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Escape THE

ISSUE

PERSONALITY CLASH CURE KNOW YOUR TYPE

GRIEF INTERRUPTED WHY PAST LOSSES REAPPEAR

ARE YOU PROCRASTINATING?

FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOUR BODY MIND TRICKS FOR UNCONDITIONAL CONFIDENCE

DECIPHER YOUR DREAMS WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN

BYPASS YOUR BRAIN’S ‘NO’ SWITCH

NAOMI WATTS “With women we probably expect a lot from each other…”

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ISSUE 7 / DECEMBER 2017

[ DECEMBER 2017 ]

THIS ISSUE

48 [ COVER STORIES ] 18

ON THE COVER: NAOMI WATTS Having earned her big break late in Hollywood terms, Naomi Watts is making up for lost time. With her own childhood marred by loss, the home-grown star’s recent role as a psychotherapist and real life motherhood have launched a wild adventure into the human condition.

38 STUFF OF DREAMS How to tell meaningful unconscious content from mental junk and what your it really means

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48 GRIEVING RIGHTS Why incomplete grief turns into chronic bereavement and how to correct past losses

72

44 THE ART OF GETTING IT DONE Beat the procrastination paradox by tripping your brain’s ‘no’ switch 62 BODY IMAGE UPGRADE Feel comfortable in your own skin by changing these common behaviours

98 WHY YOU’RE SO ANNOYING Overcome personality clashes by identifying your type

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[ BEING WITH ] 94 LIVING MEMORY: LIFE

VERSUS LAW For Dina Halkic, a landmark legal finding that her jovial teenage son was a victim of crime after cyber bullying resulted in him taking his own life provides minor relief for the senseless loss that will never heal.

102 MIND THE GAP The impact of partner age discrepancy on long-term relationship satisfaction

[ DISCOVERY ]

98 24

72 FAKE - CATIONS Escape the daily grind with quasivacations you can take any time – even on deadline

80 FIRST PERSON:

LOST IN SPACE Prominent female astrologer Lisa Harvey-Smith discusses space travel, non-human life forms and what science can tell us about religion

[ UP CLOSE ] 24 SOFIA UNSCRIPTED Filmmaker Sofia Coppola is known as the ‘master of moods’, but the daughter of a Hollywood filmmaking icon says her placid temperament often masks an emotional storm

[ IN-DEPTH ]

106 FIRST DRAFT Whether you imagine writing a novel or consider yourself a shower poet, creative writing can improve mood and instil a greater sense of meaning

110 MEDITATION ROAD MAP Why mind-wandering is the new concentration and how to choose a meditation style to suit your goals

116 HEAT OF THE MOMENT The intense perspiration and strategic poses of Bikram yoga are said to promote emotional balance

86 THE REAL MEANING

122 IN THE ZONE: SUITE HOME

OF HUNGER The line between festive excess and true binge eating plus how to tame your emotional hunger

Combine creature comforts and function with a luxe hotel vibe by taking design cues from this ‘endless’ apartment

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126 A MILLION MILES AWAY

CONDITION REPORT: THE HIDDEN EATING DISORDER A day in the life with binge eating disorder (BED)

124

From a spa hotel in France’s woodlands to a wellness resort on Italy’s largest lake, these regional European sojourns feel a million miles from modern life

[ REGULARS ]

58 IMITATING LIFE

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How literature both invites us to abandon the limitations of embodied life and anchors visceral experience

30 SPECTRUM

62 THE HOLIDAY ILLUSION

muse’s expert columnists discuss this month’s theme

Why holidays have a de-stress/ re-stress tipping point and how to optimally time your break

120 BEAUTY

THE LENS News and views you can use

muse’s gift wish list

68 SUBJECT RELATIONS:

PHOTOGRAPHY DETOX Documenting moments can objectify experience and undermine the brain’s ability to process and remember them. Try this one-day reset challenge

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[ EDITOR’S LETTER ]

E

scaping the daily grind has been imagined as a universal ideal cemented by Marxist texts and Lotto ads promising the perpetual bliss of kicking back in the Bahamas with an endless supply of mojitos (after telling the boss where to shove it).

Yet in reality, long-term respite would likely meet similar restlessness to that experienced by the many retirees who return to the workforce as mentors or take up volunteering (although the proposed respitefatigue may be obscured by a perpetual hangover).

When it comes to escape, less is more – and not just because, by definition, escape is made possible by a dominant opposite. I’m reminded of philosopher Henri Lefebvre, whose La production de l’espace celebrates worlds within and around the phenomenal architecture we ostensibly occupy. We may realise exciting new worlds within the familiar according to Lefebvre, who conceives of space belonging to three spheres and proposes ‘defetishising’ it to change the perception of it from inert and predetermined to alive and dynamic and produced through everyday experience. It’s not dissimilar to the way novelists introduce worlds of which we are, before reading, unaware (p. 58) – except it’s ‘real’. Relatedly, check out the creative ways some of the country’s most successful businesswomen make ‘me time’ in our feature on fake-cations, which vouches for integrating micro holidays with working life rather than consigning them to a dichotomy of drudge and dream (in the ‘living the’ sense), p. 72.

The other type of dreams may be a parallel metaphor for all of the above, serving to invite us into unconscious mental content and better understand our minds. In Stuff of Dreams, learn ways to decode nocturnal thoughts and even control them (p. 38).

Similarly worthy of deciphering are self-defeating behaviours that purport to excuse us from things we find difficult/unpleasant/anxiety-provoking while actually compounding stress and overwhelm (how much overtime and discomfort does it take to pay an overdue toll road fee and work up to ‘that conversation’)? The Art of Getting It Done dismantles procrastination and recommends ways to bite the bullet (p. 44). Speaking of conflict, this time of year is notorious for it – from carpark and photocopier rage as tempers fray like ripped jeans to long-running in-law friction. But it turns out not all clashes are created equal. If there’s someone you just can’t get along with, with no discernible source of conflict, identifying the personality trait or traits that cause

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your incompatibility could enable reconciliation (you and great aunt Maud might even like each other, p. 98).

I don’t mean to trivialise family dynamics, which can be a significant source of stress and even reactivate loss and trauma – especially when paired with yet another ideal, of scheduled festivity. The joviality and togetherness prescribed by seasonal rituals can amplify loneliness and even reactivate grief – whether due to an incomplete grieving process that’s become prolonged bereavement or simply by reminding us of our loss(es) at a time when we’re likely to feel them most (p. 48). In this issue Dina Halkic bravely recounts the events that led to the tragic loss of her son Allem, whose life became a casualty of cyber-bullying (p. 94).

Continuing the anti-escape theme (call me perverse), it’s important to be able to feel challenging emotions minus obligation to pull it together, or guilt for bringing down the mood. One common emotional getaway method is eating. If you tend to anaesthetise your feelings with food – and it’s more common than you might think – review the tips for alternative coping tactics from p. 86 (FYI, pudding and a Lindor ball is not a ‘binge’, but qualifies for the flexible parameters of ‘normal eating’).

I know you’re not supposed to share it, but my holiday wish is that we can permit ourselves and each other to celebrate not only what we have, but what we had, and to acknowledge the hole a loss has left while easing the void by offering support and gently inviting those who may be struggling or alone to join our festivities. It may be the best gift we could both give and receive. An Oscar Wilde quote I first read six years ago, when I learned that we need to own both our joy and anguish in order to move forward, says it all: “Life is too important to be taken seriously.”

I hope you do this end-of-year holiday your way and look forward to hearing your dreams, hopes and goals for 2018.

REBECCA LONG // EDITOR

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EDITORIAL Editor Rebecca Long rebecca@blitzmag.com.au Editorial Assistant Natasha Thompson Copy Editor Molly Morelli Managing Editor Ben Stone Contributing Writers David Goding, Stephanie Osfield, Pip Jarvis, Madeleine Dore, Sarah McMahon, Stephanie Lau, Raymond Viola, Linda Smith

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ART Javie D’Souza Diep Nguyen, Henry Lee, James Steer, Zeenia Bhikha

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POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

DR SUZY GREEN clinical psychologist A leader in the complementary fields of coaching psychology and positive psychology, Suzy conducted a world-first study on evidence-based coaching as an applied positive psychologist. The clinical and coaching psychologist founded The Positivity Institute – ‘a positively deviant organisation dedicated to the research and application of positive psychology for life, school and work’. Her roles include honorary academic positions at three esteemed education institutions as well as the Black Dog Institute. She’s an affiliate of the Well Being Institute at Cambridge University.

When we crave anything, there’s usually an uncomfortable emotion or feeling we are trying to get away from, which leads us to do something that will bring us pleasure. p. 36.

MINDFULNESS

DR ELISE BIALYLEW A doctor trained in psychiatry-turned-social entrepreneur, Elise is passionate about supporting individuals and organisations to develop inner tools to flourish, and offers workshops and training at the Mind Life Project. She is the founder of global mindfulness campaign Mindful in May, which teaches thousands of people worldwide to meditate while raising funds to build clean water projects in the developing world.

PREFERRED EXPERTS WOMEN’S MENTAL HEALTH PERINATAL & INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

DR JULIA FEUTRILL perinatal and infant psychiatrist Julia Feutrill is a perinatal and infant psychiatrist who cares for young families from preconception to middle childhood. She has worked across the mental health sector in Western Australia and is currently co-director of the Elizabeth Clinic, a specialist multidisciplinary health service for families.

PROF JAYASHRI KULKARNI psychiatrist During three decades in psychiatry, Jayashri has pioneered the novel use of oestrogen as a treatment for schizophrenia and is internationally acknowledged as a leader in the field of reproductive hormones and their impact on mental health. The president of the International Association of Women’s Mental Health, she directs a large psychiatric research group, the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre (MAPrc), dedicated to discovering new treatments, new understanding and new services for people with a range of mental illnesses.

PHILOSOPHY

DR NADINE CAMERON Academic, wellbeing consultant and meditation teacher, Dr Nadine Cameron has been engaged in a number of projects designed to encourage philosophical thought about aspects of everyday life including art, getting dressed and using leisure time. A faculty member of The School of Life, Australia, she has a PhD in mental health and particular interests in the theoretical and practical intersections of wellbeing and the body and emotional intelligence and community. Nadine attended the Victorian College of the Arts, where her focus was photography and majored in politics in her BA.

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It’s often by increasing our sense of responsibility for our wellbeing – the condition and content of our mind – that we can best escape our troubles. p. 32.

YOUTH

PROF PATRICK MCGORRY

BODY IMAGE & EATING

psychiatrist

SARAH MCMAHON

Professor Patrick McGorry is an Irish-born Australian psychiatrist known worldwide for his development of the early intervention services for youth.

The 2010 Australian of the Year, he is executive director of Orygen, The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, president of the Society for Mental Health Research in Australia and president of the Schizophrenia International Research Society.

Patrick was instrumental in the Australian government’s establishment of the National Youth Mental Health Foundation (now Headspace).

psychologist Sarah embraces industryleading best practice and advocates for ‘health at every size’ to help people establish a healthy and balanced relationship with eating, exercise and their bodies. Her personal style and approachable manner supports her clients in aligning values and behaviour to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Sarah is the director of BodyMatters in Sydney.

The more clutter we have, the more our brain has to work. It takes mental energy to filter our distractions, whether they be our clothes, books, memorabilia, or even email. p. 30.

WHO WE’VE GOT ON SPEED-DIAL MIND-BODY MEDICINE

DR CRAIG HASSED Craig’s medical background and interest in the mind-body connection have positioned him as a leader in integrative medical practice in Australia and abroad.

His teaching, research and clinical interests include mindfulness-based stress management, mind-body medicine, meditation, health promotion, integrative medicine and medical ethics. He was the founding president of the Australian Teachers of Meditation Association, is a senior lecturer at Monash University and has published 10 books.

CHILDREN/PARENTING

DR ASH NAYATE neuropsychologist Ash is a transformational coach and clinical neuropsychologist with a passion for holistic wellbeing and plant-based living. With more than 10 years’ experience in the health, developmental and medical fields, Ash incorporates coaching principles to assist clients who are seeking to achieve health and wellness goals, attain more balance in their lives, improve emotional stability, overcome addictive behaviours and increase levels of happiness and fulfilment. Ash is committed to continual and ongoing selfdevelopment, and she has personal interests in fitness, yoga, travel, integrative nutrition and alternative medicine.

SEX & RELATIONSHIPS

ALINDA SMALL

Some reports estimate that more than 80 per cent of our fantasies involve people other than our lovers. p. 34.

relationship counsellor/sex therapist Consulting as a relationship counsellor and sex therapist in private practice, Alinda Small specialises in helping clients who struggle to form and maintain relationships, couples in crisis and sexual dysfunction. A mother of three, Sydney-based Alinda has a psychology degree and is currently completing her Masters in medicine, science and sexual health at The University of Sydney.

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[ THINK ]

SURPRISE PROFANITY Dropping the f-bomb during conversation may convey honesty according to a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Since Clark Gable uttered the line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” in 1939 film Gone with the Wind, profanity has been normalised, with the f-word now a staple of television parlance. Often associated with anger, frustration and surprise, swearing may signal unfiltered expression of feelings, indicating sincerity, said co-author Dr David Stillwell. A survey of 75,000 Facebook users also supported the theory that frequent cussers were more likely to use language patterns associated with honesty.

DAYDREAM ACHIEVER Daydreaming during meetings might indicate superior intelligence and creativity. Often maligned as a deficiency, mind-wandering may owe to too much, rather than too little, brain capacity according to research at Georgia Tech.

Study participants who reported more frequent daydreaming scored higher on intellectual and creative ability and had more efficient brain systems measured by MRI. Greater capacity to think may cause the mind to wander during easy tasks, experts said. A hallmark of an efficient brain is the capacity to zone in and out of conversations or tasks when appropriate, then naturally tune back in without missing important points or steps.

LEXICON

ALEXITHYMIA A condition in which people have difficulty identifying and processing the emotions they experience. While cognitive alexithymia prevented people from identifying, distinguishing and expressing emotions, so-called ‘affective alexithymia’ impacted sensations, imagination and creativity. Severity of the psychological condition ranges from low to high and may be indicated by sensitivity to smell according to journal Scientific Reports. Counterintuitively, the condition may overlay unusually intense activation of emotions, making sufferers insensitive to affective changes and distinctions, researchers surmised.

BACTERIAL TRAUMA Susceptibility to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be predicted by gut bacteria according to a study. Scientists have added the gut microbiome to known risk factors such as adverse childhood experiences and genetic makeup, with new research suggesting that the gut microbiome influences the brain and brain function by producing neurotransmitters/ hormones, immune-regulating molecules and bacterial toxins while stress hormones can result in bacteria and toxins entering the bloodstream, causing inflammation shown to play a role in certain psychiatric disorders.

While a combination of three bacteria appeared specific to those who developed PTSD, researchers were unable to determine whether this bacterial deficit contributed to PTSD susceptibility, or whether it occurred as a consequence of PTSD.

PLAYLIST LINGUIST

Listening to music while reading may change the sound and effect of your favourite tunes by hijacking neural pathways shared by musical and language processes. According to findings published in Royal Society Open Science, study participants who read grammatically difficult sentences while listening to music deemed music to be less complete than those reading simple sentences. Simultaneous reading and listening is thought to overload the region known as Broca’s area. Yet the overlap may be leveraged by those with musical training, who also exhibit enhanced language skills.

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The percentage of dog owners who consider their pet family according to a study at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Sleep Medicine. Sleeping with a dog in the bedroom may aid shuteye, but letting it under the covers can compromise sleep.

[ CREATE ]

SHAMING RIGHTS While shame has gained ubiquity through colloquial phrases such as ‘fat shaming’, the emotion remains underacknowledged due to a tautological double-whammy according to sociology researcher Thomas Scheff. “In modernity, shame is the most obstructed and hidden emotion, and therefore the most destructive,” he said. The experience of shame – the emotion resulting from the impression that one is unworthy or bad – is then judged in an ascending process of self-judgment. Late American psychoanalyst Helen Lewis, Scheff’s mentor, referred to ‘unacknowledged shame’, meaning you mightn’t even know it’s there. Here’s how to spot hidden shame.

OVERT SHAME: Indicated by terms that avoid the word ‘shame’ and reactions such as blushing and sweating.

BYPASSED SHAME: Connoted by fleeting feelings and followed by obsessive and rapid thought or speech.

YAWN ZEITGEIST When it comes to social contagion, yawning is as transmissible as syringe doughnuts and mum jeans. But the theory that contagious yawning is linked to empathy has been usurped by a study suggesting that it owes to perceptual sensitivity (a cognitive rather than an emotional default). People who were more likely to detect yawning from a face were also more likely to be induced to yawn, Tohoku University researchers found. Sensitivity to happy or angry faces appeared to have little relation to the frequency of contagious yawning. Women are more susceptible to ‘catching’ yawning than male peers, the study showed.

TOXIC EMPATHY Imagining experiencing a friend’s misfortune may adversely impact health by activating physiological responses linked to suffering . Conversely, reflecting on how the person might feel incites a pro-health response according to research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Blood pressure and heart rate differentiated the negative arousal of a threat or fight-flight response from the positive arousal of a challenge response.

THE EMOTICON STATUS ANXIETY EFFECT Using emoticons in professional emails may seem like a way to humanise exchanges, but it could cause you to appear less competent according to a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Unlike face-to-face smiles, digital smileys did not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decreased perceptions of competence, researchers found, warning that a smiley was not perceived as a virtual smile. A simple text email may inspire confidence and elicit more detailed responses to requests than one peppered with face-like parentheses, they said.

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How much your vocal volume changes in different company may indicate how highly you appraise your status. While people tend to change the pitch of their voice depending on who they are talking to and how dominant they feel, those who believe people look up to them and value their opinions do not change the volume of speech no matter who they are speaking to. That’s the conclusion of research published in PLOS One. Even self-assured opinion leaders tend to raise their pitch when speaking to people perceived to be high-status, with experts suggesting that it may be a signal of submissivneness while volume maintenance signals feeling calm and in control.

MY DAILY GREEN

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[ BECOME ]

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METHOD MEDITATION Different types of Buddhist meditation may have distinct benefits for behaviour and cognition according to research at the National University of Singapore. Vajrayana meditation, which is associated with Tibetan Buddhism, can lead to enhancements in cognitive performance – namely attentional capacity – while Theravada meditation produced greater relaxation by enhancing activation of the parasympathetic nervous system.

CHOOSE YOUR TYPE VAJRAYANA – For situations where it is important to perform optimally, such as during competition or states of urgency.

THERAVADA – For decreasing stress, releasing tension, and promoting deep relaxation.

The average number of times per hour that email users switch windows.

That’s compared to 18 times per hour for those not using email.

The findings favour the notion of an email detox, a study suggests. Rather than experiencing a kind of email FOMO, those who relinquished email for five days experienced lower stress and better focus, which researchers attributed to the absence of a ‘high alert’ state caused by digital multitasking according to findings reported to the Association for Computing Machinery.

Tactics to mitigate email stress included controlling email login times, batching messages and taking email vacations during work time.

HOLIDAY HACK If you can only manage a few days’ leave, there may be a trick to create the illusion of a longer hiatus. Categorising experiences can help to mentally extend good experiences according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Consider organising events by type, such as ‘music’ (concert and date night at a jazz club) and sport (polo and the Australian Open).

The trick to optimal elongation is splicing events from various categories (polo, jazz club, tennis), which prolongs the life of the category by preserving anticipation within it. On the flip side, considering less appealing events separately can psychologically expedite them.

ME-TIME MANDATE Relaxation is often bundled with chocolate and rom-coms on the want-need continuum, but it’s a vital process that decreases emotional wear and tear, improving concentration and reducing emotional responses such as anger and frustration according to the Mayo Clinic. The goal is to find a practicable method of regularly escaping the daily grind while in the thick of it.

TRY • Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, meditation, visualisation or progressive muscle relaxation.

• Reading, writing in a journal, taking a walk with a friend or getting a massage.

EXCLUSION ZONE The pain of being left off an invite list or excluded from a Facebook loop about weekend plans may be eased by touch – and it needn’t be a hug from a loved one. Slow, gentle stroking by a stranger may cause a sense of social bonding that mitigates the pain of social rejection according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Affective social touch, and particularly gentle stroking of the skin, may be coded by a physiological system linking the skin to the brain, researchers said. The same kind of touch can have unique effects on physical pain according to previous research.

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OPTIMISE DOWN TIME • Maintain positive emotions.

• Choose to focus on positive rather than negative emotions. This can help you stay on a more even keel emotionally, and when time is available to relax, recovery is swifter.

• Practise self-control.

• Avoid ruminating over past events, which increases stress, and shift thoughts in another direction.

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[ UP CLOSE ]

KNOWING

NAOMI Having earned her big break late in Hollywood terms, Naomi Watts is making up for lost time. With her own childhood marred by loss, the home-grown star’s recent role as a psychotherapist and real life motherhood have launched a wild adventure into the human condition.

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“I haven’t really come across any age barrier yet; I actually believe that the work I’m doing now is more interesting than ever,” Watts says.

“I had some fear about what effect getting older would have on my career, and it’s an issue women run up against in this business. But there are so many more interesting stories that you can explore when you’re older and able to play women who have experienced so much more than and have so much more to say about life. You get to inhabit deeper characters and you’re not just there to be the male lead’s

romantic interest. Life gets deeper as you age and that leads to finding roles where you have a much more profound perspective on your world.

It’s a very good place to be.”

Even with two “highly active” young boys, Sasha, 10, and Samuel, seven, to look after, Watts thrives on working at a breakneck pace. Despite her sad split last year from long-time partner Liev Schreiber, Watts has managed to star in the ten-part Netflix series Gypsy while appearing in four feature films, including this year’s The Glass Castle and The Book of Henry.

“I don’t know exactly why, but having kids encourages you to be more active than ever,” says Watts.

VIVA PRESS UK FOR MUSE. ©2017

S

peaking in a soft Australian accent, Naomi Watts bears little resemblance to her often high-strung or intense screen characters.

Her shy smile and slightly nervous manner hints at how her emotions are simmering very close to the surface. It’s hardly surprising that she’s enjoyed a stellar career that has seen her earn two Oscar nominations (for playing a Tsunami survivor in The Impossible and a grieving mother in 21 Grams) and achieve recognition as one of the finest actresses of her generation. At age 49, and somewhat to her surprise, Watts is busier than ever.

WORDS: JAN JANSSEN

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PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN LAMPARSKI/WIREIMAGE

[ UP CLOSE ]

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PHOTOGRAPHY: ALO CEBALLOS/GC IMAGES

“I still feel like I’m 28 even though I’m so much happier now than I was at that time in my life. Running around after two young boys and being part of their world makes things seem so much more lighthearted. They have so much energy that it forces you to stay young.

The only time I feel my age is when I try to read small print or look in the mirror.”

Watts has plenty of her own energy to burn. Despite a heavy schedule, she still found time to take part in the recently resurrected Twin Peaks series, which reunited her with director and good friend David Lynch, whom she credits with saving her Hollywood career when he cast her in Mulholland Drive (2001).

“It was so great to be back on a set with David again – he’s so much fun to be around.

He’s a great friend and I’ll always be grateful to him. He saw something in me and gave me such a beautiful gift of a role that was a launching pad for me. I had spent years auditioning and struggling to prove myself to people but he was the one who trusted me and gave me that chance of a lifetime.”

Still lithe and youthful in appearance, Watts conveys powerful sensitivity and resilience in her frequently fragile screen persona. We always have the impression that there is a deep layer of hurt and anguish beneath that sunny exterior, and Watts has a seamless way of drawing us into her character’s torment.

She was only four when her parents divorced and seven when her father, a road manager for Pink Floyd, died of a heroin overdose.

“I moved around a lot as a kid,” she recalls.

“I lost my father, early on, and watched my mum try to find the right place for us to live and reinvent herself and find a career for herself. She was a very young mum. My brother and I both have a survival streak in us, having learned that through my mum, and probably a level of determination that goes into it. I lived very much under the radar (as a struggling actress in L.A.) for about 10 years before I got my big break with David (Lynch). Looking back, I don’t know what kept me going, other than a huge amount of determination.”

Her 10-part psychosexual TV series Gypsy, directed in part by 50 Shades of Grey’s Sam Taylor-Wood, is merely the latest stepping stone in her career. Watts is following the

path of other top film stars who have crossed over into episodic TV, most notably Matthew McConaughey in True Detective and Reese Witherspoon and Watts’ Aussie BFF Nicole Kidman in this year’s Big Little Lies. Watts was intrigued by her character Jean Holloway [in Gypsy], a New York psychotherapist who becomes obsessed with her patients’ lives and in particular the female partner of one such patient.

“I liked that this was not your stereotypical woman,” says Watts. “She straddles both worlds of being good and bad. You don’t see that much from a female point of view. You see that antihero thing a lot more with men, and audiences are more accepting of it, but it’s just human nature.”

THIS PAGE: Watts out and about with her children in New York City.

RIGHT: Watts as Jean Holloway in Gypsy.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALISON COHEN ROSA/NETFLIX/UNIVERSAL TELEVISION/ NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES

Knowing Naomi

“With women we probably expect a lot from each other, we get close very quickly and the experiences I’ve had with women have all been pretty great; and I love that a woman is telling a woman’s story, it makes a lot of sense.”

Although Netflix decided not to renew the series for a second season, Watts believes that Gypsy represents the kind of intense, character-driven drama that gives her the greatest artistic satisfaction.

“I definitely noticed that a lot of great writing was taking place in the TV format now, probably because of the sad state of the film industry and how all the films getting made are mostly in the franchise world, or superheroes or big comedy blockbuster-y type movies, and I really tend to enjoy working in the drama genre. Since the film industry was bottoming out, all the writers moved over to TV and we have to follow those stories, those writers.”

Watts has always felt an affinity for the arts. Her father had worked for one of the greatest rock bands of all time in Pink Floyd while her mother was an antiques dealer as well as a costume and set designer. Watts drifted towards acting when she discovered how much she enjoyed watching theatre productions as a child and appearing in school plays herself.

“I grew up in a family which was obviously very artistic and I knew very early on that I couldn’t paint,

“I haven’t really come across any age barrier yet…” and yet everyone else could – not just my nuclear family, but the aunts and cousins on both sides. And I remember once coming home with a really great picture that I’d drawn at school and no one believed that it was really me,” says Watts.

“I enjoyed being in school plays and things, but I didn’t know that was going to lead me to some kind of artistic career. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that I had something that worked for me and made me feel like I did have artistry in my blood, so to speak.”

It was after emigrating from England to Australia at age 14 with her mother and older brother (Ben, now a professional photographer) that Naomi began entertaining the idea of becoming an actress. Fate would intervene when she met a slightly older and more confident aspiring performer in Nicole Kidman while working on a bikini commercial in Sydney.

“We first spoke while we were wearing bathing suits and doing this commercial spot. After that, because we were living on the same side of town and because it was difficult to find a taxi to go over the bridge, we wound up sharing a taxi on the way

home and that’s where we got to talking some more and ever since then we’ve stayed friends.”

After working together on the Australian film Flirting, Kidman moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of her acting career and eventually persuaded Watts to follow her to Hollywood. It wasn’t long before Watts found minor roles in films such as Tank Girl and Children of the Corn IV and her future appeared bright. But then several lean years followed and Watts might have quit acting around the time she turned 30 were it not for Kidman’s steadfast encouragement and support.

“It’s a really nice story,” says Watts.

“It’s very rare in life to have those kind of friends who stay with you over the years. She didn’t drop me because I wasn’t successful. She never let me give up on myself. Nicole was my biggest booster and I was always grateful that I had her to talk to and be there for me. But at the same time, I was conscious of not taking advantage of our friendship and not feeling depressed that I hadn’t been able to achieve the kind of success she had. I just saw her as a source of inspiration to me and our friendship never wavered.”

Watts had grown increasingly despondent over the fact that she was no closer to landing her ‘big break’ in Hollywood at age 32 than a decade earlier when she first arrived in Tinseltown. That’s when “her world turned upside down” and she landed an audition with David Lynch for Mulholland Drive. He saw something in her that other directors had overlooked and even gave her a second chance after Watts blew her first audition. “I had so little faith in myself at that point that I was sabotaging myself.” Watts nailed the subsequent audition, however, and was inspired by her experience working with the iconoclastic director.

Interestingly, Watts almost packed her bags to go back home to Oz prior to the release of the film. She was “dejected” and on the brink of “looking for something else to do” with her life.

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“I’d shot Mulholland Drive (originally) as a TV series, but it never came out, so David shot some new scenes and released it as a feature film. I hadn’t worked since that picture and it wasn’t on screens yet. I couldn’t keep up my health insurance payments. I was three months behind on my rent and facing eviction. That’s how bad things had gotten,” recalls Watts.

Kidman wasn’t about to let Naomi wallow in self-pity, however. “When I was thinking of throwing in the towel, she told me to hang in there, insisting all it takes is one film to turn things around completely.”

Fortunately for Watts, she decided to “stick things out” and hope that that “one film” would indeed give her career some badly needed traction. Mulholland Drive ultimately proved to be a critical and commercial hit that launched her career. Not only were critics raving about her sexually charged performance but she was also named the best actress of 2002 by the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. In the meantime, she landed the lead role in the horror thriller The Ring, which became a surprise box-office smash. Watts hasn’t looked back since.

Within the space of the next three years, she would star in Ned Kelly (where she met and fell in love with co-star Heath Ledger), 21 Grams, I Heart Huckabees, and Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), her first studio blockbuster. (“It’s still the only film of mine that my kids can watch.”)

It was an incredible turnaround for someone who had been on the brink of packing her bags to go home. Watts credits her mum with having inspired her to stay the course.

“I think there’s a combination of grit and perseverance and tricking yourself into believing things are okay even if you’re not getting the results you want – that’s what I learned from my mother. Even if you’re being battered around, you keep going.”

Raising two sons in New York City as a single mother may prove to be one more challenge for Watts following the unexpected end of her 11year relationship with Liev Schreiber. Though she’s been spending time in the company of her Gypsy co-star Billy Crudup of late, Watts doesn’t give the impression of needing any help with either her domestic arrangements or her professional life.

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PHOTOGRAPHY: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR MICHAEL KORS

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“With women we probably expect a lot from each other…”

“I’ve had a much easier time than my mum, who was much younger than me when she was raising us,” reflects Watts. “I had a long time to prepare and I was already settled in my career, which removes a lot of the stress.

“I’ve been super lucky, though, getting to work with the best directors and actors in the business and getting to play some great roles.

Being a mother hasn’t really affected that and I still have the same passion for acting as ever....

Now there are more logistics involved with the kids being in school. I can’t move around too much but I feel there’s a good change going on for female roles, so that’s encouraging. I’m just always looking to change it up a bit.”

@musemagazineau

Old friends: Watts catches up with colleague and friend Nicole Kidman backstage at a New York fashion show.

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I ALWAYS HAD THE CONFIDENCE THAT I HAD SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY ABOUT THE WORLD. 24

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SOFIA UNSCRIPTED The daughter of a legendary Hollywood filmmaker, Sofia Coppola is known as the master of moods. Yet the director of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation says her calm exterior sometimes masks an inner storm.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ©VIVA PRESS FOR MUSE 2017

WORDS: JAN JANSSEN

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t’s been nearly 15 years since Sofia Coppola shot her low-budget masterpiece Lost in Translation. Not only did that film capture the public imagination, launch Scarlett Johansson as a star, and see Bill Murray give the best dramatic performance of his career, it also established Coppola as a gifted auteur director and won her an Oscar (for Best Original Screenplay). Since then, she’s continued to make starkly original and compelling movies including Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and The Bling Ring.

This year Coppola was named Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for The Beguiled, the Civil War romantic thriller that stars Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, and Colin Farrell. It was the first time in 56 years that a woman has captured that honour and it was a fitting tribute to Coppola’s unique sensibility and cinematic vision. The daughter of legendary Hollywood filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, movies have always been part of her life and perhaps it was inevitable that she would follow his path.

“I guess it makes sense now, looking back,” Coppola, 46, says. “But after college I went to art school. It didn’t occur to me to be a filmmaker. Now it seems obvious, because I was learning about it my whole life. But it was really the book The Virgin Suicides that kind of led me into this, because I wanted to make it into a film. Growing up, I was on my dad’s sets all the time, and my mum always encouraged us to be creative and tell stories. My dad was always talking to me and my brother about writing and film and what he loved about it, so it was something he was always exposing us to and enthusiastic about.”

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Calm and introspective, Coppola is almost too laid back to imagine her managing a massive film crew and dealing with the criminal class of producers and financiers who often inhabit that world. Her father is so “sickened” by the process that he has largely retired from directing to tend to his hugely successful wine estate.

Sofia, meanwhile, is proud to carry on in his footsteps while being able to maintain her artistic integrity in the face of Hollywood’s soul-deadening blockbuster obsession and as one of the few female directors outside of Susanne Bier, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Jodie Foster, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and the late Nora Ephron to have succeeded in a maledominated club.

“I have grown up with so many men in my Italian family that perhaps being around a lot of strong men has conditioned me. In my family generation, I’m the only girl who grew up with two brothers [Roman, and Gian Carlo, who died in a boating

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accident in 1986 at age 23 -ED]. Even my cousins are all males. Maybe with the movies I’m trying to restore a bit of balance, I’m trying to make my female voice heard... I always had the confidence that I had something interesting to say about the world.”

Over the years, Coppola has defined herself as a filmmaker who is able to appreciate the beauty of silent sequences and quiet observation – particularly in Lost in Translation and Somewhere – as much as by drawing out deeply moving and intense performances from her cast. In The Beguiled, critics lauded the work of her three female stars and how Coppola was able to create an intensely Southern Gothic atmosphere.

An inspired feminist updating of the 1971 Clint Eastwood film directed by Don Siegel, The Beguiled is set in 1864 Virginia during the final stages of the American Civil War, where John (Colin

Farrell), a wounded Union soldier, finds sanctuary at an isolated rural all-girls boarding school run by the headmistress Martha (Kidman) and devoted teacher Edwina (Dunst).

Soon these Southern belles will see their lives thrown into disarray amid mounting sexual tension and romantic obsession. Coppola wanted to find a way of bringing not only her own distinctive cinematic style to bear on the story but also create a more female-centric narrative.

“It was this story about women told originally from this ’70s, macho man point of view, and I kept thinking about how I would approach it differently. I got the book, which was out of print, and it’s all written

Sofia unscripted

My calm exterior… sometimes masks an inner storm raging inside me but which you’d never notice.

from the female characters’ point of view, so I thought about doing it that way. And I’ve always loved the South. It’s such an exotic place and so different from where I grew up (in San Francisco).

“I wanted it to be this gauzy, unthreatening feminine world, but then, underneath it, a darkness – the history of the time, and the strength of the women who had to survive, women who weren’t raised to be doing that.

There’s the contrast of the feminine world and the enemy soldier, and what happens when their lives collide.”

One interesting aspect to The Beguiled is that Coppola has previously worked with Elle Fanning on Somewhere, the director’s deeply personal meditation about a girl spending a week with her Hollywood father at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. The sparkling innocence and sweet pensiveness of her character, Cleo, in that movie – Fanning was only 11 at the time – is in stark contrast with her role in The Beguiled, where she suffuses her scenes with a brazen sexual cunning and discovery.

“It’s funny ’cause she’s still the same kid, but now a young woman,” says Coppola. “It’s really fun to see the combination of that. But I still see the same laugh, and she was always really smart and sophisticated. She always had a playfulness, so I knew that she would bring something fun to that character.”

Coppola’s directing style, as recounted by many of the actors who have worked for her, is quiet yet intense. Unlike the cliché of the screaming tyrant director – her father was known to have more than his share of on-set shouting matches with producers and stars – Coppola prefers to discuss each scene with a subdued reverence for mood and detail.

Says The Beguiled leading man, Colin Farrell: “Sofia is a master of moods. She directed the most relaxed set I’ve ever experienced in 20 years of acting, and her way of working is extremely caring and inspiring. She will come up to you before or after a take and whisper something in your ear, and you almost have to lean inches away from her to hear [what] she’s saying. But with just a few very perceptive and illuminating words, she gets exactly what she wants.”

She grew up in a highly creative family setting with a massively successful and adulated director father, a highly literate mother, and a movie star cousin (Nicolas Cage, whose late father, August, a university professor, was Francis Ford Coppola’s brother). It was during these formative years that Coppola acquired her keen sense of observation within the context of her largerthan-life and typically volatile Italian family where mealtime was often a “theatrical” feast.

“My mother (Eleanor) is the family intellectual,” Coppola says. “She was always involved in art and literature, taking me to museums, galleries and vernissages of emerging artists. Mom put me in touch with the creative dimension of life and has spurred me to be creative. I inherited from her my calm exterior, which sometimes masks an inner storm raging inside me but which you’d never notice.

“My dad is exactly the opposite, and I’ve learnt a lot from that kind of yin and yang upbringing. Growing up around his personality and in a family that was usually a high volume environment, I would make myself heard by speaking in a low voice and not getting excited or overly emotional the way everyone else would.”

She admits to having been close to both her parents although she does admit to being particularly doted upon by her father.

“With two older brothers, it’s obvious that I’ve always been Daddy’s girl. But I’m still close to both my mum and dad and they’re also the greatest grandparents in the world, full of stories to tell my kids, spending a lot of time with them, and always with a lot of love to give.”

After a failed early marriage to iconoclastic director Spike Jonze, which ended in 2003, Coppola has found happiness with French musician husband Thomas Mars, lead singer of the French alternative rock band Phoenix, with whom she has two daughters, Romy, 10, and Cosima, six.

They were finally married in 2011, but became involved romantically shortly after Phoenix contributed the song ‘Too Young’ to the soundtrack of Lost in Translation. Phoenix would later provide the entire soundtrack for Somewhere (2010) and he and Coppola collaborated again on The Beguiled.

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“(Thomas) will play me a few options, and we’ll see what fits,” she says. “It’s nice to have a musician in the house!

“We have homes in Paris and New York but my husband’s band is in Paris, so he’s often going back and forth. But the girls go to school in New York, so we have to be there most of the year. They need stability.”

With The Beguiled, Coppola regained much of the lustre that her career had lost in the wake of her previous two films, Somewhere and The Bling Ring, both of which were critical and box-office disappointments. Still, like her father, who found it impossible to match the success of his Godfather films, Coppola may spend the rest of her career struggling to find another project that will achieve the level of cult following and international acclaim that greeted her seminal indie hit Lost in Translation (2003).

She wrote the script with Murray in mind and spent a year preparing to shoot the film without knowing whether the notoriously elusive actor – he has no agent, and can only be contacted via a number kept by close friends – would actually show up. But a week before filming was scheduled to begin in Tokyo and much to the relief of Coppola, Murray arrived in good spirits and was a charming, funny and life-affirming presence for the entire shoot.

“I love Bill Murray and I really wanted to write something for him showing his more sensitive side – what you felt a little bit of in Rushmore, I wanted to see more of that side. And there’s just something funny about being stuck in a situation that you don’t really want to be in.”

The film is a subtle, moving, and wistful portrait of a fading Hollywood movie star (Bill Murray) who is being paid $2 million to spend a week in Tokyo shooting a Suntory Whisky commercial. Staying at the opulent Park Hyatt Hotel, he

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meets a recent Yale University grad (Scarlett Johansson) whose husband is doing a photo shoot of a Japanese rock band. In the course of their adventure, Murray and Johansson’s characters develop a touching friendship that speaks to the beauty of serendipitous encounters and unexpected connection.

“It’s supposed to be romantic but on the edge. Those relationships you have in real life that are a little bit more than friends but not an actual romance. They get each other and it’s flirtatious. They both know it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s flirtatious – an innocent and romantic kind of friendship.

“I saw it as a story where these two characters meet and have these great days with someone you wouldn’t expect to. It’s about moments in life that are great but don’t last. They don’t go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. Even though you have to go back to your real lives, that brief experience makes an impression on you.”

For audiences around the world, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation will be one of those films whose memory lasts a lifetime.

www.jasminealexa.com

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ASH NAYATE

Ash Nayate Muse Neuropsychologist

LIBERATION MOVEMENT inimalism is often associated with loss – with giving up things we might miss, with prospective loss and deprivation.

Yet when I embarked on a full-blown minimalism quest, I experienced stark gains: More energy. Better sleep. More family time.

More me time. More happiness.

But it wasn’t a sudden change. Initially, I didn’t even make the connection to minimalism. After all, how could something as benign as possessions have such vast ramifications? In fact, material clutter both reflects and begets mental clutter – and the more mental clutter we have, the harder it is to focus on the things that really matter.

While ‘stuff’ often serves as a kind of insulation and in some cases is perceived as protection, in many cases the parallel clutters become a source of stress; their abundance and meanings can become a source of overwhelm resulting in a general feeling of disorganisation, which can lead to desperate and unhelpful bids to free ourselves – think procrastination and self-sabotage.

The chain reaction makes sense since the more clutter we have, the more our brain has to work. It takes mental energy to filter our distractions, whether they be our clothes, books, memorabilia, or even email. The more clutter, the less able we are to filter and focus.

Yet we usually discover the profound impact of clutter only retrospectively, once it’s removed. Many people describe the feeling of paring their possessions – and sometimes commitments – as one of liberation, or a weight being lifted off their shoulders. They feel lighter (see energy and sleep). They are better able to stick to goals and less prone to procrastination and self-sabotage.

The simple explanation is that clutter drains our energy. And the more fatigued we become, the harder it is to make rational, logical decisions. This is why so many of us start the day with the best intentions to eat well, do some exercise, and be productive – but, by evening, it seems far more tempting to curl up on the couch watching Netflix and eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.

We often squander our mental energy during the day on relatively banal decisions, like which pair of black boots to wear or which episode of Game of Thrones to view on the train.

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By afternoon, when we’re choosing between a banana smoothie or a white chocolate chip frappucino with extra whip, we’re mentally tired from all the decision making. It becomes harder to listen to our rational mind and make decisions logically rather than impulsively.

There’s a term for this: Decision fatigue.

People like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg know this well, which is one of the reasons they wear an identical outfit every day.

They know to save their mental energy for the decisions that matter.

While most of us aren’t making squillion-dollar deals or have the fate of the nation in our hands, we all still have important decisions to make about our health, finances, career, family, relationships, coworkers and community.

Minimal living is about streamlining our lives so that we don’t have to squander precious mental energy on decisions that don’t really matter.

A minimal wardrobe means fewer decisions about our daily clothing. We don’t have to waste half our morning searching for that top we swore we washed. A minimal bathroom means getting ready is a breeze, because we know exactly where everything is. A minimal home means we’re not frantically searching for our phone and keys while we’re trying to rush out the door. And when we own fewer belongings, we take better care of the things we already have – including ourselves.

By eliminating mental clutter, we can better use our precious mental energy to plan and follow through on what matters and to take care of our emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Among the fringe benefits of going minimal were more time for both my family and my personal hobbies and projects. I cook more meals from scratch. I started yoga with my one-year-old son.

And I had more time to write, meditate, give interviews, work with students and clients, and – perhaps most importantly – to play with my son.

Ironically, it was only once I started getting rid of clutter that I started receiving more of the things that money can’t actually buy – like more time, improved physical and mental health, and a greater sense of purpose, happiness and fulfilment.

I encourage you to try it.

Minimal living is about streamlining our lives so that we don’t have to squander precious mental energy on decisions that don’t really matter.

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SIMPLE. STYLISH. AFFORDABLE.

MINIMALIST JEWELLERY www.minimalistjewellery.com.au

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NADINE CAMERON

Nadine Cameron Muse Philosophy Expert

FLIGHT OR FANCY chieved under the cover of darkness, on horseback and at the speed of sound, the word and notion of ‘escape’ can have a ring of the romantic. More prosaically, it can at once conjure a sense of desperation and relief; a need to get away but also an idea of how to do it (e.g. by bursting through the stairway exit when the GM has concluded her speech).

The thing about escape in the spatiotemporal sense is that we are nearly always surer of where we want to escape from than where we wish to escape to. This is as true of people in mortal danger as the merely overwrought. Regarding this latter contingent, I’m intrigued by the commonness of the fantasy of escaping work to lie on a beach…and read a novel. At some level our dreamers are already aware that their tropical paradise won’t actually deliver the desired relief, thus their need for a second escape: from island into fictional worlds.

What is revealed here is that what many of us truly desire when we think we want to swap our material circumstances is just a different way of feeling. We might believe we specifically want the salty air, the blue sky, the warm sun. But what we are looking for is how that combination of things – which become parching, tiring and/or even boring pretty quickly – make us feel at first. There is no place on Earth we can disappear to that is guaranteed to please us continually.

Novels can help us ‘escape’ from suffering over sustained periods partly because of the intangibility of their worlds. These fantastical locations keep morphing with our imaginations. We don’t get bothered by the glare in these places as we do in places in the flesh and blood world.

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Just as our mind helps us escape when we read, we should be asking what states of mind we want to escape to when we’re struggling. Start by thinking about what places you dream about escaping to. Then consider: Why there? How do they make you feel? How else can you try and get that feeling? The other interesting thing about escape fantasies – for those for whom escape is an indulgence not a necessity – is they tend to involve abandonment of responsibility. Yet what I am suggesting here is that it’s often by increasing our sense of responsibility for our wellbeing, the condition and content of our mind, that we can best escape our troubles.

There is a contrasting perspective I can refer to here offered by 20th century Western philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He suggested that a desire for escape is an essential aspect of the human condition. He saw it as a symptom of our ‘finiteness’ or, in other words, our innate incompleteness or inadequacy. We don’t have to accept that we are incomplete or inadequate to believe we possess an inherent restlessness. And if we do believe this, it would follow that, rather than trying to learn how to escape better, we should learn how to accept the constant yearning to escape or, as Levinas referred to it, (existential) nausea. Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, similarly, says in her book The Wisdom of No Escape that we will never find a perfectly safe place for ourselves.

Instead, we should all learn how to stay put and make friends with the fundamental shakiness and queasiness of life.

What is revealed here is that what many of us truly desire when we think we want to swap our material circumstances is just a different way of feeling.

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ENVIROSHIELDâ„¢ POLLUTION & INFRARED DEFENCE SPRITZ ANTIOXIDANT PROTECTION INTENSE HYDRATION

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ALINDA SMALL

Alinda Small Muse Sex & Relationship Expert

THE FANTASY REALM our fantasies might reveal more than you think. While it’s a relatively understudied field, some reports estimate that more than 80 per cent of our fantasies involve people other than our lovers. What determines the content of our fantasies?

Research out of Israel suggests attachment style plays a major role.

The Israeli study saw 48 cohabitating couples come together for a period of three weeks. Over the course of the study, participants recorded sexual fantasies as soon as they came to mind, detailing wishes, sensations, figures, feelings, thoughts and events. Their attachment styles (secure, avoidant, or ambivalent) were also identified. Results revealed that participants experienced fantasies more days than not, with an average of 13 out of 21 days including a fantasy. As predicted, the content of fantasies did correlate with attachment style. People higher in anxious attachment were more likely to experience fantasies reflecting emotional intimacy – being supported, comforted and feeling affection expressed toward them. In contrast, those high in avoidant attachment experienced more themes around aggression, alienation and emotional distancing.

There was no major gender difference in frequency of sexual fantasies. However, the content of men’s fantasies differed and they tended to fantasise less about their partner, doing this only 50 per cent of the time when compared with 83 per cent for women. Gender aside, it’s clear that most people do fantasise about people other than their lover, at least some of the time. Should they feel guilty?

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Sex is often more than just a physical act. It involves complex mental processes. Just as the lived experience isn’t always what is fantasised about, fantasies are not always about a current partner.

This does not equate to a reduction in attraction but rather reflects that sexual fantasies are often fed by novelty. They are a function of imagination that is fuelled by the novel and perhaps even the taboo. Sexual fantasies often do not comply with the social binary rules of society. They allow us to play in the possible and impossible without facing the consequences. In this way, fantasising about something does not mean we will necessarily act on it, nor does it mean that our subconscious feelings are reflected in the content of our fantasy.

Fantasies may be something that you wish to share with your partner. Although we are not morally obliged to share all of our fantasies with our partners, it may add excitement to your sex life. People who have relationships where they talk openly about sexual fantasies are often the ones who have the most active and healthy sex lives. This said, understanding what fantasies are, or more importantly what they are not, may help you to accept them and not harbour guilt. It may also give you the confidence to share them. But sharing with your partner should be a considered process.

It is vital that you read your partner’s reaction and share only what you feel comfortable disclosing. Before embarking on the sharing of sexual fantasies, I often advise clients to: (1) Start small and build on the fantasy. If you have a fantasy about being greeted fully naked at the door, ask for a partial nudity greeting to begin. This helps build the story and makes sure you are both comfortable at each level.

(2) Take turns in sharing fantasies. Finding equilibrium in disclosure allows comfort levels to increase and creates safety. However you start, proceed with caution. Make an educated decision on how your partner might react and consider the benefits of sharing and not sharing. Contemplate if this fantasy will bring some much-needed spice or if it is best left in the realm of imagination.

Fantasies may be something that you wish to share with your partner. Although we are not morally obliged to share all of our fantasies with our partners, it may add excitement to your sex life.

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ELISE BIALYLEW

Elise Bialylew Muse Mindfulness Expert

SOCIAL CRAVING SOLUTION ave you ever found yourself up late at night scrolling through Facebook when you were meant to be going to sleep?

You’re not alone.

Social media addiction is becoming an increasing problem.

As technology develops exponentially, at the click of a button we can access an infinite amount of information. With this privilege comes the potential cost of information overload, technology addiction, increased distractibility and low-grade background anxiety as we try to keep on top of things.

With invisible umbilical cords connecting us to our devices, staying present and undistracted, especially when we’re with our children, is becoming an increasing challenge.

We need an antidote for this situation.

One cure is mindfulness meditation, a training that has its origins in Buddhism but is being proven by science to be a powerful tool for enhanced wellbeing and mental focus.

Mindfulness is a training that helps us become more present, self-aware and better able to respond rather than react on autopilot in our everyday lives. It’s been shown to help with impulse control and is a powerful tool for kicking addictions ranging from drugs to social media.

Here are five steps for using mindfulness to overcome over-reliance on or addiction to social media.

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SET AN INTENTION Set an intention around changing your behaviour in relation to technology and think about practical steps you can take to make it more difficult to get hooked. Consider taking the social media apps off your phone and commit to sleeping without your mobile in the bedroom (even for just a few nights to see what effect it has).

When we crave anything, there’s usually an uncomfortable emotion or feeling we are trying to get away from.

REFLECT Take a moment to reflect on your relationship with social media. Are you happy with the way you are using it? Do you feel you might be a little addicted? If you find yourself scrolling through Facebook until the early hours of the morning, the answer is probably yes.

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RECOGNISE The next time you feel the urge to check social media, take a pause. Recognise you are caught in craving. Count to 10 before continuing to use it.

This can interrupt the urge.

INVESTIGATE When we crave anything, there’s usually an uncomfortable emotion or feeling we are trying to get away from, which leads us to do something that will bring us pleasure. Take a moment to bring your attention to your body. Sense any emotions or feelings that are present (agitation, stress, loneliness, boredom). Once you identify the emotion, silently label it to yourself, which brings more mindful awareness to your current state and shows you what the underlying issue might be that is driving the urges.

UNHOOK Mindfulness, this ability to be present from moment to moment to what is happening, allows you to consciously notice what is happening as it is happening and pause before you act on your urges. In this way mindfulness helps disrupt automatic habits and addiction loops.

Becoming aware of your cravings is the first step to having more choice around how you’re going to relate to them. Mindfulness is a practice that will help you catch the urge before you act on it and help you break bad habits.

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STUFF OF

DREAMS Can you really read unconscious content from your sleep-time thoughts or is dreaming life little more than a mental junkyard?

WORDS: MADELEINE DORE | ARTWORK: REBECCA LONG

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century ago, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Deeming dreams the “royal road to the unconscious”, Freud founded psychoanalysis – the forebear to all modern psychotherapies.

Freud’s elaborate mapping of mental life during sleep welcomed scientific exploration into the connection between the elusive and nebulous ‘mind’ and the spatially extended ‘grey brain’ (hence the term ‘grey matter’).

Met by technological advances enabling detailed scans, Freud’s dream work underscores an excitable branch of neuroscience revealing unthinkable complexity of both brain and mind. In fact, dreams are proving valuable in distinguishing between entities that have long anchored fierce philosophical debate, between so-called materialists, idealists and dualists, who believe that mind and brain are separate and either parallel or interdependent (so-called psycho-physical interactionism).

According to the American Psychoanalytic Association, without The Interpretation of Dreams, psychology might still be the study of ill humours and their effects on the brain, in the vein of a wandering uterus once thought to cause hysteria.

But do dreams have any meaning independent of models used by psychoanalytic thinkers, who interpret them against theories such as object relations – which is variously imagined as art, science and religion?

WEAVING DREAMS To Freud, dreams are wishes we are seeking to fulfil – often repressed desires we deem unacceptable or attempt to ignore in our waking lives. To Jung, they are the product of a collective unconscious. To philosopher Aristotle, dreams are the most pure form of wisdom.

Contemporary sleep scientists view dreaming as the neurological process that happens when we enter rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep. The role of dreams is a cognitive process of the past (as a way to process memories), the present (to process our emotions or strengthen new memories), and the future (by rehearsing situations).

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Alternatively, dreaming is simply an accidental by-product of brainwave activity.

Psychologist Rubin Naiman captures this ambiguity towards dreaming when he describes it as equal parts magic, science and mystery.

For Naiman, dreams may be more accurately described by what happens to people in the absence of REM sleep – that is, irritability, depression, weight gain, hallucination, erosion of reason, memory, and immune system functions.

Yet such a pervasive ambiguity when it comes to the meaning or role of dreaming, or the general dismissive attitude towards its value, may be causing broader health issues, explains Naiman.

“Today, too many of us view dreams the way we do stars – they emerge nightly and seem magnificent, but are far too distant to be of any relevance to our real lives,” he writes.

SLEEP SABOTAGE In his review ‘Dreamless: the silent epidemic of REM sleep loss’, Naiman explains how we are currently facing a deficit in dreaming due to sleep epidemic, presenting both an existential and public health crisis.

And the epidemic is only increasing, writes Naiman. “Despite decades of innovative sleep research, escalating numbers of new sleep specialists and clinics, and an explosion of media attention and public health education initiatives, the epidemic of insufficient sleep and insomnia appears to be getting worse.

“In any given year, 30 per cent of adults report at least one symptom of insomnia, including trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or obtaining restorative sleep.”

This neglect for sleep, and subsequently dreaming, has been caused by a combination of lifestyle factors including alcohol and substance use, and the increasing demands and expectations of modern life. Digital devices and alarm clocks are “shearing off” our dreaming periods, in a way that’s similar to “being abruptly ushered out of a movie theatre whenever a film was nearing its conclusion”, explains Naiman.

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Jane Teresa Anderson, dream analyst and author of Dream Alchemy, also notes that on a societal level we are not respecting sleep, but perhaps more importantly, we are not taking the time to process dreams and therefore check in with our current state of mind.

“From my point of view, yes we are sleep deficient, but the problem is more that we are deficient in giving ourselves a few minutes when we wake up to linger in the twilight zone and honour the dreaming process,” says Anderson.

There is plenty of insight to gain about our work and personal lives if we take the time to reflect on the symbols and metaphors in our dreams, she adds.

“There is information in our dreams about ourselves that can actually help us in our busy lives – either to help us get things done in a smoother, easier way, or inform us about why we think we have to do all these things in the first instance and re-evaluate our life or sense of balance.”

LITERAL VERSUS SYMBOLIC Whether accidental or the reflection of our unconscious desires, many of us have experienced how our dreams dramatise our emotions and provide symbols and metaphors for what may be happening in our daily lives.

A common mistake people make is thinking symbols have universal meaning that could be found in a dream manual.

Stuff of dreams

Conversely, the meaning of an element in a dream must be tailored to an individual’s experiences and desires that can be uncovered through work psychoanalysis.

“Dreams are formations of the unconscious, so when someone brings them to a session, they can provide an opening that wouldn’t necessarily be there if we just had an ordinary conversation,” says psychoanalyst and lecturer Dr Kate Briggs.

“Of course there may be shared cultural associations, but my way of working with dreams is for the patient to hear the meaning when they speak.

A dream image might have multiple significations and it is to hear how they link to other things for subjects, or an unconscious desire that someone hasn’t registered consciously.”

In this way, using dreams in psychoanalytic work is not about controlling the process of dreaming, but rather opening a subscription to the unconscious, explains Briggs.

“Paying attention to your dreams and registering that there is activity there is interesting precisely because it is not controlled,” she says.

They can also offer insights on what we are ignoring about ourselves, our emotions and our desires.

For Josie Malinowski, Lecturer in Psychology, University of East London, at least one part of Freud’s wishfulfilment theory rings true: that we dream of things we are trying our best to ignore.

In her recent research, Malinowski found that people who generally try to suppress their thoughts not only dream about their emotional experiences from waking life more – in particular unpleasant situations – but also have worse sleep quality and higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression than others.

“Because of this, we really need to better understand what happens to thoughts when we try to suppress them. Paying attention to our dreams, then, could help us to identify things in our lives that we’re not paying enough attention to that are causing us problems. This may mean that there is merit to exploring dream work in therapy. In fact, recent research has shown that exploring dreams is an

effective way of obtaining personal insight – both in and out of therapy settings,” she writes.

“Interpreting your dream helps you to check in on your current mindset and see how your unconscious mind works.”

DECODING DREAMS When we are very stressed and watching our time, we tend to jump out of bed and race towards our lives and to-do lists, says Anderson. “There is no way we are going to remember our dreams let alone work on them.”

For those who are time poor, Anderson recommends setting an alarm 10 minutes earlier to get in the habit of noting your dreams.

“Lie in the position that you think you dream in and recall one or two symbols or feelings from your dreaming. Over time, you will naturally start to recall dreams more easily,” she says.

While it may seem counterintuitive to add another item to the to-do list and spend 10 minutes in the morning reflecting on your dreams, investing the time can help our days run smoother by highlighting potential areas of stress and unresolved tensions in the unconscious.

“It’s similar to meditation, but dreams offer a direct line to where you are and enable you to uncover your psychological and spiritual inner world,” says Anderson.

“Keep going to the gym if that works for you, and keep meditating if that works for you; there are other places you can steal your time from – watching Netflix or scrolling Instagram.”

Once you’ve built the habit of recording your dreams in a few words or even illustrations, you may like to set aside time to work on interpreting them.

There are several frameworks or processes for interpreting your dreams and tapping into the unconscious, be it through work with a psychoanalyst or using visualisation tools.

“Dreaming is a sorting process, but also helps to solve the issues in your life that you are not really managing to resolve yourself.”

“Dream alchemy is a visualisation exercise completed in your waking state that basically works with the symbols of the dream to reprogram your unconscious mind,” says Anderson.

For example, if you have a dream about getting into a car and not being able to switch it on and feeling frustrated, you may re-imagine that situation and visualise yourself being able to work the car with ease. It sounds really simple, but it is a very powerful exercise in creating different responses, outcomes and the results you want in life,” explains Anderson.

“Dreaming is a sorting process, but also helps to solve the issues in your life that you are not really managing to resolve yourself.”

It would be exhausting to remember every dream and analyse it every day, says Anderson, but there are beneficial times to pay attention to your dreams.

Anderson says recurring dreams and nightmares warrant attention, particularly if they’re upsetting.

Dreams at critical times around major life decisions may also be worthy of note. While they won’t reveal conclusive or prescient answers to dilemmas, they are likely to reveal where your mind is really at, which may be obscured by anxiety or conscious reckoning during waking thought.

“Your dreams will reflect what is going on for you, how you are processing your life experiences during that period of change and how you can have a more positive experience of that change, or see more opportunities and get more creative,” says Anderson.

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“When you learn what kind of questions to ask and how to look at dreams, suddenly the penny drops and it’s actually quite easy to draw the parallels with your life and then to see where your unconscious brain might be sabotaging your ability to do things, or lose confidence in yourself, or whatever blockage it may be.”

Just as paying attention to our dreams can provide clarity and perspective in our daily lives, paying attention to details in our daily lives can help us dream more clearly; that is, experience lucid dreaming.

BLURRED LINES Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon in which the dreamer becomes aware they are dreaming and can potentially control their actions as well as the content and context of the dream. While it may seem New-Agey, it’s far more prevelant than one may think, with research finding that if you’ve never had a lucid dream, you may be in the minority.

Recording dreams is also a crucial step in building a capacity for lucid dreaming as it assists you in finding patterns, themes and discrepancies between dreams and realities.

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold, describes the process of training yourself to identify “dream signs, or discrepancies from reality that can help you realise you are dreaming”.

While the appeal of lucid dreaming for many may be to enact fantasies or create new realities, researchers have found pragmatic applications for improving our waking lives – from getting exercise to practising creative pursuits.

A 2008 study by researchers Erlacher and Schredl found that practising a physical activity such as squats during a lucid dream could improve performance in waking life.

Although many techniques exist for inducing lucid dreams, previous studies have reported low success rates. In a new study published in journal Dreaming, psychology researcher Dr Denholm Aspy confirmed that people can increase their chances of having a lucid dream, reporting a 17 per cent success rate during a given ‘test’ week.

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LUCID DREAMING THREE WAYS 1. REALITY TESTING Involves checking your environment several times a day to see whether or not you’re dreaming.

2. WAKE BACK TO BED Waking up after five hours, staying awake for a short period, then going

back to sleep in order to enter a REM sleep period, in which dreams are more likely to occur.

3. MILD Waking up after five hours of sleep and then developing the intention to remember that you are dreaming before returning to sleep by repeating the phrase: “The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember that I’m dreaming.” You also imagine yourself in a lucid dream.

Among those who were able to go to sleep within the first five minutes of completing the mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD) technique, the success rate of lucid dreaming was much higher, at almost 46 per cent of attempts.

“The MILD technique works on what we call ‘prospective memory’ – that is, your ability to remember to do things in the future. By repeating a phrase that you will remember you’re dreaming, it forms an intention in your mind that you will, in fact, remember that you are dreaming, leading to a lucid dream,” says Dr Aspy.

“Importantly, those who reported success using the MILD technique were significantly less sleep deprived the next day, indicating that lucid dreaming did not have any negative effect on sleep quality.”

“Being part of a community who share similar struggles can give a lot of hope during your darkest moments.”

Stephanie, SANE Speaker

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GETTING IT DONE

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CIRCUMVENT YOUR BRAIN’S ‘NO’ SWITCH

Especially appealing in the face of pressure and overwhelm, procrastination may be causing the stress it seems to mitigate. Discover how to quit putting things off.

WORDS: NATASHA THOMPSON

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s we move towards the silly season, it’s easy to push problems onto the 2018 to-do list. While avoidance might appease current qualms, science suggests working to resolve issues in the present is likely to improve psychological health in the future – not to mention enabling you to enjoy the holiday unencumbered.

In psychology, the act of repetitively putting anxiety-inducing tasks, activities or thoughts into the ‘too hard basket’ (so to speak), and rarely resolving them, is known as avoidance. Forms of avoidance can vary, from failing to discuss an unachievable workload with the boss (behavioural avoidance) to ignoring upsetting emotions in a relationship (cognitive avoidance).

In its most severe form, avoidance can fuel clinical disorders, such as avoidant personality disorder and social phobia. In its more common incarnations, avoidance can be the trigger to repetitive procrastination. Stephanie Osfield wrote extensively on the topic in our October issue, outlining the reasons why we avoid certain situations, tasks and emotions, and how we can stop. But why is it so important to reduce avoidant behaviour? And can we really turn off the procrastination switch?

THE COST OF PUTTING IT OFF Avoidance has been suggested as a cause and perpetuating factor in mental illness since the beginning of modern-day psychology. In fact, a key aspect of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was the role of defence mechanisms – psychological techniques people use to deny

or manipulate reality as a means of avoiding distressing emotions. Contemporary research has affirmed the role of avoidance in many psychological disorders. It’s not surprising then that anxiety is one of the most readily referenced avoidance type disorders given its almost symbiotic relationship with avoidance.

Avoidance in depression has been less discussed, though new research suggests it may be a common feature. In their 2009 study, researchers Raes, Vandromme & Hermans proposed that rumination (the repetitive consideration of a particular thought or problem without resolution) may act as a cognitive avoidance strategy in depression.

Their findings, published in Abnormal Psychology: New Research, supported this idea, with participants who reported more rumination exhibiting higher levels of cognitive avoidance, regardless of the degree of anxiety experienced. The researchers concluded: “These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that rumination functions as a (cognitive) avoidance strategy.” In simple terms, they found that people with depression appear to ruminate as a means of distracting themselves from processing anxiety-inducing thoughts or emotions.

THE PROCRASTINATION PARADOX For non-clinical avoiders, the act of delaying an intended thought or behaviour can still impact mental health. You don’t need a double blind experiment to tell you that procrastination is associated with stress. What you might not know is that the stress caused by procrastination can have serious consequences on both mental and physical health.

In their often-cited longitudinal studies, Tice and Baumeister found that students categorised as ‘procrastinators’ experienced less stress and better health at the start of the semester but more stress at the end of the semester, worse health overall and received lower grades on all assignments. “Procrastination does not simply shift the same amount of stress and

“You learn to become a procrastinator. And if you learn it, you can unlearn it.”

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illness from early to late in the project period,” the authors concluded.

“Rather it apparently increases the amount of stress and illness.” In other words, Organised Ally might be a little bit stressed and sick as she gets to work immediately on a new project but by leaving it to the last minute, Late Larry will get more stressed, more sick and do a poorer quality job overall. It seems just ‘getting it done’ would be the advisable option if good health and quality work is our motivation. At the time of publishing, Tice and Baumeister’s findings were revolutionary. Twenty years on and stacks of research papers later, have we learnt anything more about the effects of procrastination?

There are few people who know procrastination better than Joseph Ferrari (PhD). The professor of psychology from Chicago’s DePaul University has authored four scholarly books on the topic, countless journal articles and popular read Still Procrastinating? The no-regrets guide to getting it done. He also facilitated the 10th biannual procrastination conference held in Chicago earlier this year.

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“Everybody procrastinates but not everybody is a procrastinator,” he begins. “The research shows 20 per cent of adult women and men are chronic procrastinators. That’s higher than depression, phobias, panic attacks…and it’s not just in America.

We have found this in Australia, Italy, Ireland, Saudi Arabia and more recently in Japan, South Korea, and India. We have been doing these experiments for 20 years. These 20 per cent of people are waiting for something positive, but there isn’t anything positive.”

Dr Ferrari outlines the destructive effects of procrastination in a new paper co-authored with Thomas Tibbett (PhD). Poor savings and relationship difficulties are characteristic. The health effects, however, are only just starting to be explored.

“It’s a new area of research,” says Dr Ferrari. “But what we’ve been finding is that chronic procrastinators have more headaches, worse menstrual symptoms, more flus, more aches and pains, and three times as many heart attacks and twice as many strokes.

Why? It’s not the procrastination, it’s the worry people have about not doing these things. It’s their immune system that is suffering because of it.”

MOTIVATED TO PROCRASTINATE If the effect of putting it off leads to more stress, worse health, poorer finances and relationship issues, why do procrastinators persist?

“Procrastination is one way procrastinators avoid what they need to do because they have a fear of failure or a fear of success,” says Dr Ferrari. “Fear of failure is pretty obvious. They fear success because if they do well, they might be given more responsibilities, the expectations might increase and they might think, ‘I can’t do this.’

In developmental psychology we talk about a diffuse identity. Some people never quite commit themselves to certain values or opinions. They

“I want people to be optimistic about it.

Just because you’re a procrastinator, doesn’t mean you can’t change.” don’t commit themselves to their identity and they never go through a crisis – they never question or explore who they are. Those people have a diffuse personality, they never quite settle, they’re always hanging out there. Procrastinators often happen to be these people, and one common characteristic of this personality type is avoidance.”

So could procrastination be deemed a personality trait? “I never use the word trait,” says Dr Ferrari. “Trait implies you can’t change. You learn to become a procrastinator. And if you learn it, you can unlearn it. It’s all about saving public image. What we say in psych is ‘self-esteem’ – that’s how I feel about my self. ‘Social esteem’ is how others feel about me. If you give me a project and I give you the image that I didn’t finish it, I’ll be giving the image of someone who didn’t try. Yes it’s negative too but to them it’s not as bad as if I did do it and it just wasn’t very good. They want you to like them.”

CONDITIONED DELAY “It’s a learned behaviour because I think our culture encourages it. We don’t give the early bird the worm anymore. We are too politically correct – everybody gets a bit of the worm.

We have to change that. We need to reward people for being early. If I pay my credit card off early, where is the nice little perk I get from the company at the end of the year, saying, ‘thank you for paying off your credit card on time every year’? There is none. We don’t reward people in our culture for doing things early. We have to go back to giving the early bird the worm.”

What about society’s obsession with being busy – are we simply overloaded?

“There are two common myths about procrastination,” says Dr Ferrari.

The art of getting it done

“One people like to say is our lives are busier today. That’s a pretty insulting comment to our ancestors. You’re in Australia and New Zealand, you come from people that had to escape and survive on their own. There’s still 168 hours in a week – it’s a bit like that between my ancestors and yours.

Our lives are not busier, but they are different. Our ancestors had to get up milk the cow, yarn the fence…but they got it done.”

Dr Ferrari also absolves technology of any role in fostering procrastination.

“People say technology today makes it easier to procrastinate. Let me answer that one with a story. In 2006, a reporter from Connecticut called me.

He asked, ‘What do you think about the snooze button on the alarm clock?’

I asked, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘That was the first technology for procrastination and it’s 50 years old today.’ I thought, what about the telephone? What about the automobile? There was a time when you had to jump in your buggy and drive three miles down the road to meet your neighbour, and then the phone was invented, and you could call and wake up later.”

LEARNING TO GET. IT. DONE. Viewing procrastination as a learned behaviour provides hope. As Dr Ferrari states, if you learn it, you can also unlearn it. So how might treatment approaches support this ‘unlearning’? It depends what you believe about the mechanisms underlying procrastination. While many people continue to blame poor time management as the source, Dr Ferrari says the research is clear: “Procrastination is avoidance, it’s not time management.”

Science appears to support Dr Ferrari’s claims. “The first speaker (at this year’s procrastination conference) did a meta-analysis of all the interventions that have been done on procrastination,” says the professor.

“They found that the time management ones were the least effective. The most effective was cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). That’s what these people who have this avoidant strategy need to do – change the way they think and act.”

How might CBT work? This shortterm, goal-oriented psychotherapeutic treatment is aimed at changing maladaptive cognitions and behaviours.

In procrastination CBT is used to target thoughts and behaviours that may be maintaining procrastination. One CBT strategy used for procrastination is the behavioural experiment. This strategy involves the therapist and procrastinator identifying a few key beliefs the procrastinator has about carrying out the tasks they often procrastinate. From these beliefs, the individual forms a hypothesis and then tests its validity.

Let’s consider the student who regularly starts assignments the night before they are due because they worry they don’t know where to start. They often require extensions, have poor grades, are very stressed throughout the term and keep getting sick. The therapist might encourage this student to consider their fear about starting. Is this fear driven by a belief that they don’t understand the material well enough, that they’re not smart enough to be studying this topic or that they cannot ask for help?

Once a belief has been established, a hypothesis is formed. For instance, if the student believes they will get stuck as soon as they start, they may form the hypothesis: It will take me a whole week to answer the first assignment question. The therapist will then have the student test this hypothesis. To do this, they may ask the student to schedule six 30-minute time blocks spent on the assignment spread out across two days. The student will also be asked to record their feelings before,

after and during the ‘experiment’ and how much work they complete over the period. These experiments are designed to be achievable for the individual. At the subsequent therapy session, the therapist and student will consider the hypothesis. Did the student finish the first assignment question in less than a week? They will also consider how the student felt after each 30-minute block.

Whichever strategy you use to tackle procrastination, Dr Ferrari urges that you remain hopeful. “If you’re the one in 20, take comfort in that you’re not alone. I want people to be optimistic about it. Just because you’re a procrastinator, doesn’t mean you can’t change. Make the world a better place, be active, be productive.”

EASY TIPS If deadlines and due dates are constantly slipping you by, you may want to consider these tips form Dr Ferrari. But the professor cautions that therapeutic treatment is the only way to lasting change.

• Ensure accountability: Post your ‘to do’ list online in a public forum to ensure you are held accountable for completing tasks.

• Work alongside ‘doers’: Place those prone to procrastination in a group with non-procrastinators. If you are a procrastinator, find a friend who gets down to business and work alongside them. These ‘nonprocrastinators’ will model ways to work efficiently, indirectly ‘teaching’ the procrastinator how to get on with it.

• Make consequences: If a procrastinator misses a deadline, hold them accountable. Let them know you are angry. But ensure you communicate you are angry about their behaviour (missing the deadline) and not angry over them.

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GRIEVING RIGHTS While the holiday period is pitched as a time of universal celebration, the festive narrative can also amplify grief – especially when its course has been incomplete or it’s evolved into prolonged forms.

WORDS: MADELEINE DORE

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G

rief is a profoundly humanising response to loss. It grips every part of our lives, yet we often refer to our bereavement as a process, as a recovery, as something that we move through and get over.

Such descriptions may not be helpful, says Christopher Hall, CEO of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement. “People often view grief a bit like how they view flu – you go through a process and you come out the other end and it is all done and dusted and resolved,” he says.

“But in many ways, we never recover from loss. We don’t come to a point in our bereavement where it is all finished – death ends a life, it doesn’t end a relationship.

People continue those relationships through their actions, thoughts and memories.”

People are hardwired to deal with the experience of acute distress brought on by loss. “Many of the responses we see in the early stages of bereavement are really symptoms of anxiety. Grief disrupts the way people relate to themselves and their world,” says Hall.

While most people eventually experience qualitative changes in their grief and its intensity, according to Dr Holly G. Prigerson, from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, seven to 10 per cent of grievers will end up struggling with complicated or prolonged grief. These individuals may remain in the intense and acute stages of grief, and loss, for years, sometimes decades, and sometimes never recover.

“There is a small proportion of people whose grief does become chronic to a point where they are unable to find a new way of living in the wake of the experience,” says Hall.

A COMPLICATED GRIEF The risk factors that contribute to complications in grief are complex. In general they relate to the relationship, the nature of the death, or some other kind of subsequent or consequential loss, explains Hall.

• Relationship: The relationship with the deceased may have been complicated, dependent or conflicted. Complicated grief may more likely result from the death of a child or spouse • Nature of the death: A sudden, unexpected, traumatic or violent death can disrupt the bereavement experience, especially if somebody witnessed the distress or trauma.

• Issues around how they found out about the death: A traumatic discovery of a death such as suicide or death whereby the body is not recovered makes it very difficult for people to accept the reality of the death and derail their experience of grief.

• Guilt or self-blame: A high level of guilt or self-blame can derail bereavement as people often need additional information, or blame themselves for events that are entirely outside their control.

• Physical or mental exhaustion: In the case of a carer, there may be a sense of both relief and guilt over the death of a loved one, as well as physical and emotional exhaustion, which might be a liability taken into their bereavement.

• Mental health: History of anxiety or depression before the loss.

• Attachment styles: In attachment theory, four styles of attachment have been identified in adults: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant and fearfulavoidant. Particular attachment styles can predispose an individual to a more complex bereavement experience.

• Lack of family or social support: Social attitudes towards grief may mean people don’t have others to share their experience with and help them make sense of it.

While there is no timeline for grief, if an individual is experiencing symptoms such as persistent and invasive thoughts of loss, intense yearning, anger, numbness or confusion, isolation, a sense of meaningless or avoidance, it may be a sign of complicated or prolonged grief.

DEFINING LOSS While formal classifications of complicated or prolonged grief refer exclusively to an experience resulting from the death of a loved one, grief can result from a loss in many aspects of our lives, says Hall.

“Our view is that grief is a response to adverse life events or loss – be it a job loss, a relationship breakup, or an experience of violence where the sense that the world is a safe place is lost.”

In some cases, the grief children experience in response to their parents divorce can be more intense than the death of a parent, says Hall. “One of the reasons that may be the case is because often those are experiences that have a chronic quality to them. There may be hope that a relationship will repair, or there may be high levels of self-blame.”

The symptoms of prolonged grief may resemble symptoms of depression, especially in the case of a loss that is personal or tied to identity and self.

Dr Stephen Carbone from beyondblue acknowledges that while there are no hard and fast rules regarding grief, there can be some some overlap between complicated grief and depression.

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“When you lose something that was important to you, such as a job or a business or a relationship, that can be a catalyst for some people to experience depression, particularly if your identity is bound up in those other things. You can feel a certain emptiness because a certain part of yourself is gone,” says Carbone.

It’s important to distinguish between the experience of grief and depression, he adds.

“Grief is a normal part of life that we will all go through, whereas depression is a different kettle of fish – it affects a lot of people, but not everyone is going to experience depression. There are some similarities, but it is better to understand they are different – one is a normal response to loss, and the other is a clinical condition.”

THE HOW-TO OF GRIEVING Grieving is often imagined as an innate skill we intuitively know how to complete. And while it can be unhelpful to feel bound to a prescriptive formula, successful grieving isn’t a fait accompli. For some people, the process of mourning is disrupted, resulting in a sort of repetition of the same stage of pain.

Think a broken record of fresh loss.

Paradoxically, imagining a kind of ‘grief ideal’ can exacerbate complicated experiences of grief or cause the bereaved to question themselves and their experiences, undermining their capacity to cope.

Replacing the ‘how to’ of grieving with education on the various coping strategies, options and experiences can promote healthier relationships with loss, says Hall.

“If we view how we love somebody as very personal and idiosyncratic, then I would argue the way we respond to grief is personal and idiosyncratic.

“Some people will readily and happily see a bereavement counsellor, and others may swim, or use meditation or prayer. They might read stories of other people who have had similar experiences, or they may work to raise awareness or create a charity.”

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For most people, the bereavement process is about creating and finding meaning in their experience of loss.

“Generally, people struggling with grief are those who are searching but haven’t found any meaning in their experience – the event is unmetabolised,” says Hall.

Goal setting, mobilising support networks, physical activity, education around sleep hygiene, diet and exercise, and writing a journal can all help provide a greater sense of control for people to reactivate their engagement in life while experiencing grief.

“Many of our interventions focus on helping people reconstruct a world of meaning in the wake of that experience – how the experience has changed them, their view of the world, their identity, how they remember that person and giving them a sense of choice. These are choiceless events.”

As grief so often stems from choiceless events in our lives, we mistakenly assume that we don’t have any choices in the aftermath. But how we respond to loss is rich in choice, explains Hall.

“There are many things people can do. People will use art, listen to music, edit family video, write, or raise funds or awareness. These activities are all, in a sense, grief work, and it’s a way of making a difference and ensuring somebody’s memory is sustained.”

While prescriptive models or ‘howtos’ may be seductive, research has failed to support such frameworks built on a series of predictable phases such as Elisabeth KüblerRoss’s five stages of grief (shock and denial; anger, resentment and guilt; bargaining; depression; and acceptance), explains Hall.

Grieving rights

The Four Tasks of Mourning by J. William Worden (1991) frames grief as an active process for the bereaved rather than a set of stages to move through passively. The tasks of mourning are not following in a linear fashion, but can be revisited and reworked intermittently over time.

Tasks of grieving: • Accepting the reality of the loss • Experiencing the pain of the loss • Adjusting to a new life without the lost person • Reinvestment in the new reality.

“We’ve moved away from the idea that people go through a predictable sequence of emotional responses such as Kübler-Ross’s five stages, and have identified that people tend to oscillate between different sorts of stress – one being the emotional stress, and the other being the stress of daily living.”

The process of relearning the world can be one of the most difficult aspects of grief. “For many people, it’s about developing new skills and operating in the world in a different way. Grief is a process of relearning the self – who am I now in wake of this experience? How have I changed?” says Hall.

It’s about learning and relearning how to be in yourself and in the world.

As writer Anne Lamott puts it, “loss is not something we get over or forget, it’s something we learn to live with”.

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

THE SELF-CARE EFFECT When grieving, or supporting someone who is grieving, it can be all too easy to neglect our own needs. Taking the time to look after yourself, however, can make a big difference in your ability to function on a day-to-day basis, especially in the longer term. Below are some suggestions about how to get through some of the difficult times.

PRIVATELY AND PERSONALLY • Try to delay major decisions that cannot be reversed for six to 12 months, e.g. disposing of belongings.

• Keep a diary or journal.

• Create a memorial – do or make something to honour your loved one.

• Develop your own rituals, e.g. light a candle, listen to special music, make a special place to think.

• Allow yourself to express your thoughts and feelings privately. Write a letter or a poem, draw, collect photos, cry, etc.

• Exercise – do something to use pent-up energy, e.g. walking, swimming, cycling, gardening.

• Draw on your religious or spiritual beliefs and practices.

• Explore other people’s experiences through books, movies, articles, etc.

• Do things that are relaxing and soothing.

• Some holistic or self-care ideas that may assist include meditation, distractions, relaxation and massage.

• To help with sleeplessness: exercise, limit alcohol and caffeine and try to maintain a routine, especially around bedtime.

WITH OTHER PEOPLE • Sharing with other people can reduce the sense of isolation and loneliness that comes with grief.

• Allow people to help you; don’t be embarrassed to accept their help. You will be able to help someone else at another time. It is your turn now.

• Talk to family and friends; sharing memories and stories, thoughts and feelings can be comforting and

•

•

• •

strengthen your connection with your loved one.

Consider joining a support group to share with others who have had similar experiences.

Take opportunities to join in public ceremonies where you can be private yet part of a larger group.

Use rituals and customs that are meaningful to you.

Talk with a counsellor to focus on your unique situation, to find support and comfort, and to find other ways to manage, especially when your life or your grief seem to be complicated and particularly difficult.

WHEN TO SEEK FURTHER HELP Although grief can be very painful, most people (85–90 per cent) find that with the support of their family and friends and their own resources, they gradually find ways to learn to live with their loss and do not need to seek professional help.

Sometimes, however, the circumstances of the death may have been particularly distressing, such as a traumatic or sudden death, or there may be circumstances in your life that make your grief particularly acute or complicated.

If you are finding it difficult to manage on a day-to-day basis, it may be helpful to see a counsellor or other health professional. It’s okay to admit you are struggling with your grief. No-one will think any less of you if you ask for help along the way.

Source: Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement

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DEATH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

I

n the age of social media and mainstream tattoos, the conventions of mourning are assuming new forms. Rituals such as cemetery visits are being complemented by modern rites of passage that make grief both very visible and very public and, paradoxically, permanent.

In a way, people – in corporeal form and through their online identities – are becoming quasi-memorial sites serving as visual proxies for burial sites.

“With ‘do-it-yourself’ memorials, people are creating their own ways of memorialising the dead, particularly in a more secularised society,” says Baylor University Professor of Religion Candi Cann, Ph.D, who described such memorials as “bodiless” in a recent speech to the Association for the Study of Death and Society.

“People simply want to carry the dead with them,” she says. “They see a tattoo as forever.” In one photo in Cann’s book Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, a father displays a tattooed likeness of his son’s smiling face. The young man, who drowned, had longed during his life for a tattoo of Hawaii; in the image on his father’s back, the son sports such a tattoo.

Such individualistic practices are being sanctioned by both fragmented media and increasing secularism.

“Some people are alienated from some common traditions such as a long funeral mass. Cohesive rituals may not be part of their lives.”

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Cann describes a stage of mourning designed to deny the “messiness of the corpse” and return the dead to their loved ones.

She hypothesised that death was being imagined as frightening or gruesome through graphic depictions of autopsies and other states of decomposition in movies and television programs.

While most people limited their unembodied claim to loved ones’ legacies to T-shirts and standard tattoos, some went as far as mixing microscopic fragments of loved ones’ ashes with tattoo ink in what she termed “cremains”.

Such publicly personal memorials are “the opposite of what occurs in the religious realm with martyrs and saints, and with relics,” Cann says. “Martyrs and saints bring us closer to holiness and to God through their bodies and narratives of their suffering.”

Generally, young people are more likely to get tattoos to express grief, Cann says. “Often, they choose one of their grandparents that died, because that’s their first loss.”

One young woman commemorated her grandmother’s life with a tattoo of a bottle of window cleaner, accompanied by the words “Put some Windex on it” – which her grandmother frequently said.

Other contemporary expressions of grief are similarly personal, but temporary.

The customary all-black apparel at funerals has been superseded by ‘mourning T-shirts’, which may be the deceased person’s favourite color and display dates of birth and death, an image and endearing nickname.

“A T-shirt also is a way for people who aren’t family or allowed time off from work to say, ‘I am grieving,’” Cann says.

The trend towards virtual memorials is also pervading the funeral industry with funeral home websites encouraging ‘virtual visitors’ to sign guest books and Facebook offering permanent ‘R.I.P.’ memorials. Virtual epitaphs include digital tombstones, which allow people to use their smartphones to scan headstone codes and launch websites with an interactive life story for those who visit the grave in person or online. While spontaneous public memorials with flowers continue to emerge after tragedies such as mass shootings, unexpected celebrity deaths and acts of terror, “those spaces are becoming smaller in geography and time,” Cann says.

THE DIGITAL EDITION The digital version of the magazine enables the reader to access the magazine on any desktop, tablet or mobile device.

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e e fre h for h t load . Searc n w o D oday azine t p ap mag e s u m

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[ MIND SPACE ]

BODY IMAGE In a world saturated by physical ideals, body dissatisfaction is almost a cultural mandate.

But while the obvious solution is to flee your physique through perfecting flaws, sculpting your thoughts about your body is infinitely more empowering.

WORDS: SARAH MCMAHON

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F

orget crazy world leaders and terrorism in our back garden for just a moment; let’s spend some time considering how we can escape the merry-go-round of body shame given we are often our own worst enemies.

Instead of fuelling this internal conflict, let’s reclaim peace with how we look.

How we feel about or bodies (our body image) may seem like an indulgent issue to consider (a First World problem), particularly in the context of broader socio political issues of late. However, research indicates body shame is a critical social and public health issue in Australia, with the latest Dove research revealing almost 90 per cent of Australian women admit to cancelling plans, job interviews and other important engagements simply because they don’t like how they look.

Similarly, Mission Australia’s most recent survey of young Australians revealed body image to be one of the top three personal matters of concern, exceeding worries of depression, family conflict, personal safety, bullying, discrimination, suicide, drugs, alcohol and gambling.

Psychologists call this “normative discontent” – that unfortunately it is actually very common for people to feel unhappy with how they look.

The Butterfly Foundation’s report, Paying the Price, revealed that the ‘burden of disease’ and cost to Australia of eating disorders was at least equal to anxiety and depression.

Considering eating disorders and body image concerns occur along a spectrum, with even more people suffering invisible subclinical versions, this highlights the extreme cost of body shame to us as individuals and as a country. Indeed, many of us are plagued to the point that we experience a daily internal battle simply to participate in life.

Ironically, in a bid to rid ourselves from poor body image we actually engage in practices that perpetuate it.

Five of the most common pitfalls are outlined here, with suggestions on an alternative set of behaviours.

PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR: STRESSING ABOUT OUR WEIGHT Stress results in weight gain for many of us and, of course, weight gain increases body shame. So it goes that reducing stress about our body will actually reduce body image issues. The reasons that stress results in weight gain is complex, but can be simplified down to a simple equation. Experiencing stress triggers the release of the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol. In an attempt to reduce stress (and cortisol), we engage in behaviours that increase the ‘feelgood’ hormone serotonin. Eating ‘occasional food’ (highly calorific or fatty foods) is one way we might do this, resulting in weight gain. Irrespective of this, when cortisol is released, our insulin levels also increase, resulting in fat stores accumulating around our midsection (regardless of what we eat). So what is the solution? Learning not to worry about how we think we look is critical. Rather than looking at your body as another person would, learn to focus on being in your body and in the moment.

PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR: MICROMANAGING OUR EATING Whether it is the calories in/calories out method of deciding what we should be eating or following the latest diet of the day, controlling what we eat usually has the short-term result of weight loss. However, no diet has demonstrated sustained weight loss after two to five years. Indeed, people typically regain that weight – and more. Aside from the devastating impact of weight cycling and ‘dieting yourself fat’ that this causes, the impact of micromanaging our eating has another serious side effect. We learn to eat with our head, following a set of rules rather than listening to our bodies and what it is asking for.

Instead, we need to learn to listen to

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what our bodies want and honour that request.

Are we hungry for food – or something else?

If we are hungry for food, what do we actually feel like eating? Physiological necessity, mouth feel, taste, aroma, simply an X factor that a certain meal might have – the way our body metabolises food is complex and not something we can outsmart in the long run. Deciding what to eat is what our bodies (not our heads) were designed to do. And of course this builds body trust, which in turn improves our relationships with our bodies and our body image.

PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR: BODY CHECKING Many of us weigh ourselves regularly (more than once a week) to ensure we won’t put on weight. We also may engage in other behaviours, known as ‘body checking’ practices such as skin pinching, looking at ourselves in the mirror, measuring our size with another external object (such as how much room we take up on a chair) or trying on ‘skinny clothes’ to ensure weight gain has not occurred.

Indeed, when we weigh ourselves regularly we may have initial relief when we see the number on the scales. However, ultimately this practice increases preoccupation with weight and shape concerns. It results in us overevaluating our self-worth based on eating habits and our ability to control these, perpetuating the need to weigh ourselves. This is made worse by the fact that maintaining our body weight is not an exact science. Our body weight does not necessarily represent our true body mass. Everything from that extra glass of water to dinner out last night (more salty than usual, remembering the concepts of diffusion and osmosis from school) will result in weight changes. So we can complicate an already dangerous cycle of thought when the number on the scales is higher than we expect, regardless of whether it represents our true body mass. The solution here? Ditch regular weighing. Once a week, fortnight or even monthly is best. If you do need to weigh yourself, graph your weight and expect fluctuations. Only when there are successive fluctuations in the same direction can you expect a real change in body mass.

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PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR: REASSURANCE SEEKING Similar to frequently weighing ourselves, reassurance seeking (asking people if we look OK or if we have put on weight) sets up a vicious cycle. Initially we experience a reduction in anxious thoughts because our fears are allayed, making this behaviour highly reinforcing. However, the underlying fears actually remain unchanged as reassurance seeking fails to extinguish them. This means that reassurance seeking, while immediately reinforcing, actually serves to increase anxiety (and body shame) in the long run. The solution to this issue is beyond working out how to reassure yourself about your appearance.

Work to shift your self-worth well away from how you might look to some of the many other things in life you do well and are important, such as being a good friend, creative, productive, funny, fit or inspiring.

PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR: EXERCISING BECAUSE WE HAVE TO Exercising because we think we should (and hating every moment of it) is not sustainable.

One of the best predictors of health is fitness (not weight). Rather than exercising for weight loss, think about what you would be doing after the ‘after’ photo. How would you be exercising if you reached your goal weight? What way of moving your body do you enjoy? What makes you feel good in your skin? What can you participate in and enjoy for years to come?

So how can we escape the war on our bodies – even if to some extent it is self-imposed?

Firstly, by increasing the behaviours I’ve listed.

Stop dieting, increase body trust – eating what our body asks for, and remember our bodies are actually designed to maintain the best weight for us. Move your body regularly for pleasure.

And (easier said than done, I know) stop stressing about how you look!

Psychologist Sarah McMahon is Muse’s resident body image expert.

[ IN DEPTH ] ESCAPE

[ IN DEPTH ]

IMITATING LIFE Once deified as a miraculous extension of movable type, considered a leather-bound window to nether worlds, books have assumed the transience of tablets on long plane trips. Yet literature and the act of reading remain able to both transport us to worlds where we can wander minus constraints of embodied life, and anchor us in tactile experience.

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O

ne of the more frustrating, yet fundamental, things about being human is that we can’t understand ourselves very well. One side of the mind frequently has no clear picture of what the other happens to be upset about, anxious around or looking forward to. We make a lot of mistakes because of our pervasive self-ignorance.

Here, literature can help, because, in many cases, it knows us better than we know ourselves and can provide us with an account, more accurate than any we might have been capable of, of what is likely to be going on in our minds.

Marcel Proust wrote a long novel about some aristocratic and high bourgeois characters living in early 20th-century France.

But towards the end of his novel, he made a remarkable claim. His novel wasn’t really about these distinctly remote-sounding people, it was about someone closer to home, you: “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”

In some of the best works of culture, we have an overwhelming impression of coming across orphaned bits of ourselves, evoked with rare crispness and tenacity. We might wonder how on Earth the author could have known certain deeply personal things about us, ideas that normally fracture in our clumsy fingers when we try to take hold of them, but that are here perfectly preserved and illuminated.

Take, for example, the self-knowledge offered by one of Proust’s favourite writers, the 17th-century philosopher, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the author of a slim volume of aphorisms known as the Maxims: ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.’

It’s an idea closely followed by the equally penetrating: ‘There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.’

And the no less accomplished: ‘To say that one never flirts is in itself a form of flirtation.’

We are likely to smile in immediate recognition. We have been here ourselves. We just never knew how to condense our mental mulch into something this elegant.

When Proust compares literature to ‘a kind of optical instrument’, what he means is that it is a high-tech machine that helps us to focus what we understand of ourselves and others around us. Great authors turn the vague into the clear. For example, once we have read Proust, and are then abandoned by a lover who has kindly droned on about their need to spend ‘a little more time on their own’ because they are ‘so messed up’, we will benefit from seeing the dynamic a bit more clearly thanks to Proust’s line: “When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.” The clarity won’t make the lover return; but it will do the next best thing, help us to feel less confused by, and alone with, the misery of being ditched.

The more writers we read, the better grows our understanding of our own minds. Every great writer can be hailed as an explorer – no less extraordinary than a Magellan or Cook – into new, hitherto mysterious corners of the self. Some explorers discover continents, others spend their lives perfectly mapping one or two small islands, or just a single river valley or cove. All deserve to be feted for correcting the ignorance in which we otherwise meander through the world. The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho clarifies our feelings of loneliness; Tolstoy explains our ambition to us, Kafka makes us conscious of our dread of authority, Camus guides us to our alienated and numb selves and under Philip Roth’s guidance, we become conscious of what happens to our sexuality in the shadow of mortality.

The 20th-century English writer Virginia Woolf was often ill. But because she was a writer on a mission to clarify our emotions for us, she began – in an exemplary essay called On Being Ill – by lamenting how little we tend to know clearly what illness really feels like. We casually say we’re not well, or have a headache, but we lack a focused vocabulary of illness.

There is one large reason for this: because of how little illness has been written about by talented authors. As Woolf remarks: “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to

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speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” That turned out to be one of Woolf’s great tasks as a literary explorer. She brought into focus what it’s like to be tired, close to tears, too weak to open a drawer, irritated by a pressure in one’s ears or beset by strange gurgling sounds near one’s chest. Woolf became the Columbus of illness.

An effect of reading a book that has devoted attention to noticing faint yet vital tremors is that, once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own life, we can attend to precisely the things that the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. With our new optical instrument, we’re ready to pick up and see clearly all kinds of new objects floating through consciousness.

Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. A book will have sensitised us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity. Which is why Proust proposed, in words he would modestly never have extended to his own novel, that: “If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.”

These lines connect with an equally prescient quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “In the minds of geniuses, we find – again – our own neglected thoughts.”

It isn’t just ourselves we learn about through culture. It is, also, of course, the minds of strangers, especially those we would not – in the ordinary run of things – have ever learnt much about. With our optical instruments in hand, we get to learn about family life in Trinidad, about being a teenager in Iran, about school in Syria, love in Moldova and guilt in Korea. We get taken past the guards right into the king’s bedroom (we hear him snoring and whispering to his mistress) and the pauper’s hovel, the upper middle-class family’s holiday villa and the lower middleclass family’s caravan.

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Thanks to all this, we have a golden opportunity to spare ourselves time and error. Literature speeds up years, it can take us a through a whole life a decade per chapter, in a day, and so lets us study the long-term consequences of decisions that – in our own lives – work themselves out with dangerous slowness. We have a chance to see in accelerated form what can happen when you worry only about art and not so much about money, or only about ambition and not so much about your own children; what happens when you despise ordinary people or are disturbingly concerned with what others think. Literature can help us avert mistakes.

All those heroes who commit suicide, those unfortunate demented souls who murder their way out of trouble or the victims who die of loneliness in unfurnished rooms are trying to teach us things. Literature is the very best reality simulator we have, a machine that, like its flight equivalent, allows us safely to experience the most appalling scenarios that it might, in reality, have taken many years and great danger to go through, in the hope that we’ll be ever so slightly less inclined to misunderstand ourselves, swerve blindly into danger – and unleash catastrophes.

This is an edited extract from The School of Life’s Book of Life (thebookoflife.org). To learn more about the philosophy of literature, film and art, visit The School of Life at theschoolooflife.com

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

– ANAÏS NIN

[ DISCOVERY ]

THE HOLIDAY ILLUSION When it comes to the restorative power of holidays, there’s a tipping point.

And while you’d think a longer break would enable you to more fully unwind, the opposite may be true. Find your holiday sweet spot.

WORDS: STEPHANIE LAU, PSYCHOLOGIST

R

ecently, I went on holiday and did a big Europe trip. The idea was to take a nice break from work, relax, eat and see lots…but I was stressed out of my mind before my departure.

The illusion we have of a holiday is one of perfection and relaxation: the ultimate getaway and Instagram pictures of bliss, cute outfits and our backsides looking perfect in a bikini. The reality is sometimes far from this ideal (cue reality: travel hobo not travel chic, IBS bloating, lower abdominal tyres, heat rashes and overgrown eyebrows).

In fact, preparing to go away on a holiday can be incredibly stressful. The pre-holiday period (the lead-up to an upcoming trip) is hectic and we never seem to have enough time for the planning, organising, wrapping up at work, packing, adult admin and social commitments we try to squish in before jetsetting off.

So is it actually worthwhile going on holiday when it generates so much stress – to the point that sometimes we end up run down and sick as soon as we commence our travels?

According to Dutch researchers de Bloom, Geurts and Kompier at the University of Nijmegen, they found that yes, indeedy, holidays are worthwhile if even the preholiday period is incredibly stressful and there are definite health and wellbeing benefits as a result of holidaying.

Published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, the researchers examined how health and wellbeing develops during and after a long summer vacation, whether changes in health

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and wellbeing during and after vacation relate to specific vacation activities and experiences, and whether changes in our sleep patterns play a role in influencing pre and postholiday wellbeing.

The study found that travellers’ health and wellbeing increased quickly while on holiday, peaked on the eighth vacation day, but rapidly returned to baseline level within the first week of going back to work. The study also revealed that engagement in passive activities (i.e. the act of doing nothing on the beach), savouring (focusing on the pleasure derived from activities and positive experiences), relaxation, autonomy to choose what we want to spend our time doing (i.e. if you want to actually do nothing on the beach and successfully do so) and quality sleep revealed improved health and wellbeing.

So what can we take from this?

• Our ability to savour positive experiences while on holiday is significantly linked to improved wellbeing during and post-holiday.

• The longer and the better we sleep while on holiday, the more our health and wellbeing is likely to increase during and after a holiday.

• The length of a holiday is unimportant in terms of the strength and persistence of health and wellbeing improvements.

• Going on frequent holidays may be more helpful to maintain wellness rather than using all your annual leave in one go (also reduces the burden of booking and organising a giant yearly trip!)

“The longer and the better we sleep while on holiday, the more our health and wellbeing is likely to increase during and after a holiday.”

While this is all well and good, the results of this study beg an important question: why should we even bother going on holiday if the wellbeing effects are so short-lived? Are ‘holidays’ actually worth our emotional and financial investment?

De Bloom and her colleagues wondered this same thing – the authors compared this with asking why we should bother going to bed every night if we end up tired again anyway.

Fair point.

Although the results of this study revealed limited wellbeing improvements once individuals resumed work, the act of going on holiday (a.k.a. not working) presents other psychosocial and physical benefits.

Travel exposes us to new experiences, helps us nurture relationships by spending quality time with our loved ones, helps buffer stress by giving us a break from our daily routines and therefore makes us more resilient to burnout.

Perhaps the take-home message is that while life never slows down and holidayrelated stress sucks (albeit a First World problem!), taking breaks from our usual routines of work and reality results in definite holistic physical and emotional benefits. By prioritising our wellbeing and scheduling in frequent travel breaks that are evenly dispersed throughout the year, we can better maintain high levels of health and wellbeing and be happier, healthier versions of ourselves.

It’s a win-win for us (yay to more frequent holidays!), our relationships and our overall wellness, but also our employers. Here’s to holidaying all the goddamn time!

Follow Stephanie at Stephanielau.com.au or theholidaypsychologist.com and on Instagram @stephanielaupsychology / @theholidaypsychologist

@musemagazineau

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[ IN DEPTH ]

Can you think

OUTSIDE THE

O ?

Are you locked in a familiar process of linear thought or the cognitive equivalent of David Copperfield? While humans celebrate their role as rational animals, able to rein their impulses, cultivating your brain’s wild side may result in greater freedom and creativity.

WORDS: NATASHA THOMPSON

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“Y

ou think of something; I’m not creative enough.” If you’re the ‘creative type’, you’ve probably heard this phrase, delivered by a methods-driven thinker, who produces amazing results when given a logical problem but quickly loses momentum during an ambiguous task. This ubiquitous phrase relies on the assumption that there are ‘creative thinkers’ and ‘logical thinkers’.

A similar assumption informs the left brain/right brain argument, which despite a dearth of supporting evidence, continues to dominate pop psychology. Neuroscientist Jeffrey Anderson and colleagues at the University of Utah formally debunked the myth of preferential use of left or right hemisphere neural networks in 2013 after analysing the brain scans of 1,011 people. “It is certainly the case that some people have more methodical, logical cognitive styles, and others more uninhibited, spontaneous styles,” Anderson told the BBC. “This has nothing to do on any level with the different functions of the [brain’s] left and right hemispheres…

The pop culture idea (creative vs. logical traits) has no support in the neuroscience community and flies in the face of decades of research about brain organisation…”

So, if left brain/right brain dominance doesn’t underlie our preferential thinking styles, what does? Do creative thinkers and logical thinkers really exist at all? And if so, are these cognitive styles fixed or can we all develop the ability to think outside the box under the right circumstances? Research conducted by the University of Melbourne suggests that diverse thinking styles not only exist, but also influence how we see the world. The study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, asked 123 university students to undergo a binocular rivalry test. Binocular rivalry occurs when two objects are presented simultaneously (and exclusively) to either eye. The objects essentially ‘rival’ or compete for your awareness.

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

– Henry David Thoreau.

In most people this causes a shifting state of perception. Think of those brain games that ask whether you see the old woman or the young woman in an image. While some people’s perception shifts from one to the other and back, a few number of people report seeing a patchwork of both images, known as ‘mixed percept’.

Results from the Melbourne study showed that those high in openness – a measure of open-mindedness – were significantly more likely to experience mixed percept. How does this play into thinking styles? People high in openness also tend to be more creative.

“When you present open people with the binocular rivalry dilemma, their brains are able to flexibly engage with less conventional solutions,” lead researcher Anna Antinori said. “They seem to have a more flexible gate for the visual information that breaks through into their consciousness.”

WORLDS APART Do creatives simply see the world differently? The Melbourne study joins a body of literature suggesting that creatives really do think differently. One of these studies was led by the University of New Mexico’s Rex Jung. The neuroscientist joined forces with statisticians David Dunson and Daniele Durante to investigate the white matter connections in the brains of 68 healthy college-age volunteers. White matter is primarily made up of axons, the long ‘tails’ of neurons. Axons conduct neural signals throughout the brain, making white matter the ‘structural highways’ of the brain. Combining results from imaging data and statistical modelling, Jung’s team found that these highways were significantly more developed in certain regions for expert creatives. Specifically, those

participants who scored in the top 15 per cent on creativity tests, compared with those in the bottom 15 per cent, had significantly more white matter connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, with the differences mainly based in the frontal lobes. The findings led Dunson to suggest that the future may see skillsets predicted with brain scans.

“Maybe by scanning a person’s brain we could tell what they’re likely to be good at,” he said.

The idea that science might not only be able to confirm we all see the world differently, but evidence it at a biological level, is an exciting (if not unnerving) prospect. But what about these tests? Can we really measure such a broad and subjective concept as creativity? To consider that question, we must first consider how we define creativity. In science we often talk of creativity in terms of divergent and convergent thinking. American psychologist Joy Paul Guilford first defined these concepts in the ’60s.

While they refer to two distinct thought processes, they are generally considered in terms of problem solving and ideas generation. Convergent thinking is to approach a problem by considering a limited number of pre-determined answers, like trying to find the solution to a multiple choice question. Divergent thinking is to approach the problem by generating as many answers as possible. Convergent thinking assumes there is a single, exact answer, while divergent thinking adopts a ‘best fit’ approach. Divergent thinking is often what people want you to do when they say ‘think outside the box’. It’s the kind of thinking you need to induct that light bulb moment. It’s also often what studies of creativity assess. How does your thinking measure up?

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TEST YOUR CREATIVITY The Many Uses Task is derived from The Alternate Uses Task, a standardised test of divergent thinking, developed

by American psychologist Joy Paul Guilford in 1967. The original test gave people three minutes to think of six uses for a common household item. These ideas were then scored for originality based on the response rate from other participants. The Many Uses Test follows a similar process, but no restraints are placed on time and number of items produced. Take the test below and then score your answers.

TEST Write down as many uses that you can think of for each of the following items:

TOOTHBRUSH, TYRE, AND SPOON. SCORING FLUENCY: This measure is thought to index your innovative abilities. Count all answers (exclude a use if it is repeated for the same item) and divide by three. Use the following chart to work out where you fall in the distribution of creative thinkers.

0 CREATIVELY CHALLENGED

Most people can generate at least two uses for each item. It might be worth taking a walk.

1–7 CREATIVELY OKAY

You generated the same number of ideas as the average test taker.

7–9 BRAINSTORMER

This score is one standard deviation above the average score, suggesting you have a slight advantage in the ideas domain.

10–15 OUT OF THE BOX

Outperforming the majority of people who take this test, you are most likely the person that friends and colleagues go to when they’re stuck in a creative rut.

16–23 IDEAS PERSON

You are an innovator with an endless supply of creative ideas up your sleeve.

ORIGINALITY : If you’re with a large group, you can also measure your creative originality. Read each word aloud and check how many other people gave the same answer. For each answer that less than five per cent of your group gave, give yourself one point. For each answer that less that one per cent of the group gave, give yourself two points. Tally your scores to see who is the most original.

Scoring according to normative data from Beketayev & Runco’s 2016 study and based on results obtained from 250 men and women, with an average age of 34 years.

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FREE YOUR MIND While we have different baseline creative abilities, research suggests that we may be able to increase the types of thinking that underpin thinking outside the box. Conditions conducive to creative solutions span exercise, sleep and meditation, watching fantasy television shows and comedy, gesturing, listening to certain types of music and viewing the colour blue. If you’re trapped by writer’s block, artistic malaise or a brainstorming dead end, try these jump starts.

Take a stroll: Scientist Dr Marily Oppezzo has conducted extensive research showing that the simple act of walking, whether it’s outside or inside, stimulates our creative thinking.

“While being outdoors has many cognitive benefits, walking appears to have a very specific benefit of improving creativity,” says Oppezzo.

Listen to happy music: A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that participants who listened to ‘happy’ music (classical music with a positive valence and high in arousal) while undertaking a divergent thinking task performed significantly better than those who undertook the same task in silence.

Have a glass of wine: A study published in Consciousness and Cognition found that slight intoxication is associated with faster access to creative thoughts. The study asked 40 men to complete a remote association test (RAT) while either sober or intoxicated. During the RAT, people are given groups of three words (such as ‘bite’, ‘monkey’, and ‘widow’) and asked to find the common association between them. The test requires people to think creatively, as the ‘most obvious’ answer is often not the ‘best fit’ answer. The correct answer in the above example is ‘spider’, though many people settle on ‘black’. During the study, the intoxicated men successfully solved more RAT problems and were faster to correct their wrong answers. How does alcohol help? The authors surmise that alcohol’s disinhibiting effects on attention networks of the brain likely cause the effect, with the intoxicated men less likely to be caught out by intentional distractors cues.

Watch comedy: In a seminal study by the late professor of psychology Alice Isen, viewing comedy was shown to improve creative problem solving. Isen had participants either watch a series of bloopers, watch a film on maths or undertake physical exercise. Participants were then given a candle, matches and a box of tacks, and asked to find a way to attach the candle to a corkboard hanging on the wall so that the candle could burn without wax dripping on the floor. The participants must engage in divergent thinking to solve the problem by emptying the box of tacks, tacking the box to the wall and placing the candle inside. Those who watched the bloopers were significantly more likely to solve the problem correctly. ‘’The mind associates more broadly when people are feeling good after hearing a joke,’’ Dr Isen told the New York Times when the study was published.

LIFE IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY. – OSCAR WILDE

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Subject relations:

PHOTOGRAPHY

DETOX

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Taking photos has become a natural part of daily life, yet documenting moments can objectify experience and undermine the brain’s ability to process and remember them.

W

WORDS: MANOUSH ZOMORODI

hen it comes to obsessional tech habits, photo-taking probably isn’t the worst on the list for relationships. If you’re not gazing into someone’s eyes, at least you’re pointing an iPhone at them. But how does that persistent need to capture the moment, which so many of us feel, change how we actually experience the moment – both in the present and when we try to recall it down the line? The answer is quite illuminating.

One of the major reasons we take photos in the first place is to remember a moment long after it has passed – the birth of a baby, a reunion, a pristine lake. In the Bored and Brilliant survey, many adults said they used photos as a “memory aid”, taking pictures of things like parking spots or the label of the hot sauce at a restaurant to buy later. But every time we snap a quick pic of something, it could in fact be harming our memory of it.

Linda Henkel, a professor of psychology at Fairfield University, studied how taking photos impacts experience and memory by crafting an experiment using a group of undergraduates on a guided tour of the university’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. The students were asked to take photos of objects they looked at on the tour and simply observe others. The next day, she brought all the subjects into her research lab to test their memory of all the objects they had seen on the tour. Whenever they remembered a piece of work, she asked follow-up questions on specific visual details.

The results were clear – people remembered fewer of the overall objects they had photographed. They also couldn’t recall as many specific visual details of the photographed art as compared to the art they had merely observed.

“When you take a photo of something, you’re

counting on the camera to remember for you,” says Henkel. “You’re basically saying, ‘Okay, I don’t need to think about this any further. The camera’s captured the experience.’ You don’t engage in any of the elaborative or emotional kinds of processing that really would help you remember those experiences, because you’ve outsourced it to your camera.”

PHOTO AMNESIA In short, if your camera captures the moment, then your brain doesn’t. Henkel came up with a frightening term for this phenomenon. She calls her findings the “photo-taking-impairment effect”.

Okay, okay. Of course you’d remember things better if you were completely in the present, hyperaware of every detail, like some supreme Zen master. But isn’t that what photos are for? To refresh our fallible memories? Henkel doesn’t disagree on the basic premise that the purpose of outsourcing our memory to devices frees up our brains to do other cognitive processing. The problem is, Henkel says, “We’re constantly going from one thing to the next to the next.” Instead of out- sourcing so we can focus our attention on more important tasks, “we have this constant stream of what’s next, what’s next, what’s next and never fully embrace any of the experiences we’re having”.

Nonetheless, Henkel and her student Katelyn Parisi ran another study to see what happens to memory when people have photos to remind them of a moment or object. (Although, in the real world, Henkel rightly observes, “We’re so busy capturing photos, afterwards we don’t actually look at them, because we have hundreds and thousands of them.” Who hasn’t dumped a bunch of photos of a graduation or trip into Dropbox and promised to make an album only to never ever look at them again?)

This time when people took a tour of the museum, they were asked to take two kinds of photos – those of the objects in the exhibit alone and others while standing next to objects.

Afterward, Henkel had the subjects look at all the photos and then interviewed them on their memories of what they saw. “It turns out that it actually changes your perspective on the experience, whether you’re in a photo of it or not,” says Henkel. If you are in the image, you become more removed from the original moment. It is as if you are an observer watching yourself doing something outside yourself. Whereas if you are not in the image, you return to the first person, reliving the experience through your own eyes.

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How taking pictures affects our understanding of ourselves and the things we are taking pictures of is still a big question mark. But as a result of her experiments, there is one thing Henkel is sure of. “Cameras, as amazing as they are, can’t compare to what the brain is capable of with input from the eyes and the ears,” says Henkel. “Cameras are a lesser version of the human informationprocessing system.”

HOW TO TAKE A PHOTO TO ENHANCE YOUR MEMORY Even if you can’t bear to face a computer hard drive that’s nightmarishly filled with photos, in Henkel’s experiments, there was one way in which taking pictures did not erode people’s memories. Back on that tour of the art museum, “When participants zoomed in to photograph a specific part of the object, their subsequent recognition and detail memory was not impaired, and, in fact, memory for features that were not zoomed in on was just as strong as memory for features that were zoomed in on,” the professor wrote in her study.

“This suggests that the additional attention and cognitive processes engaged by this focused activity can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect.” I believe the science, and a bunch of close-ups of toes, noses and brushstrokes would make for a pretty weird Instagram feed.

This is an edited extract from Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi. Available now, Macmillan, RRP $32.99.

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CHALLENGE:

PHOTO-FREE DAY

Your instructions: See the world through your eyes, not your screen.

Take absolutely no pictures today. Not of your lunch, not of your children, not of your cubicle mate, not of that beautiful sunset. No picture messages.

No cat pics. Instagrammers, it’s gonna get rocky. Snap-chatsters? Hang in there. Everyone is going to be okay.

I promise.

Those of you, like my mother, who take one picture a month will find this challenge a breeze. But don’t be smug. Your tough day is coming. And this might be harder than you think. Just as they did when refraining from looking at the phone in transit, many people reported that they took pictures way more (and way more mindlessly) than they had previously imagined.

There will be rewards for your sacrifice. “Sure, the world does want to see my adorable grandchildren and gorgeous children,” Beth in Indiana wrote us. “However, it’s been a liberating 24 hours!” While there are no Bored and Brilliant challenge winners, if someone were to claim that prize for takeno-photo day, it might have to be Vanessa Jean Herald, whose green Subaru skidded off the highway and into a snowy ditch during her one-hour commute between the southern Wisconsin farm where

she lives and her job in Madison.

Although she had to wait more than two hours in frigid temperatures for a tow truck to arrive, Herald did not lose her Bored resolve! “I placed my necessary emergency calls, sent some texts to let folks know I was okay, and then just sat,” she wrote.

“Sure, my gut reaction was to snap a picture of the car sitting in the ditch and covered with thrown snow for Instagram. Or to snap a photo of the cool way the red and blue lights of the sheriff’s car blinked in my rearview mirror and lit up the roadway as the day turned to night through my two-hour mandatory break from life. But thanks to today’s challenge, instead, I chilled out, took it all in, and then pulled out my writing notebook to jot down a story about how the best-laid plans sometimes end you up in a ditch on the side of the road.” [Place imaginary photo of green Subaru in a snowy ditch on the side of the road here.]

Don’t worry if your photo-free inspiration doesn’t spill out in the shape of a well-formed story. It’s okay to be uncomfortable, hostile, or, hopefully, bored without photos to fill your day. Just use your brain instead of your phone. No one is going to ‘heart’ or ‘like’ whatever goes on up there – except for you.

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Fake-Cations THE TREND THAT TRICKS YOUR MIND INTO THINKING YOU’RE ON HOLIDAY

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PHOTOGRAPHY: THINKSTOCK

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he wellness era’s collision with an always-on mentality has created an awkward doublebind for ambitious people keen to be seen to bend over backwards for the company’s bottom line. With the nation’s annual leave total reaching record levels, it’s little wonder that ‘fake-cations’ are making waves. Basically the holiday you have when you’re not having a holiday, fake-cations are closely related to the ‘staycation’ coined by New Yorkers too busy to leave Manhattan and encouraging tourist-like behaviour in one’s own home town. More recently, the phenomenon has morphed into a weekday version promising the perks of a holiday during your lunchbreak.

While the illusion of escaping the rat race while surrounded by traffic and due back at work in an hour may sound unlikely, certain activities can promote a shifting of time effect by promoting intense focus on a nonwork activity (versus, say, spending 10 minutes in a queue and 50 trying to resolve a toll road dispute). They can also promote physiological changes that favour relaxation and negate those that perpetuate stress and anxiety.

Taking 60 minutes in the middle of the day to learn tai chi, have a massage, take a museum tour, start a photography project, learn a new language or indulge in some other activity that you enjoy or have always

Escape the daily grind without using your annual leave with the latest lifestyle trend.

WORDS: LINDA SMITH

wanted to try may seem a bit odd or overindulgent, but experts say having a lunchcation – and taking a break from the routine of daily life – can do wonders for our mental and physical health according to clinical psychologist Louise Adams.

“A lunchcation can be enormously beneficial to general wellbeing, mental health, and physical health,’’ says the Sydney-based practitioner and founder of the Treat Yourself Well program (treatyourselfwell.com.au).

“By taking time out to switch off the stress hormones and introduce some pleasurable ones (e.g. serotonin) you can influence your health down to a chemical level,” she says.

“Balance is so important yet so overlooked; looking after ourselves often slips to the end of our to-do list.

Taking a decent break to breathe can enhance our wellbeing and happiness, refill our emotional fuel tanks and increase our sense of meaning and purpose.’’

She suggests re-allocating time you tend to expend on necessary but unfulfilling or even depleting tasks – think appointments and meetings, shopping and trips to the gym.

Even the act of scheduling ‘me time’ in your diary can feel empowering and provide a preemptive boost. Just as the holiday countdown and anticipation are part of the excitement, so too is the countdown to a lunchcation. Planning something fun on Monday for your lunchbreak on Friday will help improve your mood for the week.

“We all plan things during our week, but to plan positive things – self-care things – isn’t such a habit for most of us, and we can easily end up with a life of drudge,” says Adams.

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“Making time to plan positive events and activities really gives us a life and something to look forward to.”

Adams says stress and long work hours are big problems for many of us, and the consequences can be dire if we don’t take a sufficient break each day.

Sleep problems, headaches, digestive problems, irritability, depression, anxiety and burnout are common in people who are overworked and need a break.

Taking regular breaks can prevent these from occurring and you’re likely to find you have more energy too.

Adams recommends starting small, as the small things can make a big difference without threatening to destabilise your schedule or fall by the wayside when things get busy or stressful. Doing new things once a week, like eating at a cafe you’ve always wanted to visit, attending a concert or treating yourself to a massage or pedicure in your lunch break can have a significant impact on lowering your stress levels and boosting general wellbeing.

“People always think of lifestyle change being a ‘big’ thing, but in reality it’s just the summation of lots of small changes,’’ says Adams.

“Making small changes each day will lead to huge changes in psychological health.’’

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HOW TO FAKE A BREAK PLAY TOURIST One of the things we all love about holidays is the chance to visit new places – to try new things or simply indulge in some of our favourite pastimes away from the pressures of everyday life. So take a mini ‘holiday’ in your lunchbreak and become a tourist in your own neighbourhood.

Regardless of where you live, there are guaranteed to be some great local places you’ve never bothered to explore. It may also be worth revisiting old favourites, which may benefit from your fresh perspective or their own changes.

Consider a walking tour of the city, visit museums, monuments and art galleries, jump on the hop-on-hop-off bus or tram, or stroll leisurely through parks and gardens. Pick up some tourist brochures and do things you’d only ever do on a holiday, like going to the zoo and the aquarium or taking a boat cruise. Play mini golf, go bowling, go ice-skating, have fun at a video game arcade. Dine at a restaurant you’ve never visited before, order a snack at a newfound café, or browse boutiques you’ve never stepped inside before.

Many art schools and music conservatoriums offer free (or low cost) lunchtime performances, while your local symphony orchestra or theatre is likely to

offer a variety of matinee performances perfect for a lunchcation with a healthy dose of culture. Check out the ‘what’s on’ section of your local paper for a list of events.

JOIN A TRIBE Sixty minutes is the perfect amount of time to attend some sort of class – be it for fitness, fun or to expand your horizons.

If fitness isn’t part of your weekly lunch schedule, consider adding it to your routine. And if you usually go to the gym in your lunchbreak and run on the treadmill, mix things up. Try yoga, Pilates, fitball, tai chi, Pump, spin or a high-impact aerobic class. Or have a go at something new like barrecode, bootcamp, ballet, martial arts, salsa dancing or Bikram yoga.

If the thought of getting sweaty at lunchtime doesn’t appeal, consider classes of a different kind. Universities and adult education groups often run lunchtime sessions where you can attend lectures on every imaginable topic, or enrol in a class to learn a new language or cook foreign cuisine.

Fake-cations

UPSKILL Never got around to getting your driver’s licence? Or always wanted to learn to ride a motorbike? An hour is ample time for many lessons, so why not use lunchcations to learn a new skill?

Search online for dedicated schools offering music, singing, art and acting lessons, perfect for people who have always dreamed of playing an instrument, performing on stage or creating the perfect canvas but have never have the opportunity.

Also look up your city’s art colleges and private art schools.

If the current range of classes in your vicinity doesn’t appeal, create your own – a walking group with friends or colleagues and meet at the same time and place each week for a lunchtime stroll. Making a commitment will motivate you to show up, and talking while you’re walking is a sure way to distract you from the pressure of work and from the fact that you’re exercising. You’ll get some much-needed fresh air too.

Similar groups can be created among cycle buddies or keen runners – and if you don’t want to organise things yourself, visit your local cycle or sporting store as most run free lunchtime and after-work group sessions open to the general public.

MAKE IT LAST Most of us own a digital compact these days, while smartphones are decked out with pretty decent cameras too. So why not use your phone for something other than talking, texting and Facebook and sign up for one of the many photo challenges on offer.

Set yourself a theme, look to the internet for inspiration, then get outside at lunchtime and take photos.

There are numerous weekly or daily photo challenges that invite you to take one fun, themed photo every day for a month. Day 1 might be flowers, day 12 might be someone you love, day 29 might be your work desk or something unusual you spotted on the way to the office..

The idea is to share your photos with family and friends online but, if you prefer, you can take part simply for your own fulfilment. Either way a photo challenge is a great way to make you stop and appreciate the people and places in your life a little more. It’s also a great excuse to play around with fun phone apps like Instagram. And if photos aren’t your thing, consider a blog or other online project.

TREAT YOURSELF With most massage therapists offering 30-minute, 45-minute and 60-minute massages, there’s no excuse not to squeeze a regular rub-down into your lunchbreak.

And if you have health insurance and opt for a remedial massage (or treatments such as acupuncture or reflexology), you’ll find you get reimbursed for a decent chunk of the cost. There is plenty of evidence supporting the health benefits of regular massage, especially if you spend your day sitting idle in front of a computer.

Improved posture and circulation, better flexibility, relaxation, stress reduction and improved mental alertness are just some of the reasons to take a lunchcation at your nearest massage clinic.

Beauty treatments also make a great lunchcation. Book a pedicure, a manicure, a facial, a body scrub or visit the hair salon for a wash and blow dry, which is guaranteed to make you feel fabulous. Even visiting your local department store can give you a boost – most cosmetics departments offer free mini makeovers.

SMARTPHONE SELF-HELP Technology is often blamed for making us idle, but there’s a wide range of phone apps designed to help us stay healthy and active. Use apps like Runkeeper to count your steps at lunchtime or use your phone to guide you through a lunchcation of relaxation – find a quiet spot and let your phone help you meditate or do yoga.

Apps and podcasts such as meditation music radio, Buddhify, Meditation Oasis, Relax Melodies and Take a Break! are great for switching off from the real world; while Yoga Relax, Yoga Stretch or Pret-A-Yoga Lite allow you to enjoy a personal guided yoga class at lunchtime. Gratitude Journal, iGratitude or Vision Board Deluxe can help you keep a list of the positive things in your life while apps like Anti-Stress Quotes or Happiness are great for providing a shot of inspiration during stressful days at work.

The benefits of meditation are widely known and experts believe that just one session can help us feel as relaxed as we do when we’re on holidays.

READ BETWEEN THE LINES If you enjoy reading but always fall asleep on page two after a busy day at work, make your lunchcation all about books. Find a quiet spot, whether it’s a grassy park or a beanbag in your local library, and devour a few chapters. Also consider joining a book club (most libraries and book stores have one) or form a casual one with your friends and meet every couple of weeks over lunch to discuss what you’ve been reading.

SCHEDULE ‘NOTHING’ TIME The custom to cram our calendars with events and to-dos has turned doing nothing into a curious novelty – at once cause for suspicion, derision and fear (of not being able to) and a kind of perverse desire to try it out. Why not allocate one lunchtime a week that is free of bill paying and trips to the dentist and do something you love? Sit on a bench and watch the world go by, have lunch with friends, go for a walk on the beach, cruise the stores and window shop or simply find a sunny spot and dream of faraway places. Your mind and body will thank you.

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ME TIME From the hospitality doyenne who does circus training to the media group director who practises art, sailing and target shooting, these powerful women disprove the worklife dichotomy and demonstrate that ‘me time’ and ‘world time’ can co-exist.

T

he word ‘balance’ has incurred a similar affliction to ‘mindfulness’ in becoming the target of cynical banter that neutralises the sting of living in the real world (such idealism has been called ‘toxic positivity’ for its paradoxical twist). For some, the very idea of balance seems to invalidate the thankless challenges of juggling that more than one person should be able to handle. And for those who do make a point of prioritising ‘me time’, there are dual risks of it becoming another to-do scheduled with meticulous precision, or the wellbeing benefits of taking time out being undermined by a sense of guilt. We speak with six fiercely ambitious women who have made ‘me time’ a KPI.

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“Having a number of daily routines prevents me from wasting valuable time on recurring decisions.”

TARYN WILLIAMS CEO AND FOUNDER, THE RIGHT FIT AND WINK MODELS, THERIGHT.FIT // WINKMODELS.COM.AU What/when was your aha moment about ‘me time’?

It wasn’t until I started my second business, theright.fit, in 2016, that I really started thinking consciously about taking time out in order to avoid burnout. As it is still in start-up phase, I find myself working incredibly long hours, sometimes weekends, and most start-up founders will tell you it’s easy to have that laser focus on your new business and forget about other things like self-care. For me it is all about sorting my time so I can do those long hours but maintaining a firm commitment to time away from the business so I have the energy and interest to keep going.

How is your me time engineered?

Health, fitness and learning, combined with routine, are where I focus my priorities alongside work to help me achieve balance. No day is ever the same and some weekends, as much as I try, I do have to go into the office for a few hours, so I do my best to rearrange my schedule to still get in a quick morning swim or gym session, along with a read of the papers before I head to the office. I also travel a lot for work, so I make sure I pack my runners for a quick gym session and a book to read at night before bed to ensure I keep

up with my goal of reading one book per week.

How do you make it happen?

My alarm goes off at 5.40am each weekday morning and I get into gym gear and put my headphones on with some loud wake-me-up music to get me going as I walk to the gym. I get my butt kicked for an hour in a HIIT class, run home and take a shower. I always feel amazing at the end of it. I recently moved closer to the beach, which is great for motivation.

What’s on your time management instruction sheet?

Having a number of daily routines prevents me from wasting valuable time on recurring decisions like what to eat, when and how to exercise or what to wear. Anyone who knows me knows my wardrobe includes a lot of black. My ‘uniform’ consists of a set number of pieces, selected from two or three labels. I have pre-prepared meals delivered so dinner is sorted.

Having this structure means I reduce decision fatigue and don’t spend any head space in the morning worrying about these little things, which allows me to save my mental energy for more important decisions. It also means that when I am with friends or family,

Fake-cations

I can switch off more easily and recharge. Nothing is perfect but trying to stay disciplined and stick to routine really does improve my overall sense of wellbeing.

Who’s in your support crew?

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road. It is vital to stay connected and not isolate yourself. But you do need to prioritise those relationships. Over the years I have had to let go of many ‘acquaintances’ and dropped the guilt over not having time to catch up with old school friends. I have my family and a small handful of people close to me whom I value and I ensure I keep in regular contact with. I am fortunate that they are very supportive of my lifestyle. Taking two- to three-hour power walks with a friend on the weekend around Sydney harbour or the Bondi to Bronte Walk is one of my favourite ways to declutter and feel reenergised. I also believe in the value of having mentors in your life who align with your values and provide you with support and a few tough talks along the way.

If you were writing an advertising slogan for balance, how would you sell it?

It is important not to hold yourself to an impossible standard, as no one can be the perfect friend, partner, boss or board member. Do your best, work bloody hard, and give yourself a break from time to time.

JUDY SAHAY FOUNDER/DIRECTOR, CROWD MEDIA GROUP What/when was your aha moment about ‘me time’?

The ‘aha moment ‘ came about last year. I’ve been running my business close to four years now. On average I am pulling in about 14- to 16-hour days, including most weekends. Our company is growing rapidly and towards the end of last year I came to a tipping point where I was sleeping at the office from work overload. It really hit me when I fell asleep at the wheel driving home at 3am from work. I soon realised working long hours without a break was having the reverse effect, which was detrimental to my health.

I couldn’t think straight, I was losing my appetite. I was getting agitated with staff, family and friends. It was time to re-assess things and step back.

How is your me time engineered?

I am a problem solver by nature. I like to get to the root cause of things.

I sat down one weekend and mapped out what the issues were, why I was working long hours and how effective this was to my overall business success. The findings were invaluable.

The next few days I strategised a balance between work and healthy living. For me, I am most creative when I am relaxed with a clear mind.

I decided to take up meditation and boxing. I also started to get in touch with my other passions like sailing and shooting.

“Fortnightly drawing and painting allows me to relax and be creative – it helps me with my mood, it’s my happy place.”

How do you make it happen?

I prioritised what’s important to me.

Essentially I broke up my days into what’s important and urgent when it comes to work. I made sure I took regular breaks and that I was out of the office at a reasonable hour. I scheduled specific activities throughout the week that took my mind away from work, e.g. sailing in the middle of the week, target shooting at the end of the week and drawing/art once a fortnight.

Meditation helped me focus each day on the things that matter and gave me clarity of thought. Sailing helped me to still stay focused on the end goal but at the same time to have a bit of fun, and it also gave me an opportunity to meet other like-minded people.

Shooting every weekend is my lone time, where I get to focus on specific targets and which has helped me to be patient and laser focused. I feel it has helped me to see the long-term vision for my business and life. Fortnightly drawing and painting allows me to relax and be creative – it helps me with my mood, it’s my happy place. And church, which I attend every Sunday, is food for my soul. I feel alive when I am at church and get to connect with a large, supportive community.

My friends and family have always been supportive. They’ve always told me to take time off and focus on myself.

If you were writing an advertising slogan for balance, how would you sell it?

The elevator pitch affirming my practice was “You’ve got one life, make every minute count. Always strive to be the best version of you.”

To be the best version of you, you need to have a healthy mind. If I had to sell taking time out without guilt in one breath, I’d say, “Breathe. Step back. Re-focus. Succeed.”

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TRACEY LESTER OWNER OF SUPERFLUID, THE CARLTON CLUB, THE WINDSOR CASTLE HOTEL AND THE GERTRUDE HOTEL What/when was your aha moment about ‘me time’?

I’ve always been conscious of ‘me time’ and that’s usually consisted of things that revolved around keeping myself healthy and able to perform at a high level, like working out or doing circus training three to five times a week as well as walking or running daily.

I realised that I was the central figure of my business and the axis that my staff revolved around, and that if I wasn’t strong and capable and in control mentally and physically, the cracks in the foundations would start to appear.

It wasn’t until I started running numerous businesses at once on my own that I realised I needed to upgrade and prioritise ‘me time’.

How is your me time engineered?

I schedule regular (weekly/fortnightly) visits to the kinesiologist, Chinese doctor and massage therapist to incorporate more tools to bring me back into balance physically, mentally and physiologically. My daily meditation practice affects everything about my mind and being and is my number one priority, as it is from this that all areas of my life in terms of me personally, my work and my relationships flow. It de-stresses me, removes the fatigue and the brain fog and shuts up the mental chatter and internal merry-go-rounds. It throws a new perspective on all situations. I have been practising this technique twice a day for 20 minutes for over 10 years now. This really is my number one me time, it’s my number one priority; something I am totally disciplined in.

I also do at least one meditation retreat a year with my meditation guru and more often than not will go on an annual meditation retreat for 10 days in India.

Prioritising sleep is one of the most effective ‘me time’ activities too.

How do you make it happen?

About 20 years ago I started doing fasting and juice cleansing as a high level approach to ‘detox’ from all the

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stresses of life – physical, mental, psychological. I found that doing these detoxes really reset my system on all levels, brought me back into balance, cleared my mind and my thoughts and I was able to achieve a lot more. As part of my maintenance program, I will do a juice fast three to four days a month.

And I will always take myself away, and I mean away – physically remove myself – to Thailand for at least 10 days as part of my ‘me time maintenance’, as well as before or after launching any new businesses, bars, new levels within the Carlton, or speciality projects like The Bar Dream – which involved five weeks of intense reality TV filming that I directed, produced and filmed a lot of.

What’s on your time management instruction sheet?

We have a meditation room at The Carlton Club. There was a time when 30 or about 50 of the staff at the Carlton Club were meditating. I encourage my staff to learn to meditate and pay 50 per cent of the cost. I am supportive of them taking 20 minutes out to go upstairs and meditate. The night managers who are working till 6am love going for a ‘pick me up’ meditation break to get them through the night. I have had two managers that have run off to become full-time meditation teachers. Often the office girls and myself will go upstairs at the end of the day and meditate before we finish for the day.

I will always set my morning alarm half an hour earlier than I need to wake up. I get up, go to the toilet, scrape my tongue, clean my teeth and then always jump straight back into bed and start meditating for 20 minutes. On the days when a curve ball is thrown and I don’t get to start my day this way, I will attend to whatever crisis and then will sit in my car and meditate for 20 minutes before driving anywhere or dealing with anything else. I always meditate at the end of the working day.

As soon as I get home at night I will kick off my shoes, change into comfy clothes and start meditating before I do anything else. If I have to go to

“I do circus training three to five times a week.” something straight from work I will always go up to the meditation room at work and do it before exiting the building. On the days when other staff members want to meditate at the end of the day – we will always go upstairs and mediate together before we go our separate ways. It’s a great way to end the working day together.

How does me time benefit your work and life?

My colleagues are the ones that see me in action and see me when the ‘shit hits the fan’. In my work we have lots of big level shit and high-intensity crises on all levels that would boggle your mind. I think watching the way I act and respond to this, as well as conduct my day-to-day business, has made them interested in and supportive of my practices. The first time we had an all-out emergency after I learnt to meditate, one of my top managers kept saying, “What’s wrong with you, why aren’t you screaming or getting upset, why are you so calm?” My friends and family are used to me doing all sorts of crazy and weird health and wellness things ever since I was young. Usually once they see and notice the benefits of something that I am doing and are passionate about, they are on board too.

If you were writing an advertising slogan for balance, how would you sell it?

From my meditation practice I have developed many new outlooks and philosophies on life such as: ‘There are no problems, just situations that haven’t been solved yet’, ‘No one or no thing can actually make you upset – only you can choose whether to react or not to react to a situation’ or whether you let it affect you or not, and ‘I close my eyes in order to see’.

Fake-cations

ANNA THOMAS COO, STOCKDALE & LEGGO What/when was your aha moment about ‘me time’?

My ‘aha’ moment occurred this year when I got really sick due to working incredibly long hours, not working smart, not fuelling my body properly and not making time for exercise. I ended up being hospitalised due to exhaustion. This was a massive wakeup call as I realised that without my health and making taking care of myself a priority, I wouldn’t be in a position to take care of my children, husband or business.

Stuck in hospital, I had plenty of time to think and this was when my mindset really changed. I used to be a triathlete when I was younger so exercise used to be a huge part of my life but with starting my own business and then stepping into my current COO role, getting married and having two children, life changed and my priorities shifted. I realised, though, that without my health and making time for something that is so important to me, I wouldn’t be in a position to function properly for anyone and I didn’t want to be someone who only gave 50 per cent to each of the roles in my life. I want to be able to give 100 per cent as a woman, wife, mother and leader.

How do you make it happen?

I reprioritised quite swiftly soon after leaving hospital. I realised that I did need some ‘me time’ and that I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Guilt is such a wasted emotion but one we, especially mothers, expend so much energy on. I realised, however, that it doesn’t actually serve any purpose. I implemented a number of strategies to combat getting swept back up in the daily machinations of running a business.

As a family, we took our first holiday in five years, which I booked immediately. I now go to the gym three times per week and don’t allow anything to get in the way of this. Being an ex-athlete, I realised that exercise is something I can’t let go of again.

My husband and I now have a wine and cheese night every Friday night.

Because we work and live together,

much of our time can be spent focused on the business or the children, which can be detrimental to maintaining a happy marriage. So we’ve scheduled every Friday night to be ‘our night’ where we enjoy a bottle of cab sav and some cheese and biscuits and ‘work talk’ is banned, which may seem relatively simple, but it’s something we both look forward to. We also schedule one night away each month where we book a hotel room so we can get out of the house and this also doubles as our ‘date night’.

I also spend more meaningful time with my children. My son Will loves to play basketball, so we now practise weekly together. I also spend time gardening with both Will and Amelia. We live on 22 acres and have a vegetable garden, 12 chooks and a strawberry farm. My weekends are now often spent outside with the kids as we weed, water, collect eggs, pick strawberries and fresh vegies. I’ve found being outside to be good for my soul as it’s a respite from the four walls of my office which I find myself in for long hours during the week.

How have your changes benefited your wellbeing and life?

There have been so many benefits. I’m a lot calmer, sharper, I can be more objective and less likely to be drawn into ill-thought-out decisions and I’m able to manage my time much more efficiently. I have noticed that if I don’t exercise, I’m less productive and my mood definitely drops. There are still days where I get stressed, but now I’m much better at being able to compartmentalise things. I used to feel guilty if I left early to pick kids up or watch a school concert, but now I don’t.

Since my health scare, I’ve definitely made it a priority to advocate for more work-life balance within the Stockdale & Leggo network. Each week, as a part of my role, I visit a different office and am very vocal on why I think it’s crucial to a high-functioning and -performing real estate professional. As we well know, real estate is a 24/7 business.

It’s not a 5-day-per-week proposition and to stay at the top of the game for

“I ended up being hospitalised due to exhaustion.

This was a massive wake up call.” any period of time, this balance has to be found.

One of my franchisees, after a catch-up, decided to employ a lifestyle consultant to help her find better balance in her life. She has newfound confidence, she’s exercising, she’s eating better, her work results have skyrocketed and overall she’s so much happier.

If you were writing an advertising slogan for balance, how would you sell it?

My pitch is always around being the best you can be and, in my opinion, that includes having a holistic approach to life in general. I often ask people, if you’re not taking care of yourself, how can you take care of your partner, children, business, employees and clients? It’s impossible.

My mother died when she was 50, so my slogan would be something along the lines of ‘You’re dead a long time.’

If you don’t seize the moments and prioritise your health, you’ll end up missing out on life full stop.

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L ST IN

SPACE Professor Lisa HarveySmith, Astronomer, lisaharveysmith.com INTERVIEW: REBECCA LONG

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What drove you towards astronomy as a child? What specifically was the appeal or fascination?

I was a very curious child. Maybe in both senses of the word! I left school aged 11 and instead of high school, I taught myself at home. It was kind of an organic self-organised education.

I dipped into loads of different subjects and astronomy was one that completely floored me with the sense of wonder. I think that’s because space is accessible (it doesn’t cost anything to look at the stars) and it gives you a firsthand experience of something that’s way bigger than you.

What appeal or intrigue sustained that interest?

Astronomy is about everything – the entire universe and how it works.

It doesn’t get much bigger than that. There was quite a lot of slog to complete all the exams required to start a PhD. In the UK that meant GCSE exams to get into college, three very intense A-levels in physics, chemistry and maths and an honours degree in astronomy and astrophysics.

But I knew where I wanted to end up, and that was in astronomy research.

Once I started my PhD, it was plain sailing. I loved it. The feeling was – just go and find stuff out. Chase rainbows. I did my PhD at Jodrell Bank Observatory, the largest telescope in the UK. It was an extremely inspiring place to be. My office in the Cheshire countryside was overlooked by a 76-metre diameter radio telescope dish – it was an amazing experience.

How is the science of astronomy being realised in the ‘real world’?

I’m in science leadership now, which means I carry out research, supervise research students and also manage astronomy projects and resources. This presents very different (sometimes people-oriented) challenges. That’s another reason I like to do outreach, so I can express the big picture ideas behind our astronomy research to others and really reconnect with it.

When I tour and speak about astronomy to the public, I find the response overwhelmingly positive.

People love science that they can relate to. We are now filling large venues and music arenas, which tells you all that you need to know about people’s hunger for science. Humans are curious animals and people want information about what’s happening at the cutting edge of science and tech.

I’m more than happy as a practising scientist to bring that to anyone who is interested.

What is the relevance of astronomy to contemporary life on Earth?

There are many reasons why astronomy is relevant to all of us.

Some are practical and others more emotional. The practical ones include the fact that the WiFi we use today is fast and reliable because researchers at the CSIRO radio astronomy labs where I work (in north-west Sydney) invented a way to make networking faster. What was their research project? Looking for black holes.

There are countless other technologies enabled by physics and astronomy, including medical imaging devices, computing and communication equipment (e.g. aircraft landing systems) that we need for our safe interaction with machines everyday.

How can astronomy help us to understand, make sense of or reimagine our experience of life on Earth personally and collectively?

Emotionally, I connect with astronomy because it connects me to my ancestors. The constellations (patterns of stars) in the night sky were imagined thousands of years ago and we still use many of them today.

When we look up in the sky we see the same stars as Julius Caesar. It’s an amazing feeling.

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What is the greatest myth you encounter about what’s beyond our ‘known’ world or indeed about our known world?

People often challenge me as a scientist with the concept of the Big Bang. How can all space and time have just began 13.8 billion years ago? What came before that? The fact is that the universe is expanding today, and if you project that backwards you get to a singular point that we call the Big Bang. We can even see the ‘afterglow’ of the event imprinted right across the sky. There is extremely strong evidence that it happened. But we can probably never know why or what happened before. That frustrates a lot of people, but as an astronomer I’ve learned to be comfortable with things we don’t know.

How do you respond to suggestions of pop psychology and astrology as somehow related to astronomy and what can astronomy teach us about ourselves?

I think that from a psychological perspective, astrology (trying to explain human behaviour in terms of the positions of stars and planets) is a perfectly natural thing; after all, humans have been doing it for centuries. People seem to need guidance and of course we look for that in different places. We must acknowledge, though, that astrology has absolutely no scientific basis.

Astronomy is categorically not about people, it’s about what’s out there in the physical realm. Over the centuries, astronomers have pursued an evidenced-based understanding of the universe. But even astronomy (as

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PHOTOGRAPHY: LIVE ON STAGE AUSTRALIA

Has it impacted your perception of yourself and/or your life, and how?

If you need perspective, I recommend going to a truly dark place outside the city and experiencing the Milky Way. It takes your breath away. The Milky Way shines with the combined light of 200 billion stars, our home galaxy.

We now know that the Milky Way is just one of a hundred billion galaxies.

Makes your disagreement with Sue from the finance department seem a bit unimportant, doesn’t it?

a science) has been biased by human belief. First, astronomers assumed that we were the centre of the universe.

Then we came to understand the motion of the planets and gravity and we realised that wasn’t true. The next default position was to assume that the Sun was the centre of everything.

Later, astronomers discovered that we lived in a galaxy and of course people assumed we lived at the centre of that galaxy. Now we realise that we are sitting on the edge of a spiral arm, two-thirds of the way out of an average spiral galaxy. Nothing special. It’s not about us.

My hope is that humans will start to realise that as we are ‘nothing special’ in the cosmic sense, we should find value in the pursuit of our best human lives (fulfilment, meaningful engagement with others, kindness). I think those things make the best use of our time on Earth.

Unfortunately, many belief systems drive people to pride, anger, violence and sectarianism. Humans have a very strong drive to compete and defend their beliefs. Although human beliefs and astronomy are very different, I hope that we can learn from both.

We are taught that there is a singular ‘reality’, experienced and verified by consensus. But could there be such thing as a multiverse or parallel realities?

The question of a multiverse is an intriguing one. I like the ‘sliding doors’ concept that every time a decision is made, a new universe is created, where one version of you pursues each outcome. Whacky and interesting, but we have no evidence either way.

Early astronomy realised a collision course with religion. How does astronomy relate to faith/ spirituality?

Spiritual feelings and faith are human psychological functions whereas astronomy is an evidence-based pursuit in physical science. They are different things. As such, I find it a bit rotten when famous physicists denigrate the fundamental concept of faith because, really, they are not the experts in faith and they should know better.

I know that faith can be incredibly important to some people for their psychological health. Many, like me, use meditation or outdoor activities to connect with the feeling of connection to ‘consciousness’. Meditation is

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Lost in space

a little bit different from faith in a god, but it is still a practice whose proven physiological benefits are not understood in detail. The same goes for medicine. The efficacy has been tested scientifically, but results vary widely between patients and some people get harmful side effects. All science is based on probabilities – nothing is 100 per cent certain. So some faith is required, even with the practical application of science.

I don’t personally have faith in any gods or higher beings, but I think there is wisdom in the undertaking not to pit faith against science like it’s some kind of competition. That’s far too simplistic.

That’s not to say I will never criticise the actions of organised religions, which can sometimes be profoundly

harmful to people who don’t agree with them. It’s all about respecting others.

Both science and faith are passed through the filter of human experience, which can lead to either the right or the wrong conclusions or actions being taken. Neither system alone provides the answers to everything.

What is the focus du jour in space?

Gravitational waves are the new kid in town. They were predicated by Einstein back in the early 20th century and physicists finally found them a couple of years ago. The really exciting thing is that they can tell us about new processes we’ve not been able to study before, like the collisions between black holes and very dense stars called ‘neutron stars’. That teaches us about fundamental physics, which flows into every aspect of science and technology.

What remains awesome or inexplicable to you?

One of the biggest things for me is whether we are alone in the universe.

The sheer size of space is one of the problems with solving this question.

As far as we understand, the absolute speed limit of the universe is the speed of light (300,000 km per second).

At that speed it takes several years to travel to the nearest stars and hundreds of thousands of years to cross our galaxy. Will we ever find a way around that limit and travel as physical beings through space? Will we ever meet our cosmic cousins, if they are out there? It’s an amazing thing to ponder.

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Can you explain your fascination with the birth and death of stars and supermassive black holes?

My research career started with studying how stars are born in our galaxy. Just like the Sun was formed five billion years ago, new stars are forming right now from gigantic clouds of gas that are floating around in space.

Gravity pulls the gas together into a ball, the middle gets very hot and BANG! nuclear fusion begins, hydrogen is built up into helium and the star starts shining. There are lots of things we don’t know about this process (including how the very big ‘supergiant’ stars form – by rights they should be blown apart by high temperatures before they start shining). I use radio telescopes to peer into the gas clouds and assess what’s going on.

More recently I studied the collision between galaxies and how that can create very large supermassive black holes at their centres. I’ve just recruited a new PhD student to look more deeply into the question of how supermassive black holes grow. That’s pretty exciting.

How do you imagine the limits of our capacity to occupy/exist beyond this planet?

Living in space is extremely problematic, both physically and psychologically. Humans have evolved bodies and regulation systems based upon the heat, light and gravity on the ground. In space, astronauts suffer quite severe bone and muscular wastage, effects on the eyes and vision, nausea and sometimes psychological effects from the isolation or lack of day/night. We’ve got a long way to go before we can live a comfortable or normal life in space, an environment to which our body has adapted through hundreds of thousands of years.

Is commercial space travel a feasible reality for ‘normal’ people?

Commercial space travel is now within the billionaire’s reach. If it continues at this pace, I imagine that average wage-earners will be travelling in space within 50 years. What a thought.

Imagine what the spaceport lounges will look like!

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You were named in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Top 100 Most Influential People in 2012. What influence or impact do you imagine you’ve had?

Around 2012 I was working with a team from CSIRO and the Australian government on producing Australia and New Zealand’s joint bid to host a major new international research facility, called the Square Kilometre Array. It’s a project involving 15 nations to build the most powerful radio telescope ever conceived. Our bid, and that of South Africa, were both accommodated and the telescope is now in the planning stage. It’s a massive boon to the Australian scientific landscape. For the next 50 years we will be hosting this amazing scientific facility and making discoveries about the fundamental nature of the universe.

I think the ‘influential’ gong is an interesting one. Whatever your position, I think you become influential when people want to hear what you have to say. Part of that is knowledge and passion, another is authenticity. My mission is to bring the excitement of astronomy (and

other science and tech) to everyone.

I’ve worked with schools, remote communities, the media and even launched my own astronomy distance learning course to make this mission a reality.

How do explain the mainstream appeal of TV programs based on science?

BBC Stargazing Live has been going for several years in the UK and it’s a national institution. When I got the call to be a presenter in the ABC Australian version, hosted by Brian Cox and Julia Zemiro, I couldn’t have been happier. It was shot on a fantastic location at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in NSW. Our show was very interactive and I think that’s why the audience loved it so much. We did this citizen science project where viewers scanned through real data from a telescope in space and discovered new solar systems. I really hope Stargazing Live has a long life here and Australia embraces it the way the UK did.

Lost in space

What did you learn from Buzz and Gene?

Meeting two heroes of the Apollo era was truly an honour. Both Gene and Buzz have lived incredible lives and experienced something most of us can’t even dream of – flying a tin can a quarter of a million miles and walking on the Moon.

One big surprise was to learn more about the competition between the astronauts and how the missions were assigned. In particular it surprised me how some of the astronauts seem to hold grudges even now about things that happened more than 60 years ago. Workplace politics clearly affects everyone, even in outer space!

How has your interest in science benefited your performance/ performing and vice versa?

Astronomers are trained in very specific niche skills such as mathematics, computer programming, observational techniques, scientific writing and planning. That’s all very left-brain heavy, so I ended up needing a creative outlet. I always felt very passionate about sharing my love of astronomy, so I started giving a lot of public talks and TV/radio interviews.

That sort of grew organically and now I enjoy working with clients as a speaker and presenter as well as continuing my research career. Plus, I’m really excited to be working on my first popular astronomy book, which will be coming out next year.

It’s all a creative outlet for me. I’ve worked with amazing people including Brian Cox, Todd Sampson, Dr Karl, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Alan Duffy and toured with two Apollo moon walkers, Buzz Aldrin and the late Gene Cernan, the last human being to walk on the Moon. The conversations are so stimulating!

“Both science and faith are passed through the filter of human experience, which can lead to either the right or the wrong conclusions or actions being taken.

Neither system alone provides the answers to everything.”

How do you reconcile your ultramarathon running with your academic pursuits?

Ultramarathon running is the quest to hurt without suffering. I’ve always enjoyed exercise as an integral part of my life and running was always the place I felt free. I’ve raced since I was a kid and I ran half-marathons at uni. My first encounter with the ultramarathon community came when I moved to Australia 10 years ago.

Since then I’ve run 6-hour and 12-hour races, a 24-hour race around a 400m athletics track in Brisbane, in which I ran four consecutive marathons (which was the most painful experience of my life but great fun), and very enjoyable 100km races in the bush. I’ve twice run the iconic Comrades Marathon in South Africa (it’s actually 89km long), which attracts 20,000 runners annually and is an amazing cultural experience.

More recently I branched out into six-day racing, which is great fun as it gives you the space to just ‘be’ for a full week. My favourite was the Big Red Run, which took me 250km through the Simpson Desert. Running on gibber plains, salt lakes and sand dunes for six days was like nothing else.

Whatever else I do, it was definitely a highlight of my life.

When I run, everything else just goes away. It’s my escape and I feel that it has strengthened my character and my confidence. Sure, it is bloody hard work but most worthwhile things are.

What legacy would you like your work to leave?

My research is exciting, as is the development of world-leading telescopes for the next generation of astronomy professionals. But I feel that my true purpose in life is to inspire people with astronomy. If I can motivate people to look up into the night sky and wonder, if I can motivate young kids to consider careers in science and tech as something that is open to them, I’ll be happy.

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THE REAL MEANING OF

HUNGER At a time of year that sanctions culinary excess, people for whom food serves a secondary purpose often suffer in silence.

We seek middle ground between the overcontrol peddled by the diet industry and disinhibition of binge eating.

C

ontrary to the intuitive conclusion that compulsive eaters are at greatest risk and most visible in situations involving abundant food, people who struggle with compulsive eating often dread eating in front of others because they feel too self-conscious, guilty and ashamed, or as if people are looking at them critically, while others throw themselves into extreme exercise regimes in a bid to offset the excess calories and/or associated remorse.

According to dominant theory, part of the function of emotional eating is to distract from and anaesthetise difficult feelings or attribute them to something simpler (the immediate visceral experience of eating and surrounding rituals as well as emotions related to eating behaviour are often less confronting than core sources of shame, guilt or grief ).

The MasterChef era’s yen for food trucks and gourmet doughnuts, deification of the word ‘indulgence’

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and entry of the word ‘binge’ to flippant social parlance clash with ideologies equating abstinence or selective eating with moral superiority and the imperative to maintain a certain body shape. Moreover, what have come to be imagined as ‘normal’ and even healthy eating attitudes and behaviours – think Paleo and intermittent fasting – would a decade ago have indicated marked eating pathology.

Muse body image and eating disorders expert Sarah McMahon says ‘normal eating’ is flexible and not only forgives but permits eating something you don’t really need but feel like – think a creamy vanilla slice you spot on the way to pick up the Christmas cake. Psychotherapist Julie Simon, author of The Emotional Eater’s Repair Manual, says that while eating for emotional reasons is unhelpful, occasional excess is within the definition of healthy flexibility.

“We all enjoy eating and, on occasion, will eat when not hungry or overeat just because the food is incredibly tasty or because it enhances our personal or social experiences,” says Simon. “There’s nothing wrong with occasionally using food to enhance enjoyment and celebrate life.”

Food consumption becomes a problem when it is no longer an enjoyable, present experience, but an escape from emotions or life.

“You use food to calm, soothe, comfort, and pleasure yourself, distract yourself from unpleasant emotional states and powerless thoughts, and fill up an inner emptiness,” says Simon.

“No doubt your emotional eating has helped you cope daily with selfdefeating thoughts and emotional states like anxiety and depression.”

According to Mary Anne Cohen, director of the New York Center for Eating Disorders, emotional eating stems from attempts to satisfy hunger from the heart, not the stomach. It can be a proxy for intimacy for people who experience fear or maladaptive behaviours in relationships.

“Food never rejects you, food never leaves you, food never gets angry with you, food never dies. Food is the only relationship where we get to say when, where, and how much. No other relationship complies with our needs so absolutely,” says Cohen.

Like any relationship, the relationship with food and eating can be nurturing or abusive, supportive or neglectful, nourishing or punishing, Cohen says. And like interpersonal relationships, patterns of relating to food often stem from early patterns in the family of origin. “If we have been hurt by the people we love, we hurt ourselves with food. Emotional eating becomes protection from pain,” Cohen says. Eating disorders and, to a lesser extent, dysfunctional relationships with food, often attempt to serve as a proxy for love, connection, security and intimacy.

Geneen Roth, author of Women, Food and God, agrees that emotional eating is an emotional analgesic. “In the moment that you reach for potato chips to avoid what you feel, you are effectively saying, ‘I have no choice but to numb myself. Some things can’t be felt, understood or worked through,’” says Roth. “You are saying, ‘there is no possibility of change so I might as well eat’. You are saying,

‘goodness exists for everyone but me so I might as well eat’. You are saying, I am fundamentally flawed so I might as well eat’. Or, ‘food is the only true pleasure in life so I might as well eat’.”

Emotional eating does serve as a numbing agent, at least in the short term. Carbohydrates are known to facilitate release of calming neurotransmitter serotonin, and anticipation of consuming forbidden or numbing foods can cause a rush of reward chemical dopamine.

“Emotional eating can be used as a tool to suppress, soothe, or avoid emotions, including anger, stress, boredom, sadness and loneliness,” says dietitian Chloe McLeod. “The habitual nature of this can result in the individual forming a connection between the emotion felt and the food eaten. The ritual can be incredibly powerful, as the indulgent snack causes the release of ‘happy hormones’ like serotonin, which can alleviate stress or sadness and make us feel better, although it can often result in you feeling worse in the long run.”

Cruelly, the compensatory caloric restriction common after a binge eating episode can actually increase the risk of a subsequent episode according to nutritional therapist Amanda Palm, who says the appeal of carbohydrates is heightened in people who restrict their intake.

“It’s a trap for well-meaning dieters who suddenly cut high carbohydrate and sugary foods, but then later ‘cheat’ because the cravings are too powerful,” says Palm.

“The foods we reach for when feeling emotional may be based on the nutrients they contain that can actually assist us,” says nutritionist Tracie Connor. “For example, the high magnesium content in dark chocolate and cacao can help to lower nervous tension and increase alertness, and carbohydrates help to transport [serotonin precursor] tryptophan to the brain to aid the production of serotonin.”

BINGE AS DISORDER Contrary to the notion that consuming something ‘bad’ or prohibited – as arbitrated against personal eating goals – constitutes a ‘binge’, actual binge eating is a serious concern that can come to govern a person’s life, taking priority over social engagement, distracting from work and goals and elevating the risk of developing depression as well as diet-related conditions including diabetes. Criteria for a binge are feeling out of control and rapidly consuming a large amount of food in a short period of time.

Personality may be a key predictor of a recognised condition known as binge eating disorder (BED) according to psychologist Dr Simon Sherry, author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Perfectionistic attitudes – those that suggest an unrealistic belief in the attainment of standards that preclude inevitable human mistakes and shortcomings – can cause a need to escape one’s own unattainable expectations according to Dr Sherry, from Dalhousie University.

Dr Sherry coined the ‘perfectionism model’ to explain the connection between perfectionism and binge eating. A certain type of perfectionist – one who believes that others are evaluating their performance critically rather than merely being selfcritical – is most susceptible, experts found. Dr Sherry surmises that the weight of pressure felt to be coming from important others may become intolerable.

“It seems that as perfectionists go about their day-to-day lives, they generate a lot of friction,” says Dr Sherry. “Because of their inflexibility and unrealistic expectations, they also create problems in their relationships.”

Ironically, the pursuit of perfection often plays out in the very compulsive practices employed – more or less consciously – in a bid to escape the pressure of it.

Dr Sherry also subscribes to the link between other types of overwhelm and binge eating as a type of escape.

Binge eating is often considered

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‘dissociative’, taking place in a sort of haze of unreality enabled by the immediate visceral stimulation of food, ‘as if’ the person is absent.

“Think about it. When was the last time that you were rapidly eating a pizza and pondering a major life decision at exactly the same time?” he asks.

While binge eating banishes troubles and difficulties in the short term, it also generates powerful negative emotions of guilt and shame that are longer lasting.

“We want to improve the lives of perfectionists with patterns of disordered eating,” he says.

A complicating factor among perfectionists caught in binge eating may be their reluctance to expose their own perceived imperfections – including to health professionals.

“There are effective interventions for binge eating, including some help for perfectionism – change is possible,” says Dr Sherry.

THE FOOD ADDICTION DEBATE Whether or not there is such a thing as food ‘addiction’ is contentious.

Some pundits swear certain foods are engineered to be addictive, as documented in David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, while others espouse that people are not addicted to food in the same way as they are addicted to alcohol or drugs because the behaviour is more compulsive than addictive.

But psychologist Kellee Waters says the semantic debate distracts from very real effects and suffering.

Waters, who identifies as a ‘recovered food addict’ and wrote the book Food Addiction Therapy: The Simple Eating Plan, says the way our brains respond to dopamine affects how easily we become addicted to substances and activities that activate reward circuitry – including food and eating.

One hallmark of addiction is loss of control over use of a substance or behaviour, says Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones, acting director of Addiction Medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne.

When it comes to food addiction, he says it makes sense for the brain to

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seek out certain behaviours that have a biological imperative like a survival benefit. And, of course, we all need food to survive. “Bears will seek out high-calorific foods as humans do, but unfortunately, high-calorific foods are all too abundant in the First World,” he says.

This wealth of food choices and rising obesity levels led Yale University researchers to launch the Yale Food Addiction Scale in 2008 to help study the eating habits of people around the world. Research suggests that people with food addiction respond to food cues in much the same way that alcoholics respond to drinking cues, even suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

The debate about the definition of food addiction often centres on its terminology, says Dr Lloyd-Jones. “At times, criticism has been levelled at the use of the word ‘addiction’ as it is seen as pejorative, as is the word alcoholic.

But for some this is liberating as an explanation of what they suffer from,” he says.

“Addiction is stigmatised and perhaps considered to be too extreme a word for a behavioural state such as a binge eating disorder,” he says.

Nonetheless, components of addiction including continuing the behaviour despite adverse consequences, diminished self-control, compulsion, and appetitive urges or cravings are what many experts, including Waters, believe are evident in cases of food addiction.

So what’s the difference between an emotional eater who uses food to escape expectations and emotions and a food addict? “Both have the same psychological and biochemical imbalance, but an emotional eater will eat erratically while a food addict will need to down masses of the same foods every day,” Waters says.

A range of genetic, environmental and emotional factors can contribute to someone developing an addiction, explains Dr Lloyd-Jones.

“Things like genetic influences and vulnerabilities or protective factors, exposure to the substance, societal influences, personality factors, such as someone who takes risks versus someone who avoids risks, impulse control, trauma, especially in the formative years, and co-morbid mental health disorders such as eating disorders,” he says.

CHICKEN OR EGG Whether binge eating is a go-to crutch able to be resolved with mindful eating or has become an impediment to life as in the case of binge eating disorder (BED), resolving underlying issues can present a catch-22. In order to access and work through the underlying disturbance, one does need to relinquish the very behaviours that seem to protect them.

“Only when we stop this emotional eating do we discover just how needy and vulnerable we really are, and that can be scary,” Cohen says. “Healing an eating problem means learning to turn to people for nurturing rather than to our secret relationship with food.”

The real meaning of hunger

While emotional eaters often share certain traits and modes of operating, there is no single or quick fix. However, Cohen advises acknowledging the depth of pain that drives the behaviour and seeking professional help. It is no more shameful than seeking help to rehabilitate a slipped disc.

“It’s not because you’re lazy and undisciplined, have bad genes, or lack willpower. Your emotional eating represents your limited ability to care for yourself. It’s a sign that you’re lacking self-care skills that are generally learned in childhood,” says Simon.

“Maybe you were forced to spend much of your precious childhood trying to cope with unpleasant emotional states, insecurity and low self-esteem. Your emotions and needs were neglected, and you lost touch with these important internal signals.

“Unlike our chaotic inner world, food is soothing, readily available and predictable. Rather than acquiring necessary self-care skills, we end up with skill deficits, which unfortunately can have lifelong consequences. We grow up with an emotionally starved inner child running our lives.”

According to Cohen, psychotherapy is an effective way to heal the rifts that cause us to turn to food for comfort.

“Psychotherapy is a powerful channel for this healing. In therapy we develop a partnership with another human being who is trained to help us unravel the inner reasons why we have made trusting food safer than trusting people,” says Cohen.

Often this needs to be paired with a structured plan written by a trusted dietitian, to in effect ‘re-train’ trust in both appetite and food and learn what the body needs rather than the mind, especially since a cruel paradox within the emotional eater’s cycle is that the behaviour used to soothe feelings of inadequacy and helplessness often cause weight gain and undermine selfworth – which makes emotional eaters prime candidates for crash diets that perpetuate the cycle.

Another effective strategy is mindful eating, which focuses on the experience of eating rather than thoughts and beliefs about food and eating or whether you really did mess up the interview for your dream job.

Psychologists Kristina Mamrot and Kate Swann, co-authors of Do You Really Want to Lose Weight?, say that understanding the emotional and social contributors to overeating is the first step to recovering from an unhealthy emotional dependency on food.

“You need to understand which emotions contribute to the overeating, such as depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, work stress, day to day problems, boredom, loneliness or anger,” says Mamrot.

Stress often elicits or exacerbates emotional eating among susceptible people, she says.

Unlike addiction to drugs and alcohol, recovering from a food addiction – whether or not it’s a true dependency – isn’t as simple as sudden and absolute abstinence, says Mamrot.

“Without food, even the most obese person will die. So people who feel addicted have to continue a battle with every mouthful, every time they sit down to eat.” Waters says overcoming compulsive eating demands a twostep approach of breaking the cycle of over-reliance on food with small changes to diet and behaviour over several months and increasing healthy neurotransmitters with strategic dietary choices. The former minimises the risk of withdrawal symptoms and setbacks.

“Then it’s about increasing the amount of healthy, natural neurotransmitter foods in your diet to help stabilise and balance your neurotransmitters throughout the day without causing spikes and falls that lead to cravings, emotional eating and bingeing,” she says.

SIGNS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD HAS CROSSED THE LINE ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGIST KELLEE WATERS • You consume large quantities of junk food or foods you find it hard to stop eating – often those in multipacks and brimming with saturated fat, sugar, refined carbohydrate, flavour enhancers and artificial sweeteners • You need to have a particular food every day and if you don’t have that food you experience a kind of withdrawal – feeling angry, anxious, tired and lacking focus.

• You binge eat, meaning you eat in a manner that feels out of control, often consuming an uncomfortable quantity of food in a short period. A hallmark of binge eating is that it tends to be secretive and includes foods or quantities that evoke feelings of guilt and shame.

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PLATES OF CHANGE If you tend to meet stress with a packet of biscuits or high-carb takeaway but are mostly in control of what and how much you eat, try these strategies from our expert roundtable to reset your relationship with food.

KNOW YOUR TRIGGERS

Chloe Mcleod, Dietitian “Identifying your triggers is important.

For example, if you know being home by yourself after work is a high-risk time for you, maybe this is the time you go to the gym, or find another activity instead. Or if you are feeling stressed or angry, taking the time to practice meditation is fantastic at helping you calm down.

Try to distract yourself away from food.

Call your mum, go for a walk, try yoga.

You’ll be surprised how easily you forget about the food you’re craving.

Do your best to eat slowly and mindfully.

Take your time with your food, and savour each bit. Think of the flavours, textures and smells. Slowing down the process of eating can help prevent overeating, and help you enjoy what you are having more.”

When you have the desire to eat, give yourself a moment to think about whether you’re hungry or just want to eat. If you’re hungry, you’ll be eating anything you can get your hands on, including a carrot or an apple, whereas emotional eating, is usually for one type of food like ice-cream, and that food only.

Have a great meal plan to follow that is nutritionally balanced, includes foods you love to eat and regulates your blood sugars so you’re never too hungry.

Don’t deprive yourself. Depriving yourself of your favourite foods has been shown to only make that comfort food all the more appealing. Sometimes when it’s back on the menu, it’s not quite as appealing anymore and easier to manage your intake.”

MAKE A PLAN

FEAST ON LIFE

Dr John Demartini, Human Behaviour Expert “Fill your days with high priority actions that inspire you and have meaning, and that you spontaneously desire to achieve. This awakens the forebrain’s executive centre that then masterfully governs the more impulsive or emotional eating behaviours.

When you are inspired you eat wisely.

When you are not fulfilled, nor have meaning, you are more likely to attempt to immediately gratify your unfulfilled feelings with sweets and empty calories.”

STRATEGIZE KEEP A DIARY

Jamie Rose Chambers, Dietitian “Keeping a food diary will help you to stay mindful about what you are eating and patterns that are occurring in your diet.

Make sure you have non-food rewards or activities that make you feel good and are something to look forward to if you’re bored, like making a yummy healthy dinner, run a bath or curl up to read your favourite book.

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Fiona Tuck, Nutritional Medicine Practitioner Start a healthy eating plan including a variety of fresh wholefoods every day.

Often comfort eaters will feel guilty which leads to skipping meals the next day,

which ultimately ends up with binge eating or overeating. Ensuring the body has a wide variety of nutrients daily can help to increase energy levels, stabilise blood sugar and elevate the mood, which can lower the likelihood of comfort eating.

Eat tryptophan-rich foods in the afternoon or early evening as these will help to boost serotonin levels and reduce the desire to comfort eat. Tryptophan-rich foods include salmon, turkey, bananas, spirulina, eggs and milk.”

NURTURE YOURSELF

Karina Francois, Naturopath “There are a number of ways to feed your feelings and fulfil yourself emotionally. If you are lonely, reach out and speak with someone. Feeling anxious? Get some fresh air to calm your nerves. If you’re feeling tired, have a bath using calming essential oils such as lavender or camomile.”

The real meaning of hunger CONDITION REPORT

THE HIDDEN EATING DISORDER With the word ‘binge’ being used to describe everything from a TV marathon to eating a whole chocolate bar, and those ruled by binge eating hidden behind a normal or even elevated weight, people with binge eating disorder are fighting a private battle against one of the most common eating disorders.

VANESSA, 41, Binge Eating Disorder (BED) I’ve always wanted more food. I think I was born with food addiction.

By age 11 I was yo-yo dieting and started binging and starving myself.

Throughout my teens and 20s my weight fluctuated depending on my emotional state. After going through significant changes in my 30s, my binge eating got out of control. I found myself going on food safaris and eating highly palatable, high in sugar, fatty and salty foods all day. Here are some excerpts from my journal that I documented how I felt about a binge at that time: After having lunch at work, I had already decided that I was going to eat some more, even though I was full. I initially felt comfort but I also thought of what excuse I was going to give my colleague for having ventured out in the rain when I said that I wasn’t going to go out. The truth is I wanted to go alone so that I could binge undisturbed.

I went to the supermarket and I bought more food. I was acutely aware that I could bump into someone from work and was taking extra care to turn into small streets to finish the food. I brushed off the crumbs and went back to work and had a meeting.

On the way home from work, I bought more food and continued eating. If someone had watched the process, it

would have looked ugly. I was walking down the streets, gulping down one thing after the other. Eating the last bite, I noticed that I wasn’t even taking the time to taste the food. It wasn’t really satisfying by that stage anymore at all.

I’m not sure why I was in such a hurry but it felt like I was doing everything really quickly so that it would be over before I had time to come to my senses and stop. I felt like such an addict. The thought came to my mind that I could have squeezed pieces of food into a syringe and then injected them. It brought up the image I often get when I see the food vending machines in train stations.

They’re filled with biscuits, candies, chips and cakes. For me they could just as well have been filled with packets of cocaine and heroin. Food has always been the number one, legal, easily attainable, and culturally accepted drug for me.

I passed a lady who seemed to me to be doing the same thing. I wanted to stop her and ask if she had the same problem as me. But I just walked on. Maybe she was thinking what I normally think when I see others eating bread and pastries: why can they get away with it and I can’t? How do they control it? How do they know when they’re full? It made me think how many of us are out there really, pretending that we eat ‘like normal people’ only to go binging, starving

and purging ourselves behind closed doors so that we can fulfil cultural ideals of being thin, fit, happy, healthy, perfect. How many of us have wars in our heads about what to eat, what not to eat, when and how to stop eating, how to lose weight, how to keep it off every minute of the day?

I don’t normally keep food in the house as I know I’ll eat it. Now I’m exhausted. I’m so full that I’m feeling sick – it’s crazy how I can eat that much – but actually, I could eat much more than that!

What happened next? After a few days of dieting I binged again.

At its worst, binge eating disorder totally took over my life.

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From your place in recovery, how do you reflect on binge eating disorder?

At its worst, binge eating disorder totally took over my life.

It caused me to experience uncontrollable food cravings. Eating became an unconscious thing; it wasn’t a lack of willpower, it was like I was on autopilot. When I was binge eating, I would swear not to do it and the next minute I’d find myself stuffing food into my mouth. If someone had watched the process they would have seen me gulping down one thing after another. During a binge, I didn’t even take the time to taste the food and it wasn’t satisfying at all. After a binge, I would be consumed with guilt and shame. Binge eating takes over your whole life and thrives in isolation and shame.

I couldn’t keep any food at home without eating it, so I had to shop for each meal separately. I would spend days on ‘binge safaris’, going from one shop to the next and travelling to find specific foods. I felt so ashamed that I didn’t want to be social and isolated myself. I sometimes cancelled social activities, such as dinner parties, because I’d binged and then felt I needed to starve myself.

I bought food and ate in secret in the bathroom at work. I never let my binge eating disorder influence my performance at work, but in hindsight, this probably put me under a lot of stress and caused my eating to get worse.

My boyfriend at the time broke up with me because of how binge eating disorder was affecting my moods and self-esteem.

Did you recognise BED before your diagnosis?

I’ve had issues with food for as long as I can remember. At around 10 years old, someone told me to stop eating because I’d get fat. From that moment, the war in my head started. I wanted to eat, but I also wanted to stop eating to avoid putting on weight. I started starving myself, which in turn led to more binge eating.

I recognised I had a problem with food but didn’t have a name for my behaviour until I found professional help. It was a relief to learn I had binge eating disorder because it gave this monster a label. Before the diagnosis I believed I was the only person in the world doing these things. I was so ashamed that I didn’t tell anyone about my behaviour for a long time.

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What led to your seeking professional help?

My binge eating grew totally out control in my early 30s. Within a year I had moved from London to Paris, gone through a relationship break-up, fallen in love and changed jobs. I felt quite ungrounded.

I gained weight at a rapid pace and was scared of how the binging affected my mental health. I felt increasingly out of control and desperate. That’s when I sought help from a counsellor who worked with me to gain awareness around my food, and what was triggering my binge eating episodes.

Do you participate in ongoing treatment or self-help?

I have a good support network. I’m committed to daily actions that support my recovery lifestyle. Things like planning my food, sticking to my food plan, talking to others in recovery, journalling, self-reflective exercises, spiritual pursuits, and plenty of rest and gentleness with myself.

How do you think your experience has influenced your personal trajectory?

Binge eating disorder has totally changed my life. Personally, I’ve had to look very deeply into what is causing my food issues and have reviewed my thought and behaviour patterns.

I’ve learnt to regulate my emotions to make better decisions and to live with confidence.

I’ve had to become very clear on what I value in life, what I can’t control and how I want to live. My life’s been totally rearranged.

What’s the most frustrating misconception you’ve encountered?

I believe the severity of binge eating disorder should be more widely recognised and appropriate treatment should be more widely available. I’d like to see the relationship between binge eating and food addiction further explored.

I’m extremely vocal about my experience.

I enjoy sharing my experience with people and helping people struggling with their food. I want to see binge eating disorders in the limelight of Australia’s health concerns and for others to live free from the pull of addictive eating.

The real meaning of hunger

What has it taught or given you and can you find humour in it?

Binge eating disorder recovery has given me clarity, integrity and a deep appreciation for life and the people in it. I’m amused by the fact that I’m still a total foodie. If I relapsed, I believe my binge eating would be so much more ferocious than it ever has been. Recovery is an ongoing process and as such it needs continuous attention.

What does recovery look like for you?

I have worked through my baggage and am in recovery. My recovery has become my lifestyle and I’m still learning every day. It’s my first priority. I’ve built daily actions, behaviours and habits into my life. I’ve transformed. I never knew life beyond binge eating disorder could be so fulfilling.

My life has totally transformed as a result of my recovery journey and I feel grateful that I developed binge eating disorder, believe it or not! Without this, I wouldn’t know myself as well as I do now and have such clarity about my values. I’m not ashamed and have a healthy self-esteem and enjoy living in a healthy body and mind.

DAY IN THE LIFE …IN RECOVERY

Fine more information on eating disorders and where to find help at: SANE Australia – sane.org The Butterfly Foundation – thebutterflyfoundation. org.au National Eating Disorders Collaboration – nedc.com.au

• I’m an early riser and get up at around 5am to eagerly start my spiritual morning routine of yoga, meditation and writing in my journal.

All of this sets me up for the day with a positive frame of mind.

• Binge eating disorder has resulted in me having low-bone density, so I take care to move and build strength through walking and yoga daily.

• I like to learn new things, so I listen to audio books and podcasts on my way to work. I get on with work, an in-built skill for a disciplined workhorse like me. But I don’t overwork anymore like I used to. I take a sick day when I’m unwell rather than soldiering on. My life is all about balance now, because binge eating disorder was all about being on the extreme ends of a spectrum. I don’t overschedule myself and I say no to activities I don’t want to go to, making sure I take time out when I need it.

• I plan my meals in advance and cook on weekends so meal preparation during a busy working week is effortless.

• I’m in close contact with my recovery community and I talk to my friends who are also in recovery daily.

• I love an early night and most nights I’m in bed by 9pm. I kiss the ground every night before bed and say thank you for another day in this beautiful life.

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LIVING MEMORY: LIFE VERSUS LAW For Dina Halkic, a landmark legal finding that her jovial teenage son was a victim of crime after cyber bullying, resulting in him taking his own life, provides minor relief for the injustice and loss that will never heal. Now a fierce campaigner for awareness of online abuse, she bravely recounts conversations with her son in the hope of alerting other parents to signs of online victimisation.

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Dina Halkic y son Allem was a respectful, jovial and family-orientated young man. He had a large circle of friends and was the most popular among his peers – in particular the girls!

Allem was at his prime: he grew to be quite a tall, well-groomed young man. He loved his friends, who were the centre of his daily routine, and his mum and dad.

He met the person who would later be convicted in October 2008 at a birthday party and started a friendly relationship with him. He was four years older than Allem and he had a car, which Allem loved getting around in. He would often get picked up and dropped from school. I remember the first [time] I met him something really didn’t sit well with me; the offender wasn’t social with us and often stayed in the corner of the room just watching how we all interacted, which was particularly unusual as all of Allem’s friends loved chatting away. I remember saying to him when he left, “Allem, I don’t like this person,” and he would just say, “Mum, he is lovely.” Allem always saw the best in people.

A few months later, I remember during Christmas I didn’t see much of Allem hanging out with the offender and I said to him, “What ever happened to [the offender]?” and Allem said, “I don’t really like him much and I’ve decided to stop seeing him.” I was so glad!

However, in January of 2009, I remember one day hearing Allem typing away on his keyboard loudly and I ran upstairs to ask, “Are you okay – is everything okay?” He turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, Mum – just leave and shut the door.” Then I knew something was not right, but I just thought he was probably anxious about starting year 12 and left it at that.

I really didn’t see any other signs from Allem that I thought were worrying. I remember my husband Ali came home from shopping and said to Allem, “I just saw [the offender] at the shops and he looked and me and didn’t even say ‘hi’,” to which Allem replied, “Don’t worry about him.” In hindsight I think his facial expression was a worrying one.

Allem would often be texting on the phone and I recall a time when I overheard him talking on his mobile saying to a friend, don’t listen to him (offender); he’s trying to get my friends to hate him and he was bad mouthing me – don’t listen to him. When I heard this and he got off the phone, he just left the house to walk to a friend’s. I tried talking to him but he refused to answer me and just left. I did worry at that stage and spoke to Ali. When Allem got home he just went straight to his room and didn’t want to eat or talk.

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A few nights before Allem passed, he was constantly on the computer. There were very minimal interactions with us and he seemed to be very anxious. I remember a time he was lying on the couch and kept flicking channels on the remote control and I said “Allem, stop, whats wrong?” and he just got up and went to his room, saying absolutely nothing – nothing at all. In hindsight this was a very big sign that something was going on and I just didn’t pick it at all. I hate myself for that, that was a sign...

I knew all of Allem’s close friends and I saw them often, but not one of them told me of the situation – not one of them! It was when Allem passed that they all came that day and started talking about the offender and how he wouldn’t leave him alone. I said to them, “Why didn’t you tell us?” and they said they always encouraged Allem to just ignore him.

That’s when everything came out!

Once we heard the extent of it, we called the police straight away as we knew this wasn’t Allem doing this all alone and that something made him do it. Two detectives came to our home and I remember playing a DVD of Allem and crying, saying “Please do something. Our son would never do this, please?” – begging them. I recall they had tears in their eyes and they promised to look into it. The next day a few policemen came to the door, took the hard drive and confirmed that they found Allem’s phone and that there were a number of threatening messages from a period of weeks from the offender. They took statements from Allem’s closest friends and spent days and days at our house.

The last night before Allem passed was like every other night.

He packed his school bag and had a brief conversation with his dad about the cricket match they were going to attend the following weekend. He was looking forward to it; he said absolutely nothing to alarm us in any way.

When the police checked his phone records they found he was on the phone to the offender at 1.30am for 20 minutes. We will never know what was said, but Allem left the house for the last time soon after. He had another friend he apparently called at 2am to pick him up and drop him at Shell service station West Gate. His mum came to our house the day after Allem’s passing and said [the friend] dropped him off. We were absolutely devastated that he could be dropped off in the early hours of the morning with no questions. Left all alone in those early hours, Allem must have been so terrified – it’s just devastating, and [his friend] drove off just like that…

He turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, Mum – just leave and shut the door.” Then I knew something was not right, but I just thought he was probably anxious about starting year 12 and left it at that.

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We were called into the prosecutor’s office and they were determined to convict the offender with something. There was no law but they knew that the offender was why Allem chose to leave [that evening]. They saw the text messages, they saw the online messages, and they were so determined. The only law we could act on was a stalking charge – that’s it – but it was something, and we all agreed to pursue this no matter what. The prosecutors wanted to charge him. We wanted the offender to remember every day what he did to our beautiful son. We wanted him to go through the questioning; we just wanted something. On the day of judgement, he pled guilty at the very last hour, when the prosecutor wanted to grill him but he changed his plea. The judge gave him a conviction of stalking and 200 hours community service and I was just devastated.

How could he get away with this? How? Once the offender was charged, we sought legal advice and had huge assistance from Schembri Lawyers to put forward Allem’s case to the Victims of Crime Tribunal. This has never in history been put forward in a suicide case! The date came for the hearing and our lawyers were extremely well prepared. They told us before the hearing, “This will be very tough but we will do everything in our power to have a successful outcome.” The time came for our lawyers to speak, we spoke of our heartache, the judge was just listening. We left and came back within the hour and the judge summarised Allem’s last few weeks before his passing and said, “Allem’s death is a direct result of the offender’s threatening messages”, and awarded Allem as a victim of a crime.

I just broke down out loud – we both did. We were so proud of our son…so proud….

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Allem’s passing has taken a toll on our relationship.

We are just lost in sadness, our lives are just hollow, empty. We have separated as a couple but are there for one another no matter what.

My proudest moment since Allem’s passing is having Allem being recognised as a victim of crime and restoring dignity for him and for us.

For families of young people, I’d say awareness of the dangers of online predators, bullies and cowards is something you need to speak to your children about – they need to speak up, they need to seek help if they are getting bullied so they do not suffer in silence. Their friends need to speak up. There is help.

If Allem was here now, I would say, “Allem I love you soooo much, I miss you immensely.” I would hug him so tight and never let go…

For immediate advice and support for emotional or mental health distress, call Lifeline on 131 114, or visit beyondblue.org.au.

For more information on bullying, visit Bully Zero Australia Foundation, bzaf.org.au

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hink about someone in your life that you just cannot understand. Maybe it’s that colleague you are always battling, or that family member you hide from at reunions. She (or he) has beliefs and interests that are totally bizarre. You can’t believe they support that political candidate, that they like that weird experimental jazz music, or that they aren’t on board with your awesome idea for a change in the workplace. What is it about this person that makes them so…challenging? And from their point of view, what is it about YOU that makes you impossible? The two of you might be experiencing a personality clash on a key trait called openness. While you may not be able to escape each other, gaining some insight into what openness is all about may help you come to a mutual understanding, and be more open to those different on openness.

IDENTIFYING YOUR TYPE

If you’ve relegated a relative, friend or colleague to the ‘not my type’ corner, or seem to be persona non grata despite being perfectly lovely, you may have missed a simple solution. Often mistaken for incompatibility, personality trait clashes can be reconciled. You might even like each other.

WORDS: KATE BARFORD

Pop quiz: Are you a fan of abstract art? Are you always the first to discover the newest café?

Do you enjoy discussions about philosophy?

Do people comment on how random your book or music collections seem? Are you constantly challenging the status quo? If so, you’re probably high on a personality trait called openness. On the other hand, if you find art boring and pretentious, eat at the same place every Monday, always listen to the same old goodies, and prefer to stick to what you know – you’re probably low on openness. Strong markers of openness are curiosity, creativity and imagination. People high on openness are unconventional while those low on openness are more traditional.

Rather than thinking of yourself as an open person or an unopen person, think about openness on a scale from one to 100. Do you think you are high, low, or somewhere in the middle on openness compared to other people you know? How do you compare with that person you clash with? Keep in mind that this personality trait is normally distributed – in other words, most people fall somewhere in the middle of the scale, and few people are very high or low on this trait.

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CLASHES IN CONTEXT People who are particularly high or low on trait openness might experience personality clashes with opposite others. According to a 2009 chapter in the Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior by leading expert on openness Professor Robert McCrae, the personality trait openness can have serious social consequences. Hopefully, understanding a little bit about how people can differ on this trait can help you navigate relationships with people different to you on openness, and understand how to play to your own strengths as a person high, low, or in the middle on openness.

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The workplace: Why can’t Jack just get on board with the new change? Or, why is Jill always re-inventing the wheel? Is there a Jack or Jill at your workplace?

Perhaps you are the person always pushing or blocking change. People high on openness enjoy change and novelty, and are better at adapting to new ways of doing things. People low on openness may be more wary of changes, but they may have the advantage of setting clearer goals.

There are a few things to think about when it comes to openness clashes in the workplace: • How do you manage people high and low on openness? If you’re Jack and Jill’s boss, try to think of tasks that suit their level of openness.

‘Highly open Jill’ may want to take on that new lead, whereas ‘low openness Jack’ may be more happy to help you sort through those files you’ve been avoiding.

• You might even have an openness clash with your own job. People high on openness like to work in jobs where they can be innovative and investigative. People low on openness enjoy more structure and convention at work. If you’re thinking about a career change,

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2 finding something that matches your level of openness might set you on the right track. And you may find that you meet people similar to you on openness seeking the same career path.

• Keeping in mind that most people are somewhere in the middle on openness, if you are very high or low, it might be useful to pick your battles. Take your time to think about why the change you’re suggesting is really necessary and how you can make the goals of the change crystal clear to get those low on openness on board. If you’re lower on openness, try to be more flexible with the little changes, and save your fight for the ones that really matter.

Relationships. When it comes to love, personality often doesn’t matter. Extraverted people don’t necessarily have a preference for other extraverts, for example.

But when it comes to openness, birds of a feather flock together. Most people want a partner similar to them on openness. If you’re sizing up a potential partner, think about whether you two are compatible in terms of openness. Someone similar on openness to you is more likely to share your interests and political beliefs, so a match on openness could mean a match made in heaven. But what if you and the person you love are different on openness?

• That’s okay! While peoples’ ideal mates tend to be someone similar to them on openness, similarity on openness doesn’t necessarily predict relationship satisfaction.

Why you’re so annoying

• While similarity on openness doesn’t predict relationship satisfaction, level of openness can. People of high openness have more open communication styles and tend to talk things through rather than avoid problems. This can actually lead to healthier relationships. On the other hand, women with more conservative beliefs may be less likely to divorce, so people lower on openness may be better at sticking it out through tough times.

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Interests. Why is that person always trying to delve into deep philosophical conversations with you when you couldn’t care less? Or, how can people not like experimental jazz? These are questions people low and high on openness might ask. More open people tend to have diverse interests in the arts and sciences, whereas less open people tend to have more narrow interests.

High openness Jill may explore everything from Mozart to Miles Davis, to Florence and the Machine, while low openness Jack may stick to what’s playing on the radio, or his few favourite albums from growing up. If you’re high on openness, you may recall a time when you were flabbergasted when someone told you they don’t like music; and if you’re low on openness, you might recall sitting in a mandatory arts class at school thinking, ‘What on earth is so special about a couple of red and blue squares?’ Openness expert Prof McCrae summed it up nicely in his 2009 chapter noted earlier: “open people are bored by the predictable and intellectually undemanding amusements of closed people; closed people are bored by what they perceive to be the difficult and pretentious culture of the open.”

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Politics. We’ve all experienced clashes when it comes to politics. We often find ourselves dumbfounded by the candidates our family, friends or colleagues vote for, sometimes unexpectedly. In a day and age where political pundits seem more polarising than ever, how can we understand those whose political persuasions are so far from our own? Higher levels of openness are related to more progressive politics, whereas lower levels of openness are related to more conservative beliefs. Openness is more closely related to people’s social rather than economic political beliefs. Politicians

Kate Barford is a personality researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne.

are great at picking up their market share of high and low openness people by emphasising the dangers of change and the importance of tradition to capture those low on openness, or by challenging the status quo to bring the high openness people on board. But remember, most people fall somewhere in the middle on openness, just like most people aren’t political radicals!

TAKEAWAYS • Openness is personality trait that reflects creativity, imagination, change tolerance, and diverse interests in arts and ideas.

• If you’re unhappy at work, it might be an openness clash. If you’re high on openness, you’ll enjoy work where you need to innovate. If you’re low on openness, you’ll enjoy more structured goals at work.

• If you’re looking for a relationship, you may want to look for someone similar to you on openness, as they are more likely to share your interests and beliefs. If you and your partner are different on openness, you can still have an awesome relationship, but you may need to be aware of each other’s different communication styles.

• People who differ from you in interests and politics may in part be that way because of their personality. People low on openness enjoy conventions and traditions and don’t cope as well with change, whereas people high on openness love novelty and the unconventional.

IMPORTANT: Remember, the world isn’t made up of open and unopen people. Most people fall somewhere in the middle on the trait dimension of openness. And personality isn’t fixed and rigid; it changes over the life span, and it interacts with the environment. If you’d like to try to increase your level of openness, an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests travelling is great start.

@musemagazineau

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MIND THE

G A P Considered taboo when ‘silver foxes’ such as Hugh Hefner, Rupert Murdoch and Geoffrey Edelsten stepped out with partners decades their junior, major relationship age gaps have become more mainstream. But while partners may report mutual attraction, studies of long-term relationship satisfaction show mixed results.

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t’s lunchtime in a gridlocked Sydney street. Pedestrians pretend to check their Blackberries as they shuffle past a well-dressed couple holding hands – but Kate’s boyfriend isn’t convinced. The giveaway is the pause – not a full-on double take, but the kind of kinetic stutter ordinarily reserved for B-list celebs. Except neither 30-something Queenslander Kate nor her businessman husband is famous.

“He keeps saying that they think he is lucky,” says Kate of the man who could, at a pinch, be her father.

“I see people looking at us when we walk along the street in Sydney holding hands.”

The couple has been inseparable since meeting three years ago in an airport, when Kate was freshly single after an unsatisfying relationship.

Had the Don Draper lookalike been her age, there probably wouldn’t have been a pre-flight coffee date – let alone the proper date the following week.

“My ex wanted to go to our local shopping mall, have coffee and watch The Biggest Loser at night,” says the ambitious businesswoman, who’d look more at home on the Upper West Side than in the Aussie ’burbs. “We lived in suburbia and it was boring and I had to steer our lives,” Kate says. She puts the partnership with a man of like vintage down to experimentation.

“I have always liked older men for as long as I can remember. They were always between the ages of 40 and 60,” she says.

Kate is among a growing band of women dating men who would, in shopping parlance, be deemed ‘vintage’. Social commentary is more likely to use the term ‘sugar daddy’ to describe a man 10 to 60 years a woman’s senior. Blame the likes of US bride Brynne Edelsten for the intimation that dating above your own decade is more likely driven by money than matters of the heart, or physical

attraction. But that’s where Kate and cultural fairytale part ways. For financially secure Kate, the attraction to Dave was instant.

“He was wearing a smart suit, tall, broad shouldered, and talking on the phone. He was obviously early 50s,” she says. “The comparison between my ex and him is almost day and night. He is so incredibly attentive, he is driven, passionate. He knows how to communicate, he can read me like a book… My ex didn’t even see our break-up coming.”

The fact that the pair travels the world together while staff manage Kate’s business attests to some sort of compatibility. “We work together as a team. He is a young 50-somethingyear-old, not necessarily in looks, but in vibrancy and passion.” While the couple does predict that the age discrepancy will become more pronounced, they say stereotypes and urban myths are just that.

“There will be difficulties ahead and we talked about our sex lives.

He is a passionate lover and is in tune with me,” Kate says. While she says there are certain advantages to the fact that he “takes a bit longer”, he is worried. “When he is 70 and I am 54, he has told me that we can find options.”

Research shows that around 60 per cent of men aged over 60 suffer from erectile dysfunction (ED). “He does not need Viagra but I am aware that one day we may need this,” says Kate.

Biology’s bias may not be as much of an issue, however, as the lengths to which couples will go to circumvent it. Kate’s beau suggested that she consider seeing a male prostitute once he can no longer meet Kate’s needs.

Biological discrepancies, from fertility to arousal, validate an argument that women dating or marrying up are messing with a natural order in which coupledom is somewhat functional.

Between biology and pragmatism, it’s unlikely that Kate and Dave will procreate.

The phenomenon colloquially termed the ‘Hef Effect’ – a legacy of the late Playboy magazine founder – hasn’t been done any favours by high profile couplings between billionaires and younger women, which hint at financial opportunism. Octogenarian billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s split from 40-something wife Wendi Deng a few years back inspired a bitter legal battle and cast an unflattering light on chronological disparities. Against such high profile cases, the gold digger theory is a logical conclusion. But in an era of alpha females with their own share portfolios, the opposite may be true. Thirty-two-year-old writer Evie Livingstone says a perk of having an older partner is that he’s less likely to lean on her financially.

“They are generally established with careers, homes and financially stable like myself. I am established financially and like dating my equal in that regard. Financial independence fosters greater equality in a relationship,” says the divorcee.

LEVELLING EFFECT While it’s often said in jest that men suffer a kind of lag in emotional maturity relative to chronological age, there may be more to it than pub jokes suggest.

Harvard University social psychologist Dr Justin Lehmiller endorses the levelling effect. “We know from a lot of research that greater equality tends to make couples happier,” he wrote on his blog, The Psychology of Human Sexuality.

“Conversations and discussions with older men tend to be more thought provoking, intelligent and you can have a difference of opinion without either party getting offended.

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I have found them to be calmer, actually listen to what I say and try to help me if I want it,” says Livingstone.

Then there’s the sex. “The sex is much better with older men. I have only slept with a few guys but the older men have a strong desire to pleasure a woman; their experience, control, stamina and knowledge far outweighs the supposed teachability of younger men.”

The picture contrasts starkly with screen grabs of the News Corp chief and Deng, who reportedly started out as an intern at Murdoch’s Star TV, but also defies images of single beds and Barbie pink decor captured in a reality TV show tracking the daily lives of Hugh Hefner and his postpubescent ‘girlfriends’. It would be remiss not to pit the Playboy Mansion against Freud’s Oedipus complex (or Jung’s version, Electra complex), which supposes that children harbour a deep-seated sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. Theory goes that if a female gets stuck in this phase, she’ll gravitate towards a partner who mirrors her father. But Livingstone is neither money nor daddy-hungry.

Clinical psychologist Lissa Johnson (lissajohnson.com.au) dismisses dominant armchair diagnoses. “In short I think it’s a stereotype. Like any relationship, these relationships are powered by a complex network of interacting factors, personality, chemistry, upbringing, values, similarities and differences, one of which is age,” she says.

The age of a would-be partner is more important than is PC to admit.

Dating site RSVP’s 2013 Date of the Nation Report, based on survey responses from 3,500 Australians, shows that age is the most important determinant of whether someone deems another member a match.

A spokesperson for leading dating website RSVP says chronological chasms can affect compatibility. “...there are a number of things to consider in relationships when there is a significant age gap. Some of the issues that can come up are

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related to level of physical activity or commitment to work, life stage and priorities such as starting a family, and of course whether your friends will mix easily.”

Johnson says age gaps can be less dramatic in real life than they appear on paper. “Psychologically speaking, age differences are likely to become less significant as couples age,” she says. As we age, developmental stages converge, better aligning partners who may once have been worlds apart.

“The difference in life experience and maturity between a 20-yearold and a 35-year-old, for instance, is much larger than that between a 60-year-old and a 75-year-old.”

Kate’s friends didn’t question her relationship. “My friends, when they met him, all said that I’d finally found the man I always wanted.”

MORTALITY CHECK Perhaps the greatest strike against trans-life stage relations is the fact that one partner is likely to die years before the other.

“I am acutely aware that I’ll probably lose him before more time.

I am aware that there is a chance that for some time I may need to care for him,” Kate says. Dave is similarly concerned about the way time might re-cast the now-lovers in less conjugal roles. But there may be a sort of mortality silver lining.

According to a study published in journal Demography, a significant age gap skewed in favour of sir is related to better life expectancy for both partners. Marrying a woman seven to nine years younger is associated with a reduction in mortality risk of 11 per cent compared to marrying on age par, the research found. Crudely, Kate may be adding years to Dave’s life.

There is also a survival-based case for being the younger woman. The same data, from around two million Danish couples, found that women who marry men seven to nine years their junior actually increase their mortality risk by 20 per cent, with researchers surmising that the stress of social sanctions, which tend to be greater in relationships in which the woman is older, may adversely impact health markers.

Aoife Brennan is taking her chances. The Irish mother of two teenage boys and author of The Cougar Diaries, Part 1 discovered a yen for younger men after fighting her way through a messy divorce.

“Younger men tend not to have baggage in the forms of kids, ex wives and broken dreams scattered behind them,” she says. They also tend to have flat stomachs, washboard bellies and smoking hot guns. “They work out in the gym, they play sport and they love to party. They have endless energy, sheer enthusiasm and a lively

Mind the gap

interest in the world around them.

They believe they can do anything and they are probably right. In fact, what is not to like?” Brennan asks.

Since Demi Moore, Mariah Carey, Madonna and Susan Sarandon stepped out with ‘cubs‘ by their sides, a pride of civilians has emerged from the ‘cougar’ closet. In 2010, NSW hosted Australia’s first cougar convention, where over 200 cougars battled it out for the ‘older woman’ crown. Hit TV show Cougar Town cemented relations between older women and younger men in the cultural consciousness. There’s even a swag of dating websites hooking up ‘cougars’ and toy boys. Cougarlife. com and Marlo Jordan are two such platforms. But what – eight packs notwithstanding – is in it for us?

Sexologist and relationship expert Dr Nikki Goldstein (drnikki.com.au) says younger men can emotionally complement older women. “Women are better at healing, men sometimes become more cynical as the years go on. Some younger men have a more optimistic and better outlook on life and relationships with less baggage and more energy,” she says. “Besides youthful good looks there is also less baggage and more playfulness. As men get older they get set in their ways and tend to carry around emotional baggage from past relationships.”

Cubs may also serve a functional role, she says. “Some women enjoy being the lover and also teacher as in a way it fulfils a maternal and protective instinct.”

For Brennan, dating younger feels liberating. “I think it is lovely that women as well as men can make choices dictated by what they want and not by what society says they must do…”

Back in Sydney, sponge baths are the last thing on Kate’s mind. “I enjoy every second I am with [Dave].

He loves me for who I am and I love him for who he is. I feel proud to be with him.”

THE DOWNSIDE OF MARRYING UP While in the short term, men and women both report greater marital satisfaction with younger spouses, recent research reveals that age gaps lead to lower long-term satisfaction. A study recently published in the Journal of Population Economics found that men reported greater marital satisfaction when paired with a younger spouse, but the satisfaction of having a youthful partner didn’t last.

“We find that men who are married to younger wives are the most satisfied, and men who are married to older wives are the least satisfied,” said study coauthor Terra McKinnish, a professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Women are also particularly dissatisfied when they’re married to older husbands and particularly satisfied if they’re married to younger husbands.”

After six to 10 years of marriage, satisfaction had declined sharply.

“Over time, the people who are married to a much older or younger spouse tend to have larger declines in marital satisfaction over time compared to those who are married to spouses who are similar in age,” said McKinnish,

who authored the examination of 13 years’ Australian research with Deakin University professor of economics Wang-Sheng Lee. One reason for the decline could be how the age difference between spouses affects the couple’s ability to respond to negative economic shocks, such as a job loss, McKinnish said.

“We looked at how couples respond to negative shocks and in particular, if they have a major bad economic shock or worsening of their household finances,” she said. “We find that when couples have a large age difference, that they tend to have a much larger decline in marital satisfaction when faced with an economic shock than couples that have a very small age difference.”

Similarly aged couples are more in sync on life decisions that affect both partners (having children; general spending habits) and thus may be better equipped to adjust to a negative financial shock, McKinnish surmised.

Conversely, an unexpected financial crisis could expose underlying tensions and mismatches in couples with a larger age gap.

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F1RST DRAFT HOW RELEASING YOUR IMAGINATION BENEFITS EVERYDAY LIFE

Whether you imagine writing the next great Australian novel or consider yourself a shower poet, regularly dedicating time to creative writing practice could lead to better mood and life satisfaction.

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ou don’t need to have the beginning, middle and end of the next Cloudstreet in mind to benefit from writing creatively. Simply letting your imagination turn into words – whether in the form of short fiction or poetry – may lead to an ‘upward spiral’ of increased wellbeing and creativity according to research at New Zealand’s University of Otago.

Creative writing was among the most common practices found to correlate with greater enthusiasm and higher ‘flourishing’ on days after plying the chosen creative endeavour. Flourishing is a concept used by positive psychologists to describe growth towards the optimal condition of ‘thriving’.

Songwriting was also reported as benefiting outlook a day later in the study based partly on analysis of participants’ emotion diaries.

“There is growing recognition in psychology research that creativity is associated with emotional functioning. However, most of this work focuses on how emotions benefit or hamper creativity, not whether creativity benefits or hampers emotional wellbeing,” said lead researcher Dr Tamlin Conner.

“Our earlier research found that PA [positive affect] appears to increase creativity during the same day, but our latest findings show that there is no cross-day effect. Rather, it is creative activity on the previous day that predicts wellbeing the next,” said Dr Conner.

Positive affect encompasses feelings such as pleasurable engagement, happiness, joy, excitement and enthusiasm.

Even when controlling for next-day creative activity, the previous day’s creativity significantly predicted energised PA and flourishing.

“This finding suggests a particular kind of upward spiral for wellbeing and creativity – engaging in creative behaviour leads to increases in wellbeing the next day, and this increased wellbeing is likely to facilitate creative activity on the same day,” Dr Conner reported.

For people who favour images and practical activities, painting and drawing, digital design, making new recipes, crafts such as knitting and crochet and musical performance realised similar benefits.

The findings favouring creativity’s wellbeing effects are reflected in other research linking writing about feelings to more efficient performance of stressful tasks.

In a study measuring brain activity, Michigan State University researchers found that writing about anxiety-provoking thoughts freed up brain space for more concrete tasks.

“Worrying takes up cognitive resources; it’s kind of like people who struggle with worry are constantly multitasking – they are doing one task and trying to monitor and suppress their worries at the same time,” said lead author Hans Schroder. “Our findings show that if you get these worries out of your head through expressive writing, those cognitive resources are freed up to work toward the task you’re completing and you become more efficient.”

Reflecting on the findings published in journal Psychophysiology, co-author Jason Moser likened the difference to that between an efficient late-model car and an old car that goes but is beleaguered by rattles and the odd false start.

While previous research has indicated the benefits of expressive writing for helping to process past traumas or stressful events, the current study suggests the same technique can help people to prepare for and perform better on stressful tasks.

“Expressive writing makes the mind work less hard on upcoming stressful tasks, which is what worriers often get ‘burned out’ over, their worried minds working harder and hotter,” Moser said. “This technique takes the edge off their brains so they can perform the task with a ‘cooler head’.”

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Why spend the holidays reading a novel when you could be writing your own? Take a cue from novelist and writers’ retreat founder Vanessa Carnevale.

MINDFUL CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE

Becoming a novelist and founder of writing retreats wasn’t so much a conscious decision for me, but a gradual exploration of my creativity over time.

Creative writing has opened up a world for me – one where I’m able to immerse myself into the lives of fictional characters while playing with language and using words to create something out of nothing, satisfying my need for creative expression, which contributes to my happiness and general wellbeing.

For many years, I delayed writing what was to become my debut novel, The Florentine Bridge, due to a number of reasons. Partly due to fear of not knowing whether I could write a book, and simultaneously not quite understanding that ideas for novels don’t have to arrive into our consciousness with a clear beginning, middle and end. I know now that anyone can write a book.

The ingredients so many want-to-be writers think are necessary in order to write – confidence, a fully formed idea, an extensive vocabulary, a perfect first draft, an audience clamouring to read their every word – are false.

In fact, all the aspiring writer needs is a pen, notebook and perhaps a little curiosity. Creativity requires us to pay attention to it, to nurture it, to allow it space in our lives to move us. Not everyone wants to write a novel. For some, simply being able to express oneself on the page is enough to help make order and sense of the world.

Either way, writing, like any other craft, requires patience and practice, but one doesn’t need to be perfect in order to benefit from writing.

Writing can be a wonderful tool for wellbeing and stress relief, for exploring feelings and emotions, and for creative expression. For those less accustomed to letting go of inhibitions to dabble with fictional words on a page, support and tailored exercises can go a long way.

As a host of Your Beautiful Writing Life retreats and workshops, held in Australia and Tuscany, I’m finding that more and more people are looking to explore their creativity through writing.

For some, writing a book is a dream that keeps being pushed down the priority list. Some people simply don’t know

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

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where or how to start. Others come to a retreat as a means to carve out space for desire to dabble with writing and learn how to nurture their artistic talents alongside corporate careers and the pressures of the daily grind.

Coming to a writing retreat is a commitment. For some, it can be a very big and sometimes scary nod to the universe to say, ‘Yes, I’m ready. Yes, I want this. Yes, I’m putting myself and my creative life first.’

While writing novels brings me immense joy, so does witnessing the transformation writers experience at a retreat. Helping others connect with their creativity, or find the confidence to start a book is an honour and privilege I don’t take lightly.

After all, writing requires a certain degree of trust. Of believing in oneself.

Of becoming comfortable with not knowing the outcome. Will a completed manuscript find a publisher? Will my writing be any good? Can I be honest and authentic on the page?

Retreats can cater for writers of all ages and experience levels. Some writing retreats will feature hands-on and intense workshops that focus on craft and technique while others might focus on providing ample writing time and workshopping opportunities. I prefer to offer a well-rounded yet tailored approach: less structure, with workshop offerings covering aspects of writing and publishing as well as group coaching sessions to help writers learn how to work with resistance and self-doubt.

When I started training as a life coach, I immediately knew that these kinds of skills could tie in perfectly with supporting writers at all stages of their careers, from those wanting to dip their toes in to more established authors who were navigating the pressures of delivering manuscripts under contract.

To write with honesty, to put our thoughts into written format while exploring fresh ideas on the page requires courage. It isn’t always easy, but it’s freeing, invigorating and deeply rewarding.

You can start the way every writer out there does: one idea, one thought, one word at a time. Visit vanessacarnevale.com

• A pen or pencil and a notebook.

• Optional: Instrumental music.

Step One Find a comfortable and quiet place to sit in. If you find instrumental music calming, have that playing in the background. Have your notebook and pen nearby. Close your eyes and take a few calming deep breaths to centre yourself.

Step Two Look around you. What can you see?

What can you feel? What can you hear? What does the energy in the room feel like? Notice the small things around you, the tiny details. Flowers in a vase, raindrops sliding down a window, an almost empty coffee cup, a kettle boiling.

Step Three Focus on one of the things you’ve noticed and start writing about it from the point of view of a fictional character. Try not to censor or edit as you go and see where your writing leads you for this particular scene. In subsequent sessions you can continue from where you left off by repeating the exercise, imagining yourself ‘in the scene’ with your fictional character/s.

Write for five minutes and build up to 20- to 30-minute sessions.

REMEMBER: Trust your characters. Trust your story. Trust yourself.

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[ DISCOVERY ]

Meditation

ROAD MAP Mind-wandering during meditation is rarely encouraged. New research suggests it’s not only acceptable, but beneficial. We consider different types of meditation and their various benefits.

WORDS: NATASHA THOMPSON

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hey say ‘focus on your breath’ but you’re focusing on the dinner, the itchy tag on your new workout pants, the obnoxiously loud breath of the lady to your right or anyone else inconsiderate enough to swallow or cough or…breathe…and distract you from your untameable breath. And then you feel a bit guilty, a little incapable and a lot frustrated that you can’t do such a simple thing as focus on your breath – and there it goes again, your mind is off. Mind-wandering (thoughts that stray from your current task) often gets a bad rap in the world of mindfulness and meditation. After all, mindfulness is all about being in the present moment, not the world of the fairies. New research, however, suggests mind-wandering during meditation might not only be possible, but beneficial.

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Scientists from Australia and Norway came together for a study that appears in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Their goal? Investigate whether different styles of meditation allow the same degree of mind-wandering. To answer this question, the international team had 14 experienced meditators engage in ‘concentrative’ meditation and ‘non-directive’ meditation as they laid in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

Concentrative meditation resembles the type

of meditation you have probably engaged in at a yoga class or mindfulness workshop. According to study authors, this type of meditation requires paying attention to the physical sensation of breathing. Off-task thoughts are suppressed. If mind-wandering does occur, the meditator “gently but firmly” brings their attention back to the breath. On the other hand, non-directive meditation occurs with a “relaxed focus of attention”. The individual again concentrates on their breathing or a specific sound, but beyond this, their mind is warranted to wander. If the meditator becomes aware that their mind is mainly focusing on spontaneous thoughts, emotions and sensations, they simply move their attention back to the meditative sequence, gently and without judgment.

Fostering acceptance and tolerance of stressful and emotional experiences is the aim of nondirective meditation, while concentrative practices seek to reduce emotional reactivity and improve focus.

REIMAGINING MENTAL SPACE The results of the international study were novel – surprising even the researchers. “I was surprised that the activity of the brain was greatest when the person’s thoughts wandered freely on their own rather than when the brain worked to be more strongly focused,” said one of the authors, Jian Xu. The researcher’s comments highlight an interesting finding: when study participants engaged in nondirective meditation as opposed to simply lying in the scanner, they showed greater activity in regions of the brain related to emotional processing. Simply put, when meditators were directed to meditate, they appeared to be doing more emotional processing than when they were left to think about whatever they wanted. “The study indicates that nondirective meditation allows for more room to process memories and emotions than during concentrated meditation,” concluded co-author Svend Davanger.

How does mind-wandering play into all of this? The international team also found activity in the default mode network, or DMN, (a collection of brain regions thought to index mind-wandering) to be greater in non-directive meditation when compared with rest. On the other hand, concentrative meditation showed no ‘enhanced’ activation of this network. In summary, non-directive meditation again appeared to be facilitating added mental ‘space’, but, in this case, for mind wandering.

“It is remarkable that a mental task like nondirective meditation results in even higher activity in this network than regular rest,” commented Davanger.

THE BENEFITS OF A WANDERING MIND Is mind-wandering during meditation a bad thing? Research over the last two decades has shown that the DMN is likely involved in creative thinking. Imaging studies demonstrate that the DMN is activated during creative tasks, and this task-specific activation is greater in those with enhanced artistic abilities, such as professional artists. Perhaps even more interestingly, those with a creative leaning

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appear to have a more efficient and physically developed DMN. A 2015 study published in NeuroImage found that people who produced more original ideas during a divergent thinking task had significantly greater regional grey matter volume in one region of the DMN known as the precuneus. That is, the more creative people had physically denser brain tissue in a region of the DMN. With the DMN serving a key role in creative thinking, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that meditative practices, which allow for more activation of this network, may be beneficial for enhancing creativity. This link was evidenced by a 2012 study out of Leiden University. Published in Frontiers in Cognition, the study provided participants with two 45-minute meditation sessions and a baseline session where participants engaged in focused attention without meditation. The meditation sessions were presented in either a focused attention or open monitoring framework. Open monitoring meditation involves attending to anything that comes into awareness. If each meditation style were placed on a scale of mind wandering permissibility, open monitoring would be the most mind-wandering-friendly practice. Not surprisingly, participants in the study performed significantly better on measures of divergent thinking following the open monitoring session, producing more ‘fluent’, ‘original’ and ‘flexible’ ideas.

OFF THE BEATEN TRACK • DIVERGENT THINKING: A thought process used to produce creative ideas or solve a problem by exploring all options.

Divergent thinking does not assume a ‘correct’ answer but, rather, an answer that fits best. It is often tested in psychology by asking a person to generate as many possible functions for a common household item as they can think of.

It can be measured in terms of…

• ORIGINALITY: The number of creative ideas that only a small percentage of people think of • FLUENCY: How many creative ideas a person produces overall • FLEXIBILITY: The number of different action categories a person’s ideas fall into.

For instance, they may suggest a hair brush could be used to brush a dog (pet grooming category) or as a wand to remove dust from the carpet (cleaning category)

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CULTIVATING BREAKTHROUGHS So mind-wandering-friendly meditation practices might help us have that ‘aha’ moment, but do they help us implement it?

Research suggests that creativity involves more than just activation of the DMN. Executive regions of the brain, involved in skills such as planning, self-regulation and attention, come into play when we begin putting that ‘aha’ idea into action.

The importance of these regions in creative thinking was highlighted in a 2014 study. The research, published in Neuropsychologia, focused on the neural connectivity of ‘high’ and ‘low’ creative thinkers when they were not engaged in any particular task.

Essentially, the researchers wanted to see if the brains of more creative people would show different connections to the brains of less creative people when they were mind-wandering. Results revealed that the brains of highly creative thinkers showed a greater connectivity between the DMN and an executive control region of the brain. In simple terms, their mind-wandering and selfregulation networks were more in sync.

So what does this mean for the aspiring creative? A growing bank of research suggests

Meditation road map

that concentrative practices can improve the functioning of executive regions, especially as they relate to sustained attention. In one study, researchers Fadel Zeidan and colleagues demonstrated that as little as four 20-minute sessions of concentrative meditation could improve attention. The study saw 49 students undergo either a meditation training scheme based on shamatha techniques (a concentrative practice) or a nonmeditation-focused attention task (listening to an audio book).

Following the brief intervention, both groups showed improvements in mood, but only the meditators experienced enhanced cognitive function – scoring consistently higher

on all cognitive tests and as much as 10 times better on a sustained attention task. “The profound improvements that we found after just four days of meditation training are really surprising,” said Zeidan.

“The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed.” One example of this was the computer-based ‘n-back’ test, in which participants were asked to correctly identify prior stimuli in a series of stimuli to test working memory capacity and, by association, attention. Following the training, the meditation group averaged around 10 consecutive correct answers while the audio book group only averaged one. “Findings like these suggest that meditation’s benefits may not require

extensive training to be realised, and that meditation’s first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,” Zeidan said.

The moral of the story? Like most things, meditative practice appears to benefit our thinking styles in different ways. If you are prone to mindwandering, a concentrative style might be key to reining in those daydreams, while those met with a creative roadblock might want to consider a non-directive practice. Whatever style suits your current situation, be encouraged that science is starting to evidence just how effective meditation can be – changing the way we think, in results that are just as observable on a brain scanner as they are on the meditation mat.

MEDITATE ON THIS MEDITATION TYPE

KEY PRINCIPLES

MAIN BENEFITS

EXAMPLES

FOCUSED ATTENTION OR CONCENTRATIVE

• Pay attention to the physical breath • Actively avoid mindwandering • Aim: Reduce emotional reactivity and improve concentration

• Enhanced ability to concentrate and sustain attention • Better ability to put creative plans into action • Reduced susceptibility to distraction

• Shamatha or samatha • Transcendental meditation

NON-DIRECTIVE

• Relaxed focus of attention • Mental repetition of a mantra or meditation sound • Aim: Improve ability to tolerate stressful and emotional experiences • Mind-wandering permitted but not encouraged

• More ‘aha’ moments on the creativity front • Space for emotional processing

• Acem meditation • Clinically standardised meditation

OPEN MONITORING OR CHOICELESS AWARENESS

• Attend to anything that comes into awareness without responding to it • Sustain attention with the changing flow of experience (sometimes focusing on emotional tone) • Aim: Enhance calmness and awareness of different thoughts and emotions

• A broader attentional scope – enhanced ability to attend to multiple things in your environment at one time

• • • •

Vipassana Zen Sahaja yoga Concentrative qigong

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FINE-TUNE YOUR MOOD While the source of bad moods can be hard to trace, there are proven ways to shorten their lifespan and enhance positive feelings.

WORDS: NATASHA THOMPSON

M

ost of us lament the occurrence of a bad mood’. And few would fail to appreciate a good one – when you feel like everything is just going your way.

Yet unlike emotions, which can generally be traced to a cause and addressed internally or with another party, mood is more nebulous, making it hard to define, let alone control.

A psychology researcher at the University of Ohio has described the phenomenon of ‘mystery moods’, linking unexplained bad moods to hidden factors such as failing at nonconscious goals (or goals you’re not aware you have). Other contributing factors can be similarly covert. For instance, research has found that we can ‘catch’ bad moods.

“Evidence suggests mood may spread from person to person via a process known as social contagion,” said University of Warwick researcher Rob Eyre. Conversely, exercising outdoors in nature may be the ultimate mood-booster, combining factors known to contribute to positive mood – immersion in nature, moderate sun exposure and exercise. Manipulating your mood may have fringe benefits for creativity and even work performance since happy moods are associated with better decision making and working memory. Try these natural mood enhancers.

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SUNSHINE Getting a dose of sunshine is a sure way to lift mood thanks to the beneficial effects of vitamin D. This nutrient, which is actually a hormone, is synthesised in the skin with the help of radiation from the sun. While the mechanisms by which vitamin D boosts mood are unclear, the effect is measurable. Low vitamin D levels are associated with increased risk of developing symptoms of depression and seasonal affective disorder. One study showed that people attending psychology clinics report more symptoms of distress on days when less sunlight is reaching the ground.

About 50 per cent of people worldwide have vitamin D deficiency according to a study published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics. With just 10 per cent of necessary intake obtained from food sources, scientists are increasingly recommending increased sun exposure as an effective way to boost vitamin D intake. Yet many experts are concerned about promoting sun exposure and the known harm caused by UV rays. A commentary published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition concludes: “moderate sun exposure (less than the time required to burn) to the arms, shoulders, trunk, and legs should be sought rather than avoided”. If you are outdoors, consider a sunscreen that allows UVB but not harmful UVA light to reach skin – and download a sun smart app to time your exposure.

“Evidence suggests mood may spread from person to person via a process known as social contagion.”

EXERCISE It’s called the runner’s high, but you don’t have to run a marathon to get the moodboosting benefits of exercise. Physical activity that increases heart rate is so powerful it’s being explored as a preventative measure against depression. A landmark study of 33,000 Norwegian adults led by the Black Dog Institute showed that just one hour of exercise per week – at any intensity – could have prevented 12 per cent of depression cases in a sample.

NATURE Humans feel happier when they’re in nature acording to a growing body of research. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a short walk in grassland appeared to reduce rumination – a maladaptive thought process common in both anxiety and depression sufferers.

Participants who walked in grassland for 90 minutes, as opposed to those who walked next to a busy road, demonstrated less activation in an area of the brain commonly associated with rumination. “Accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanising world,” co-author Gretchen Daily concluded.

FRIENDS It’s no coincidence that the theme song of Friends began with ‘I’ll be there for you’. New research confirms the benefits of speaking to a friend but cautions judicious friend selection.

Researchers at The University of Warwick found that both good and bad moods are contagious. Adolescents who had more friends who suffered from bad moods were more likely to suffer from bad moods themselves.

The same was true for happy moods.

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HEAT

The intense perspiration and strategic poses native to Bikram yoga, which is practised in 40-degree heat, are said to promote emotional and physical balance.

WORDS: NATASHA THOMPSON

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SUPPLIED

of the moment

W

hile most people facing an important decision enlist the help of a friend or parent or write a pros and cons list, Bikram yoga teacher Suzyanah Hashemi (pictured) heads to her studio. “Whenever I want to make a serious decision in my life, I come to this room because I know if I make this decision in this room, it comes from my inner being,” says Hashemi, who co-owns the Bikram studio in Melbourne’s Glen Waverley. It might sound fluffy, but Hashemi – who has credentials in biochemistry – assures that there’s a science behind the beneficial effects of the yoga style colloquially known as ‘hot yoga’. Developed by Bikram Choudhury and inspired by the gentler yoga style hatha, the practice consists of two breathing exercises and 26 postures, which are practised in a room heated to between 39 and 40 degrees, with 40 per cent humidity.

It’s the kind of temperature where sweat beads roll off your forehead and collect at your feet. “The heat and the humidity works on your cardiovascular system,” says Hashemi.

“Your heart pumps faster, you have to breathe more and expel more carbon dioxide – so your lungs become more efficient and your aerobic capacity increases. I don’t think any other yoga tradition does that to your body.” The heated room also creates a negative gradient. “The room is hotter than your body temperature,” says Hashemi. “It demands a higher energy for your body to actively transfer this heat to your skin and out of your body. So the calories you burn in one hour are higher than any other type of yoga.” As a fringe benefit, the negative gradient also aids the body’s lymphatic system in removing toxins through the skin according to Hashemi.

If the heat isn’t enough, then there are the poses. “It was designed with the tourniquet effect, to flush the circulatory system and remove toxins from the body,” says Hashemi.

The tourniquet effect is thought to work a bit like a garden hose with a kink in it. Poses briefly restrict certain arteries and veins, leading to a build-up of blood. As the pose is relaxed and the arteries are released, a burst of high-pressure blood is directed at certain organs. Former biochemist Hashemi says the tourniquet effect rebalances the endocrine system, the body’s hormone-producing gland network. “The tourniquet effect acts on the endocrine system by oxygenating it and making sure it works properly. Most of the time we suffer from symptoms because

the endocrine system is not working at its best. Scientifically speaking, Bikram works to balance the amount of cortisol in the body.”

Hashemi believes the physiological changes Bikram instils in the body can have notable effects on mental health. She refers to the findings of a 2016 paper published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The study found cortisol reactivity (the amount of cortisol produced during a stressful situation) and reports of binge eating to be significantly reduced by an eight-week course of Bikram yoga. Cortisol is a hormone that is released when the brain perceives stress. It acts on the hypothalamic-pituitaryadrenal (HPA) axis, the network of glands and neural cortices that mediate the stress response. The amount of cortisol released during a stressful situation is thought to vary according to individual perception of the stressor and differences in regulation of the HPA axis. High levels of cortisol interfere with memory, learning, immune function and weight regulation, while over-activation of the HPA axis and chronic elevation of cortisol levels is thought to perpetuate the symptoms experienced in anxiety disorders and increase an individuals’ risk of depression.

More than 50 women, between the ages of 25 and 46 and at risk of obesity, took part in the study Hashemi mentions. All women were grouped as high or low cortisol reactors and randomly assigned to either a waitlist or the eight-week Bikram yoga class. Those categorised as ‘high’ reactors (people whose body released more cortisol during a stressful laboratory situation) demonstrated significant reductions in cortisol reactivity after the eight-week yoga program when compared with other high reactors who were placed on the waiting list. All of those who took part in the yoga reported greater decreases in the number of times they binge ate or ate to cope with negative affect during the study period.

Hashemi has seen similar improvements in her students, from greater stress tolerance and concentration to overcoming drug addictions, depression and eating disorders. “(Students talk about) better handling of stressful situations and being more focused – because being in the class for 90 minutes, you have to improve your endurance. The emotional control and mental strength you develop after a few months is something you develop from all yoga but the heated room helps encourage determination.”

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HEATED HEALING Plummeting into substance abuse following a barrage of stressors, Marisha Caferella turned to her yoga instructor. “I remember going to class at the time and saying to myself, ‘I have to tell my yogi, I really need help, I need to get things sorted,’” says Marisha. The Melbourne woman had only just begun practising at Bikram Yoga Glen Waverley when relationship difficulties and conflict with her son inflamed symptoms of anxiety and depression, reigniting a previous addiction. “I’ve got a long history with addiction,” says Caferella. “When I started I wasn’t having severe problems.

I had something that triggered it – my relationship was difficult, I had a lot of stuff going on with my son…but before that I had not had problems for years.” She initially started Bikram to overcome workrelated trauma and care for her mental health. “I worked in a job that was pretty stressful,” she says. “You can get vicarious trauma. I wanted to do something that could look after my wellbeing and mental health, and something I could do on my own.” After starting Bikram in January

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2015, Caferella has now been clean for a year, with minimal relapses. She believes Bikram and the support she received from her yoga teachers were fundamental to her recovery. “It has changed my life a lot. It certainly helps with anxiety. One of the key things with meth use – why people struggle to stop – is the level of anxiety that happens after stopping. I was finding that it was really good to go attend a class.” Caferella is now in fulltime employment assisting unemployed youth find work. She continues to practise yoga and apply the skills she learns on the mat in day-to-day life. “I use breathing (to deal with everyday stress) but it’s also just knowing that it’s going to be ok, that I’m going to hit the mat soon. And I don’t get that same level of anxiety when I am regularly attending yoga class. I just think it’s something that I’ll probably always do and try to share with others. It has so many healing properties, not just physically but mentally as well. It’s made me feel like a calmer person. When I get those feelings of anxiety and depression, I know I have something to go to.”

Like her students, Hashemi has been changed by Bikram. “I’ve always been an emotional person and Bikram has helped me to control these emotions,” she says. “I came from a family background where there were high expectations placed on the kids and we were always compared to the others. Because of this, I always felt I needed to work really hard to measure up and I often had selfdoubts. Practising Bikram has taught me to accept myself for what I am and celebrate myself for who I have become. I have learnt to recognise my strengths and weaknesses and use them both to my advantage. I have also realised that what I thought to be an expectation was merely a sign of the faith my family had in me.”

Yoga has been so therapeutic in Hashemi’s life, she was hesitant to take on the role of teacher. “Bikram is definitely more than a job for me,” she says. “At the start I was really reluctant to become a teacher. I’ve always been a high achiever – I’ve always lived with a lot of stress. The Bikram room has been a place of meditation for me, where I would drop everything.” It was Hashemi’s passion for the practice that inspired her to start training towards becoming a certified instructor in 2012. “When I decided to become a teacher it was like a calling for me. I wanted to share my enlightenment, if you will, the transformation I had experienced and to help others overcome their problems. The joy of having someone come to me and tell me they’ve taken charge of their life – that’s why I do it.”

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THE WISH LIST Whether you’re relaxing poolside or welcoming the new year in high glamour, complement your natural shine with these travel-friendly beauty buys – just in time for your gift wish list.

1 2

3

4

PAMPER & POLISH FOR THE ULTIMATE HOLIDAY

1. Focus Care Youth+TM Avance Elixir from Environ, $150, sensaskincare.com.au 2. Instant V-Lift by Freezeframe, $69, freeze-frame.com.au 3. SALT by Hendrix Bath Tea in Calendula + Rose, $24.95, saltbyhendrix.com 4. Charlotte Tilbury Hot Lips Mini Lipstick Charms, $60, charlottetilbury.com/au 5. SALT by Hendrix Mermaid Oil, $34.95, saltbyhendrix.com

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5

7

RESORT READY

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FOR THE JET-SETTER 6. Jin Soon Nail Lacquer in Kookie White, $26, mecca.com.au 7. Sephora Collection The Vacationer Makeup Purse, $199, fishpond.com.au

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8. NARS Audacious Lipstick in Mona, $49, mecca.com.au

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9. Zoeva Complete Eye Set, $119, sephora.com.au

10 11 12

GOLDEN LUXE FOR THE ONE WHO HAS IT ALL 10. JOICO The Luxe Set, $55, joico.com.au 11. Chanel Soleil Tan de Chanel, $69 for 30g, davidjones.com.au

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12. Charlotte Tilbury Naughty and Nice Magic Box, $295, charlottetilbury.com/au 13. Yves Saint Laurent Pop Water Full Metal Eye Shadow in Dewy Gold, $49, mecca.com.au.

14. Victoria Beckham Estee Lauder Eye Metals in Blonde Gold and Bitter Clove, $68, davidjones.com.au

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15. D’Lumiere Esthetique by Dr Daniel Lanzer Deep Purifying Cleanser, $70, dlumiere.com.au

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SUITE HOME 122

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T

Clever design principles and mixand-match décor tame the volume of this 62nd-floor apartment by suggesting boundaries and ‘living pockets’ while preserving the expansive feel lent by a vast bird’seye view of Melbourne. Interior designer Dana Goldberg explains how to combine a hotel vibe with the creature comforts of home.

he owners of this 62nd floor apartment overlooking Melbourne’s CBD wanted a hotel feel with the warmth and functionality of a permanent home – as apt for entertaining guests as fostering family harmony and interaction. “The owners wanted to personalise the space while introducing a hotel-style sophistication to their new home,” says interior designer Dana Goldberg, director of Melbourne design practice Nido Studio Interior Design.

The dual imperatives depict an increasingly common balancing act by designers seeking to reconcile contemporary living with more primal needs for a sense of safety, warmth and nurturing. “It’s about refocusing vastness to create intimacy,” says Goldberg, labelling their strategy ‘expansion-contraction-expansion’.

“With soaring ceilings, a vast floor plan and dominating drop-dead city outlook, our challenge was to instil human scale proportions,” says Goldberg. This was achieved by creating pockets within the large living/ dining space without actually using solid walls, Goldberg says. Different furniture and rugs were used to ‘insulate’ areas used primarily for dining, main living, informal living/rumpus/ kids’ chill-out area. “Our approach was not to compete with the view or try and block it. We opted instead to riff on modernist principles of enduring site-responsive design and ensure that our design complements the view and vice versa,” she says of the 500-square-metre space that at once feels larger and smaller than its dimensions. New and unexpected areas were introduced such as the customdesigned curved window bench seat – perfect for taking in an evening cocktail with friends but otherwise unassuming and amenable to enabling alternative uses of the space. “Our design also responds to how people might use the space through different times of the day, through changing seasons and functions.

We created varied spaces to harness natural light and enjoy the view through the day: to the west a custom-built curved bench seat hugs the curve of the wall, defining the living room to suggest a sense of enclosure while doubling as a perfect spot to have a sunset aperitif with friends; while to the south a more introspective layout in the master bedroom creates the perfect retreat,” Goldberg says.

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To create the “living pockets”, careful fabric selections for sofas and armchair upholstery, throws, cushions, rugs and table and floor lamps were used to create a sense of containment without formal boundaries.

How do you reconcile the trend towards open, flexible design with warmth and containment or ‘tame volumes’, as you describe it?

Open space living doesn’t necessarily mean a cold space because it is not a room that is contained within four solid walls; it can still feel warm and welcoming, which can be achieved by space planning, use of furniture, lighting, rugs and accessories. Conversely, our clients who live in period homes often end up extending and expanding their entertaining and living spaces in order to create open living areas.

We used a mix of warm and blond timbers – for the custom joinery and loose furniture – as well as an array of textiles for the upholstery, rugs, throws and scatter cushions. The idea was to create a richness of materials with layers of textures rather than one flat finish.

The bedrooms were part of the ‘hotel feel’ brief and had to have the similar treatment but more inward-looking: airy, tranquil, warm, inviting and private.

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What need were you meeting when you decided on a flexible floor plan and mixand-match palette?

Our clients entertain a lot and often have guests staying from overseas, so the space had to be flexible in order to allow for everyday family living as well as absorb extra guests when they come to visit. All armchairs had been upholstered in a fabric that can suit the different living spaces as well as the bedroom.

Side tables and coffee tables were finished in warm timbers and can also be moved around as needed. The same goes for floor and table lamps.

Each space had the flexibility of merging or changing its purpose without creating solid boundaries.

How do humanistic imperatives inform your design practice?

Our practice philosophy for design forgoes fashion or trend – opting instead for enduring design that lasts for generations. Our view is that interior design is not a means unto itself but a beginning: a home comes to its own over time.

We see our role as less prescriptive but more transformative: we provide a stage for the architectural intent to be celebrated, for the context to inform and inspire, and for the inhabitants to be agents of change within their home. We create a foundation that will enhance our clients’ lives.

focus on

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[ DISCOVERY ]

A Million

Miles Away

From a spa hotel in France’s woodlands to a luxe wellness resort framed by postcard vistas on Italy’s largest lake, these regional European sojourns will make you feel a million miles from the madding pace of modern life.

WORDS: RAYMOND VIOLA

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LA CLAIRIÈRE, FRANCE $$$: Indulge = $2,465pp twin share for 7 nights After the hustle of modern life comes the desire to destress, luxuriate and breathe in the freshness of nature. The La Clairière Bio & Spa Hotel, nestled in the woodlands of northern France, sets the pace to satisfy such desires. Let the cool forest breeze of Vosges du Nord fill your lungs as you practise your morning yoga and Pranayama in the midst of the lush surrounds.

Further relaxation takes place at the spa, where you can get massages after massages or alternate immersions in the heated hydrotherapy pool, steam bath, sauna and swimming pool. This verdant getaway is green at its core, using

renewable energy to power 100 per cent of its electricity and utilising eco-friendly products and locally sourced organic ingredients for your accommodation and dining experience.

What’s included: Seven nights’ accommodation, full board, an initial wellness consultation, a wellness program, unlimited access to the spa with heated outdoor hydrotherapy pool, steam baths, saunas, whirlpool, gym and indoor swimming pool and attendance to group classes including yoga, Pranayama, qi gong and a beginner’s meditation course.

La Clairière, France

Sun Gardens Dubrovnik, Croatia SUN GARDENS DUBROVNIK, CROATIA $$: Indulge Lite = $1,320pp twin share for 7 nights

Discover more hidden European treasures at healthandfitnesstravel. com.au

If you’re looking for a wellness escape that checks all the boxes, Sun Gardens Dubrovnik might just be the retreat for you. You’ll be spoilt for choice with the variety of activities, from exhilarating land and water sports to the more grounding yoga, meditation and tai chi – it offers something for everyone.

The spa experience is not one to be missed.

It’s the first of its kind in Croatia, based around a holistic healing approach that uses all-natural ingredients in all of its treatments. With everything this wellness

sanctuary has to offer, it would be tempting not to leave, but opportunities to explore Dubrovnik await with available tours to take you to the historic old town and other nearby adventures.

What’s included: Seven nights’ accommodation, daily breakfast, a wellness program, daily access to the spa and sports centre and attendance to group classes including tai chi, aquarobics, yogilates, wall climbing, Pilates, stretching, tennis tournament, and 5-a-side football.

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GRAYSHOTT SPA, UK $$$: Indulge = $2,690pp twin share for 7 nights There’s nothing like being coddled in a proper Victorian manor to make you feel like a lady. If Downton Abbey had a wellness du jour, it would probably look something like this. But don’t let its old-world flair fool you – this quaint health farm runs with all the mod cons of today’s spa destinations complete with a bespoke health program to clear your wellbeing woes away. The markings on a stone above the entrance perfectly describe the full experience, ‘Pax intrantibus, salus exeuntibus’, a Latin phrase that translates to, ‘Peace to those who enter, good health to those who leave.’ Rightfully so, the entire estate radiates an exceptionally tranquil ambiance, ideal for anyone clamoring for some ‘me time’ and a bit of peace and quiet.

What’s included: Seven nights’ accommodation, full board, return private transfers, a wellnesss program, spa treatments, access to spa, gym, swimming pool, and tennis courts and complementary attendance to group classes including power walks, circuit training, yoga, Pilates and tai chi.

The Malvern Spa, UK THE MALVERN SPA, UK $$$: Indulge = $1,355pp twin share for 3 nights Spa culture is nothing new to The Malvern as it stands on the historically eminent spa town of Worcestershire, where natural mineral water springs flow abundantly. Sensibly the go-to destination for those looking for some serious pampering, this posh resort boasts an extensive spa menu that incorporates the use of the Malvern spring water for hydrotherapy and various facilities like the salt grotto and herb sauna. If you’re not one to sit all day donned in fresh white robes, there are plenty of activities to keep you occupied. Up to 50 classes are hosted in their exercise studio per week, including aerobics, spinning, Bodypump, Pilates, and yoga.

What’s included: Three nights’ accommodation, full board, wellness consultations, personal training sessions, spa treatments of choice, access to the wellness centre and fitness facilities and complementary attendance to group classes including Bodypump, Zumba, circuit training, yoga, Pilates and more.

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Grayshott Spa, UK

A million miles away

MARBELLA CLUB, SPAIN $$$$: Splurge = $3,780pp twin share for 7 nights With Marbella Club’s aristocratic origins, you cannot help but feel like royalty while staying at this Mediterranean hideaway. Marbella’s wellness philosophy hinges on our deep connection with nature, so embrace the life of sun, sand and sea as you recharge your batteries in the lap of luxury. You wake up every day with the uplifting sounds of crashing waves and birds chirping in the background and a well-balanced breakfast that simply puts a spring back to your step.

It’s a rhapsody for the senses, and that’s just the beginning of it. Marbella Club also boasts a comprehensive selection of health programs that provide solutions for stress, insomnia, detox and fitness.

What’s included: Seven nights’ stay in a private villa, daily breakfast, a wellness program, complementary attendance to group classes, a variety of thalasso-inspired spa treatments and unlimited access to the thalasso pool.

Marbella Club, Spain

LEFAY RESORT AND SPA, ITALY $$$$: Splurge = $3,385pp twin share for 5 nights

Lefay Resort and Spa, Italy

Surrounded by towering mountains and Italy’s largest lake, Lake Garda, Lefay is the kind of place that no matter where you look, there’s a postcard-worthy vista to take your breath away. But more than just a destination of immense beauty, Lefay offers an experience that takes your whole wellbeing at heart. Its concept of ‘new luxury’, combining a focus on space, nature, silence and service, makes this resort stand out. You will feel as though you are in your own wellness bubble with attentive staff to cater to your every need. Pamper options in the midst of a therapeutic garden are at your disposal, as well as a relaxing saline bath where you can float weightlessly under a softly lit moonlike sculpture.

What’s included: Five nights’ accommodation, full board, an initial wellness consultation, a wellness program, access to the spa and complementary attendance to group classes including qi gong, meridian stretching, tai qi, yoga, aqua gym, abs, Pilates, circuit training.

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NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE WORD ITSELF SAYS ‘I’M POSSIBLE’!

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Book any 5+ Night Wellness Packages at Amatara Wellness Retreat and your flight to Phuket from Australia is complimentary* TERMS AND CONDITIONS: Redemption value up to THB 20,000 or approx. $750 AUD and applies only for one round trip per booking, not combinable with other offers. Book and stay by 25th December 2017.

Health and Fitness Travel www.healthandfitnesstravel.com.au T: 1300 551 353 E: info@healthandfitnesstravel.com.au

SHOT ON IRISH EXPERIENCE • DAY 7 E^Zkg HhgZ`a l g^mme^ i^lmh k^\bi^

Find the flavours of the Wild Atlantic Way with the O’Briens.

2018 EARLYBIRDS ON SALE NOW Call 1800 002 007 See your travel agent LEARN MORE AT trafalgar.com/muse *Conditions apply. For full details, please visit trafalgar.com – TT 186150965