Chronic stress underlies a whole range of physical and mental health concerns, driving depression, anxiety, sleep problems, promoting weight gain and your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. It’s not just a psychological phenomenon but has serious effects on physical health and the actual structure of the brain so anything that can help you to manage stress and reduce your exposure to chronic stress is going to be beneficial. Meditation and mindfulness can be a really helpful to have in the toolbox of brain health. In this episode I talk to meditation teacher Ashley Hunt, who works across the world with individuals and corporations such as Twitter to introduce people to meditation and help them to find space for it in their lives. In this conversation we talk about how Ashley started to use meditation as a teenager and why it was completely useless, but how she later found ways create a mindfulness practice that worked for her, the link between stress and aging and the overlap between mindfulness and therapy.

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