perfectly sensible advice has never been remotely useful to me.
So on here you’ll find a mixture of lifestyle medicine, coaching, behaviour change, neurodivergence, professional development and supervision, with occasional deep dives into whatever has caught my attention.
You’ll also find hockey, parkrun, views from walks, things I’ve noticed in day-to-day life, parenting and trying to keep up with everything. The cats make fairly regular appearances too, along with plenty of evidence that knowing quite a lot about healthy behaviour doesn’t automatically make you brilliant at doing it.
So that’s a bit of an introduction to me. I’m glad you’re here. Do reach out and say hi.

04/09/2026

I’m looking forward to this today!

Back in June, Samantha Buckland and I introduced our Professional Maturity Wheel at the IPM Congress. Today, we’re continuing that conversation in a practical workshop for UKIHCA members.

Finishing your training doesn’t mean all the uncertainty suddenly goes away. As we develop our practice, new questions and more complicated situations come up. It's also really common and normal to have moments when we wonder whether we really know what we're doing.

In the session today, we’ll be looking at what helps us move from being trained health coaches to becoming trusted and professionally mature practitioners, and how we can feel more confident in who we are and how we work.

Izabella Natrins will also share insights from two recently published papers on professional identity and the ongoing development of health and wellbeing coaching.

I’m really pleased to be part of this conversation with Izabella and Sam. See you at midday!

04/09/2026

I’ve been meaning to start posting again after the summer holidays. Been to Italy, had a lovely time. Then life kind of got in the way a bit, but now I've run out of excuses.
And now... I keep not doing it.
I have plenty of ideas. I know why I want to be here. But I have a complicated relationship with social media, and after a few weeks away, starting again somehow feels like a much bigger thing than it really is.
Which got me thinking about activation energy.
Getting started often takes more effort than keeping going. We see it with exercise, eating habits, sleep routines, work we’ve been putting off… and apparently, in my case, posting on social media.
We often wait for motivation to arrive before we act. But sometimes it works the other way round: taking one small action helps create the motivation for the next one.
So I’ve written a blog about starting again when you don’t really feel like it and why the first step doesn’t need to be particularly impressive.
This post is also me practising what I preach.
One post. One small step. Starting again.

Read the full article here: https://castlehealthcoaching.co.uk/2026/09/03/getting-started-again-when-you-dont-really-feel-like-it/

04/07/2026

Some mornings, I don't feel like practising what I preach.
This morning it was drizzling, I'd had a busy week, my achilles tendonitis is still a bit grumbly. The cat had stolen my warm spot on the bed, which meant that I couldn't go back to sleep (because you can't move the cat!) but snuggling down around the cat seemed like a good idea.
I knew parkrun would probably do me good.
Knowing and doing are two very different things.
So I made a deal with myself. I didn't have to run well, I didn't have to run all of it, I just had to turn up. I went and did a bit of a walk-run-walk-run-limp-walk. Not my best at all, and I had all the self-criticism that comes along when I don't do well, because the internal story of 'well you should just try harder' is well ingrained.
But I moved my body. I caught up with familiar faces. I got some fresh air. And I came home feeling noticeably better than when I left.
That's something I see every day in coaching and in medicine. We often wait until we feel motivated before we act. But if we wait for motivation to appear, we'll never get started. Motivation comes from doing. Often, motivation turns up only after we've taken the first step. We just need to move forward and do something.
Sometimes "better than nothing" is exactly enough.

Address

London

Website

http://www.drcarolinegibson.com/

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