How Harry Styles’ ex Roxie Nafousi became a manifesting guru

Roxie Nafousi was just 27 when she hit rock bottom.

A longtime fixture of London tabloids — her famous exes include Harry Styles and Damien Hirst, and she’s been known to pal around with Rita Ora and Cara Delevingne — Nafousi was struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol, even as the flash bulbs kept popping.

“There’s always someone doing more drugs or partying harder than you, so it’s easy to hide in that space for a long time,” she told The Post. “I truly thought I’d never get better.”

But Nafousi decided to try, albeit in her own way: She jetted off to Thailand and signed up for a yoga teaching course, hoping that could be a new, stable career path. And when she got back to London, she chanced on a new idea that would change both her life and career.

She came upon a podcast episode that was all about manifesting — that oh-so-modern riff on the age-old idea of the power of positive thinking.

That was four years ago, and since then she’s manifested a career in manifesting. Nafousi has become Gen Z’s go-to life coach: an insta-fixture who champions the magic of manifesting for others. She regularly leads hundreds of people in corporate and private seminars to teach them her path to success, and even turned her training manual into a British best-seller, “Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life.”

She’s already finished book No. 2, boasts 141,000 followers on Instagram, and has a line of products planned, including mantra cards and a self-love journal, as well as her book’s looming stateside debut. Even before it’s widely available, though, the chic, pocket-sized tome has already been spotted in the hands of supermodel Bella Hadid.

Cannily, its cover is Hermès orange. “The cover was really important to me. I am trying to make self-development fashionable and cool, something to be proud of,” Nafousi said.

‘Manifesting is something that comes very instinctively to me. I ame up with all my steps in about five minutes.’

Roxie Nafousi

The 195-page manual is a fast read, and Nafousi’s seven-step program is drawn from her own life turnaround, taking newbies from stage 1 (Be Clear in Your Vision) to stage 7 (Trust in the Universe).

“Manifesting is something that comes very instinctively to me — I came up with all my steps in about 5 minutes,” she told The Post. “I wanted to make it very practical for someone who wouldn’t usually be interested in this concept.

“I want to help people become the best version of themselves that exists. We’re born into this world with such incredible confidence, and then life happens to us, and we start to believe we’re not worthy. I believe it’s possible with this kind of coaching to get people back to that childlike status.”

Nafousi’s practice involves emphasizing what she calls “high vibe” emotions — positive thoughts, joy or kindness — and minimizing hatred, fear or guilt. Like attracts like, she says, so the more positive energy you generate, the more positive outcomes you’ll experience in life.

“Everything in the universe is made up of energy — the sky, our feelings — and what differentiates them is the density, the frequency of those vibrations. As we change our frequency, it changes the reality we experience,” she said.

Turn envy into inspiration, Nafousi recommends: that negative, often Insta-powered emotion can be constructive if you look at it a whole new way.

“Envy is the scarcity mindset,” she said. “Your having something doesn’t take away from me, because there’s enough for all of us. If you see a confident woman walk into the room, don’t say ‘Omigod, she’s so arrogant’ but think about how much you’d love to embody that confident too, and work on healing yourself.”

Vision boards are a mainstay of the Nafousi version of manifesting: Create these collages as concrete focal points to keep your positive thinking on track, she said. We’re all the masters of our destiny, per Roxie, but there’s also a guiding hand out there.

“I do believe there is a some greater force pulling and maneuvering,” she said. “To me, the universe is an energetic force greater than myself.”

Nafousi’s own turnaround is one she touts as evidence of manifesting’s all-encompassing power. The privately educated daughter of a wealthy businessman, she claimed she never felt happy: “I don’t speak about my childhood, but I never grew up knowing happiness or joy. I wasn’t shown an example of how to be happy.”

Not long after her return from that yoga course in Thailand, she met Wade Briggs, an actor, and soon became pregnant with their son, Wolfe; he was born a year to the day Wade first messaged her on the elite dating app Raya. Nafousi segued into workshop hosting and private coaching soon after her son was born, then scored the book deal she’d visualized for herself.

Of course, Nafousi isn’t the first guru of such you-go-girlness. Rhonda Byrne’s Oprah-bolstered “Secret” series touted much the same message more than a decade ago, albeit with a more materialistic emphasis.

But Nafousi swears her approach isn’t meant to be used to wish for penthouses and Lambos.

“It’s not just about manifesting things — that’s just the cherry on the top. Really it’s about self-worth, self-love and contentment,” Nafousi said of her own approach.

Some experts, though, sound alarms around surrendering the direction of your life to the abstract idea of manifesting. Gabriele Oettingen is an NYU professor who’s studied positive thinking for much of her career. She says that such upbeatness is more like an emotional energy drink — a brief pick-me-up that can leave us drained and depressed overall.

“It’s good if you want a short-term Band Aid on your mood,” she told The Post. “But you really need to put energy and effort into getting your wishes accomplished.”

Oettingen’s studies have shown that people who positively fantasize about losing weight loss less than those who just get on with it, for example. She instead recommends a process she calls WOOP: wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. It’s fine to visualize happy outcomes, she said, but the best way to achieve them is to identify a way to tackle obstacles which stand between you and success.

British academic Rhiannon Jones, a cognitive neuroscientist, has even stronger reservations. Her work explores the idea of thought-action fusion – put simply, the idea that we can manifest our wishes and dreams by thinking about them.

“Manifesting can be dangerous, because you can’t believe in manifesting positive things through positive thoughts without also believing negative thoughts will manifest too,” Jones warned. “That’s the flip side of the law of attraction.” 

Nafousi is no-nonsense when challenged by cynics.

“Look, you do not have to listen to me. Nobody has to. There are thousands of coaches, and it’s whoever communicates best to you — you could read it in a book, and the penny just drops,” she said. Nafousi admits she has no conventional medical qualifications and said that she has experienced first-hand that manifesting’s outcome isn’t always as some might expect.

For one thing, she has split with her son’s father, Briggs, though they remain close and co-parent happily. “Second to my son, he was clearly the best thing to happen to me, but everybody has their own thing … It’s never been, ‘Oh my gosh I must meet one person for the rest of my life,’” she said, then paused for a beat. “I’m not back on Raya but I’m single and open.”