There’s no doubt that meditation is the cool thing to do at the moment. TIME Magazine has hailed the “Mindful Revolution,” Google has an in-house mindfulness program, and lists of "outrageously successful" people who meditate regularly make the rounds on my social media feed, including Huffington Post and Thrive Global founder Arianna Huffington who champions its use in the workplace for boosting productivity and the corporate bottom line. There’s also increased interest in mindfulness in scientific circles. Everything from mindfulness for binge-eating, to mindfulness for post traumatic stress is being put to the test and the results are promising. Researchers... Read full article »

I was standing on the side of the road while my three-year-old son was kicking his legs and screaming his lungs out. While Theodore usually loves walking to his childcare centre, on this particular Monday morning he did not want to go to school, and he felt that the whole neighbourhood should know about it. To my mortification someone came out of their house to see what was going on. Another person walking by gave me a strange look. “What is she doing to that poor child?” the look said. With a To-Do list as long as my arm waiting... Read full article »

I was sitting in front of my computer screen staring blankly. I’d been writing for three hours straight, without looking up and had just put a full stop on the end of a paragraph that had proven stubbornly difficult to write. With deadlines looming as I race towards the finish line of completing my book, I was trying to work out which was the most pressing of my pressing tasks to move onto. But my brain had turned to mush. I was distantly aware of my aching hips and tight lower back and knew I needed to get up and... Read full article »

If you’re anything like me and the 20 million other people who have now watched the YouTube video of Mick Fanning’s shark encounter during the J-Bay Open in South Africa, your heart started pounding when you first saw it. The huge dorsal fin of what experts estimate to be a 3.5-meter great white shark rises up out of the ocean taking Fanning by surprise.   By his own account on live television moments after it happened, the shark came from behind him and he instinctively lifted his leg out of the way before he started punching it. “I just sort... Read full article »

Dr. Craig Duncan was not supposed to have a heart attack. The 43-year-old leading sports scientist was as fit as the elite Australian athletes he trained. He ran every day. He was vegetarian. He had no sign of heart disease - not high blood pressure or high cholesterol. In fact he’d recently had an ECG to check his heart and got the all clear from doctors.   But Craig is lucky to be alive after suffering a Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection. There were only 150 cases of the rare condition recorded and the majority had been autopsies.   I interviewed... 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 »