Inside a splendid mansion that was once home to Napoleon’s daughter is one of the world’s most cutting-edge medical spas: Villa Stéphanie. Offering full-service diagnostics (the on-call team of specialists includes cardiologists, gastroenterologists and dentists), and astonishingly advanced treatments, visitors leave Baden-Baden the picture of good health. The spa’s renowned nine-night “The Kings Way” programme […]
Plunging into a pool of ice cold water sounds pretty good right now, doesn’t it? As temperatures peak and we are reduced to sweaty puddles of our former selves, fantasies of cooler environments start to consume us. But would you actually try submerging yourself in an ice bath? You may know of Wim Hof through […]
I remember walking down Oxford Street on Friday 8 July 2016, joining masses of other Black people to cry, “No justice, no peace.” Only a few days after protesting again, with that same plea for humanity, I can’t help but reflect on how our vulnerability has once again been put on display, for others to […]
Wiggle your big toe. Go on, wiggle it. While Uma Thurman might have been recovering from a far more extreme place when she delivered this line in Kill Bill: Volume 1, there’s no doubt all of our feet could do with a little more conscious movement. Our only connection with the ground, the feet have […]
Sleep is becoming an increasingly elusive beast. Research shows that nearly half of the UK population struggles to fall asleep at least once a month, with 36 per cent experiencing that very specific frustration at least once a week. If you’re one of them, may we suggest the “cognitive shuffle”? While it might sound like […]
Trigger warning: Different elements of disordered eating and exercise addiction are discussed in this piece. “Complimenting someone on their weight loss can be as harmful as complimenting someone on their weight gain,” wrote Demi Lovato on Instagram Stories in a post discussing recovery from eating disorders. “If you don’t know someone’s history with food, please […]
British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously survived on just four hours of sleep a night, Donald Trump proclaims the same and if you’ve ever read a Business Insider “Day In The Life” you’ll know that to be a Fortune 500 business leader, ergo a successful (that’s not to say likeable) person, you must wake up […]
One of my earliest memories is of pain. My teenage years were filled with hospital appointments, calendars circled with dates for surgery. At 13, over the course of one night, my spine twisted like a plumbing trap to more than 80 degrees. At one point, a piece of hardware from the titanium rods supporting my […]
I fear this year there will be none of Keats’s promise of “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Rather, we would be better to bulk buy SAD [Seasonal Affective Disorder] light accessories and only then immerse ourselves in the poet’s concept of “negative capability”, which translates roughly as: Don’t let uncertainty paralyse you. It’s uncertain, […]
Whether it’s the worldwide health pandemic or the constant threat of global warming, we’ve been under a bit of stress lately. It isn’t just this year, either. Statistics from 2018 – a time when the world was, arguably, a much easier place – showed that a huge 74 per cent of us felt so stressed […]