When my doctor first told me that he thought I had Lupus, he couldn’t offer me a cure or a cause. By way of explanation for why my immune system had turned on my normal healthy tissue, he said that the disease was probably genetic. The implication was that I got dealt an unlucky hand and there wasn’t anything more I could do.   I’ve spoken to many other people who have been told the same thing when they were given a chronic illness diagnosis. In fact genetic inheritability is often quoted in statistics to explain disease. For instance if... Read full article »

The benefits of meditation are being proven again and again by researchers around the world every day. Scientists have shown meditation can enhance your immune system,  it can help you cope with chronic illness, and it can change your brain structure to help with anxiety, focus and attention.   But in a world where we have bills to pay, bank balances to replenish and relationships to nurture, finding time can be tricky. Many of us struggle to carve out time to get even the daily recommended dose of 30 minutes of exercise a day let alone finding any amount of... Read full article »

I’d like to tell you the story of an apprehensive pack of lab rodents that have been able to teach us something profound about stress. If you’ve seen my film The Connection you will have heard a little about these animals, which were studied by scientists at the National Centre for Biological Sciences.   In a series of studies, the Indian researchers took lab rats and restrained them for two hours a day, for ten days to stress them out. The scientists observed that the animals started acting anxiously even when they weren’t being constrained. When they were placed in... Read full article »

You would expect the business card of a man who was one of the first people to be employed by Google to read Head Programmer or Manager of Digital Innovation, but when Chade-Meng Tan handed me his card, it gave him the title of ‘Jolly Good Fellow’ with a subtitle ‘Which nobody can deny.’   Meng’s job description at Google is to enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace. He was awarded this noble position after he spent his 20% time - the time Google engineers are allowed to spend on something other than their regular job, developing a... Read full article »

Last Thursday night I was exhausted. The last thing I felt like doing was getting dressed up and heading out. But this was an engagement I had to keep. Not because it had some important work purpose or because I was obligated to go. It was for my mental health. I hadn’t caught up with a particular group of women for over a month. The instant I saw them, I knew I wanted and needed to be there.   If you’ve seen my film The Connection you may recall seeing vision of women with their babies sitting happily in a... Read full article »

It was Monday morning. I was stuck in a hot car park with my husband and 18-month-old son. We were an hour out of Sydney. Our car was broken down. My email inbox was chock-a-block, there were a bunch of voicemails on my phone and I had a ‘To Do’ list as long as my arm.   We’d just spent the weekend on the Hawkesbury River at a holiday house only accessible by boat and after successfully transferring our luggage from the boat to the car with relatively little fuss from my son, we discovered the car had a flat... Read full article »