Forgiveness isn’t just an act of the heart — it’s also, quite literally, medicine. That’s the finding of the largest forgiveness study ever conducted: published in 2024 in BMJ Public Health, it involved 4,598 people across six sites on four continents — Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ukraine (two locations), Colombia and South Africa — carried out…

On 11 August 1999 a shadow crossed Europe, from France all the way to Romania. It was the last total solar eclipse of the millennium: for a few minutes day turned to night, the birds fell silent, the air grew cold. Millions of people, faces turned upward, held their breath. And then, as promised, the…

Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely, weighing just over four pounds, and as a child she fell ill with almost everything: double pneumonia, scarlet fever and then polio, which paralysed her left leg. Doctors said she would probably never walk unaided, and for years she wore a metal brace. Yet by the age of twelve she…

On 9 August 1173, in Pisa, the first stone was laid for what was meant to be a perfect bell tower: tall, straight, proud. But beneath the site lay soft, sandy, water-logged clay, and within a few metres the tower had already begun to lean. A flaw, a fault in the ground the builders never…

We’ve been told over and over that it takes 21 days to build a habit. So when, on day twenty-two, the new good intention still isn’t automatic, we feel like failures and give up. But that number is a myth, and the truth is far kinder. In 2010, Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University…

We almost always come back from a walk among the trees a little lighter, our minds clearer. We put it down to chance or good mood, but behind that feeling there is a bodily response that science has learned to measure. In Japan they call it shinrin-yoku, “forest bathing.” In a series of experiments conducted…

There is a quiet paradox in relationships: the closer a person is to us, the more we tend to take them for granted. We stop saying thank you to the one who is always there, as if their presence were owed to us. And yet it is right there, in giving thanks, that one of…

“I don’t have time” is perhaps the most repeated phrase of our days. We say it in a rush, as both an excuse and a sentence. And yet, almost two thousand years ago, a Roman philosopher had already warned us that the problem, often, is not the amount of time, but how we use it.…

We think of food for our waistline or our heart, but rarely for our mood. And yet the brain is an organ like any other, and what we put on our plate is also the fuel it thinks and feels with. In recent years, science has begun to measure this link. The SMILES trial, published…

After a bad night everything weighs more: we get irritated over nothing, take everything personally, and struggle to see the good side of things. It’s not just a feeling: it’s the brain that, without rest, changes the way it feels emotions. In 2007, in the journal Current Biology, Seung-Schik Yoo, Matthew Walker and colleagues showed…

Many couple arguments don’t start with the problem itself, but with feeling unheard. We say “you don’t understand me” far more often than “I disagree.” And behind that need to be heard there is something measurable, which research has studied for decades. Psychologist John Gottman, after observing thousands of couples for over forty years, identified…

We admire people who seem “naturally gifted” — at music, at sport, at numbers — and often we quietly conclude that we simply don’t have the gift. It’s a convenient shortcut: if only talent counts, there’s no point even trying. But research tells a different, far more encouraging story. In 1993, psychologist Anders Ericsson, together…

There are days when stress walks through the front door before we do: a deadline, a phone call gone wrong, tiredness piling up. And it is often the person we love who receives our tension, through no fault of their own. A sharper tone, a distracted reply, our mind already somewhere else while they are…