Today marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and with the coronavirus epidemic it’s an event unlike any other before: all digital. Throughout today, Earth Day Network will flood the Internet with global conversations, performances and video teach-ins from inspiring musicians, artists, scientists and thinkers – with a new call to action every hour. Today we face two crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate disaster.…
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…
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”),…
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…
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…
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…
