We need pain. It seems contradictory to say it, particularly now that we have so many ways of dealing with it and switching it off. Pain not only tells us something is wrong, it also protects us. If you slam the car door on your hand, it’s going to hurt. You will have damaged the soft tissue; all the muscles and [...]

“To the outside, it would look ugly,” chuckles Sarah Garner, an infectious disease specialist. “It’s yelling, screaming, pulling faces, sometimes clawing at my skin. Making jerky random movements. Lots of pummelling of [...]

I refuse to address the conundrum of what diet to deploy on your excess tum. It just seems so wrong, after all we’ve collectively been through, to embark on anything resembling self-denial. Instead, let’s focus on nutrition for exercise, as whatever’s happened, your routine has probably changed. Maybe you’ve [...]

The place looked like something out of an old horror film: all paint-chipped walls, dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight. I walked through a gate, up a flight of creaking steps, and knocked on the [...]

When was the last time you were really scared? You might think, that time I lost my child in a shopping centre, or the moment the doctor told me it was serious, or the night I was followed home from the bus stop, or as I was walking up to the stage to give my big [...]

The last time I played basketball was in mid-March. My teammates and I – I’ve played basketball every week with the same group of guys for over 10 years now – laughed about the coronavirus. We stopped shaking hands but we weren’t socially distanced. Some made “joke coughs” and there was a general feeling [...]

The coronavirus crisis is having a significant impact on children’s sleep, with anxiety and lack of routine causing serious disruption, experts and charities have [...]

Alan Dolan couldn’t afford market research when he started out as a breathing instructor in 2005. Instead, he took soundings from London taxi drivers. “I’d tell them I taught people to breathe for a living – they’d be in hysterics and say: ‘What a great scam!’” says Dolan. Recently their reaction has [...]

Once upon a time, smoking at your desk was practically a sign of productivity. I’m not suggesting you rush out and blow a week’s salary on a pack, but I am about to plot a path from the ashed keyboards of yesteryear to our current problem of being hopelessly distracted by [...]

The queues were “absolutely crazy”, says Gavin Hudson, the owner of the cycle repair startup Butternut Bikes. As lockdown descended he began fixing old bikes in the parking lot of a Methodist church in north London, before moving his services to a furloughed pub in Crouch End. However, the surge in demand for [...]