A 2023 Stanford study found a specific double-inhale breathing pattern outperformed other breathing techniques and meditation at improving mood in daily practice.
Wellbeing
The body as a landscape, not a machine.
Body
The sauna is a small wooden room that smells of cedar and effort. I've been using it for two years now and I still feel a small thrill every time I open the door. Like I'm about to step into somewhere that demands my full attention.
The body isn't a machine. It's a landscape. Weather and seasons and terrain that shifts whether you ask it to or not. It has weather and seasons and terrain that changes with use and disuse. Movement is how we tend that landscape.
What a wearable can reveal, what it cannot know and how to avoid letting a score become a judgement.
Hunger doesn't climb in a straight line the longer you go without eating. It comes in waves, tied more to habit than to actual need.
Most runners hit a wall somewhere around the thirty kilometre mark, not because their will gives out, but because the body's glycogen simply runs low.
GLP-1 was never a brand name. It's a hormone your own gut already makes and the drugs just borrow its signal and make it last longer.
There's a whole scale in exercise science built to measure effort by feeling, because heart rate alone keeps disagreeing with how hard something actually felt.
There is a small, steady voice that lives in the margins of my day. It is not loud, it does not arrive with a notification.
Energy & Rest
Wellbeing is quieter than the routines we’re sold. It’s less about adding things and more about coming back.
I met Amara at a wellness fair in Johannesburg. Her table was modest. A few crystals. A business card. A calm that seemed to radiate from her skin. I was sceptical. I am still sceptical. But I was also curious.
Continuing can be its own quiet form of courage.
A famous study found Olympic bronze medalists consistently looked happier than silver medalists, for a reason that has nothing to do with the actual result.
I have treated rest as something I could earn for a long time. Finish the work. Answer the messages. Be useful. Then perhaps there would be a quiet afternoon waiting for me at the end of it all.
There are days when movement feels joyful and days when it feels like one more demand. I have learned that both can be true without turning the body into a problem to solve.
Living Well
A penguin on rock looks like a creature managing. On how much of what we call weakness is really the wrong surroundings.
A practical reflection on recognising stress and finding a gentler way back to centre.
Wellbeing across a life doesn't decline steadily with age. Large studies find it dips in the mid-forties and climbs again afterward.
A large amount of nutrition research relies on people accurately remembering and reporting what they ate, which is a documented, known weak point in the science.
Researchers who study laughter found it happens mostly in company and almost never in response to an actual joke.
A 2023 public health advisory found roughly half of adults report measurable loneliness, a scale researchers now treat as a genuine health risk.
Psychologists distinguish feeling good from actually flourishing and research finds the two don't always move together at all.