Olivia Kaur

There's a lot of chatter about "self-care". Between wellness and beauty companies promising to release feel-good endorphins with every product and being told to take more baths and learn to meditate, it can be confusing to determine what "you" time really should be—and shouldn't be. 

Aristotle believed that happiness could be achieved through living a life of virtue. It is the highest desire and ambition of all human beings and nothing can stop them from achieving so.

Cultivating one's virtue is the surefire way of reaching happiness. It's more than a lifestyle. It's practicing the prudence of character and having a good fate.

Many of his ideas bear great similarities with the principles of the Judeo-Christian religions.

Many of us feel overwhelmed in these strange times, and need to avoid the common mistakes we make:

1. Just Do It: We need to stop waiting for the exact ‘right’ moment and actually take action with the available options right now.
2. Your Unconscious Mind: Make use of it by sitting still and not engaging your mind at all times.
3. Don’t Be Self-Critical: Don’t self-sabotage yourself by negative thoughts and embrace self-compassion instead.
4. Use A Different Approach: Our own values and beliefs may need a rethink and we might require fresh, alternative solutions to our problem.
5. Connect With Loved Ones: Make sure you are not neglecting your support group, friends and family in these hard times.

Working from home carries with itself unique challenges that are not addressed or even acknowledged in many cases.

Dozing off during work is often an unwanted effect of longer working hours and family responsibilities. Lack of a good night’s sleep isn’t helping either.

Excellence is something that we have to demonstrate every waking moment of our lives, not something that is done once and then forgotten. Excellence is a way of life and is the operating system inside us which is coded through habits.

Stoics called excellence as Arete.

In New York, February 1908, thousands of women who were garment workers went on strike. They marched through the city to protest against their working conditions, which included less organized workplaces (than the men), lower echelons, lower wages, and sexual harassment.

The strikes lasted for more than a year. In honour of the anniversary of those strikes, a National Women's Day was celebrated on Feb 28, 1909, spearheaded by the Socialist Party of America and led by German socialist Clara Zetkin.

When we experience hardships it's easy to want the easy way out and we find it extremely difficult to stick around for things to get better or find a solution for it. We feel temporary relief from running away because out of sight, out of mind.

However, we will always trip over our problems because they are inevitable unless you resolve them. We cannot escape what lies unresolved within us.

• Like an essential app on our smartphones, face recognition has been an important, often crucial ability for our ancestors, with the eyes playing a big role.
• Evolution or nature has placed a special significance on facial recognition for most of us, with a dedicated region of the brain known as fusiform face area used only for computing the faces, mainly through the eyes.
• People who are face blind tend to have social anxiety and avoid the eye region of people while looking at them.

Answering with yes to these questions is the first step to self-improvement:

• Do you want to do better?
• Are you willing to feel the discomfort of putting in more effort and trying new things that will feel weird and different and won’t work right away?

A rarely remarked upon feature of buildings is that they tell us something about themselves and its broader view of the world.

The Mauritshuis, a museum in the Hague completed in the classical style in the early nineteenth century, tells us that its dignified and stately, calm and rational, but also a place for tenderness. It reminds us that we are a tiny moment in a long history.