Huffington, the former spouse of a Ronald Reagan-era Republican, was once a leftish writer, then a right-wing commentator, then a supporter of the Democratic Party. She now propagates "mindfulness", and "the third metric" of success, "well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving". (The first two metrics, if you didn't know, are money and power.)

But nobody would much care if Huffington believed Barack Obama was a drop bear or wombats built the pyramids, if she hadn't figured out how to make money online from something that looks a lot like a newspaper. Huffington founded The Huffington Post in 2005, and in 2011 she sold it for $US315 million to media corporation AOL, although she remains its editor-in-chief. The website is a news aggregator - that is, it includes links to stories from around the internet, assembled under Huffington headlines with a liberal spin. But it's also a source of original journalism, such as its 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about the lives of severely disabled war veterans, and a platform for a vast number of non-conservative bloggers.

So Arianna Huffington is very rich - actually, she was very rich even before she sold the website - and I'm waiting for her in a fabulously expensive pub where Bill Clinton, David Beckham, David Cameron, Kevin Spacey, Chris Martin and Lindsay Lohan have all been seen, possibly in the very spot where I'm sitting, but probably in another bit.

I'm receiving texts from John from the London HuffPost (as we insiders call it) saying Huffington's stuck in traffic, and suggesting I order something to eat from the bar. A barman who looks like Ricky Martin tells me there is no bar menu, but I can get food on Huffington's room-service account. I choose a chicken sandwich, excited by the idea it is the most exclusive chicken sandwich in London. I will bite into it and know what it is like to be rich. This is, I admit, a high expectation to pin on a chicken sandwich.

The sandwich arrives before Huffington. It is brought to my table by a waiter who also looks like Ricky Martin. The filling is trapped inside a hopelessly unfashionable focaccia (What's up, rich people? Never heard of sourdough?) and has that faintly fishy hint of reheated poultry. For some reason, this makes me very happy.

Huffington has written a book entitled Thrive about the third metric, and how people like me - stressed-out workaholics struggling with competing deadlines - should relax more and meditate, and ignore our emails and work calls outside of office hours. It's not really my cup of chamomile, but she's probably right. It's a lot easier to turn on your mobile phone than to turn it off. And we're all working longer and longer hours because we love our jobs and we're afraid to lose them, because we can't afford to miss anything, because we don't want to be left behind, and because of 24-hour news aggregators such as The Huffington Post.

When Huffington finally turns up, she's a little less flawlessly groomed than the perfectly poised woman on the cover of Thrive. In fact, the very bones in her face look different. This is because it's not Huffington; it's her sister, Agapi Stassinopoulos, who is travelling with her. When the real Huffington makes an entrance, wearing a white linen suit, a black silk blouse and kitten heels, she looks like she has just come from hair and make-up - which she possibly has. She orders scrambled eggs from a man who looks like Ricky Martin, and they are delivered almost immediately by a man who looks like Ricky Martin. It's probably the same bloke, but it could be that the Ricky Martins are reproducing among themselves. Huffington is apologetic for her lateness, charming, interested, and extremely skilled at eating while talking. "That's why I ordered scrambled eggs," she says, in voice like honeyed almonds. "So I wouldn't have to chew."

But isn't that exactly the kind of distracted multitasking she warns against in Thrive?

"That's not multitasking," she says. "Because my brain is only involved in one thing. Multitasking is when your brain tries to do two things. If you're eating and talking, that's one of the most pleasant things you can do."

The Huffington Post has 11 international editions, covering language groups and territories from Italy and Germany to Japan and Brazil (Australia, she says, is "on the shortlist"). People working for Huffington in three different countries helped set up our interview. I ask if it isn't easier to suggest not turning on your phone when you have staff all over the world who do have their phones turned on?

"We all have plenty of excuses about why we can't turn off our phones," says Huffington. "The bottom line is that giving ourselves some time to disconnect from the digital world is essential if we want to connect with our wisdom, intuition and creativity. HuffPost is a 24/7 global media company, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to be on 24/7. We make it very clear that everyone can turn off their phones when they leave the office."

Arianna Huffington was born in Greece in 1950, and moved to England at age 16. She read economics at Cambridge, and graduated to write books such as The Female Woman - a rejoinder to the women's liberation movement, in which she argued men and women were obviously innately different and therefore more suited to particular roles. In 1980, she moved to the US, and later married Michael Huffington, a banker and businessman who worked in arms control for the Reagan administration. Arianna and Michael had two daughters - Isabella and Christina - and, in 1993, Michael won a seat in the House of Representatives as a Republican. In 1994, he failed in his bid for the Senate, after a campaign in which Arianna had played a prominent role. The couple divorced in 1997; a year later, Michael came out as bisexual.

Arianna ran an early website called Resignation.com, calling for the resignation of President Bill Clinton, but by 2003 her politics had begun to shift and she stood (unsuccessfully) as an independent candidate for governor of California (Michael endorsed the opposition, Arnold Schwarzenegger). The next year, she began to appear at Democratic Party events, and The Huffington Post grew up as an alternative to the flames of the right-wing bonfire of inanity that she had once helped stoke. In 2006, Michael became a blogger for the site.

But as a commentator who has changed her mind before - moving from left to right to left to spiritual - does she worry that she's got it wrong again with Thrive? "Actually, the spiritual has underlined my whole life," she says. "After all, I wrote a book called After Reason in my 20s and a book called The Fourth Instinct, about our instinct for meaning and transcendence, in my 40s.

"I left the Republican Party when my understanding of the role of government changed. It wasn't the goals that I thought our society should be striving toward that changed, but my thinking about how best to reach them. I had once believed that the private sector could address the major issues our country was facing -

Income inequality, for example - and the need to care for those left out of America's prosperity. But I saw firsthand that this wasn't enough. So it became clear to me that we could never really address some of our society's most fundamental problems without the raw power and agenda-setting potential of government appropriations."

Huffington's father, Konstantinos, was a journalist and management consultant. Her mother, Elli, was a homemaker and, she says, "obviously the most important person in my life". On August 24, 2000, an elderly, weakened Elli asked Arianna and Agapi to take her to the Santa Monica international food market in Los Angeles. She shopped for salami, cheese, olives, chocolates and nuts, came home, prepared a meal, and invited her family to eat together.

That evening, with her granddaughters zipping in and out of the room on Razor scooters, Elli fell. She told Arianna not to call an ambulance but to pour a glass of red wine, and her family waited with her on the floor of her room until she passed away.

"She did not want to die in the hospital," says Huffington. "She knew that death was imminent. Then, really, you're not prolonging life, you're just dying there surrounded by machines and tubes. And she wanted to die with her family, those she loved, her granddaughters, and with a sense of joy in the last moments of her life." It was a "transcendent" experience for Huffington, a lesson in presence, in being in the moment. She says her mother gave her and her sister two great things: "a sense of unconditional loving, and a sense that we could aim for our dreams. She gave us a willingness to take risks, and not to be constantly looking at our lives with fear," says Huffington. "She always used to say, 'Failure is not the opposite of success, it's a stepping stone to success.'"

Has Huffington ever really failed? "I've failed a lot along the way," she insists. "I ran for governor, I wasn't elected governor. I got divorced - that's a failure of a marriage. When The Huffington Post was first launched, I got a lot of negative reviews."

But perhaps the most frightening moment in Huffington's life came in 2007, two years after the start-up of The Huffington Post, when she collapsed from exhaustion in her home office and woke with a cut eye and a broken cheekbone, lying in a pool of blood.

She was burned out, and realised she had to change, and that the ultimate measure of personal success might not be dying at her desk. As is traditional for rich people in such circumstances, she embarked on a spiritual quest, encountering on her path the words of the Torah, Deepak Chopra, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Carl Jung, the prophet Muhammad, Eckhart Tolle, and Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City.

But Carrie Bradshaw isn't a real person, I point out. "Some of the best quotes come from fictional characters in movies and novels," says Huffington.

In March 2012, Huffington took a call from her eldest daughter, Christina, who was only two months' away from graduating at Yale, to say she couldn't breathe. Huffington rushed to be by her daughter's side in the emergency ward as Christina crumpled under the weight of her cocaine abuse.

"She's been sober for two-and-half years now," says Huffington. "And she went back to Yale and got her degree. She has a good job in Los Angeles."

To cope with the crisis, Huffington says, "I focused on being grateful that she was alive, that she wanted to get well, that she'd reached out to me, and that we had a loving family that rallied around her and helped with her recovery."

Christina, with on-message inevitability, later blogged about her addiction for The Huffington Post.

Huffington says people concentrate on immediate negative events so as to survive disasters - "Like, if a leopard was chasing you and you focused on a rainbow, you would be dead." But we tend to remain preoccupied with danger "even when the leopard is not chasing us", she says.

I agree, but isn't the media part of the reason why people continue to focus on the leopard rather than the rainbow? Isn't it journalists like us who encourage the public to view the world as a perilous rat's nest of corruption and conflict? "Absolutely," says Huffington. "We in the media have a responsibility for that, because it is obviously part of our job to speak truth to power, to point out where the destruction and dysfunctionality are, but also we are equally responsible to put the spotlight on what is working.

"There's a lot that is working," she says, "in terms of start-ups creating jobs, or people giving back and alleviating suffering. But we treat these things as back-of-the-book stories, the soft stories that we write about at Christmas. But, in fact, they're not. They're where a lot of the solutions are coming from - these efforts by individuals, communities, cities. If we in the media did a better job covering them, we could have some scale."

Does she think the media are really interested in solutions? "I think a lot of journalists are interested in solutions," she says, "and what the media need to realise is readers are interested in solutions. And part of the way our traffic has grown is through this. It used to be 'If it bleeds, it leads', and now we are realising that the things people like to share are good news stories."

The third metric has affected working practices at The Huffington Post. There are meditation, breathing and yoga classes throughout the week in the New York office, and dedicated meditation, yoga, and nap rooms on the Washington DC premises. Employees are encouraged to take breaks and switch off, and Huffington plans to bring even more mindfulness into their lives in the future.

But, short of team-building exercises, there's not much that's more frustrating than management trying to make workers happier with meditation classes rather than, for example, pay rises. I wonder if journalists at The Huffington Post will be allowed not to be mindful, or will they all have to practise mindfulness?

"All that matters is that HuffPost - and ideally every other company - makes options available to our employees that makes their lives healthier and more sustainable," says Huffington. "Whether they take them up or not is, of course, up to them."

Which brings us to the subject of employment. Some of the finest minds in the press grappled for years with the question of how a media company could make money online. The answer turned out to be simple: don't pay the people who produce the content. Huffington Post bloggers get nothing for their posts, and never have. Once the company was sold at a huge profit, there were protests, boycotts, a failed lawsuit and all kinds of indignant noises made by people who had initially embraced this cowardly new world in which nobody stood up for their right to be paid, and instead waited, salary cap in hand, for their reward in some future digital heaven.

Instead, it turned out that, if you give something away for long enough, people start to think it's free.

"Platforms never paid bloggers," says Huffington. "Bloggers basically take advantage of our very big platform if they want to sell a book, write about their ideas, sell a movie, whatever it is they're doing, or write about politics."

The Huffington Post has 800 people on the payroll but it's also "a platform that has tens of thousands of people writing, whenever they want, if they want", she says. As for blogging, "It's almost like writing for Facebook. When you write for Yelp, update your own Facebook account, or when you write for Wikipedia, nobody pays."

And that's the contradiction at the heart of the Huffington project. Arianna Huffington seems very nice and sincere and she's probably right when she says we need to shift away from "this collective delusion that the way to succeed, the way to accomplish, is through burn-out" and "our responsibility is to make sure this delusion is well and truly dead before your children grow up."

But how can we not work harder just to survive, and run faster simply to stay in place, when, as Huffington says, "nobody pays"?

Huffington has her phone turned off in her handbag but, five minutes before she is due to leave, John from the London office comes down to make sure she's ready to go. Somebody has organised her taxi, and various Ricky Martins help enable a smooth transition from luxury hotel to her next appointment at the US embassy.

I'm not sure Huffington realises what life's like for the rest of us, but I continue to draw comfort from one little thing: even very rich people have to eat fishy, reheated chicken in their sandwiches.

And I meditate on that.