<ul>
<li>All of our attention is being focused on the threatening aspects of the situation.</li>
<li>Headlines are dominated by places where the pandemic is currently hitting the hardest.</li>
<li>Our usual routines are no longer safe.</li>
<li>The safety measures people are taking may be more immediate and visible.</li>
<li>We don’t have much control over the situation.</li>
</ul>

Why A Pandemic Is Uniquely Stressful

<ul>
<li>Reach out to a mental health professional, even if you can’t meet with them in person.</li>
<li>Reframe the virus outbreak by temporal distancing, or by focusing your attention on a longer timescale.</li>
<li>Try putting the outbreak in historical context (there have been many pandemics during our history).</li>
<li>Limit how much information you consume about the new virus outbreak. Find the right balance between being informed and being overwhelmed.</li>
</ul>

Tackling Your Anxiety

<ul>
<li>Try meditation or any anxiety-busting method that works for you.</li>
<li>Look for things that are future-oriented and pleasurable.</li>
<li>Do tasks around the house you have been putting off.</li>
<li>Think of activities you can still do with your loved ones, even if you can't be with them physically.</li>
</ul>

Stress-Reducing Activities

The past few days have made clear how serious the escalating coronavirus pandemic is for many people in the United States. Schools and workplaces across the country closed, major events were canceled, and testing delays made it impossible to confirm how many people were infected.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Personal Development

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Health

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Mental Health

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Communication

How to Stop an Anxiety Spiral

Learning a new skill can be tough. Those of us trying to master a new language, learn a musical instrument, or take an online course, will find that when the initial enthusiasm dries up, things move at a snail’s pace.It’s easy to assume that our brains aren’t capable, but that’s not true. Anyone can master a new discipline with the right tools and strategies.

Learn A New Skill

Most learning techniques with lots of theory and colorful infographics do not assist in making the information stick in our minds.There is a need for ‘desirable difficulties’ which exercise our minds and translate into long-term retention of knowledge.

Make It A Challenge

.. or a Q&A session primes the brain to absorb the information afterward, and failing to answer it initially is part of the game. 
The brain needs to know that it doesn’t know.

A Pre-Test Quiz

Continuously quizzing yourself, something called ‘retrieval practice’ jogs the memory and builds stronger traces. The harder the retrieval is, the stronger the memory formation.
Teaching others is an excellent way to gain in-depth knowledge of a subject.

Teaching Others

Spending too much time on one topic can be counterproductive. It is better to switch and rotate between topics, something called ‘interleaving’. The technique has an in-built momentary confusion once you switch back and forth, resulting in a better long-term recall of the material.

Mix It Up

Cardiovascular exercise makes us better learners, triggering dopamine and epinephrine in our brains, providing us with a natural memory boost.

Get Moving

Our memory is contextually sensitive, making our surroundings affect its functioning.Studies show that changing the place of learning can help retain and recall the topics better.

Change Your  Environment

Recovery is a must for learning. Taking time off does not mean more brain stimulation like TV or video games. It means just closing your eyes and doing nothing. Surprisingly, that is when the brain gets to work, cementing what you have learned.

Do Nothing

Handpicked sources to help you adapt to the mindset of lifelong learners

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Problem Solving

Lifelong Learners

If your aim for 2020 was to learn a new skill, you may be at the point of giving up. Whether you are mastering a new language or a musical instrument, or taking a career-changing course, initial enthusiasm can only take you so far, and any further progress can be disappointingly slow.

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Learning & Education

Fail productively... how to turn yourself into a super-learner

Throughout time research has proven that shopping enables individuals to relax and forget about their worries. Anxiety is one of the most often met reasons that make people choose shopping over any other activity, as this gives us the impression that we can control a situation we have no real control over.

Anxiety encourages us to shop

Feeling anxious can lead to quite harmful behaviors, as one tends to always choose the safe path. For instance, when stressed over a certain situation directly related to goods, you might feel the need to buy too many products, a fact which, over time, will result in others not having what to buy or you having bought too much and wasting the very products you bought.

Anxiety and panic buying

When faced with difficult periods, like the pandemic we are all dealing with at present, individuals seem to tend to associate luxury goods to a greater safety level. Furthermore, research has shown that people believe to be able to distance themselves from danger only by purchasing luxurious and expensive products.

Anxiety and the need to buy luxury goods

We are currently required to handle an unprecedented situation, at least for most of us: we need to make sure we have all the necessary goods in the proper amount, without letting the others starve. One way to make this work is by buying on a regular basis, just the amount that we need. We can, as a result, ensure both our own and the others' survival.

Learn to control your anxiety when buying

Many of our buying, hoarding, and consuming values and behaviors are closely related to anxiety. As the Coronavirus pandemic rages on around us, and our day-to-day lives are upturned and disrupted, most of us are experiencing anxiety to a lesser or greater extent. How does anxiety affect our buying activities?

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Money & Investments

How Anxiety Affects Our Buying Behaviors

Common symptoms: chest tightness and shortness of breath. But these are also common symptoms of anxiety.
People with anxiety may continue to worry that they are getting sick, even if they don't have a fever or a cough. But there are ways to distinguish between anxiety chest tightness and the new virus chest tightness and a way to manage the former.

Symptoms of the new virus

If you are experiencing chest tightness or shortness of breath now, ask yourself first:
<ul>
<li>Are you someone with a history of anxiety, especially if it is tied to health concerns?</li>
<li>If yes, did your symptoms show up while reading news about the virus?</li>
<li>Do you find it hard to focus on other things?</li>
</ul>
Paying too much attention is called hypervigilance and body scanning. It is associated with anxiety.

Anxiety chest tightness

The brain is very powerful. We can see a positive pregnancy test and immediately develop morning sickness. Anxious people can read about the shortness of breath and instantly develop it.
However, shortness of breath is also tied to the way anxious people breathe. Anxious people breathe fast and too shallow. They blow off too much CO2, which makes them feel dizzy and makes their chest feel tight.
To alleviate the symptoms, breathe in slowly through your nose, count to four seconds, and then breathe out slowly through pursed lips. It will normalize your CO2 levels.

Anxiety causes shortness of breath

There are many ways we can slow down a rapid heart rate or quickened breathing.
<ul>
<li>Focus on something in your environment or count backward out loud from 100 by threes. It lets you really focus and be in the moment.</li>
<li>Progressive muscle relaxation. Tense and then release parts of the body one by one. Do this for a few minutes each morning, midday, and night.</li>
</ul>
If you practice these techniques and you improve, it's a good sign that it was anxiety.

Anxiety-related chest tightness

It is possible to be anxious and have a physical illness. 
<ul>
<li>If your chest tightness goes away for periods of time - like while you're watching a funny show - it's less worrying. </li>
<li>If you are seriously ill, these distraction techniques are not going to reduce your symptoms. If you're experiencing more than one symptom of  the new virus, you might want to call your doctor.</li>
</ul>

Worried that you're really sick

Like much of the world, I've spent the last few weeks in an anxious haze, walking aimlessly between my apartment's three rooms because there's nowhere else to go. I'm taking Emergen-C and checking my temperature twice a day. I have an anxiety disorder, and I am also, quite reasonably, afraid that I will get COVID-19.

Is My Chest Tightness Anxiety or the new virus?

Over the history of Western literature about pandemics, much has been said in the way of catharsis, ways of dealing with intense emotion, and political commentary on how people respond to public health crises.
It is worth to peruse these texts to understand our reactions to the spread of this virus.

Insight from literature

Homer's Iliad opens with a plague visited upon the Greek camp at Troy. The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio is set during the Black Death. 
The stories offer the listeners ways to consider how similar crises have been managed previously, and how to reorganize their daily lives, which have been suspended due to the epidemic.

Stories help us to think

<ul><li>Mary Shelley's apocalypse novel The Last Man (1826), depicts the life of Lionel Verney, who becomes the last man after a devastating global plague. The book criticizes the institutional responses to the plague, showing the revolutionary utopianism and the in-fighting that breaks out among surviving groups before they also die.</li><li>The short story, The Masque of the Red Death (1842), also shows the failures o authority figures to respond to a disaster appropriately. </li></ul>

Authority's failure to respond

<ul><li>Albert Camus' The Plague (1942) and Stephen King's The Stand (1978) depict the social implications of plague-like pandemics, particularly regarding isolation and failures of the state to contain the disease and moderate the growing panic.</li><li>The 2016 novel Fever by Deon Meyer describes the results of a bioengineered virus where survivors besiege one another for resources.</li></ul>

Modern and contemporary literature

Some speculative novels written by indigenous peoples and writers of color are treating colonialism and the diseases that spread by the colonizers as the source of an ongoing apocalypse. 
For many people in formerly colonized places, the apocalypse has already come - literally and metaphorically - and have destroyed their populations.

Fiction by indigenous peoples

From Homer's Iliad and Boccaccio's Decameron to Stephen King's The Stand and Ling Ma's Severance, stories about pandemics have - over the history of Western literature such as it is - offered much in the way of catharsis, ways of processing strong emotion, and political commentary on how human beings respond to public health crises.

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Society, Arts & Culture

Pandemics from Homer to Stephen King: what we can learn from literary history

Choose one exercise for each of the following four categories:
<ul>
<li>P- Plyometric cardio (e.g., Jumping Jacks)</li>
<li>A- Abs (e.g., Plank)</li>
<li>U- Upper Body (e.g., Push-Ups)</li>
<li>L- Lower Body (e.g., Squats</li>
</ul>
Perform each exercise for 30 seconds. After performing all four exercises, rest 30 seconds and start again

The P.A.U.L. method (10 minutes)

<ul>
<li>Jumping Jacks: 20 reps or 40 reps</li>
<li>Squat: 10 reps or 20 reps</li>
<li>Incline push-up: 10 seconds or 20 seconds</li>
<li>Plank: 30 seconds or 40 seconds</li>
<li>Single-Leg Glute Bridge: 5 reps each leg or 10 reps each leg</li>
</ul>
Complete this circuit three times with a 30-second rest between each round.

A HIIT circuit (beginners and advanced)

<ul>
<li>40 Speed Skaters</li>
<li>10 Floor Burpees</li>
<li>15 Leg Lift + Hip Lift</li>
</ul>
Set a timer for 10 minutes and complete the circuit as many times as possible with little to no rest over the course of those 10 minutes.

The 3-HIIT wonder (10 minutes)

<ul>
<li>Star Jumps (30 seconds): a dynamic exercise that targets legs, glutes, core, shoulders, and cardio.</li>
<li>Squat Jumps (30 seconds): a dynamic exercise that targets the legs, glutes, and core.</li>
<li>Close Grip Push-Ups (30 seconds): this targets your chest, shoulders, and core.</li>
<li>Reverse Crunches (30 seconds): this targets the lower abs but will require the entire core to be involved.</li>
<li>Toe Touches (30 seconds): it targets your upper abs.</li>
<li>Burpees (30 seconds): this targets legs, glutes, core, shoulders, and cardio.</li>
</ul>

The perfect HIIT workout

How to make home workouts fun and accessible

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Remote Work

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Sports

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Exercise & Fitness

How to Start Working Out at Home

Chances are you've heard about the fitness phenomenon, HIIT. And for good reason - the tough workout promises toned muscles and intense fat burning in a matter of minutes. The best part is, you don't have to leave your house to get its benefits.

HIIT workouts you can do from the comfort of your own home

Any exercise can be a form of HIIT, if it follows a specific regimen where you vary your speeds and intensity when doing it. Example: 
<blockquote></blockquote><ul><li>Jogging lightly for three minutes.</li><li>Pushing yourself harder for a minute (run or sprint).</li><li>Repeating this cycle 4 more times.</li></ul><ul>
</ul>

High-intensity interval training (HIIT)

HIIT workouts generally only last about 20 minutes, which makes them attractive for busy people (most of us). A 20-Min HIIT home workout:
<ol>
<li>Dynamic Warm-up</li>
<li>Bodyweight Squats</li>
<li>Push-ups</li>
<li>Star Jacks (or other dynamic exercises)</li>
<li>Inverted Row (or other pull exercises)</li>
<li>Plank (or other core exercises).</li>
<li>A stretching to cool down.</li>
</ol>

HIIT home workout

We help many of our coaching clients begin at-home workouts, including HIIT routines, and today we'll share with you exactly how to train without a gym. No gym? No problem! Let our coaches build you an at-home workout! Here's what we'll cover in today's guide for HIIT at home: Let's do this thing!

The HIIT Workout for Home (Interval Training for Living Rooms) | Nerd Fitness

Coffee is worldwide famous for its flavor, smell and energetic effect. According to experts, however, the real coffee has only one flavor, without any added cream or sugar and, above all, without be reheated in the microwave.&nbsp;On the other hand, farmers, roasters and so on will invite you in the universe of various flavors, that could make anybody fall in love with at least one coffee kind.

Customizing your coffee

Coffee is, for most of us, a synonym for starting our day, getting the energy in order to work hard, being able to think, to dream. Coffee is so much more than just a hot or warm drink. Coffee is for the adults who do their best to be efficient at work, but also a drink that runs in the family and connects individuals.

The true meaning of coffee

Throughout your life, you tried, at some point or another, coffee. And you came, undoubtedly, to the conclusion that coffee is miraculous.&nbsp;And it is indeed: coffee enables you to start over again and to carry on, no matter how old or tired you are. After all, this is coffee we are talking about.

The power of coffee

Sitting upstairs on the stove is this morning's coffee, lukewarm, waiting for me to decide that I'm ready to drink it as is, or just a bit cooler once I add a little milk; see, I'm not above adding milk to my coffee, or drinking an afternoon glass at room temp.

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Food

The Deep Metaphorical Power of a Good Cup of Coffee

One of the good things about social distancing and lockdown is that everyone is trying to come out of this healthier, more grounded, saner, more connected and more empathetic.
One of the key ways to do that is to meditate, and it is something most of us know the benefits, but it is practiced by few and mastered by only a handful.

Meditation for People Who Don't

Meditation requires no equipment, can be done indoors, and is extremely beneficial to cultivate calm, balance, focus, and emotional resilience in these times of uncertainty. It helps us live, work and sleep better. It is an immediate remedy to lessen your anxiety and provide clarity of mind.

The Most Difficult, Easy Thing

The main stumbling block for most people is the mastery of the skill of meditation. Meditation cannot be compared to any form of exercise or hobby as it is an internal skill.
Most people get some benefits out of meditation, but it is not transformative. We have to learn it by ourselves, without having images or ideas in our minds, of what it is, how it is done by others and how it would feel.

Meditation Is an Internal Skill

Basic skills that make up a meditation technique:
<ul>
<li>Directing your attention/focus</li>
<li>Relaxing</li>
<li>Not getting upset with distractions</li>
<li>Noticing of subtle sensations in the body</li>
<li>Allowing things to unfold without any interference.</li>
</ul>

Basic Steps Of The Meditation Technique

It represents a time period filled with uncertainty as there is no immediate feedback to measure one’s progress, as in any other activity like basketball, for instance. Every novice practitioner of meditation goes through this.
For meditation to get a hold the only way to cross this window of uncertainty is to continue to meditate, even if one is not sure of doing it right.

The Window Of Uncertainty

But even the initial success of increased awareness feels like failure to most novice meditators. It’s best to just do the practice to the best of your understanding, choosing a method that is okay with you and get any lingering questions answered, to decrease the ambiguity and feeling of being lost.

Failure is a Success

Choose a method: There are hundreds of ways to meditate, starting with focusing on your breath. Choose one that works best for you.
Practice with the best of your current understanding: Most beginners leave as they get uncomfortable with this practice or try to get calm or focused by themselves, not realizing that their effort is only the act of meditation and nothing else.

Meditation: The Roadmap

Meditation becomes a far more relaxed and comfortable experience, an effortless effort when you ask the questions and be at ease.
The instructions of meditation are only to guide you towards what you have to discover. Like a finger pointing towards the moon, you have to stop looking at the finger and see where it is pointing. It is good to ask questions like how to stop thinking, or worrying about an itch, or not liking what we feel during meditation.

Get Your  Meditation Questions Answered

For the first few weeks, practice your chosen method every day. After a while, you can also branch out towards some other method, like a guided meditation or some guidance from a book or article you see. 
This exploration expands your repertoire of methods, expanding your understanding and making you realize that all these techniques have a core which is the same.

Experiment With Various Meditation Methods

It seems as though we've entered the "What do I do with myself?" phase of social distancing. Over the last week or two, several billion daily routines essentially evaporated, and now each of us has to make a new one. [...]

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Mindfulness

meditation

Meditation

A Complete Guide To Actually Getting Somewhere With Meditation

All over the world, governments have implemented lockdowns, restricting all non-essential travel, closing all the places where people can gather.
Lockdown isolation can lead to mental stress, and experts suggest various ways to safeguard your emotional and mental wellbeing, during this period of being alone.

Mental Health During Lockdown

<ul><li>Small things: Self-isolation can be dealt with ‘micro-lifts’, small, quick activities like saying hi to someone on FaceTime, joining an online group, or learning a bit of a new language.</li><li>A healthy diet: While it can be tempting to just sit on the sofa with zero movements, or snacking all day, it is a good idea to eat well, and eat healthily.</li></ul>

Lockdown Tips

Whatever the limits and constraints, try to get some nature exposure and exercise, even in a garden, terrace or balcony. You can also take care of the houseplants or open the windows to let fresh air in the room.

Engage With Nature

Keep bathing and brushing your teeth as before, and go to bed at healthy times to get adequate sleep. Try doing something else apart from eating, sleeping and watching Netflix. Any hobby or activity helps.

Maintain Your Routine

Avoid sitting in front of screens all day: Long periods of screen gazing, whether it’s a TV, PC or a smartphone, can disrupt your sleep and deteriorate your overall wellbeing. This is due to the blue light that most devices emit. 
Try getting into arts and crafts, listening to podcasts, knitting, meditation, cooking new stuff, writing, gardening, or reading.

Screen Exposure

<ul><li>Stay Connected: Even during a lockdown, we can be social using email, social media, video conferencing and the phone.</li><li>Limit your news intake: Too much virus news all day can harm your mental health. Limit news intake to a few times a day.</li><li>The Negative Spiral: Self-isolation can sometimes thrust us into a negative spiral if we start to overthink and be self-critical. It is best to stay positive and optimistic.</li></ul>

Staying Positive

As coronavirus continues to spread in the UK the government has implemented a lockdown on the country meaning all non-essential travel to be avoided. The new measures have also seen pubs, restaurants and theatres close, while people have been asked to work from home where possible.

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Habits

How to manage your mental health if you self-isolate

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