Hilary Rose on burnout: 'I got swept up into the work, into the programming of productivity'

With a successful TV career and family, on paper, Hilary Rose was living the dream. In reality, though, she was exhausted and on the cusp of burnout. She tells Gemma Fullam how she finally found solace in nature and was inspired to launch her hit podcast

Hilary Rose found solace in nature and going back to simple pleasures. Pictures: Miki Barlok

“Know thyself,” says actor and podcaster Hilary Rose, quoting the most famous of the three maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. “I really love that. I always come back to that.” If you thought of wellness, self-care, mindfulness and manifesting as very recent, very modern concepts and practices, well, you’d be mistaken. The ancients were early adopters of all of the aforementioned. And it wasn’t just the Greeks, the Romans were dab hands, too. 

“When you arise in the morning,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in his mindfulness masterwork, Meditations, “think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” That message of living in the now, the ability to find magic in the mundane, is today often forgotten as the relentless demands of modern life obscure the things that truly nourish us.