The coronavirus is taking a toll on our mental and our physical health. So how do we make sense of it? We asked some experts. --- 1. Acknowledge your anxiety. First, she recommends acknowledging that anxiety, which is a normal evolutionary reaction to a perceived danger or threat. 2. Schedule worrying. The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) says setting a daily half-hour “worry period” at the same time and place helps to stay in the present moment the rest of the day. During the allotted slot it recommends “distinguishing between worries over which you have little or no control, and worries about problems you can influence.” 3. Reframe the situation. You are not “stuck inside”. No, you are indulging in a long-awaited opportunity to slow down, focus on yourself and your home. 4. Set quarantine rituals. This could entail a walk first thing in the morning, starting a journal, or speaking to a family member every morning on FaceTime. 5. Exercise. 6. Small acts of altruism. Helping others can give you a sense of purpose and control. Do you have an elderly or sick neighbor you can offer your services to? 7. Physical distancing, not social distancing. It goes without saying, but “loneliness is bad for humans,” says Duckworth. Have a coffee over FaceTime. Call your parents or kids every day. While in some ways coronavirus is isolating, Bhatia says it is worth remembering that it’s a shared global experience. “Everybody’s affected to different degrees, but the bottom line is that everybody’s in it together, and scientists all over the world are trying to work on it together to find a solution quickly.”

To fight the pandemic, restaurants are shuttering across America with no aid in sight. What will happen to the rest of us? --- The boldest action on the parts of government includes eviction bans and more funding for paid sick leave and relaxed liquor regulations. What do these regulations offer an undocumented dishwasher who just got laid off, beyond the hope that his landlord might not demand four months’ back rent in due time? What do they offer business owners trying to keep their employees employed, beyond hope for a fraction of the revenue needed to pay for rent, supplies, and staff? Restaurants are suffering from this pandemic because they’re the center of communal life in America, but the awful cascade of consequences lays bare how broken American life has become. American restaurant culture is a glorious public-works project, like a train station or a bridge, built during more prosperous times; its rusting supports and cracked concrete would have been tough but possible to fix oh, any time, for decades. But no one did. And now, the earthquake has come. Without major and unprecedented government intervention and responsible community support, independent food culture could go the way of the neighborhood pharmacy and department store in the wake of this pandemic. In high-rent neighborhoods in American cities, the transition is already underway, with high-rent blight stuffing neighborhoods with chains, fancy and otherwise. And as restaurants go, so will independent stores of all kinds, whether it’s repair shops or clothing stores or bookstores like the one I worked in, which are now struggling to survive and temporarily laying off staff. Any retail that’s not a grocery store is in serious danger. In the aftermath of the Great Shuttering, without help, the only operators with capital to reopen will be the same massive corporations whose irresponsible treatment of their workers is threatening to worsen the outbreak.

Hmm. Getting your body into the proper sleep position is one of the best things you can do for your health. But we are, above all, creatures of habit, and changing the bedtime posture you’ve held for much of your life isn’t easy. If you can do it, though, it may well lead to dramatic improvements in not only sleep quality but also your overall health.

The CCCC is a simple tool that allows groups of parents and other caregivers to automatically generate a fairly distributed cooperative childcare schedule. Don’t miss the explainer, which explains why collective childcare is vital even in times of social distancing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UmfWCSgtZPR6o3B1lfsqi51bADjnDvMrDLg1M2fTIt4/mobilebasic

It involved the designation of wild animals as “natural resources” by the Chinese government, which caused a large increase in wildlife farming, with many more and different kinds of animals being put into contact with humans and each other on a regular basis. Add illegally trafficked animals into the mix, and you’ve got the right conditions for diseases to jump from the animals to humans. Then potentially infected animals and their meat, accompanied by potentially infected humans who raised those animals and butchered that meat, are then brought to the wet markets for sale to the public. "Unless China bans wildlife farming for good, this will keep happening.”

Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

We live in an interwoven, interconnected world where an injury to one is truly an injury to all. We must confront the coronavirus with solidarity and fight for a society where the health of all is more important than profits for a few. --- The scramble reveals a class system in which a mark of relative status is the power to withdraw. If you have wealth or a salary from an institution that values you, and enough space at home, you might be able to pull off the essentially absurd trick of isolating yourself for a few months by drawing down the global web of commodities on display at Costco and Trader Joe’s. But for the 50 percent of the country that has no savings and lives paycheck to paycheck, or in small apartments with little food storage, or has to hustle every day to find work, this is simply impossible. People will be out every day, on the subways, at the gas stations, choosing between epidemiological prudence and economic survival, because they have no choice but to make that choice. […] “Wash your hands” is good advice but also a poignant reminder that this is not the sort of problem that personal responsibility can solve. Epidemiology is a political problem. It’s not hard to sketch the steps that would ease our cruel situation: a work stoppage, massive income support (unemployment payments with some universal basic income in the mix), a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures and evictions. Treatment for coronavirus and potentially related symptoms should be free and comprehensive, no questions asked (about immigration status, for instance), so that no one goes untreated because of fear or poverty. This is all, in the most straightforward sense, good for everyone. It is also how people look out for one another’s vulnerability and need when they see one another’s problems as their own. […] It takes a vast and intricate infrastructure to keep us all running in one another’s service, and in the ultimate service of return to capital: from highways to credit markets to the global trade regime. The fact that these interwoven systems are tanking financial markets around the world at the prospect that people might need to spend a few months sitting at home rather than hurrying around exchanging money shows how finely calibrated they are to profit, and how totally lacking in resilience to shifts in human need.

As I drove to my parents' home yesterday - trunk full of disinfectant, hand sanitizer, thermometer, nutritious meals for their freezer - I couldn't stop thinking about how our definition of "acts of love" needs to change during this crisis.

These guidelines are intended to help Flatten the Curve with the COVID19 outbreak, to help limit spread and reduce the load on hospitals and other healthcare.

For centuries, the United States has resisted a centralized public health policy. This week, as protective measures against the coronavirus varied county to county, Americans saw the cost.

One thing I’ve learned in therapy is that in times when the world around us feels terrifyingly beyond our control, we turn to small expressions of control over our thoughts, our bodies, and our time. Two big ways that desire to regain a sense of autonomy & control can manifest is spending money, and physically going places. If your aging parents (for example) insist on going to the grocery store unnecessarily, it’s possible they’re doing it to (unconsciously) soothe anxiety! If a person needs to spend money and/or leave their house to feel a sense of control over themselves, telling them not to do it is a direct threat to this assertion of autonomy. Of course they’re going to push back, of course they’re not going to “listen to reason.” So much of being the adult child of aging parents is the art of benevolent manipulation. (Sorry Mom & Dad, if you’re reading this.) Instead of telling them not to go to the grocery store, full stop, redirect their impulses — buy a cozy sweater online, take a walk through a park There are ways to both spend money and leave the house that don’t put you or others at risk! Sometimes people ignore good & urgent advice because they’re assholes or idiots! More often, they’re just scared, and don’t necessarily realize they’re scared, and don’t necessarily realize they’re making their choices in an attempt to calm their fear. NB grocery shopping can also be soothing because (if the person doesn’t live alone) it’s not just spending, it’s spending *to care for loved ones*. Buying a sweater online doesn’t scratch that itch—in that case maybe the move is buying books or games as gifts for friends/family This is especially ~a thing~ with many older women, who can have a hard time centering themselves when soothing their own anxieties. (“I’m cold, go put on a sweater!”) I don’t want to make this all about older generations though! Those beautiful young idiots still packing into bars and restaurants are asserting autonomy. I usually hate leaving the house and lately all I want to do is take the dog for a walk, or go for long drives. Our brains are always running background programs to rebalance and recalibrate. The best thing you can do is learn how to see it in your loved ones (and yourself! but that’s um many many years of therapy) and gently help them fulfill those self-soothing needs in less harmful ways

Our health system will not be able to cope with the projected numbers of people who will need acute care should we not muster the fortitude and will to socially distance each other starting now. On a regular day, we have about 45,000 staffed ICU beds nationally, which can be ramped up in a crisis to about 95,000. Even moderate projections suggest that if current infectious trends hold, our capacity (locally and nationally) may be overwhelmed as early as mid-late April. Thus, the only strategies that can get us off this concerning trajectory are those that enable us to work together as a community to maintain public health by staying apart.

Soap absolutely annihilates the coronavirus, a chemistry professor explains. --- One side of the soap molecule (the one that’s attracted to fat and repelled by water) buries its way into the virus’s fat and protein shell. Fortunately, the chemical bonds holding the virus together aren’t very strong, so this intrusion is enough to break the virus’s coat. “You pull the virus apart, you make it soluble in water, and it disintegrates,” he says. Then the harmless shards of virus get flushed down the drain. And even if it the soap doesn’t destroy every virus, you’ll still rid them from your hands with soap and water, as well as any grease or dirt they may be clinging to. Soap will also wash away bacteria and other viruses that may be a bit tougher than coronavirus, and harder to disintegrate. The trick is this all takes a little time to happen, and that’s why you need to take at least 20 seconds to wash your hands.

Every person I talked to was now two people, the one who was nice to me because I was thin, and the person who had been mean to me when I was fat. I was also two people: the fat person who felt like everyone was better than me, and who was so scared to walk across a room, or even stand up, and now, the thin person, who did not know how to manage the exhilaration of suddenly not feeling that way, and of sometimes even feeling superior to people. […] It’s bizarre the way that women’s feelings about their bodies, good and bad, are tied to other women, like, if a woman has a great body, this can feel like a rebuke to everyone who has a regular body. As I watched J. Lo’s Super Bowl halftime show, I thought, this is going to turn into a thing where middle-aged women get upset because they don’t look like that, and they will express this anger in racist and sexist comments about her clothing choices and the precise shape of her body. Poor innocent J. Lo’s body — here it thought its whole purpose was just to move J. Lo’s consciousness through space. I wonder how many women don’t feel so much that they’ve accepted their bodies as much as they need to present as someone who has. Younger women tell me that the way that they hear weight anxiety being expressed is more through the buzzword of “health,” so women say they’re not eating dairy, or bread, or sugar so they won’t be seen as judging themselves, or others. […] I am not saying that no one has accepted her body, that it’s all a lie. I am just saying that I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone. And while there is certainly more of what is called a “celebration” of different shapes, it is rare that those shapes are not proportioned in a fairly universally attractive way.

We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. We should prepare not because we are facing a doomsday scenario out of our control, but because we can alter every aspect of this risk we face as a society. That’s right, you should prepare because your neighbors need you to prepare—especially your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time. […] Here’s what all this means in practice: get a flu shot, if you haven’t already, and stock up supplies at home so that you can stay home for two or three weeks, going out as little as possible. The flu shot helps decrease the odds of having to go to the hospital for the flu, or worse yet, get both flu and COVID-19; comorbidities drastically worsen outcomes. Staying home without needing deliveries means that not only are you less likely to get sick, thus freeing up hospitals for more vulnerable populations, it means that you are less likely to infect others (while you may be having a mild case, you can still infect an elderly person or someone with cancer or another significant illness) and you allow delivery personnel to help out others.

Dialectical behavior therapy is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy that combines strategies like mindfulness, acceptance, and emotion regulation. […] In DBT, the patient and therapist are working to resolve the seeming contradiction between self-acceptance and change in order to bring about positive changes in the patient.

Johanna Hedva lives with chronic illness and their Sick Woman Theory is for those who were never meant to survive but did. Her fellow spoonies. --- If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street. […] There are two failures here, though. The first is her reliance on a “public” – which requires a private, a binary between visible and invisible space. This meant that whatever takes place in private is not political. So, you can beat your wife in private and it doesn’t matter, for instance. You can send private emails containing racial slurs, but since they weren’t “meant for the public,” you are somehow not racist. Arendt was worried that if everything can be considered political, then nothing will be, which is why she divided the space into one that is political and one that is not. But for the sake of this anxiety, she chose to sacrifice whole groups of people, to continue to banish them to invisibility and political irrelevance. She chose to keep them out of the public sphere. […] Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. […] “Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. […] The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Meditation is a simple practice available to all, which can reduce stress, increase calmness and clarity and promote happiness. Learning how to meditate is straightforward, and the benefits can come quickly. […] Remember, the purpose of meditation isn’t to achieve perfect control over your mind or stop thinking altogether. The intention should be to bring a more compassionate, calm and accepting approach to whatever happens.

Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz patiently answer pretty much every question we could think of about healthy food. --- In fact, the basic theme of optimal eating — a diet made up mostly of whole, wholesome plant foods — has been clear to nutrition experts for generations. What does change all the time is the fads, fashions, marketing gimmicks, and hucksterism. How do you avoid the pitfalls of all that? Focus on foods, not nutrients. A diet may be higher or lower in total fat, or total carbohydrate, or total protein, and still be optimal. But a diet cannot be optimal if it is not made up mostly of some balanced combination of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and water. If you get the foods right, the nutrients sort themselves out. But if you focus on nutrients rather than foods, you quickly learn that there is more than one way to eat badly, and we Americans seem all too eager to try them all.

It’s a simple formula for weight loss: burn more calories than you consume. How come that often doesn't work? --- The discrepancies between the number on the label and the calories that are actually available in our food, combined with individual variations in how we metabolize that food, can add up to much more than the 200 calories a day that nutritionists often advise cutting in order to lose weight. Nash and Haelle can do everything right and still not lose weight. None of this means that the calorie is a useless concept. Inaccurate as they are, calorie counts remain a helpful guide to relative energy values: standing burns more calories than sitting; cookies contain more calories than spinach. But the calorie is broken in many ways, and there’s a strong case to be made for moving our food accounting system away from that one particular number. It’s time to take a more holistic look at what we eat. […] It increasingly seems that there are significant variations in the way each one of us metabolizes food, based on the tens of thousands—perhaps millions—of chemicals that make up each of our metabolomes. This, in combination with the individuality of each person’s gut microbiome, could lead to the development of personalized dietary recommendations. […] Or maybe the focus will shift to tweaking your microbial community: If you’re trying to lose weight, perhaps you will curate your gut microbiome so as to extract fewer calories without harming your overall health. […] None of these alternatives is ready to replace the calorie tomorrow. Yet the need for a new system of food accounting is clear. Just ask Haelle. “I’m kind of pissed at the scientific community for not coming up with something better for us,” she confesses, recalling a recent meltdown at TGI Friday’s as she navigated a confusing datasheet to find a low-calorie dish she could eat. There should be a better metric for people like her and Nash—people who know the health risks that come with being overweight and work hard to counter them. And it’s likely there will be. Science has already shown that the calorie is broken. Now it has to find a replacement.

The cubital tunnel is located in the elbow and encases the ulnar nerve. Compression of this nerve can cause pain, but certain exercises can help.

Like superheroes, each pain reliever has its own set of strengths and weaknesses.

My change of circumstance made me hyperaware of what I wanted everyone to see: a woman in charge of herself. A Strong Woman Doing Well On Her Own. A woman (I’m sorry) thriving. The logic was this: if I looked good I was doing well, in a way that anyone could see before I opened my mouth. I was tired of the gentle arm squeezes and soft-eyed how-you-holding-ups, of people checking in to make sure I was “taking care of myself”. I figured that becoming inarguably, conventionally attractive would cut them off at the pass, giving them a narrative they understood (“glow up” is a universal language) and saving myself the trouble of figuring out what I actually felt. I was comforted by the cut-throat simplicity of it: to be hot was to be doing well. Better than before, better than him. Better than other, weaker people who are broken by something as small as grief. I didn’t pause for a minute to consider how unhealthy it was to look on a breakup as a competition. I just knew that I did not want to be a loser. I wanted to be the winner, and very hot. […] It became clear that my post-breakup plans were unlikely to materialise: I would glow laterally at best. But I kept going, no longer in service of being seen, but to luxuriate in not being so. I know many if not most people attend Spin class because it makes their butts look good. But I’m sure there are others, like me, who are there because it makes them feel like their butt, and the rest of them, have dissolved into a fine mist.

Why do sites that apparently condone drug injection actually encourage recovery? The paradox dissolves if you understand the real drivers of unsafe drug use and addiction: stigma, criminalization, mental illness, despair, and trauma. When people with addiction are provided with a safe, caring, and nonjudgmental atmosphere, they can slow down and engage in practices that allow safer injection, they have better access to clean equipment, and basically, time to think.

Twelve years on benzodiazepines.

A medical study says that only 5 percent of Ambien users are fortunate enough to experience what it calls “zolpidem-induced somnambulism and amnesic sleep-related behavioral problems.” Given the proliferation of anecdotal evidence about Ambien’s psychotropic effects, that number is surprisingly small. It’s still unclear what yields results showing such a strange experience for a minority and no experience for everyone else. Do you have to be a neurotic to enjoy Ambien? Or are most people just too desperate to get to sleep to see what happens next? I have no idea, and neither, I think, does medical science.

A $3 squirt of CBD oil on your ice cream or coffee? Probably right around 10 mg. You’d need 30 times that amount to get to the levels at which researchers have found stress-relieving results. […] it wouldn’t be fair to say that 5 or even 20 mg of CBD oil in your coffee is proven to do nothing; that hasn’t been proven. It’s more accurate to say that 20 mg of CBD oil in your coffee has never been proven to do much of anything, and related research indicates that’s probably way too low of a dose to have any measurable effect. […] One study found that placebos sometimes work even when the subject knows it’s a placebo. Another, using that same public speaking setup that CBD studies have used, found that anxiety treatments are particularly susceptible to the placebo effect, with 40 percent of placebo-treated patients showing a decrease in anxiety symptoms while tasked with speaking to a crowd. So is it possible that despite all this anecdotal evidence, low-dose CBD is a placebo? Sure, because, say it with me: We don’t know anything about CBD. […] There are big companies and small companies, companies that provide elaborate chemical charts and companies that have no online presence at all. There are companies that run their goods — either as raw materials or as consumer-stage final products — through lab tests. There are those that say they do but provide no information on what the labs found or which labs tested their products. Everyone wants a piece of CBD, and nobody is watching. Remember: There’s no regulation by the FDA or anyone else. […] In 2016, the FDA tested several “CBD oils,” ultimately issuing warnings to eight companies. Some of those oils were found to contain no or barely any CBD, and many contained illegal quantities of THC. […] CBD, though wildly understudied, is not bullshit. In fact, the FDA just approved its very first cannabis-derived drug, a CBD-based epilepsy treatment called Epidiolex. The dosage for Epidiolex starts at around 2.5 mg/kg and is increased to 5 mg/kg, so a 150-pound adult would settle onto a dose of just over 340 mg per day, though the diseases it targets start in childhood. Even some of the claims made by recreational CBD sellers aren’t bullshit, in the abstract. CBD really does show some anti-inflammatory properties. It really does have anxiolytic effects, in certain situations. Of course, it’s the scammy nature of herbal supplements that a seller can say something like “CBD has been indicated to reduce anxiety” (a true statement!), even though the actual product you’ve got in your hand has never been indicated to do so. Nutmeg, for example, will act as a dangerous psychoactive drug at high levels, but it would be deranged to put “scientific research has shown that nutmeg can get you high as hell” on a pumpkin spice latte. It’s correct, but it’s also incredibly misleading. We don’t know how CBD affects the brain in any kind of depth. We don’t know which doses and delivery methods are best for different outcomes. We don’t know how CBD interacts with most other drugs or foods. We don’t know the differences between the effects of isolates and full-spectrum preparations. We don’t even know how many cannabinoids there are. California, for what it’s worth, seems aware and concerned about this whole thing. But a lack of data does not hinder capitalism; it is, rather, a huge help. When nobody knows anything, you can say — or imply — anything. More importantly, you can sell everything.

When to get up if you go to bed now and need to wake up not groggy. Sleepyti.me bedtime calculator helps you wake up refreshed by finding the best time to go to sleep. Please keep in mind that you should be *falling asleep* at these times. The average human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep, so plan accordingly! sleepyti.me works by counting backwards in sleep cycles. Waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle leaves you feeling tired and groggy, but waking up in between cycles wakes you up feeling refreshed and alert!

Get this: All bodies are different. But I don’t mean this in some flip way. I mean it in a bone-deep, beautiful, complicated way. All of the dogs’ bodies are so different.

This suggests that sun is better for us than previously thought, and the potential risks of minor skin cancer outweigh the risks of not getting enough sunlight. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯