Year: 2019

January 02, 2019 at 08:23AM Things that are the worst: your fav coffee shop running out of oat milk, missing your flight because the security line was so long, and painful periods. And if the cramping, bleeding, and mood shifts weren’t enough to make us all dread that time of the month, some of us are blessed with an additional fun period side effect: PMS back pain. According to the Virginia Spine Institute, back pain that comes on during menstruation is generally caused by the same thing that causes your cramps: overactive muscles. Thank the chemical prostaglandin, which tells your uterine muscles to contract (and thus shed the built-up uterine lining) during your period. If your body goes overboard making prostaglandin, those contracting muscles can cause some major cramping—creating pain that can radiate to your lower back. (Hello, back pain.) However, Adrienne Potts, MD, FACOG, an obstetrician-gynecologist specializing in family planning and preventative care, says that there are some other factors that can cause PMS back pain. For example, she says having a retroverted (aka tilted) uterus may make some women experience cramping in the lower back instead of (or in addition to) the abdomen. And there are other health conditions, like endometriosis or uterine fibroids, that can also contribute to cramping and lower back pain during menstruation. “It can be hard to disentangle the cause without a more in-depth examination, particularly in separating the more ‘typical’ pain that women commonly experience from pain that could suggest a secondary condition,” Dr. Potts says. She

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January 02, 2019 at 07:48AM I’ll go ahead and confess that any time I hear an esthetician or dermatologist talk about “balanced skin,” I’m left wondering what the heck that even means. pH as it relates to skin care is complicated, confusing, and without fail, whisks me back to high school chemistry class, where we’d go over the difference between beakers full of alkaline and acidic solutions. Now, as more-and-more tubes and bottles in my skin-care regimen tout pH-balance as a key perk, I wondered why I need to care about it in the first place. First thing first: Let’s break down what all this science-y stuff actually means. In case you don’t remember from high school—which, I’m going to be honest, I definitely needed a refresher—the pH scale runs from 0 (acidic) to 14 (basic). Healthy skin has a natural pH level of between 4 and 5.5, so your skin operates on the slightly acidic side of things and the goal is to use products that will help keep it that way. That’s exactly why so many key ingredients and actives are acids. Need to moisturize? Slather on a hyaluronic acid. Want to brighten? Get to work with the L-ascorbic acid. Feeling like you want to resurface skin? Try an alpha-hydroxy or beta-hydroxy acid. That retinol? Yep, it’s retinoic acid. And the list goes on and on (and on). Despite this, we tend to start our skin-care regimens by sending our complexions to the opposite end of the pH scale. “Most

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January 02, 2019 at 06:00AM There’s nothing like the start of the New Year to make us take stock in who we’ve been and who we want to be. Often, at the core of regrets and goals alike are certain behavioral habits. So it stands to reason that our habits have a large influence are on who are. And we all know that there are good and bad habits: Some, like taking the stairs rather than the escalator, clearly lean toward the positive, while a less-than-stellar habit might be drinking six cups of coffee every morning. But what about the less obvious habits, like the ones we create at work? Some may keep us stuck in roles that don’t quite fit while others allow us to outperform and reach heights of success we didn’t know were possible. The key to understanding how to make and break habits is understanding the anatomy of them: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, I work out five days a week, and the cue is my calendar. The routine is going into my gym, changing my clothes, and starting to exercise. The reward? I get a huge energy boost that lasts for more than an hour. This loop has happened for so long, I don’t think about it at all, I just do it. That’s the power of habits. Simply put, we’re often not even aware that we’re at the mercy of our own bad work habits. So how can this power negatively

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