A New Way of Being

Are you someone who has a tracker to keep tabs on things like your sleep and calorie count? We are increasingly obsessed with data and tracking – and we are also increasingly out of touch with the signals of our body. Christie Aschwanden is an award winning journalist, Nordic skier and the author of the fascinating book - Good To Go: What the athlete in us can learn from the strange science of rec...

Psychological flexibility is often described as the ‘super skill’ of resilience, wellbeing and mental health. It is your ability to ‘make contact with experience in the present moment fully and without defence’. Research has found that it is associated with higher quality of life and wellbeing. As regular listeners will often hear me say, we are not our thoughts – we are aware of our thoughts. Thi...

Olympic 2020 Tokyo 1500 metres silver medalist Laura Muir is one of the finest middle-distance runners Britain has ever seen. But there’s more – she is a trained vet too. Muir graduated from the University of Glasgow’s prestigious vet school in 2018 all while competing at the top level – winning her first senior outdoor gold medal at the European Championships that summer. How did she juggle both...

As research into the potential healing powers of psychedelics gains pace, I am thrilled to be joined by Michael Pollan, the author and journalist described as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In his book How to change your mind , Michael researches how psychedelics including psylocibin mushrooms are being used to help people suffering from various mental health...

A good night’s sleep can make you feel strong enough to take on the world. A bad nights sleep – well, let’s not go there. This clip is all about how to avoid falling down the insomnia gap. You see, one bad night’s sleep can quickly snowball – so it’s good to know how to stop that from happening and to recognise the signs. This is from my conversation with Dr Guy Meadows – the founder and clinical...

Lawrence Dallaglio is an English sporting icon who understands the power of being driven by a higher purpose. He won 85 international rugby caps and was a crucial player in England's World Cup triumph of 2003. But Dallaglio is not cut from typical rugby playing cloth. It was the tragedy of losing his older sister in the Marchioness boating disaster of 1989 that ended up propelling him to pursue a...

Who doesn’t want to know how to stop unpleasant and even intrusive thoughts from bothering them? While lots of people talk about positive thinking, and training yourself to turn a negative into something upbeat – the truth is – that takes a lot of effort and doesn’t always work. Dr Russ Harris is one of the world’s leading psychologists. He shares a portable mindfulness technique that can sap the...

There’s a saying that I’m confident you will have heard of – but which we can all too quickly forget when the mind starts taking off. And it is – what you resist, persists. One of my guests who has really internalised the wisdom behind that saying is Jonny Wilkinson. We all know his story – he was the darling of English rugby who kicked the World Cup winning drop goal in 2003, and whose mental hea...

Gary Lineker has been in the news recently – more than usual – after a social media fracas that led him to miss a week of presenting match of the Day and which briefly dominated the news headlines. As we now know that situation was soon sorted – and Gary was quickly back alongside his chums on the MOTD sofa, looking as unruffled as ever. Being centre of the media glare as he was didn’t seem to kno...

We all come into this world with unconditional worth – and then we lose sight of that and spend so much time running around trying to prove that we are enough. It’s part of the human condition – and has been something of a key theme running through this podcast. One of my guests I talked about this with was the 1996 formula one world champion Damon Hill, whose father Graham had also been a world c...

How can you have as many good days as possible? It’s so easy to continually be looking to the future – and pay too high a price in the present as a result. Frances Houghton is a five time Olympian, who won three silver medals, 4 world championship golds and held two world records in rowing. Early on – she set two goals, to compete in as many Olympic games as possible, and to win Olympic Gold. Even...

This episode is about how much our parental influences shape our outlook on life. While we all come into this world with some innate traits, we are also largely a blank slate to start with, but are hugely conditioned by our upbringing. But I think the really interesting thing is that we invariably pick up a framework of what is right, and how to behave in those early years – and that can then shap...

What are you like at sitting with emotions? It can be so easy to distract ourselves, or numb ourselves – by reaching for a drink or a device, or even by going up into our heads and getting lost in rumination. One of my guests who told me he had to embrace sitting with emotions was the former UK Special Forces soldier and Royal Marine Commando turned explorer, adventurer, investigative journalist a...

“I like things to happen… and if they don’t… I like to make them happen.” - Winston Churchill This episode is all about creating opportunities… rather than waiting for things to fall in your lap. I spoke to the award winning author and journalist Maurice Hamilton, who explained how he got to do the job he loves – in part by taking motivation from the most successful formula one driver of the early...

Burnout and stress is on the rise. Finding work-life balance is increasingly elusive. What's the answer? The issue isn't necessarily too few hours in the day, it's how we use the hours we have - which comes down to our choices and priorities. Ed Jackson, the former pro rugby player turned walking quadriplegic who is now a charity fundraiser and TV presenter, came up with a superb formula for how t...

It can be easy to judge other people for negative actions and decisions, but the truth is we can’t know the circumstances that led to them. We are not nearly as in control of our lives as we like to think. People don’t necessarily like to hear that, but we don’t choose the family we are born into, our genes, our personality traits, the influences we are surrounded by while growing up and so on. Wh...

When Joe Wicks came up with the idea that changed his life, and started posting online content in 2014, there was no master plan. He just loved doing it and ploughed on - even as people told him he was barking up the wrong tree - before eventually breaking through. It's a story that is often repeated in seeming 'overnight successes' - that ability to keep on going even when the rewards are not imm...

" Commit to something - then figure it out. " Jimmy Chin Jimmy is a pro climber, skier, photographer and Oscar winning Film director. The theme of this episode is about following your heart and taking risks. Committing to a path and working it out along the way. Jimmy picked up the Academy Award for the incredible  Free Solo. You can find the episode with Alex Honnold, star of  Free Solo , here: h...

Many high achievers are driven by a burning desire to compensate for the wounds of childhood trauma. But you can’t fill an inner void with accomplishments and approval. This isn’t to cast judgement on so called "successful" people – it is just to suggest that putting them on a pedestal is overly simplistic, and in many cases they may benefit from empathy rather than envy. This week's bitesize gues...

Don't overlook what you have NOW by focusing on what you are working towards in the future. We live in a world of perpetual doing. Thinking about the future, and the past, making plans, and completing tasks. There's nothing inherently wrong with that – BUT - we do risk missing out on the joy of being, appreciating our experiences in this moment This was clearly illustrated to me by one of my previ...

Over the course of the last 4 and a half years speaking to people for this podcast – the topic of visualisation has come up a lot. Former Wales rugby union captain Sam Warburton spoke about using it to help him recover more quickly from an injury. 6 time major golf winner Nick Faldo would visualise the outcomes he wanted twice a day in his pomp, and “saw” himself as the winner of major championshi...

'Marvel at the incredible benefits walking confers on our bodies and minds' Professor Shane O Mara is a leading neuroscientist and author of the fantastic book – In Praise of Walking Getting out walking is so important, especially at this time of year, and particularly for those of us still working at home after the covid pandemic changed working habits so profoundly. It helps with creativity, moo...

"Happiness is about pleasure and purpose. the key is to get that balance right" This bitesize episode is all about setting up our lives for happiness. Paul Dolan - professor of Behavioural Science at LSE and author of the excellent book Happiness by Design - says happiness is about striking a balance between pleasure and purpose. He shares some great examples of how to find both – and talks about...

Henry Fraser is a best-selling painter, best-selling author and highly in-demand public speaker. When he was seventeen years old, Henry’s life changed in a moment when he was paralysed from the shoulders down after breaking his neck diving into the sea in Portugal. Before his accident, despite being an academy rugby player for Saracens, Henry described himself as being quite anxiety prone, and som...

Smartphones have so many people in a grip, and the mental health cost is profound. In this episode, professor Cal Newport - author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism - sounds a warning. He talks about the work of Jean Twenge, a generational researcher in the US. Her research revealed the profound impact that smartphones had on the wellbeing and mental health of the first generation of students th...