Welcome to the last day of 2025. At Voxel Hub, it was a year of slow, paced growth and continuous client support. Most importantly, we were able to keep our prices low and services as flexible as possible. I want to think that this made a difference in our client’s lives, and your feedback says so. Thank you. Here are the key themes that emerge from our journey this year.
AI adoption
What stands out to me personally is the general adoption of AI solutions by the general public and their impact on our work this year. Given my experience working with AI professionals over the last two decades, we have been preparing for this shift since our founding in 2019. Unfortunately, the regulation of those relatively new technologies is slow, so we have updated our client agreements to offer as much flexibility as possible, while also maintaining our firm commitment to clients’ safety and wellbeing. We hope that the current guidance we provide in our agreements can at least inspire a more informed approach to the choices we make around using AI tools in our daily lives – especially for mental health support. Why is this important? Our work varies – sometimes we work with well-functioning, thriving individuals and organisations. However, often we also work with people and teams who experience challenges and various forms of dysfunction. When we find ourselves in vulnerable moments in our lives and operations, our capacity to make sensible decisions can be compromised. Thus, we need to be really careful about what we automate, how we automate it, and to what extent we may be forming long-term attachments to algorithms and AI models. Hence, our agreement update with AI recommendations.
Negative bias and decreased ability to connect with hope
For those of us who work in liberation psychology to support people recovering from relational and systemic harm, this year was challenging. News from many countries challenged the rights of displaced individuals and communities. Digital spaces amplify those challenges, especially in spaces that prioritise and highlight negative conversations. Thus our work becomes even more critical than ever. We remain committed to stressing the importance of balanced, grounded and contextualised views. So even if the news is hard, we must remember that for many of us, our daily reality still contains many options, opportunities, and responsibilities to stand up for each other collectively. To do this, we need to rest. We need to reconnect. We need to rebuild. And we need to connect with hope and joy – as impossible as it may seem at first. In our work, we have seen incredible kindness, courage and generosity this year. Our clients and our supporters inspire us every day to look forward and work towards better futures (while keeping a watchful eye on developments that may worry us, too, of course).
Burnout rates are rising
Here in the UK, the workplace burnout report is worrying. Many corporates I spoke with this year are actively looking for mental health support, but may also be quite unaware of the realities and nuances of this specific challenge. Challenge, which by the way, we all face in academia, parenting and other aspects of life too. Managing burnout requires a lot of proactive prevention work and ongoing monitoring of our wellbeing levels because when we burn out, it’s pretty much too late to intervene – we need to take time off. As we are aligned with the collective values of systemic therapies such as eco-therapy, geek therapies, narrative therapies and liberation psychology, we work with groups of people to identify warning signs when those occur. However, I cannot stress enough how critical it is to put in place good workplace wellbeing policies followed by processes, training, and actions. In my experience of delivering such training this year, employers are incredibly relieved when they understand the complexity of burnout and the options available to tackle it (immediately and long-term).
Looking ahead to 2026
In the New Year, my professional intention is to finish my master’s research on geek therapies in the UK to deliver even more support to the geek community than what we have done so far.
Our strong commitment to the quality of our services means that we will be improving the after-care for our clients – we will be working on even more resources and self-guided wellbeing support. It’s important to us that the impact of our work continues. Of course, we are always here, and you are very welcome to come back for more coaching, consultancy or counselling (which many of you do!). However, there is also a lot of value in independent work within the boundaries of our agency and capacity. We want to support that.
Finally, we will be listening more. We have robust feedback mechanisms built into our client journey already. Nonetheless, this is ongoing work, and I believe we can do more on that front.
Let me wrap this post up with a huge thank you to each and every person who connected with Voxel Hub this year, and wish you all a very peaceful and joyful Happy New Year 2026.
