Wellness Evidence Study: Daily Meditation Reduces Anxiety & Boosts Cognitive Function

Daily Meditation Reduces Anxiety & Boosts Cognitive Function in 8 (Not 4) Weeks A new study from NYU split people who hadn’t meditated before into two groups: One did 13 minutes of daily guided meditation, and the other listened to a 13-minute podcast. At four weeks, there was no significant difference between the groups, but eight weeks proved a different story: The meditators saw significantly…

Q&A with Bill Bensley: How Will Travel Change Post-Virus? COVID-19 Silver Linings?

The GWI’s PositivelyWell campaign just kicked off a new interview series with wellness leaders on how the Coronavirus is impacting wellness markets and how wellness will likely evolve in a post-virus world. The first interview is with famed architect and designer Bill Bensley who discusses how the travel industry will change after the epidemic (predicting that the “old luxury will be deader than a doornail”),…

US under Coronavirus: Only Rich Nation Where Citizens Lose Both Employment & Health Insurance Simultaneously

The pandemic’s severe blow to our collective sense of wellbeing will, of course, be global, but the US seems particularly vulnerable. As of last week, roughly 22 million Americans filed for unemployment. According to a new study by Harvard and City University of New York (published in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine), 1.5 million people in the US have already lost their health insurance during…

How to Avoid Work from Home (WFH) Burnout

MONTHLY BAROMETER – WELLNESS EDITION  MONTHLY BAROMETER The pandemic has magnified the macro challenge of social inequalities by laying bare the shocking disparities in the degree of risk to which different social classes are exposed. In much of the world, a pattern has emerged: The wealthiest have escaped to their holiday homes; the middle class hunkers down at home to telework and homeschool; while the…

Must-Reads from the Wellness World (Week of April 21, 2020)

The Cluster Effect: How Social Gatherings Were Rocket Fuel for Coronavirus – Guardian, April 9, 2020 This article explains how social gatherings of different sorts (religious, social, cultural, etc.) helped spread the virus. This is the so-called “cluster-effect” that turbo-charged the spread of the pandemic. It begs the fundamental question of whether governments, when they start relaxing social distancing measures, will allow large social, cultural…

Listening is a Key Wellness Leadership Resource

“In real ways, we are invited each day to slow down and listen. But why listen at all? Because listening stitches the world together. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters.”—spiritual teacher Mark Nepo Your commitment to be a wellness leader means you are serving as a positive force for wellbeing. And when you take a lead in increasing the health and wellness…