Meet Gen-Z's favourite manifestation guru

Roxie Nafousi went from party girl to bestselling author and life coach. Alexandra Jones finds out how she turned her life around

F FROM the ages of 23 to 27, I couldn't tell you what I did, other than take drugs and party." Author and development coach Roxie Nafousi is reflecting on how her life has transformed in just a few years. "I hit my lowest point at about 28. I'd just completed a month-long yoga teacher training in Thailand, thinking that it would be the thing to save me." Within 24 hours of being back in London, though, the one-time girlfriend of Damien Hirst was taking cocaine again. "I went on a two-day bender and when I woke up from that, I just thought, 'Oh god, I'm never going to change. There's no hope for me.""

It was a friend who recommended that she listen to a podcast about manifestation - and it felt like a lightbulb moment. "It just really resonated," she tells me with a small shrug. "And the rest is kind of history." We are sitting in Riding House Cafe one blustery December lunchtime. In person Nafousi, now 32, couldn't be further from the desperate and drug-addled party girl she's describing - she has a warm, calming demeanour and is immaculately turned out, fresh-faced and elegantly dressed in muted tones. Her 27-year-old self would scarcely believe it.

She is compassionate to herself about that period, she says. "I struggled for years with self-doubt, self-loathing and I used alcohol and drugs to numb out those feelings." She was living in a flat in South Kensington that her father - a wealthy businessman - owned. She didn't have a job. "I just had no purpose.

I became addicted to cocaine really quickly. It's really very hard to stop in a city like London because there's always someone worse than you and there were a lot of people telling me I wasn't an addict, like 'Oh, you're fine!' But people don't want to admit you've got a problem, because then they might have to admit they've got one. Manifesting saved me," she says.