THE RULES OF LIVING WELL

I’d always planned to put together the Rules I’d collected about health into a book. I’m not quite sure why it didn’t happen earlier. My publisher and I had a lot of conversations about the title – we worried that The Rules of Health would sound too focused on physical health, and we knew we wanted to include all the important Rules I’d observed over the years about emotional and mental health too. We came to the conclusion that The Rules of Living Well encapsulated what these Rules were all about – everything from relaxation and confidence to exercise.

As always, there’s nothing in the book about what you should eat or which exercises you should do. These Rules are ones that healthy people follow in terms of attitudes and mindsets. As well as sections on resilience and food, I also included sections on aspects of your life such as learning and retirement, in order to cover all the Rules I’d amassed about staying healthy in mind and body.

I ended up with ten sections altogether:

• •Balance
• •Confidence
• •Resilience
• •Exercise
• •Relaxation
• •Food
• •Learning
• •Parenthood
• •At work
• •Retirement
• •Challenge

The section on challenge is about how to survive crisis and trauma. Very few of us escape these during our whole lifetime, and the Rules I’d seen put into practice can make a huge difference to how you get through. No point knowing how to live well when times are good – that’s the easy bit. The Rules of Living Well needed to give some guidelines for coping when the going gets tough.

The highest number of votes here was for one of the Rules in this section: ‘Forgive and don’t forget’. It’s a useful Rule on an everyday level, but essential for your wellbeing if you’ve been through a devastating divorce, say, or an abusive childhood. It’s not easy, but it’s what you deserve. I know that once I’d seen it in action, and then learnt to adopt it for myself, I started to live a whole lot better.