A couple of nights ago I found myself witnessing an interesting exchange between a meditation expert and an accountant. The meditation teacher was encouraging us to stop at the beginning of each day to do a simple breathing exercise. But the accountant (my Dad) wanted to know why. “What’s wrong with just launching into the day? Why is taking a few breaths going to be good for me? I breathe all day every day and in my sleep, without needing to think about it.”   The exchange between my skeptical father and the meditation expert made me recall the interview... Read full article »

Last week I found myself caught up in an airplane boarding queue as my fellow passengers hustled and bustled to get settled in seats. The plane was packed full of corporate commuters traveling between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two busiest cities. There was a sense of chaos in the air.   As harried passengers pushed and shoved their bags into tight overhead lockers, the line lagged and a flight attendant made polite small talk with me. “Hello, busy day?” he asked, expecting me to reply with the common response, “Yes, crazy.” But I wasn’t feeling stressed or rushed. “No, not... Read full article »

In the last few weeks I’ve been doing a social experiment unbeknownst to the people around me. My family, friends, colleagues and even total strangers have all been unwittingly drawn into the exercise. Inspired by the work of Professor Barbara Fredrickson, a leading researcher looking at the health benefits of positive emotions, I’ve been practising the ‘Three Loving Connections’ exercise. It involves consciously trying to boost my brain and body’s experience of the power of love by seeking out three meaningful interactions each day and reflecting on them each night. According to Fredrickson’s findings, it appears these micro moments may... Read full article »

I recently found myself in a health food store handing over my credit card to buy over a hundred dollars worth of supplements and food products promising to boost the health of my gut microbiome. In my basket was kombucha (fermented tea), kimchi (fermented cabbage) and a jar of probiotics promising ‘a range of health benefits supporting overall health and wellbeing'.   I had been reading about the amazing highly complex, highly diverse community of microorganisms that make the human body their habitat. The tiny critters living in our gut have been shown to play a key role helping us... Read full article »

When I was in the US last year for the tour of my film The Connection, people kept talking about the microbiome. It seemed to be a buzzword. In fact, Fortune Magazine declared 2015 "The Year of the Microbiome." But before I started sculling kombucha, popping probiotics and fixating on a ‘microbiome diet’, I wanted to find out for myself what it is, what the research actually shows and what this could mean for our health.   If you’re new to the craze, the human microbiome is the term being used to describe a bacterial world that subsists on humans... Read full article »

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 »