Your body

Put a hand just below your ribs and let it move. Most of us breathe up in the chest, and the settling effect comes from lower down, where the diaphragm can actually shift.

You can check this lying down with a book on your stomach. If the book rises, the breath is going where you want it. If only your shoulders move, it…

Hot yoga asks you to keep drinking all the way through the class. If forgetting to eat and drink is one of your regular problems, choose a different room.

This is not about the style being bad. It is about matching what you choose to the things you genuinely find hard. Dehydration creeps up quietly and…

There is no breath that calms everyone. The one that settles your friend may leave you worse, and that is information about your body rather than a failure in you.

Labels like calming or energising are a rough guide at best. What actually happens depends on how you usually breathe, what your body has been…

Start with a count of four in and four out, then drop the count. Once the rhythm is there your body will choose its own length: six and six, eight and eight, whatever settles you.

The count is scaffolding. Holding onto it too long turns the practice into something you can pass or fail, which is the opposite of the point.…

Rather than pulling in a big breath, breathe gently and slightly less than you want to, then wait. The deep breath that arrives by itself does more than the one you force.

Keep the breathing light and unhurried, and after a while a mild hunger for air builds. Let it build a little. At some point the body takes a fuller…

Holding your breath for a moment makes the next one deeper, which sounds backwards until you know why. The urge to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide, not by a shortage of air.

Sensors in the brainstem watch the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, and a pause, especially after breathing out, lets it rise a little. The…

The three ordinary breaths between rounds are not a gap in the practice. They are where you find out what the practice did.

Come back to normal breathing and check the body, the thoughts, the mood, the energy. Do not analyse it, just register it. Going round after round…

To find the soft ocean sounding breath, breathe out through your mouth as if fogging up a mirror. Then keep that same slight narrowing at the throat with your mouth closed, and let the sound get quieter and quieter.

Starting with the mirror gives you something to do instead of an anatomy lesson about a part of the throat you cannot see. Once the mouth closes, the…

Close your right nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left. Swap fingers at the top, breathe out through the right, in through the right, then out through the left. That is one round.

The fiddliness is not a flaw in the design. Keeping track of which nostril and which stage takes up just enough of your mind that there is little…

Where ADHD and disordered eating meet, the pattern is more often bingeing, or bingeing and purging, than strict restriction. Restriction tends to travel with over-control, while bingeing travels with impulse and reward seeking.

This matters because the questions asked at assessment are usually the restriction ones, so a binge pattern can sit unnoticed for years. If you…

Most claims about food and behaviour rest on weak studies. The ones worth taking seriously give each person both the real thing and a dummy at different times, with nobody knowing which is which, so that hope and expectation cannot do the work.

The food colouring trials are the standard example. Around 150 children each received drinks containing a preservative plus one of two dye mixes, or…

The same brand of sweets is often made with plant based colours in one country and artificial ones in another. If a company can make it without the dyes elsewhere, the dyes are not essential to the food.

Nine artificial colours are approved in the US, and the volume approved for use rose roughly fivefold between 1950 and 2012. One of them, Red No. 3,…

Skin prick and IgE blood tests find real allergies. The IgG food sensitivity panels sold direct to families have not been shown to measure sensitivity at all, and they tend to come back with a long list of foods to avoid.

IgG antibodies mostly show that you have eaten something, not that it harms you, which is why the results look alarming and change so little when…

A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.

One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…

The studies linking pesticide levels to ADHD are tangled up with income, since families least able to buy organic differ in plenty of other ways too. If organic food is affordable for you, fine. If it is not, you are not failing your child.

In one study of 1,140 children, 94% had detectable pesticide in their urine, and ADHD was about twice as common among those with higher…

Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.

If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…

Put an actual number on it: how many coffees, teas, energy drinks and colas in a normal day. Without that number, your sleep problems, your anxiety and how well a medication is working are all being read against an unknown.

People underestimate this, partly because it feels embarrassing and partly because a large takeaway cup is often two or three servings. Count across…

Stimulants sharpen focus in almost anyone, so responding well to one does not confirm you have ADHD. The diagnosis comes from your history and how you function, not from a trial of tablets.

This cuts both ways. Someone can be handed a diagnosis on the strength of a good response, and someone else can be doubted because their response was…

Food and movement are powerful, and hardly anyone keeps them up as prescribed. So the question is not what works best on paper. It is what you will still be doing in six weeks.

Roughly a third of people follow a prescription exactly as it is written, and keeping to a diet or an activity plan goes worse than that. Which means…

Pick one small change and leave the rest alone. A full overhaul asks the most of you at the point when you have the least to give, and it usually collapses in the second week.

One change, small enough to be almost boring, kept for a month. Then another. It feels slow while you are in it, and it is the version that tends to…

Working out what you have comes before choosing what to take. The right remedy for the wrong condition is still the wrong remedy, however good the remedy happens to be.

The health food shop route usually starts with a self diagnosis, and that first step is the one worth slowing down. St John's wort will do nothing…

Supplements are regulated as food rather than as medicine. Nobody checks strength or purity before a product goes on sale, and the main rule is that the packet cannot claim to treat a disease.

Most people assume the opposite, that anything on a pharmacy shelf has been through some kind of approval. Regulators here generally act only once a…

When researchers ran DNA testing on 13 herbal products, only 2 contained the plant on the label. Three had none of it at all, and several were padded out with rice, soy or wheat that nobody had declared.

The obvious problem is paying for something you did not get. The quieter problem is the undeclared filler, which matters a great deal if you avoid…

A second study, this time of 44 products, found only about half were authentic. Roughly six in ten were mislabelled, three in ten contained a substituted ingredient, and one in five held contaminants or fillers.

One study of this kind is a story about some bad batches. Two independent studies finding the same thing is a description of how the market works.…

If you are going to buy supplements, look for an independent verification mark: USP Verified, NSF, or a product tested by ConsumerLab. It is the nearest thing available to the check that regulators do not carry out.

Those schemes test identity, strength, purity and how a product was made, and manufacturers pay to take part voluntarily. There are different tiers,…

St John's wort can cut the effectiveness of the contraceptive pill by around a third. If you take both, that is worth knowing today rather than finding out later.

It speeds up the way the liver clears certain drugs, so the pill is not the only thing affected. Warfarin, some HIV medicines, ciclosporin and a…

Several herbal products change how fast the liver processes medication, which can leave a prescribed drug either weaker or stronger without a single change to the dose.

This is often why a supplement looks like it caused a relapse or a sudden run of side effects. Nothing about the prescription changed, so the pattern…

Two to be careful with in particular. Yohimbe reliably ramps anxiety up, so much so that it has been used in research to bring panic on, and kava is a sedative that stacks with alcohol and with sedating medication and has damaged livers at higher doses.

Kava has been restricted or banned in several countries over liver harm, which tells you how seriously that risk is taken. Yohimbe is a poor choice…

You cannot patent a plant, so there is little commercial reason to fund expensive trials of one. When you read that a herb has no evidence, that often means nobody paid to look rather than that somebody looked and found nothing.

Both halves of that need saying. No evidence is not proof of no effect, and it is also not permission to assume one. It leaves you with an open…

Some of these do have real evidence behind them. St John's wort has repeated support in mild to moderate depression, SAMe and methylfolate have reasonable backing as additions to treatment, and omega-3 has looked weaker in the larger and better run trials.

That last part is worth sitting with, because it is what usually happens. An early promising effect shrinks as trials get bigger and better…

If you want to use herbal remedies, two things carry most of the risk. Make sure whoever prescribes for you knows what you are taking, and buy from a source that has been independently tested.

That is a short list on purpose. Nearly all the harm in this area comes from an interaction nobody knew about or a product that was not what it…

Herbal products are rarely covered by insurance and they add up quickly. That cost belongs in the decision, particularly when you cannot be sure the capsule holds what it says.

Money spent here is money not spent elsewhere, and often the alternative is a treatment that is covered and has been tested. Nobody is telling you…

What you feel does not stay in your head. Emotional states register in the body's immune signalling too, which is one reason a long stretch of unspoken distress can leave you physically run down.

This is not a claim that you can think yourself well or ill. It is closer to saying the body keeps a tally. If you have been carrying something heavy…

Water, sleep, food and digestion are not the boring preamble to the real work. When those are running badly, everything else you try has less to work with.

It can feel almost insulting to be asked about breakfast when what you carry is so much bigger than breakfast. But a body short of sleep and short of…

Health advice usually assumes a kitchen, a fridge and money for the week. If you are working with less than that, the answer is not to try harder at the advice. It is to shrink the plan until it fits what you actually have.

A plan you cannot keep does more than fail. It quietly adds to the pile of evidence that nothing you do makes any difference, and that pile is heavy…

A physical symptom is not a free floating fact. Read it next to what your life has actually held, the early parts included, and it often makes more sense than it does on its own.

This works in both directions. It stops you treating a body complaint as something random that landed on you, and it stops you treating it as a…

Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.

People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…

Months of fog, where thinking feels like wading, is a real complaint and deserves looking into rather than waving away. It usually has more than one cause, which is part of why it gets dismissed.

Fog sits where several things overlap: dissociation, anxiety, poor sleep, thyroid and iron problems, infections, medication. Because it belongs…

There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.

If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing…

Thirst, hunger, the ache of having sat too long: these are not nagging, they are instructions. When self-care keeps failing, it is often because the instruction never arrived.

People who have been through a lot sometimes stop registering the signal at all, and then eating, sleeping and resting all go sideways. If that is…