Do you feel a bit 'off' about work? A bit 'off’ about yourself? Perhaps - on paper - you seem successful enough, but you don’t feel successful? Are you chasing goals but, when you get there, you do not feel any better? Well, if this is you - and we think it’s a lot of us - then this week’s guest is just the tonic. Writer Emma Gannon became the poster girl for hustle culture when she released her bestselling business book The Multi-Hyphen Method. But things were not all they seemed: she was...

Our guest this week is a campaigner, a warrior, an author, a one-woman dancing dynamo. Her mission? To free us from the shame that surrounds us: Body shame, sexual shame, you name, it we’ve been ashamed of it. You know her on Instagram as the sensational Style Me Sunday, and we talk to Natalie about all the big changes she made when she was at a emotional dead end, the heartbreak of friendship ruptures and the evil of WhatsApp. PS: This podcast was bravely brought to you by Symprove. Get your...

We often talk about triggers, don’t we? The tiny stabs that strike at the heart of a regret or a fear or a grief or a resentment. Sometimes we can pivot from merry to murderous in a nano-second and we are left angry and or sad but unable to identify the trigger that sent us there. It is, we think, why so many of us feel so irritable so much of the time. We stumbled, the other day, on the concept of glimmers. And even the idea of glimmers is gently soul-warming. Glimmers are the exact opposite...

Why are we all obsessed with dresses? SEPARATES scream the fashion pages. SUITS they howl. But the thing about dresses is - there’s only one thing to decide on in the morning. And once that decision is made then boots and belts and shoes and earrings are just fun and games. Considering we lean so hard on dresses, we are thrilled to have the dress queen on the podcast today: the authority, the grand fromage of frocks. Isabel Spearman styled fashion luminaries and worked for big, beautiful...

Are you feeling a bit lost? A bit broken? A bit bored? Do you feel stuck? Trapped? Disconnected from any sense of joy? Do you yearn for change but feel terrified of it at the same time? Could you possibly be experiencing a midlife crisis? The midlife crisis gets a bad rap. It’s become a much-maligned term but that doesn’t make it any less real or any less painful. But maybe this identity storm is not a disaster…maybe it’s an opportunity? This is what psychologist Dr Julie Hannan, author of...

We recently received an email from someone who apologised for her delayed reply: she had ‘disappeared into the things’. HARD RELATE. We are constantly in danger of disappearing into the things: the sadness, the panic, the phone. So in this episode we talk about the strange things that are happening with our sense of self at the moment… plus all the mini identity shifts that send us from Diary Of An Edwardian Lady Lady (‘Gosh, is that a Golden Crested Bum Puncher?) to Bleeding Heart to Hard...

Who doesn’t love a solution story: the tale of a grown-up woman who had a problem and thought ‘You know what? I am not going to wait for some f****r to fix this – I am just going to do it myself’. This is true of today's guest. Joanna Jensen suffered from eczema as a child and, when her own children were born with the same condition, she decided ‘enough is enough’. In 2010 she created Child’s Farm from her kitchen table and, by the end of the decade, it was the UK’s number one baby and child...

Last night we slept so badly that Annabel put hairspray under her arms and Emilie put her contact lenses in twice. This week the podcast is dedicated to the recognition that so many of us are so exhausted. How many times - today - have you thought ‘I am so tired’? Did you wake up thinking, ‘I am so tired’? Did you spend ten minutes sitting on the side of the bed, wrapped in a towel, staring at the wall, thinking, ‘How am I going to manage?’ Did you think, just as you woke up, ‘I can’t wait to...

Are you being rude? Do you even know any more? Do you even care? This week on the podcast we discuss when it’s acceptable to ignore people (airports, for a start); what to do when you forget someone’s name for the millionth time; the question you should never ask and whether diary invitations are helpful or just annoying. And, now that it’s March and the sun’s a little bit out, our wardrobes feel very unfresh. So we wonder about all the dangerous clothes we‘re hankering after… We used to be...

Regular listeners will know that we often slip ’the patriarchy’ into the conversation around what holds us back. From diet culture keeping us hungry while feeding our self-loathing; to medical misogyny. So it’s a privilege really to have entrepreneur Sahar Hashemi on the podcast this week. Sahar has smashed through many a ceiling and is still busy opening lots of doors for women: she founded Coffee Republic - three years before Starbucks landed on our shores; for the past couple of years,...

All those years trying to fit in. The energy wasted wondering if we were loveable enough. The box ticking: professional, ambitious, presentable. And yet here we find ourselves, at the sharp end of 2023, weirder than ever before. So, we did some…research, and it turns out you lot are up to all sorts of micro-weirdnesses. Maybe it’s time to unleash your inner weirdo on the world. She is bursting to be set free. We talk about the support groups we need: one for those who’ve been asked to ‘say a...

So…January. Only 2000 years of it left. Just a joy of a month isn’t? Everyone is feeling fantastic, right? Well if, like us, you are wading through quicksand, then this is the episode for you. This week’s guest is a happiness teacher. At UCLA. To MBAs. Professor Cassie Holmes is an award-winning academic and social psychologist, who, nearly defeated by the grind, decided to learn how to have a more fulfilling existence. And - spoiler alert - it’s mostly about how we manage our time. Happily,...

Not to be dramatic but it’s nearly f*****g Christmas...Anyone else feeling exhausted/deranged/burnt-out? We thought we’d share some of the best advice (and weirdest) we’ve received from you guys, from ‘Nothing good comes from a drink you have set on fire’ to ’Never trust a man called Tim’. We talk about all the modes we might slip into during the perineum of the year, from Goblin Mode to Donkey Mode. And how we would decorate the perfect Midult Christmas tree: a tiny vortex to scream into and...

So buckle up for the best kind of Christmas chaos…with our friends and yours, The Scummy Mummies. Helen talks about navigating the single life while Ellie owns up to a Christmas loo brush (is it acceptable to clean it in the dishwasher?) and a hefty midlife crisis purchase. And here’s the burning Midult question this Christmas: Bublé or Tucci? Only a few more breakdowns ‘til Christmas guys... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you feel as though you are about to explode with ALL THE THINGS? Ageing parents, health, money, a social life, trying to stay hydrated, sober and sane, and sleep for more than 45 minutes? Well someone else who understands the ferocity of the rush hour of life is novelist Fran Littlewood – she’s here with us today to talk about her brilliant book Amazing Grace Adams; the story of a perimenopausal woman going on a rampage. It’s a raging read, out in January and it’s already been optioned by...

Everything in the world is making us want to retreat to our beds with a book right now. But what to read? Enter our guest this week, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is a writer of naughty books and heartwarming books and books that can help us to look at ourselves with more generosity – from her hot novel Insatiable to the most recent Careering. She also has a mini-book out with The Pound Project called Burn Before Reading which is full of books to hold on to when you are in the emotional quicksand. We...

Bay Garnett is the woman who turned second hand into vintage. She is the person to talk to right now, when money is tight, fashion feels oppressive and we want to stop contributing to the fast fashion phenomenon that just feeds our greed for new…more…now. In this episode, the Queen Of Thrift talks to us about how to plug into the thrift circuit, how shopping can also be activism and why secondhand clothes can help us tell our own style stories. Rather than the ones that are just…sold to...

We all kind of agree that (despite the amazing skin elasticity and ability to metabolise alcohol) our 20s were the f*****g trenches. So here we are in our 30s, 40s, 50s trying to decide which bits of our personalities to hold on to and which bits to let go of. Who to be, basically. Well maybe we could start with who we’d like to be in a very micro way. This week we start a campaign to be the people who…. organise 6:30pm dinners and no longer compliment people on losing weight. Tiny steps to...

If you are anything like us, you will have been driven half mad tracking the chaos - the sheer wildness - of the last few months in politics. So have we got a treat for you. This week our guest is the sensational Hugo Rifkind, Times star columnist and radio presenter - his Saturday morning show on Times Radio is a must-listen. He unpacks his red box of weirdness for us as we talk about the maddest things that have happened in this Autumn term of politics. Given we are in fast moving times,...

Here we all are, wrestling with the shifting sands of our identity. Who are we? What are we doing? Is this what we wanted? And alongside these panickings, there are times when our physical selves change and challenge us in ways that can make us feel desperate. Today’s guest opened the floodgates for people to take about their experience of hair loss when she started documenting her own situation. And the solutions she sought. Because Jo Jones is a woman of action – she co-founded Beauty...

Do you have a happy vagina? Do you even know what would make it happy? Content? Perhaps equal pay and a health industry that prioritises its well-being? This is why activist and advocate Mika Simmons wrote her book, The Happy Vagina, to empower us to talk openly about health, relationships and pleasure. In this episode we talk to her about why vulvas need a rebrand, medical gaslighting, the stupid term ‘hysteria’ and get a bit f*****g furious and a tiny bit hopeful.  Learn more about your ad...

So last week we posted a Gemma Collins meme about those motivational slogans - printed and framed - that are somehow too much to bear. You lot shared all of your love-to-hate motivational sayings and now we’ve done a podcast about it. As well as Emilie’s most recent undignified moment, how late-onset rudeness has crept on us and why you should never EVER look in a lift mirror. Also we chat to the fabulous founder of Blink Brow Bar, Vanita Parti, about why brows are everything... PS: This...

Are you scared of mascara? Bruised by blusher? Disconcerted by dark circles? Do you want to look like you know what you’re doing with makeup? Or maybe you’ve set the bar lower, and you just want to look a little less corpse-like as Winter beds in. This week we called in our friend and general sensation, Nadine Baggott, to talk all things make up. Because Nadine – who seamlessly transitioned from veteran health and beauty journalist to YouTuber with 23 million views - is a proper expert. We...

Most of us live in a constant state of despair around how to get dressed. Office clothes now feel like fancy dress. Trying to look a little bit swishy for a night out feels like a Sisyphian struggle. We want to look together but casual at the weekends but mostly we look like pile of old laundry. So the question is: how to look relevant and comfortable - and even a little bit dangerous - when you’ve slightly lost your way? This week we’ve brought in some heavy hitters. Ex-Vogue fashion editors...