The big idea: can writing make you healthier?

Research supports the benefits of ‘expressive writing’ – but what makes it so cathartic?

Susie Orbach: ‘Body uniformity is out of control – there’s no right way to have labia!’

The psychotherapist on body hatred, what’s changed since she wrote Fat Is a Feminist Issue – and the smell of her clients

Gareth Thomas: ‘I will be a voice for people with HIV. I won’t be derailed’

He was one of Wales’s greatest rugby stars – and the game’s first professional player to come out as gay. But it’s the truth about HIV that Gareth Thomas is set on tackling now

The ‘missing personality type’: could you be a Highly Sensitive Person?

Are you moved to tears by the smallest thing? Do emotions overwhelm you? According to a new book, it may be that you are an HSP just like Nicole Kidman, Lorde and Miranda Hart. Rhik Samadder wonders if he qualifies as one, too

Leaving London was a wrench, but our family life back in Coventry has so much more to offer

Hayley Myers was worried about relocating back to her home city of Coventry after a decade in London, but she hasn’t looked back

A winter of the mind: how to escape survival mode

For many of us, it has been a cold and traumatic year. But, as one reader found, difficult times can lead to new and revolutionary ways of thinking

A trip to my mother’s native Sweden helped me recapture my childhood

It was a nostalgic journey to rediscover my family roots, but it was also great fun and reminded me how much I missed this beautiful land

My search for female gardeners’ life stories helped me combat loneliness – and make great friends

I was lonely after lockdown and wanted to know why women gardened so wrote to those I admired. Now I have a host of new friends from different generations and backgrounds

From short king spring to ‘short men are psychopaths’. When will the obsession with men’s height end?

A new study claims to have proved that the Napoleon complex is real – but it misses the bigger picture, says feature writer Simon Usborne

It takes all 53 of our senses to bring the drab external world to life

Sensory perception is a many-splendoured thing, and without it we’d have nothing, writes Ashley Ward