Health

To many people in corporate America, working five days a week—Monday to Friday, 9 to 5—feels as habitual as brushing their teeth. But it wasn’t always that way. In the late 1800s, a full-time manufacturing worker could easily spend 100 hours per week on the job. It wasn’t until around 1940, after a concerted push from labor unions, that the 40-hour workweek became standard in the U.S.Now, almost a century later, there’s growing momentum for an even more condensed schedule, with major companies—including Panasonic, Kickstarter, and the online thrift store ThredUp—trying out four-day workweeks. “We’ve all been working far too hard, and we’re missing out on life,” says Charlotte Lockhart, co-founder of 4 Day Week Global, a group pushing for shorter workweeks worldwide. “It’s affecting our hea...

On a recent weekday afternoon, Xuan Zhao popped into the post office shortly before it closed. The man helping her was incredibly patient and went out of his way to assist her with a pile of packages. So before she left, she handed him a compliment card she had designed. “Your willingness to go the extra mile never goes unnoticed,” it said on the front. The flip-side read: “You’re receiving this compliment because your awesomeness deserves a big shoutout,” along with a reminder that kind words have the power to brighten other people’s day more than we might expect, and a suggestion to pay it forward. “He had such a big smile on his face,” she recalls.Zhao, a behavioral scientist at Stanford University who’s the CEO and co-founder of the well-being start-up Flourish Science, has spearheaded...

It’s fortunate that liars’ pants don’t really catch on fire. If they did, much of the world’s population would be ablaze at any given moment. “People lie most days,” says Kevin Colwell, a professor of psychology at Southern Connecticut State University who researches deception. The majority of fibs are the sorts of harmless white lies that don’t hurt anyone. (You don’t actually like Aunt Mildred’s new haircut? She’s not going to be any worse off believing otherwise.) “Lying is a very important social skill,” he says. “It greases the wheels of society and makes our relationships work better.”More harmful lies, however—those that are intentional misrepresentations of material facts—have the opposite effect. Being lied to or about can deteriorate someone’s mental health and lead to a ripple e...

Be honest: do you stretch before and after your workouts? If you don’t, you actually might be onto something. Most physically active adults with reasonable fitness goals may not need to stretch at all.Here’s what every busy person should know about stretching—and how little you can get away with doing.What is stretching, anyway?There are two main types of stretching: static and dynamic. Static is when you hold a stretch for at least 10 to 30 seconds. Reach toward your toes for half a minute, and you're doing a static stretch. “That’s the stuff you can do at home when you’re on your own in the evening to maintain flexibility,” says Kieran O’Sullivan, a lecturer who studies musculoskeletal pain and injury at the University of Limerick in Ireland.The second type is dynamic stretching. This is...

In his song “Hearts and Bones,” Paul Simon, describing the dissolution of his marriage to Carrie Fisher, sang, “You take two bodies and you twirl them into one . . . And they won’t come undone.” The pomp and pageantry of love and commitment—whether that of a traditional wedding or a conventionally romantic night out with red roses and candles—looms large in our collective imagination. These rituals offer couples emotional generators to affirm their shared reality and identity. But rituals can also provide opportunities for much-needed transitions when ending relationships, whether we call it breaking up, divorcing, or separating.Can couples craft new rituals to help them decouple—to acknowledge that their once-shared reality is now fragmented?This is precisely where Ulay and Marina Abramov...

A new study has unveiled an alarming picture of declining overall health in India. The report, released by the Indian multinational healthcare group, Apollo Hospitals, found that skyrocketing cases of cancer and other non-communicable diseases across the country have now made it “the cancer capital of the world.”Despite reporting more than a million new cases every year, India’s cancer rate has not yet surpassed countries like Denmark, Ireland, and Belgium, which record some of the highest cancer rates in the world. It is also currently lower than the U.S., reporting 100 cases for every 100,000 people compared with 300 in the U.S. But that could soon change due to what some experts have called an “epidemiological transition.” The new report finds that currently, one in three Indians is pre...

Call it the Five Stages of Grief (Taylor’s Version). Last week, ahead of the release of her album The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift shared five new playlists that sort her old songs into stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. “These songs represent making room for more good in your life,” she says in a brief audio message accompanying the final playlist, acceptance. “Making that choice. Because a lot of time when we lose things, we gain things too.”In the two months since Swift announced her new album, which comes out April 19, fans have speculated that it will explore themes related to coming to terms with the loss of a long-term relationship. (The pop star revealed the end of her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn last April; she’s now dating Kan...

Americans are increasingly at risk of having lower incomes, poorer health, and a worse shot at opportunity even before they are born. More babies are now born with low birthweights than in the last 30 years. This has caused growing inequalities that can persist if not properly addressed. In certain parts of the country, that risk may be ten-times greater. Underweight newborns are at an increased risk of long term health challenges, lower IQ scores, and developmental delays. New data shows that the frequency of this problem is rising with more than 300,000 newborns now experiencing low birthweight. This public health and equity issue is increasingly common in low-income communities, communities with poor access to healthy foods, and homes that are near high-polluting sites. Emily Oster, a p...

Pfizer Inc.’s RSV shot produced immune reactions in young adults at higher risk of severe illness just as well as in older people, spurring the company’s plans to apply for wider U.S. approval.A single dose of the vaccine, called Abrysvo, produced a strong immune response in adults ages 18 to 59 with conditions such as asthma, diabetes, or chronic lung disease, Pfizer said. Based on the final-stage trial results, the company plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration to extend the shot’s approval to adults 18 and older.RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is a flu-like illness that affects elderly adults and babies most severely. The market for adult vaccines alone could reach $11 billion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, making it a lucrative target for drugmakers like Pfiz...

If you have a headache or eye pain after viewing the solar eclipse—even if you wore eclipse glasses—you’re not alone. But don’t panic. Experts say it’s probably not a sign of serious damage.Looking straight at the eclipse without protective glasses can potentially cause permanent damage to your vision. It’s dangerous to look directly at an eclipse—except during the period of "totality," when the sun is entirely covered by the moon—for the same reason it’s never a good idea to stare at the sun: its light can burn your retina, a risk that’s formally known as solar retinopathy.But if you suffered this kind of damage, you’d be more likely to experience visual disruptions—such as blurriness, light sensitivity, or dark spots—over the following hours, rather than eye pain. The retina doesn’t have...