March 20, 2019 at 04:00AM by CWC When you think of an ordinary volcano, you probably picture fiery red lava spewing from a collapsed mountaintop or perhaps oozing down the slope with a dull glow. Far from ordinary is Indonesia’s Kawah Ijen volcano, which awes with a stunningly blue illumination. Kawah Ijen displays one of the world’s most mesmerizing natural wonders, but you need to hike the crater before dawn to see it. “The blue glow is due to sulfur burning, a common volcanic product that makes a blue flame. If you had a piece of sulfur sitting on your desk and you touched a match to it, it would turn blue,” says James E. Quick, PhD, a volcanologist who spent 25 years with the United States Geological Survey (USGS). “When magma is approaching the surface, it contains gases, the most common being CO2, H2O, and sulfur. As the magma comes to the surface, it starts to boil off these gases. When the sulfur is released from the magma, if it encounters a lot of water beneath the surface, it will be absorbed by the water and won’t escape. But if it has a dry pathway to the surface, it will come to the surface and be released.” In the rare case of Kawah Ijen, the deposits of sulfur are “produced by releases of sulfur that are quite hot, and they’re hot enough that when they come to the surface, they ignite,” says Dr. Quick. “In some cases, the sulfur is flowing down
Category: 2019 Health
Menopause is health tech’s last frontier, but this startup is looking to change that
March 20, 2019 at 03:00AM by CWC At this point, there seems to be a health-care startup to meet almost every basic women’s health need. We can consult apps like Maven Clinic for a UTI prescription or a lactation consultant session, get a read on fertility with services like Kindbody, and score birth control pills, emergency contraception, and HIV prevention drugs from Nurx. But there’s still one subset of women who haven’t been directly targeted by the fem-tech revolution: those seeking menopause treatment. This is absurd, considering that the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) says an estimated 6,000 US women reach menopause, or the permanent end of their menstrual cycles, every day. And that’s not even counting the tens of millions who are experiencing symptoms of perimenopause—the transitional phase in which a woman’s ovarian function starts to decline and periods become irregular during her late 30s and early 40s. “When we started speaking to women who were experiencing the symptoms of menopause, what we heard over and over was I feel alone, I didn’t feel prepared for this, I don’t feel educated about what’s happening to my body.” —Rachel Blank, co-founder of Rory Not only is there a huge market for menopause support, there’s also a huge need for it. Starting during the perimenopause phase, which lasts an average of four years, it’s not uncommon to notice a tanking libido, mood swings, weight gain, hair loss, insomnia, vaginal dryness, and hot flashes—serious symptoms that can dramatically affect a woman’s quality of
Foam rolling’s secret perk? Doing it *before* a workout makes your muscles even more effective
March 19, 2019 at 05:00PM by CWC These days, “foam rolling” and “recovery” have practically become synonymous—despite the fact that you can, apparently, use your foam roller for an actual workout, too. But what you may not know is that everyone’s favorite recovery tool has another important function aside from helping soothe sore muscles after a workout: They can actually be used before your workout to make your time on the mat even more effective. The process, referred to by some trainers as “neuropriming,” helps warm up your muscles so that they are fully relaxed before you start working them. That way, when you enter into your workout, they’ll be able to fully compress—allowing you to reap the full benefits of the work you’re putting in. Basically, it’s giving you a full muscle pump instead of the limited one that tight muscles restrict you to. “That’s 100 percent recruitment of the muscle,” explains John Burns, CEO of Tom Brady’s wellness company, TB12. “Imagine you’re doing your quad exercises with 90 percent of the muscle: How much more stable could you be, how much more powerful could you be, how many more reps could you do [if you were using all 100 percent]?” I mean, a lot. And that’s not the only reason why you should be rolling it out before you’re sweating it out. “Foam rolling before your workout helps increase circulation, decreases tension, and primes the neuromuscular system by driving the parasympathetic nervous system to maximize movement capabilities,” explain Dariusz Stankiewicz and Corinne Croce, the
Deliciously Ella’s new app is a one-stop shop for on-demand yoga and healthy desserts—am I in heaven?
March 19, 2019 at 04:00PM by CWC Upon first exploring plant-based food blog Deliciously Ella‘s newly minted app, I exclaimed, “My, oh, my! I can queue up an on-demand yoga class and learn how to make plant-based salted caramel sauce in the very same digital location.” The two major tabs of founder Ella Mills’ fresh creation are indeed “recipes” and “yoga.” Meaning, I could literally just eat salted caramel straight off the spoon while practicing camel pose. Casual. For $0.99 a month, users gain access to more than 400 recipes, many of which include tutorials (no more scratching your head if you need to “strain” cashews), and yoga sequences between 10 and 40 minutes in length. Mills plans to add new content each week. Scan through the app’s edible offerings, and you’ll find detailed instructions for peanut butter and raspberry porridge (“fly me to the moon”), butternut squash Wellington (“let me play among the stars”), and cacao mouse cake (“fill my heart with song”). Scan through the app’s edible offerings, and you’ll find detailed instructions for peanut butter and raspberry porridge (“fly me to the moon”), butternut squash Wellington (“let me play among the stars”), and cacao mouse cake (“fill my heart with song”). After drooling all over my phone and mentally pinning everything I want to make, I decided to hop on my yoga mat to try a quick 10-minute stretch to go along with my morning coffee. I chose one entitled “Wake Up Energy.” The instructor guides me through several
Shift workers share how they sleep, socialize, and generally function on a nontraditional schedule
March 19, 2019 at 03:00PM by CWC It’s 3 a.m. when firefighter Molly* jolts awake. Great, just great, she thinks. Molly works 10 24-hour shifts a month and, but this is a night where she’s home in her own bed. “I fall asleep easily, but have problems staying asleep,” she says. When she clocks her rest at the firehouse, she has to be up and ready in mere seconds at the sound of an (extremely loud) siren. Knowing she might have to be awake and alert enough to make literal life or death decisions makes for terrible sleep during shifts. And because her body’s conditioned to spring into action at any time, she has trouble getting quality sleep at home, too. Kimberly Brown, MD, a 34-year-old ER doctor living in Memphis can relate. Her schedule is all over the place; sometimes she works 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., and other times it’s 8 p.m. to 7 p.m. “My night shifts are never more than three days in a row, so I don’t get too used to it,’” she says. Still, because her hours change so often (and to such a high magnitude), she says it’s hard to get consistent, quality sleep. Chasing enough sleep is a pursuit that keeps so many of us awake at night—and in the case of night shift workers, during the day, too. According to Well+Good’s recent survey of nearly 1,500 people about their sleep habits and health, 92 percent of of us feel fatigued more
I fell in love with pole classes, and TBH I’ve never felt stronger
March 19, 2019 at 12:55PM by CWC I start climbing upward, the pole wedged between my knee and my foot. Once I’m as high as I can go without kicking the ceiling, I swivel my hips to the front, flip upside down so that my butt is over my head, and grip the pole with my right knee. I push my arms outward, extend my legs, and drop, tumbling downwards in a dramatic fashion until I catch the pole with my opposite knee. For a moment, I swear I was flying. I’ve been pole dancing consistently for almost two years at this point, which in the grand scheme of things, isn’t an incredibly long time, but it’s weird to think about what I used to do before I frequented Incredipole multiple times a week. I started going during a period when I was very sad, very insecure, and wanted to explore an active hobby that made me feel good—after all, endorphins make you happy, as the great Elle Woods once said. The problem? I didn’t really know how to work out in a healthy way. Former years dabbling with appetite suppressants, counting calories, then attempting to burn off said calories while feverishly pedaling on an elliptical put me in a place where I didn’t know what a happy medium felt like. When I started taking pole, I hadn’t engaged in that sort of destructive behavior in years, but the anxiety associated with going to the gym was very real for me. But,
Why you should actually do the jump moves in your workouts (even though they’re so damn hard)
March 19, 2019 at 12:03PM by CWC I’m all good with doing squats or lunges or any other workout move that takes place on the floor, but the second an instructor puts the word “jump” before a move I roll my eyes and sigh with utter frustration. I hate jumping in workouts, because it’s so. Freaking. Hard. But it’s also good for your body, especially if you’re working on your strength (ugh). Know that trainers aren’t just trying to torture you when they make you jump—it’s truly about building up your body’s power. “The purpose of jumping in workouts is to engage a large muscle mass to burn calories,” explains Jason Karp, PhD, author and coach and chief running officer of Run-Fit. “Landing from a jump is demanding and includes a lot of force, so it increases your muscle power.” So yeah, though you may feel like you’re truly dying while doing a burpee or a box jump, you’re not alone—people just don’t jump in real life, so your muscles aren’t naturally built to have to do it all the time. “Jumping feels so hard because of the large muscle forces—landing from a jump puts a lot of stress on the muscles and joints,” says Dr. Karp. “Even landing when running uses two to three times body weight, so jumping equals even greater than three times your body weight when landing. Most people don’t have strong, powerful muscles because they haven’t trained their muscles to be that strong and powerful.” I also asked
How to wrap your headphones so they never get tangled at the bottom of your gym bag
March 19, 2019 at 12:01PM by CWC I’m the queen of tangling things. No matter how carefully I pack up my bag, my necklaces and headphones always end up in knots. It’s a conspiracy, I say! And if you feel my pain—the pain of spending 10 minutes fidgeting with a bird’s nest of white wire before moving on with your life—there’s a simple solution. Often the best technique is one that’s been around for a while. Well, there’s a super-old video from YouTube’s youth that perfectly shows how to wrap your headphones so they don’t get tangled in your bag. (The demonstrator uses original iPod headphones, according to video from 2006, but the wisdom still applies.) For someone like me who’s always in a rush and therefore not interested in any hack that takes more than 30 seconds to do, this one fits the bill. According to user CuriousInventor, start by taking the headphones end in one hand, securing them with your thumb, then begin wrapping the cord around your remaining four fingers. Once you get a couple loops away from the end, use the remaining cord to wrap around the middle of the bunch you just created. Then, finish by bringing the headphone jack through one of the loops. While this wrap job keeps your headphones nice and secure in your bag, using them again is as easy as pulling from both ends: it quickly unravels itself knot-free in a second flat. Pretty magical, huh? Of course, if you watch to ditch
You can’t avoid going to work, but “replugging” makes the day easier
March 19, 2019 at 11:42AM by CWC We all might benefit from “mentally reattaching” to work, according to a new study published in Journal of Management. Okay, I don’t love all of those words together. Mentally reattaching to work sounds like something I absolutely do not want to do. Despite my skepticism, replugging into work in the morning might help you become more engaged at work. Co-authored by a Portland State University professor (and my boss, probably), the small study surveyed 151 people across a variety of industries. People who take a few minutes to replug into work in the morning created a more positive work experience, the study concluded. What exactly does that entail? It could be anything from going through your to-do list while in line for coffee to planning out specific tasks that need to get done while you’re in the shower, says Charlotte Fritz, co-author of the study, the aforementioned PSU professor, and a person I believe maybe never experienced anxiety because thinking about work while doing mundane tasks is the story of my life. I kid about that last part, because a key component of replugging into work is that you first have to unplug from it. A key component of replugging into work is that you first have to unplug from it. “We know that detachment from work during non-work hours is important because it creates positive outcomes like higher life satisfaction and lower burnout,” says Fritz. On the flip side, reattaching to work (blah) creates a
Got an earache? The remedy is in your pantry, according to a naturopathic doctor
March 19, 2019 at 11:05AM by CWC People who get earaches on the reg can tell you that while they’re obviously not as painful as say, cramps or migraines, they’re still in that sweet spot of being just bothersome enough that it’s hard to focus on anything else. And while most earaches resolve on their own (more on that in a sec), they still hurt—which makes home remedies such a tempting option. As it’s somehow still cold and flu season (also: allergy season) and thus peak angry ear season, Patti Kim, ND, LAC, an LA-based naturopathic doctor, kindly shared with Well+Good her go-to home remedies for earache. Are you all ears? You should be. What usually causes an earache? The usual cause of earaches, according to Dr. Kim, is an ear infection. There are actually two different kinds, she says. First, there’s swimmer’s ear, which is an external ear infection. “They call it swimmer’s ear because people get it from swimming,” Dr. Kim says. “The water will dry up the natural lipids and oil barriers [and] cause inflammation and irritation.” Don’t let the name fool you though—you definitely can still get it even you haven’t been swimming (say, if you damaged your ear canal by going too hard on those Q-tips). Then there’s the less-common middle ear infection (also called otitis media). Dr. Kim describes it as a “cold trapped in your ear” that usually comes from a bacterial or viral infection and while it’s more common in children, it can still