Tag: Habits

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Health

The Pandemic Has Modified Their Bathe Habits. How About Yours?

The Pandemic Has Changed Their Shower Habits. How About Yours?

Robin Harper, an administrative assistant at a Martha’s Vineyard preschool, grew up taking a shower every day.

“It’s what you did,” she said. But when the coronavirus pandemic kept her indoors and out of the public eye, she started showering once a week.

The new practice felt environmentally virtuous, practical, and liberating. And it stayed.

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Ms. Harper, 43, who has returned to work. “I like showers. But it’s an off my plate thing. I am a mother. I work full time and there is one less thing to do. “

Parents have complained that their teenage children don’t take daily showers. After the UK media reported a YouGov poll found that 17 percent of Brits had given up daily showers during the pandemic, many Twitter users said they did the same.

Heather Whaley, a writer in Redding, Connecticut, said her shower use fell 20 percent over the past year.

After the pandemic forced her to lock her up, Ms. Whaley, 49, said she started thinking about why she showered every day.

“Do I? I want you to say.” Taking a shower was less a question of function than a question of doing something for myself that I enjoyed. “

Ms. Harper, who still uses deodorant and washes “the parts that need to be done” at the sink daily, said she was confident she was not offending anyone. Her 22-year-old daughter, who takes a demanding bath and shower twice a day, did not comment on her new hygiene habit. Still have the children in their school.

“The kids will tell you if you don’t smell good,” said Ms. Harper, “3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds will tell you the truth.”

Daily showers are a fairly new phenomenon, said Donnachadh McCarthy, a London environmentalist and writer who grew up taking weekly baths.

“We had a bath once a week and washed at the sink the rest of the week – under our armpits and our private lives – and that was it,” said 61-year-old McCarthy.

As he got older, he showered every day. But after a visit to the Amazon jungle in 1992 exposed the ravages of overdevelopment, McCarthy said he pondered how his daily habits affect the environment and his own body.

“It’s not really good to wash with soap every day,” said Mr. McCarthy, who showered once a week.

Doctors and health experts have said that daily showers are unnecessary and even counterproductive. Washing with soap daily can rid the skin of its natural oils and make it feel dry, although doctors still recommend frequent hand washing.

The American obsession with cleaning began around the turn of the 20th century when people moved to cities after the Industrial Revolution, said Dr. James Hamblin, professor at Yale University and author of Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less. “

Cities were dirtier, making residents feel like they had to wash more often, said Dr. Hamblin, and soap making became more common. Indoor plumbing also improved, giving the middle class better access to running water.

To stand out from the crowd, wealthy people started investing in fancier soaps and shampoos and bathing more often, he said.

“It became a kind of arms race,” said Dr. Hamblin. “It was a token of wealth to look like you could bathe every day.”

Kelly Mieloch, 42, said she’d only showered “every few days” since the pandemic began.

What’s the point of showering every day if she rarely leaves home to run errands like taking her 6-year-old daughter to school?

“You don’t smell me – you don’t know what’s happening,” said Ms. Mieloch. “Most of the time, I don’t even wear a bra.”

In addition, she said her decision to quit daily showers helped her appearance.

“I just feel like my hair is better, my skin is better, and my face isn’t as dry,” said Ms. Mieloch, an Asheville, NC mortgage lender

Andrea Armstrong, an assistant professor of environmental science and studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., Said she was encouraged as more people rethink their daily shower.

An eight-minute shower uses up to 17 gallons of water, according to the Water Research Fund. Running water uses as much energy as running a 60-watt light bulb for 14 hours for five minutes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And frequent washing means going through more plastic bottles and using more soap, which is often made from petroleum.

The individual decision to stop showering or bathing every day is an important decision at a time when environmentalists are urging countries to take more action against climate change, said environmentalist McCarthy.

“There’s nothing like bathing in a deep, warm bath,” he said. “It’s a joy that I absolutely accept and understand. But I keep these joys as rewards. “

However, Professor Armstrong said large numbers of people would need to change their bathing habits to improve carbon emissions. To make a real impact, local and federal governments need to invest in infrastructure that makes showering and water use generally less polluting.

“It pains me to think about fracking every time I shower and use my water heater at home,” said Professor Armstrong. “I’m in Pennsylvania. There is not much choice. “

Despite the compelling science, it’s hard to imagine that Americans as a whole rarely shower and bathe, said Lori Brown, a professor of sociology at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC

“We’ve been told so much about it that we can’t smell and buy products,” she said. “You are dealing with culture. You’re not into biology. You can tell people all day that this is of no use to them, and there will still be people who say, “I don’t care. I will take a shower.'”

Nina Arthur, who owns Ninas Hair Care in Flint, Michigan, said she had many clients who were menopausal and felt so uncomfortable they felt like they had to shower twice a day.

“I’ve had women who have hot flashes in my stool,” she said.

One client was sweating so badly that she asked Ms. Arthur to come up with a hairstyle that could withstand constant sweat.

The pandemic has not affected the bathing habits of such clients, Ms Arthur said.

“When you have menopause, the smells are really different,” she said. “They are not your normal smells. I don’t think there is a woman who would want that smell on her. “

Ms. Arthur, 52, said she understood the environmental argument for fewer showers, but it wouldn’t encourage her to change her bathing habits.

“No,” she said. “I’m not that woman.”

Susan Beachy contributed to the research.

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Health

What Bears Can Educate Us About Our Train Habits

What Bears Can Teach Us About Our Exercise Habits

Grizzly bears move through landscapes the same way most people do, preferring flat trails over slopes and gentle speeds over sprints. This emerges from a notable new study of grizzly bears and shows how their outdoor life compares to ours.

The study, which included wild and captive bears, a special treadmill, apple slices, and GPS trackers, expands our understanding of how a natural drive to conserve energy affects the behavior of animals, including ours, and effects on health and that Weight Management Might Have. The results also help explain why bears and humans cross paths so often in the wild, and provide useful reminders of wilderness planning and everyone’s safety.

In recent years, biologists and other scientists have become increasingly interested in how we and other creatures find our way through our environment. And while some preliminary answers crop up about why we move and navigate this way, the results, on the whole, aren’t particularly flattering.

The accumulated research suggests that we humans as a species tend to be physically lazy, with a hardwired propensity to avoid activity. For example, in a meaningful neurological study from 2018, brain scans showed that volunteers were drawn far more to images of people in chairs and hammocks than people in motion.

This seemingly innate preference not to move made sense to us long ago, when hunting and gathering required hard exertion and copious amounts of calories and resting under a tree didn’t. Being inactive is more of a problem now, with food everywhere.

To what extent we share this preference for physical lightness with other species and whether these preferences affect how we and they traverse the world has remained unclear.

Cue grizzlies, especially those who live in Washington State University’s Bear Center, the country’s premier grizzly bear sanctuary and research center. University biologists affiliated with the center study how animals live, eat and interact with people.

For the new study, which was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they now decided to examine exactly how much energy grizzlies consume when they move in different ways, and how these and comparable numbers do not only affect real behavior Bears could affect us and other animals.

In the beginning, they built a stable enclosure around a treadmill that was originally built for horses. With modifications, it could tip up or down as much as 20 percent while handling the size and weight of a grizzly. At the front of the enclosure, the scientists added a feed box with a built-in rubber glove.

Then they taught the center’s nine male and female grizzly bears – most of whom have been resident at the center since birth and with names like John, Peeka, and Frank – to climb and walk on the treadmill while slicing hot dogs as a reward and accept apples.

“Grizzlies are very food-centric,” says Anthony Carnahan, a doctoral student at Washington State University who led the new study.

By measuring changes in the composition of the air in the enclosure, the researchers were able to track each bear’s energy consumption at different speeds as it walked uphill and downhill. (The bears never ran on the treadmills for safety reasons.) Using this data, the researchers determined that the most efficient pace for the bears, physiologically – the one at which they consumed the least oxygen – was about 2.6 mph.

Finally, the scientists gathered available information about wild bear movements using GPS statistics from grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park, as well as map data and comparable numbers from previous studies of humans and other animals migrating through natural landscapes.

When comparing the data, the scientists found that wild grizzlies, like us, seem born to be idle. The researchers expected the wild bears to move at their most efficient speed whenever possible, says Carnahan. In reality, their average pace driving through Yellowstone was a tricky and physiologically inefficient value of 1.4 mph.

They also almost always took the least steep route to get anywhere, even if it required extra time. “They did a lot of side-hilling,” says Carnahan.

Interestingly, these speeds and routes were similar to those used by humans when choosing routes through wild areas, the researchers found.

Overall, the results suggest that the innate urge to avoid exertion plays a bigger role in how all creatures, large and small, normally behave and navigate than we can imagine.

However, the study doesn’t rule out that grizzly bears, like other bears, can move with sudden, breathtaking speed and ferocity if they choose to, Carnahan points out. “I saw a bear walking across a mountain meadow in six or seven minutes than it took me all afternoon,” he says.

The results also do not tell us that we humans are destined to always walk slowly and stick to the apartments, but only that it can require both mental and physical exertion and goal setting to avoid the easiest routes are not adhered to.

Finally, the study is an invigorating reminder that we share nature with large predators, which of course choose the same paths as we do. You can find useful information on safety in grizzly land on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee website.

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Health

The best way to Preserve Your Pandemic Habits

How to Keep Your Pandemic Habits

The following is a print review of several longer stories published this week called the 7 Day Well Challenge. Below are links to the full stories.

Looking back at 2020, bans and pandemic restrictions forced many people to start new routines. Work pendulums disappeared. Fitness classes have been canceled. Houses became classrooms and workplaces.

Some people blossomed with all the changes; others fought.

“The experience of 2020, tough as it was, contained many lessons,” said Gretchen Rubin, author of the book “Better Than Before: What I’ve Learned About Making and Breaking Habits”. “Some people’s habits have improved – often when they use the time they normally spend on business travel or commuting, exercising, cooking, reading, or other healthy habits. Other people’s habits deteriorated because they were under stress or were torn out of their usual helpful routines. “

As you ponder the changes and challenges of the past year, you have an opportunity to recycle your best pandemic routines and build on them in the new year. Here are five habits you can keep.

Pandemic Habit: During this crisis, we learned that we are all interconnected and that taking care of ourselves – staying safe and healthy is also a way to care for our community.

Recycle the habit: Continue to make self-sufficiency a priority after the pandemic ends. If you are someone who believes you don’t have time to care for yourself, or if it seems selfish and indulgent, you are not alone.

“One of the things that you keep coming across is the idea that I can’t invest in things that are good for me because it robs me of my ability to be a good parent or to do what I have to do Work, ”said Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University and author of The Willpower Instinct. “Wouldn’t it be great if we learned how to be interdependent and if we actually have some kind of joy in knowing that when I take care of myself, I often take care of others too?”

Self-care isn’t just a nap or a hot bath to get away from family. It’s about setting priorities, setting boundaries, and finding a purpose. Start mapping on a typical day, from morning to bedtime. You probably sleep eight hours – but how do you spend the other 16 hours? List the time it takes to prepare meals, get work done, shop, watch TV, wash up, help children with homework, care for an aging parent, or catch up on emails. (Wirecutter, the Times recommendation site, has reviewed the best time tracking apps and recommends Toggl.)

In what one or two hour period each day do you feel best? Your most energetic? Your most productive? Now look at your list. Who gets these lessons? Instead, try to give yourself this time.

This doesn’t mean taking a break from life. It means focusing on your priorities, not others. You can use that hour or two for a hobby, a work project you feel passionate about, time with your kids, or even volunteering. Focusing on your personal goals and values ​​is the ultimate form of self-care.

Pandemic Habit: To prevent the virus from spreading, everyone learned to hold each other accountable by wearing a mask, restricting contacts and keeping their distance.

Recycle the habit: While you still need to take precautionary measures against pandemics, you can build on your accountability. Find someone responsible to help you meet your health goals. You can check in to a friend’s home every day to talk about healthy eating. Make a plan to go for a walk with a friend. You can create public accountability by posting your goals on social media.

If you prefer to be accountable only to yourself, you can be accountable by using an app that will send you daily reminders such as: B. Headspace or Calm for meditation, Noom for tracking your diet or Fitbit for tracking your exercise habits. You can even hold yourself accountable through a daily journal entry.

“We do better when someone is watching,” said Ms. Rubin, who wrote the book on Habits. “Even if we are the observers!”

Pandemic Habit: When the gyms closed and fitness classes canceled, many people had to figure out how to work out at home.

Recycle the habit: Instead of trying to plan a long training session, take small training breaks throughout the day. Take a walk after a long meeting. When you’ve been on an appointment all day, take a break and do some yoga stretches. Do jumping jacks or wall pushups while listening to the news or a podcast.

Several studies show that short breaks in exercise lead to significant changes in your fitness and metabolic health. Begin with 20-second exercise breaks three times a day. If you want to do more, take a few minutes off.

“You don’t have to do any structured exercises. You can just be active, ”said Martin Gibala, professor of kinesiology at McMaster University, whose lab has conducted several studies on short bursts of exercise. “It is much easier to start activities when you do it in these small workouts. Every little thing counts. “

Pandemic Habit: According to a survey by Axios, Last summer, nearly half of Americans said they formed a capsule or social bubble – a select group of friends supposed to help them navigate pandemic life.

Recycle the habit: Don’t dissolve your pandemic capsule when Covid-19 restrictions end. Keep it to support your health goals. Even if you haven’t had a quarantine capsule, you can still form a new health conscious bubble in 2021. Create a hiking capsule and meet a few times a week for group hikes. Or talk to your podmates about their healthy eating goals. They can share recipes and tips, and plan potlucks for healthy eating after the social restrictions are removed.

It took a pandemic to teach some people what many cultures have known since time immemorial – that social networks can bring us healthier and happier lives. In Okinawa, Japan, which has one of the longest average life expectancies in the world, people form a type of social network called a moai during their childhood – a group of five or more friends who offer social, logistical, emotional, and even financial support a life long. Members of each moai also appear to influence the other’s lifelong health behaviors.

Several communities in the United States have attempted to reproduce the moai effect by creating health moais from like-minded people who go out together or share healthy meals. After Dan Buettner, a National Geographic associate and writer, persuaded 110 people in Naples, Florida to potluck moai, 17 percent said they lost weight and 6 percent reported an improvement in blood sugar.

Forming groups of friends to help you achieve your goals is one way to sustain your healthy habits, said Buettner, author of Blue Zones Kitchen, which studies healthy eating habits in regions where people live longer. “It’s the best intervention you can invest in,” he said. “It’s long-lasting and has a measurable impact on your health and wellbeing.”

Pandemic Habit: In the early days of the pandemic, people panicked, hoarding toilet paper and packing their pantries to cope with the uncertainty of shutdowns.

Recycle the habit: Plan for uncertainties and compile a collection of legal documents to ensure everyone is prepared for an emergency.

Start with a three ring binder. While you should make a digital copy of all of your important documents, it is good to have a physical folder that your loved ones can access during a crisis. The first few pages should contain a list of your important documents – banking information, insurance papers, and important contacts. However, the most important document in the folder is your advance directive.

An upfront referral should designate someone to make medical decisions for you if you cannot make them and provide specific advice on what to do if you become seriously ill. The correct documents for your state can be found on the AARP website (aarp.org/caregiving).

And here’s a surprise: if you sit down to imagine a serious health crisis and the guidance you want to offer a surviving family member, it doesn’t have to be depressing. Use the process as an opportunity to reflect on your values, your hopes for aging well, and what makes life worth living. It can be like traveling back in time to the future and helping loved ones in one of the most difficult moments of their life.

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Health

For a More healthy 2021, Maintain the Greatest Habits of a Very Unhealthy Yr

For a Healthier 2021, Keep the Best Habits of a Very Bad Year

Here’s a better way to start the New Year: skip the traditional January resolutions and take time for a few New Year reflections instead.

Take a moment to look back on the last 365 days of your life. In years, when you talk about 2020, what stories will you tell? Will there be clapping for healthcare workers every night at 7 p.m.? Or maybe it’s a reminder of the months you spent most of the time at home with family members – or the pandemic bubbles that you formed and that helped make friendships stronger. Maybe you are telling the story of losing someone you loved, or remembering finding strength and resilience that you didn’t know you had.

While reliving much of 2020 sounds like a terrible idea, psychologists say it is a better way to start the new year. Looking back, you can build on what you learned and may even discover some hidden positive habits that you didn’t realize you started.

“I don’t think we’ve done ourselves enough credit,” said Kelly McGonigal, health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University and author of The Willpower Instinct. “I don’t think we had the emotional appreciation we need and deserve for the year that many people had. The reflection needed in the moment is a real, honest, and self-compassionate look at what has been lost, who has been lost, and what you want to remember in order to remember 2020. Reflection is a way of being ready to move forward into the New Year. I say this every year, but I think this year is especially true. “

Thinking about what you achieved in 2020 – and what you missed or lost – is also a healthier path to self-improvement than the typical New Years resolution. Studies consistently show that New Year’s resolutions don’t work. By February most people left them.

The problem with many resolutions is that they are inherently self-critical and come from some sort of magical thinking that one big change – some weight loss, regular exercise, more money – changes lives. “It’s just too easy to look for behavior that you regularly criticize yourself for or that you feel guilty about,” said Dr. McGonigal. “It’s the false promise, ‘If you change this one thing, you will change everything.'”

Studies show that one of the best ways to change behavior and form a new habit is to tie it up with an existing behavior – what is known in the science of habit formation as “stacking”. This is why doctors suggest taking a new medication while you are brushing your teeth or drinking your morning coffee, for example: you are more likely to remember to take your pill if you transfer it to an existing habit. Adding steps to your daily commute is often a better way to add exercise to your day than trying to set a separate time for a daily walk.

By reflecting on the teachings of the past year, we can stack and build on the good habits we started in 2020. Maybe in doing so we had to find new ways to exercise when the gyms were closed, build friendships made by our social bubbles, and organize our homes 24-7 living and learning, learning to cook healthier meals or ourselves for those To blame caring for others.

Now that the vaccine distribution and the end of the pandemic are in sight, it is no longer necessary to abandon these changes and try to build on them. The first challenge is listed below. Then from Monday and every day Next week, the 7 Day Well Challenge will identify a popular quarantine habit and offer a new strategy to turn it into a healthy lifelong habit. Just sign up for the Well newsletter and you will receive a daily email reminder to take part in this day’s challenge.

Quarantined clapping has become a nightly ritual in many parts of the United States and around the world thanks to health care workers. It was both a token of community and a token of gratitude. The experience was what sociologists refer to as “collective flare”. This happens when people come together and participate in a group ritual at the same time.

Clapping for key workers had the effect of “unifying and motivating the group to work toward a common cause such as surviving the pandemic,” said Joshua W. Brown, professor in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Indiana University of Bloomington. “Group expressions of gratitude can be empowering for both those who express them and those who receive them.”

Perhaps you have shown gratitude in other ways. Have you offered delivery and restaurant workers larger tips than usual? Did you thank the food and pharmacy staff from the bottom of your heart at the checkout? Did you remind yourself and your children of all the things you were grateful for when things got tough at home? I took up a regular gratitude hand washing ritual and thought of 10 things to be grateful for – one for each finger I washed.

Why it matters: Numerous studies show that people who practice gratitude daily, consciously counting their blessings, are happier, have less stress, sleep better, and suffer less from depression. In one study, researchers recruited 300 adults, most of them students, for psychological counseling. All volunteers were given advice, but one group added a writing exercise that focused on bad experiences while another group wrote a thank you letter to a different person every week for three weeks. A month later, those who wrote thank you letters reported significantly better mental health. And the effect seems to be permanent. Three months later, the researchers scanned students’ brains while they were doing another gratitude exercise. The students who wrote thank you letters at the start of the study showed greater activation in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, believed to be related to both reward and higher-level cognition.

Try one or more of these simple gratitude exercises this week.

Start small. Send an appreciative email or text, thank a service agent, or tell your children, spouse, or friend how they made your life better. “A good way to develop more gratitude would be to take regular small steps – an extra email or thank you letter to a colleague, or an extra personal thank you note and focus on how rewarding it is to make someone’s day more valued . Said Dr. Brown.

Create a gratitude reminder. Dr. McGonigal holds a note on her desk lamp that reads:

1. Someone
2. Something
3. You yourself

It is a daily reminder to say thank you not only for the people, events and gifts in your life, but also for your own achievements. She might be grateful for a workout, a healthy body, or a new challenge. “Gratitude is really good when you believe in your ability to create a more positive future and a willingness to trust others to help you do so,” said Dr. McGonigal. “And that feels like a really good attitude right now.”

Express your gratitude in writing. You can send emails or post feelings of gratitude on social media or in a group chat. Or think of someone in your life and write them a thank you letter. (You don’t have to mail it.) Fill out your letter with details describing how this person influenced your life and what things you appreciate about them. Or keep a daily gratitude journal.

“I think gratitude comes to its full potential when people can express gratitude in words,” said Y. Joel Wong, chairman of the counseling and educational psychology department at Indiana University. “When we can say what we are grateful for and explain why, it shifts our attention from what is negative to what is positive in our lives.”

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