Arsenal manager’s wife shares unusual tips for finding true happiness – it’s not what you think

Life coach Lorena Bernal, who is married to Mikel Arteta, warns people not to chase happiness or they’ll always be unsatisfied – and what to do instead

The beauty queen who marries a footballer is something of a soccer cliche, but with Lorena Bernal, that’s where the resemblance to your classic WAG comes to a screaming halt. In fact, a conversation with Lorena, 44, a model, actress, life coach and spiritual coach, not to mention wife of Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, is constantly surprising.

She is intelligent (trilingual in Spanish, English and French), thoughtful and serious about her work of improving people’s sense of self-worth and helping them find, “peace, love and joy”. And now she’s distilled her philosophy and methods into her first book It Starts With You: How to Find Lasting Peace and Happiness.

But forget daily affirmations or working towards the elusive goal of finding “happiness”, Lorena wants us to focus on something else entirely: love. “I don’t mean how to love people but how to love everything – the places, smells, sensations and even challenges,” she says. “And of course, how to love and care for others and also to let yourself be loved and cared for.”

She adds that in order to love others, however, we must all learn to love ourselves. “It’s simple but also complicated and challenging,” she admits. These were lessons that Lorena, who was born in Argentina and grew up in San Sebastian, Spain, began to learn when she won a modelling competition at the age of seven.

READ MORE: ‘At my darkest moments I wanted to rip my own face off – but now I’ve found inner peace’

As a child she was passionate about “entertainment, modelling, acting, stage, cameras and lights” but Lorena’s other great interest was, “human beings and people. I was fascinated, I would observe, I would analyse people’s emotions. I would start crying and instead of feeling sad, I’d look at myself and see how I’d express the crying and sadness in my face,” she says.

She attended drama school when she was 11 and later won a San Sebastian beauty pageant, “The Most Beautiful Eyes of the North Coast”, which led her to enter the 1999 Miss Spain contest, which she won at just 17. Rather than going to university to study psychology as planned, she was whipped off to fulfill her Miss Spain duties, before strutting the catwalk and acting in shows such as CSI: Miami. Hollywood also beckoned.

“I started a professional career, being a celebrity, TV and acting,” she says. “I also had challenging moments, I was on my own at 17, exposed to huge fame, and this world of travelling and being alone in Los Angeles.” While the experience was overwhelmingly positive, Lorena says it was also lonely. “That journey wasn’t completely shared with my friends. I was modelling and acting, some of my friends sometimes didn’t have the tools to understand me and there was a bit of jealousy from others.

“I was quite mature for my age, and I developed a loneliness in my journey. I didn’t feel pain, I embraced it but I was by myself. Just able to get comfort from my family when I got to see them.” Yet she says, “I never took anything for granted. I never expected anything – I was happy with what I had and who I was. I was thankful to be here.”

It’s an attitude that she didn’t spot in abundance around her though. “I saw people with a lot of success who weren’t happy: athletes who were extremely successful but who weren’t happy, and people in Hollywood. I’d be surrounded by the people at the highest point you can achieve and they weren’t happy. I realised that happiness is not related to the success, money or fame that you have.”

Lorena started investigating more deeply. “The brain, neurology, spirituality, psychology – everything you could imagine. Energy healing. I would eat books!” What we need to have a “happy” life also started to become clear. “If we understand happiness as a goal to reach, we chase it. If we’re chasing something, we’re comparing everything, seeing things as being positive and negative.

“If our brain is wired to compare and want more all the time, it will never be satisfied. There will always be something we will find that’s better or bigger or more. It’s a chase that will never finish and we will only realise it in our last days when we look back and we feel that love is all that matters, ‘Oh my God, I wasted my life chasing ‘happiness’ instead of realising the happiness I had already in my life’.”

On the flipside, she stresses that we should try not to get too bound up in our fears and worries. “Our brain is wired to understand, remember, plan, keep us safe, worry and alert. It’s a black box with sensors – an intelligent computer. The problem is when you think you are your brain and it controls your life with negative thoughts.”

She’s also vocal about her spiritual beliefs. “We are mind, body and spirit and I believe and I know there is a spiritual world that is made of energy. We can’t sense it with the five senses that our brain is wired to but we can sense it with our heart and true being that there is more. We have the sensation inside of us. The source of that, I call it “Energy, God, Universe, Source¨- that’s the source of everything”.

If this is unexpected from a football manager’s wife, she says, “That’s not my individual world. That’s a world I witness because my husband works there. It’s an area I’m living in but I don’t individually belong there. I see it from a different perspective: the kids wanting to play football, and how for my children and kids in general that develops into a career.

“I get inspired by people who are passionate and are in this, as well as all the amazing values that sport brings – togetherness, learning how to fail and go again, joy together, families getting together to watch a team and a game. I see that and I like it, I didn’t get caught up in what people might think this world is.”

After 22 years together (15 married) and three children (Gabriel, 16, Daniel, 13 and Oliver, 10), Lorena and Mikel share an incredible bond as well as a meeting of minds. Last year Mikel told the BBC : “She has changed my life. She has changed my perception about life… I have that feeling with her that we never get bored. I can be sitting there five hours, 10 hours, go anywhere in the world and enjoy and have fun and laugh.”

Could Lorena be the secret of Arsenal’s success? “In our profession we always talk about the protagonist, which is the player or the coach or the manager,” Mikel said. “But what about the person that is next to that one? And without that there is not enough foundations and there is not enough strength for that to be consistent.”

The couple do constantly share ideas. “All the time,” says Lorena. “In certain things in life we look at things in exactly the same way. In others, we are very different. When someone looks at things from another point of view, it expands your mind. It’s amazing.”

She takes a similarly awed attitude to parenting their boys. “They teach me more than I teach them – I try not to put my own learned lessons on them. It’s really amazing to learn from their point of view and how they see things and how they experience relationships, joy or happiness.”

Juggling it all keeps her more than busy. “As a coach, I have clients. As an entrepreneur, I take care of my company, Live Love Better. We organise events, talks, retreats. And I’m an actress. Depending on the day I’m wearing several different hats.”

So does she have a daily practise that helps her maintain her equilibrium? “Nope,” she says. ”My answer is not very popular. I don’t follow any set routine to keep myself focused. When you are in coherence with who you are you are being authentic to yourself. When you need something to keep you focused on something, maybe that’s something you are forcing yourself to follow?

“I have good days, I have not so good days. I allow myself to be super active some days, and if I feel, ‘I can’t’, I’m just going to have coffee and go for a walk. I don’t push myself – I follow my own rhythms.”

It Starts With You: How to Find Lasting Peace and Happiness by Lorena Bernal (Harper Collins), £12.99, is out now; visit livelovebetter.co.uk