Category Archives: Body & Mind

Get Some Rest


You might think that productive people never stop working and don’t get any rest, that means you might be wrong. All of us need to take breaks to refresh ourselves and permit our bodies and minds to reset. In the modern working environment it’s easy to get pressured to always be busy, but you should try your hardest to not be. Take a breather and relax on a regular basis and you just might find that (almost ironically) you’ll be more productive.

Why does modern work culture undervalue rest and encourage nonstop busyness?
It seems self-evident that more work equals more output. This is true of machines, so why shouldn’t it be true of us? Well it’s not. We have adopted industrial-age attitudes, and they don’t really work for us. There is also a long-standing assumption that not working hard is morally suspect.

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Thanks to Delaney!

An Ad Campaign That Sells More Than a Product

It can be hard navigating the world as a person with a disability, be it mental or physical, and it can be even harder to make friends. Unfortunately there is a lot of social stigma around people who look different, fortunately in the UK a company launched an ad campaign to sell chocolate and social acceptance. The ads are in support for the Paralympics which are currently underway in Brazil.

All three spots are based on real-life stories from disabled people. Another spot concerns a woman in a wheelchair who ran over another guest’s foot at a wedding. In the third, a disabled woman laughs with a friend about an embarrassing moment with her new boyfriend.

Cat Collins, strategy partner at AMV BBDO, explained in a statement: “Rather than creating distance by putting disabled people on a pedestal, we believed we could achieve more by showing disabled people simply as … people. For Maltesers, that meant seeking out the hilarious stories from their lives that they look on the light side of, just as the characters in the rest of our campaign do. It meant using a powerful weapon to break down discomfort, division and prejudice — a good laugh.”

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A Playground Where Kids Play With Tools

NYC playgroundKids need places to play, and those playgrounds need to encourage community, exploration, and more. Designing a good playground can be harder than it sounds, it’s not as easy as putting a slide in a park and hoping that’s enough. A good playground has risk and challenges the players.

In New York City there is a new spot for kids called play:groundNYC that is unlike other modern parks. This park has tools so kids can try to build things and the grounds are designed to encourage kids to try and experiment with the tools and obstacles present on the site. It’s like an adventure park!

The adventure or “wild” playground movement has risen in response to this overprotectiveness. Its advocates argue that less adult supervision may be more developmentally rewarding for children. There are hundreds of adventure playgrounds in the world, most of them in Western Europe. (The concept was invented in Denmark in the 1930s.) There are about a half-dozen in the United States, with twice as many in the pipeline; numbers are imprecise because the definition of what exactly qualifies as an adventure playground varies. One that undoubtedly does qualify is Adventure Playground in Berkeley, California, a 37-year-old local landmark.

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Teenage Pregnancy Rates Plummet Thanks to Birth Control


Just over a decade ago the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox looked at how pathetically backwards sex education is in the USA. Thanks to documentaries and compounding evidence that asbstinance-only education has no impact on teen pregnancy rates (it does increase STI/STD rates though!) sex education is no different. The USA is catching up with the rest of the developed world when it comes to talking to teens about birth control.

Since 2007, teens have become better informed of their choices around birth control and are using that knowledge.

What changed was how teenage girls used contraceptives. The percentage of sexually active teens who used at least one type of birth control the last time they had sex rose from 78 percent in 2007 to 86 percent in 2012. More teens gravitated toward better types of birth control — like pills, IUDs, or implants — rather than relying on lower-quality birth control like condoms.

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Men Shouldn’t Worry About Being Breadwinners

Gender stereotypes and expectations aren’t good for anybody, and there’s more and more evidence that men who worry about having to be the primary income earners hurts their health. The old way of thinking that a man had to earn more than his partner in a heterosexual relationship no longer makes sense. Thanks to the efforts of countless individuals there are fewer obstacles for women to make as much, if not more, than their male counterparts.

She attributes that to gender performances that cloud our judgment. Men are taught to see breadwinning as an obligation; women to see it more as an opportunity. Women are less likely to dwell on what other people will think of them if they aren’t the primary source of income, while men feel the need to take on higher-paying positions, even when the role might just be an anxiety-inducing, taxing, stressful experience.

Of course, generalizations like that reinforce the gender binary at the root of this, but in service of understanding the flaws in that conceptualization.

“I would encourage men to feel more free to ask, ‘Do I really need to do this? Do we need this extra money?’” she said. “I think women are more likely to ask themselves that.”

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Thanks to Delaney!