I curate articles from around the web that present an interesting perspective or helpful information at the intersection of technology and wellbeing. Each of these articles were featured in my August 2020 newsletter. I send out an update twice a month along with some notes on my latest work. Sign up for my newsletter here.
AUGUST I
Whether You Are a Night Owl or Early Bird May Affect How Much You Move
Are you an early bird or a night owl or somewhere in between? Early risers actually have an advantage, according to a new study of how our innate body clocks may be linked to our physical activity habits.
Gretchen Reynolds posted a story in The New York Times' about a study published in June in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports showing how our daily movement is impacted by our chronotype, or the "a master internal body clock, located in our brains, that tracks and absorbs outside clues, such as ambient light, to determine what time it is and how our bodies should react.
Day types tend to wake a bit later and experience peak alertness a few hours deeper into the day. And evening types rise as late as possible and remain vampirically wakeful well past dark."
The study showed early risers did the equivalent of walking 20 to 30 minutes more each day compared to “evening types,” who tend to stay up late.
Learn your individual chronotype here and read the full story on nytimes.com.
The Workforce Is About to Change Dramatically
As someone who has lived and worked remotely for most of my career, I know the downsides to this existence over the long-term which is why I'm so interested in how COVID will change how we work.
"Work does not necessarily make for the ideal community. But in the past few decades, the office has served, for many people, as a last community standing," Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic. "In an age where various associative institutions are in retreat—such as religious congregations, bowling leagues, and unions—there is one place where the majority of adults ages 25 to 55 have kept showing up, almost every day, of almost every week. At work."
That community is essential for mental health. It's one of the reasons I've been a fan of coworking spaces. I've used them around the world and that became a way to be involved in a community whether that was in Lisbon or Berlin or Grand Rapids. The pandemic has brought this "last community standing" to a end. Or has it?
"What’s more, for many workers, their emotional relationships with colleagues have changed because their spatial relationships with those colleagues have changed. Many white-collar companies have become virtual group chats punctuated by Zooms. This is not business as usual. Online communications can be a minefield for mutual understanding, as Bill Duane, a former Google engineer and a corporate consultant, told me. Silly office interactions, Duane says, can be 'carrier waves' for productive office work. Without them, our lovable yet complicated colleagues can be reduced to annoying abstractions."
This entire story about three predictions for what the future workforce might look like is a fascinating read.
AUGUST II
Kickstart Program: A Science-Backed Approach to Success
Over the past few weeks, I've been creating and refining a free program we're using as an introduction to our group coaching course, Be Your Own Best Coach. After talking to all of the people who went through the first two cohorts, we heard repeatedly, that the skills we trained are so useful and are never taught any time at school, at work or at home.
So we decided to pack key lessons from the course into a 5-step Kickstart Program. Presented via email over three weeks, each step gives science-based, critical skills you need to manage your life, build resilience, and improve your shot at success. We also built new action guides for each step.
We're launching our third cohort in October with a paid campaign to promote this Kickstart Program starting in a couple weeks. That means I need feedback to ensure it's a success.
Check it out and please let me know what you think! Here’s the link to the landing page >>
Time to ditch ‘toxic positivity,’ experts say: ‘It’s okay not to be okay’
A friend of mine recently reached out to me about having sadness and feeling anguish about even feeling sadness because so many others have harder challenges.
It was a struggle to know it's okay not to be okay. There is so much change happening right now that it can all feel like too much, and reassuring platitudes like: “It could be worse.” or “Look on the bright side.” can be worse than unhelpful.
“While cultivating a positive mind-set is a powerful coping mechanism, toxic positivity stems from the idea that the best or only way to cope with a bad situation is to put a positive spin on it and not dwell on the negative,” said Natalie Dattilo, a clinical health psychologist with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It results from our tendency to undervalue negative emotional experiences and overvalue positive ones.”
As I read this article my friend shared on toxic positivity from The Washington Post, I was reminded of one of my favorite Pixar’s movies, Inside Out, about how five emotions — personified as the characters Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Joy — grapple for control of the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley during the tumult of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco.
When Joy tried to dominate everything, Riley was in turmoil. It wasn’t until Sadness was allowed to show herself that Riley was able to finally deal with struggle and get through her change.
We need sadness sometimes to find joy.
A Tribute Fit for a King
Sad news came Friday as we learned Chadwick Boseman, who most famously portrayed T’Challa, King of Wakanda in Marvel's Black Panther, had died of colon cancer at 43.
In a show of how impactful he was in his short time with us, the Twitter post announcing the actor passed away has become the most-liked tweet of all time, currently with 7.4 million likes. The tweet surpassed an August 2017 post from former President Barack Obama, which was previously the most-liked tweet of all time.
As a Marvel fan, I thought a nice tribute would be to share a a message from the post-credits scene of Black Panther that seems fitting to remember Boseman as he embodied T'Challa...
"In times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe."