Mindfulness is said to help everything from anxiety to overeating. But how does it work? Experts separate fact from fiction

FALSE “Mindfulness is the opposite of ‘emptying the mind’; it is fully immersing the mind in precisely what you are doing,” says neuroscientist TJ Power. “If you were eating a banana mindfully, 100% of your awareness would be focused on the taste and experience.”

Neoprene is made from toxic chemicals, hard to recycle and, with 400,000 tonnes made a year, a growing problem. So can surfers and swimmers find green wetsuits?

I have been hesitating for months. The wetsuit I swim in every week to keep me toasty warm in the winter and safe from jellyfish stings in the summer is riddled with holes. Yet I can’t bring myself to buy a new one because I’ve learned that comfortable, flexible and insulating neoprene is manufactured using some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

Neoprene, a synthetic foamed rubber, is made from the petrochemical compound chloroprene. Exposure to chloroprene emissions, produced during the manufacturing process, may increase the risk of cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

After escaping the deadly attack at the Manchester Arena with my son, I suffered with survivors’ guilt. So I decided to do something positive to help

The first time the Manchester Survivors Choir sang together – eight months on from the arena bombing in 2017 - it was very emotional. I remember thinking how beautiful we sounded. About 18 of us had come together at a church in the city to sing together – all of us had been impacted by the bombing. It felt very special, as though we were all connected. We were a varied group – there were people like me who had been there on the night and had tried (and failed) to get back on with normal life. Others had been injured or lost loved ones. Singing together felt a bit like mindfulness, something to focus on. It gave us all an opportunity to meet other people and feel as if we were doing something positive.

On 22 May 2017, I had taken my then 10-year-old son Jake to see Ariana Grande. It was his first concert, and it was fantastic. I didn’t hear the bomb go off – the suicide bomber detonated it in the main foyer area, and we were leaving by a different exit. I realised something was wrong when people started screaming and running. Even then, my mind didn’t go to a terrorist attack; people were saying maybe a speaker had exploded.

Sarah Thornton had dismissed them as ‘dumb boobs’ until a double mastectomy changed everything. Her new book, Tits Up, explores what our beliefs about breasts mean – from feeding babies to bra design and Baywatch

Throughout her life, Sarah Thornton hadn’t given much thought to her breasts. They were there, of course, and they’d fed two children. But they had also attracted unwanted attention, and latterly they’d become a source of concern – with a history of breast cancer in her family, and after years of vigilance and tests, in 2018 Thornton was about to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Preparing for the operation, she realised she still hadn’t given them much consideration, nor what it would be like to have “new” breasts in the form of implants. When they turned out to be bigger than expected, she was shocked, “but in the end,” she says, “it wasn’t the aesthetic form as much as the feeling. It was like losing sentience. And it put me on a quest to understand these things that I’d never thought too much about. These things I’d kind of dismissed as dumb boobs.”

Thornton’s new book, Tits Up: What Our Beliefs About Breasts Reveal About Life, Love, Sex and Society, is a deep dive into the bosom of our fixation with boobs. Writing the book, she says, has transformed how she views her own breasts. “I really did go from dismissing them as a kind of shallow accessory, to thinking of them as a really important body part – one we wouldn’t have a human species without,” she says. “Our top halves have been invaded by male supremacy and I did not realise how deeply patriarchal even my own view of breasts was. I was dismissing them as dumb boobs, partly because they’re positioned primarily in culture as erotic playthings and I didn’t want to just be an erotic plaything.”