Feel Better Now? The Rise and Rise of the Anxiety Economy – The Guardian, March 10, 2019 Anxiety is now a multibillion-dollar industry that is rising fast and at risk of becoming over-commoditized. It contains many “anti-anxiety” products, ranging from squishy toys to coloring books to meditation apps to weighted blankets, which often do little to acquiesce anxiety and sometimes have quite the opposite effect.…
Trips Led by and for Women (to Celebrate Women’s History Month) – The New York Times, March 4, 2019 In early 2018, the Global Wellness Summit identified the trend “A New Feminist Wellness,” which examined how more travel is now squarely aimed at women’s empowerment, whether it is more all-women adventure tours or more retreats for women to heal emotionally. This trend is really picking…
Switzerland’s Gottlieb Duttweiler Insitute, a leading future-forecasting think-tank and a Global Wellness Institute™ (GWI) research partner, will hold a conference May 10 in Zurich called, “Eternity Now: Wellbeing and Beauty Retail Reimagined.” A provocative lineup of speakers will tackle this topic from Marcia Kilgore (founder, Bliss-Labs, FitFlop, Beauty Pie, etc.) to GWI research partner, Anjan Chatterjee (Professor of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, author…
A large, new meta-review of 108 randomized controlled trials (23,000 participants) from the very stringent Cochrane Database found that exercise requiring standing up and not sitting is a very good way to reduce falls in the elderly. Tai chi, for example, reduced the rate of falls by 19 percent. The researchers summarized as follows: “We’re very sure that starting an exercise program will reduce the…
The World Happiness Report has been gauging the happiness of nations since 2012, and two new studies, 1) the Global Wellness Index (from investment firm LetterOne) and 2) the Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index now offer a window into how 150+ nations fare when it comes to overall health and wellness. Each index uses slightly different measures, so rankings vary somewhat, but both are important new…
MONTHLY BAROMETER – WELLNESS EDITION An issue to watch is whether our relation to work, and what it means for wellbeing, will evolve in 2019. When there is so much science-based evidence showing the necessity of a good night’s sleep, why is workaholism so much in vogue among successful entrepreneurs and investors? The culture of work zeal is particularly entrenched in the tech industry, where…
