Does it seem like every piece of health advice you get boils down to one of two things—diet and exercise? Or, every time you visit the doctor, they give you the same off-the-script speech about healthy lifestyle habits that are basically just “eat well” and “move more”?
,
Of course, fitness and nutrition are fundamentally two of the best things you can do for your body. This is pretty undisputed. But there are other things you can do to improve your health, too—and some of them are actually really enjoyable (we promise!).
Take it from the communities around the globe known as Blue Zones—the regions where people live the longest, healthiest lives (identified by National Geographic Fellow and acclaimed writer Dan Buettner). Most of the individuals living into their 90s and beyond in these areas aren’t following the latest diet or running on a treadmill at a boutique bootcamp studio. They’re living well-rounded lifestyles that put a major emphasis on pleasure and joy.
“Even if you don’t reside in a Blue Zone, adopting these principles can have a profound impact on your health and longevity,” says Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, founder of the renowned health education nonprofit Proactive Health Labs. She says we can all learn from these Blue Zone habits, and implement them into our own day-to-day. “By making simple yet significant lifestyle changes, anyone can follow the path to a healthier and potentially longer life,” she says.
Here are four Blue Zone-inspired healthy lifestyle habits for longevity that feel like anything but a chore.
1. Take it easy
“Downshift,” recommends Stephenson-Laws. “Manage stress effectively, as chronic stress can lead to inflammation and various chronic illnesses.”
None of the Blue Zone areas are in major metropolitan cities—and perhaps there’s a correlation between the pace of life and health. Perhaps it’s a bit of the “island life” state of mind. Aside from Loma Linda (a California suburb 60 miles east of Los Angeles) and Costa Rica, the other three Blue Zones are on actual islands: Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria are all surrounded by water, separated from the hustle and bustle.
This isn’t to say that you’re doomed if you live in a city, but more to point out that a slower pace of life can contribute to your well-being. How can you slow down? Maybe there are commitments you can say “no” to, or ways to build more breaks into your days.
2. Embrace happy hour
If you don’t already drink, this isn’t your call to start—alcohol as an ingredient has no health benefits. But Blue Zone communities (except for Loma Linda, which is primarily comprised of sober Seventh Day Adventists) tend to imbibe before dinner with friends and family. An aperitif, if you will.
So if you do enjoy a glass of wine, have one at five rather than a late-night binge, says Stephenson-Laws. “Moderating alcohol consumption [can help you] maintain optimal health and avoid potential adverse effects.” What’s more, there’s plenty to be said about the longevity-boosting benefits of giving yourself a ritual that helps you to destress (see above) and find some camaraderie and connection, which leads us to…
3. Prioritize your social life
One of the best components discovered about the Blue Zone lifestyle habits? The sense of social connectedness. “Belonging is essential,” says Stephenson-Laws. “Building a supportive community, whether through faith-based services or positive social networks, contributes to a longer life.”
Put your relationships first—before work and other priorities. Investing your time in your family and building friendships can foster a sense of support, stave off loneliness, and give you greater purpose. “Surround yourself,” says Stephenson-Laws.
Ask yourself: What can you do this week—or right now—to improve your social health? It can be simpler than you think. Maybe invite someone on a walk. Schedule a catch-up call with a friend. Or introduce yourself to someone new at yoga class.
4. Find your happy
It’s easy to default into cynicism under the guise of “realism”—but it’s far more courageous to choose joy and optimism in spite of hurdles. “Embracing a sense of purpose and positive attitude [is a Blue Zone habit],” says Stephenson-Laws. “This can significantly contribute to a healthy and happy life.”
Though gratitude, optimism, and finding meaning aren’t necessarily the easiest things to implement right away, this formula can have a significant impact on your physiological and psychological well-being. And it’s free—no supplements or gym memberships required.
A few years ago, a beloved French bakery near my house closed and was replaced by a gym. So it goes with gentrification: Ease replaced by discipline. The new gym is part of the OrangeTheory chain, which is open only for classes, like a SoulCycle. It’s expensive, and the people I see coming out of there always look flushed and satisfied post-workout. I won’t make excuses or offer explanations. I’ll just skip to the part where I ended up joining.
At these gyms, you wear a heart monitor on your arm that is linked to a screen at the front of the room, on which everyone’s heart rate is displayed. Your name appears in a box that changes color from green to orange to red as your heart rate increases. The lights in the room are orange, and the music is incredibly loud. Every detail has been optimized for maximum motivation-juicing purposes. Previously, I had thought gyms like this were evil because exercise is supposed to be loose and creative, or something. I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t have time for loose and creative workouts lately.
So there I was on a recent Saturday morning, having fully crossed over to the side I used to think I hated, and I was loving it. I was just getting into the second half of the class, my heart rate steady in the orange zone, when the trainer approached my rowing machine: “Kathryn, right? There’s someone here to see you.”
I looked up, and through the glass doors to the lobby, I saw … my 13-year-old son. He was in shower slides and pajamas, and he was holding my debit card up to the glass, beseeching me. Through the glass door, he mouthed: Can I use it?
I gestured no with my whole body. I sent vibrational waves of no that, I was hoping, would be palpable to him through the glass door. I frantically waved my hands for him to leave. GO, I mouthed, AWAY! He stood there for a minute, taking it in, and then he left. I looked up at the screen, and my heart rate was in the red zone. I was molten with anger.
What part of my parenting had failed to erect and maintain a boundary between my basically teenage son and my workout time? Why was there porousness there?! Where did he get the idea that he could interrupt my exercise class with a request like that?
When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping. These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about. During this phase, now called “REM sleep,” people tended to have vivid dreams. Maybe, Kleitman suggested, the eye movements reflected “where and at what the dreamer was looking” in their virtual world.
Several researchers tested this “scanning hypothesis” in the ’50s and ’60s by waking sleeping volunteers when their eyes twitched and asking them what they had just dreamed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these crude methods failed to produce consistent results.
Esther Perel: What I understand so far is that you are in a transition.
Caller:Very much so.
You are hoping to be able to reunite with your ex-wife. You were together for about seven years.
Yeah, married seven and together 13.
Okay, and the last time you were in a transition, you had just had a new job, you had a child, you had a new house, and you let it all go. You fell in love with another woman. You instigated a rather expedient divorce. You have been with this other woman since, and at the moment of the next transition, which was to marry this new woman, you freaked out, and you realized that’s not at all what you wanted.
Yeah.
And you were about to meet with your ex for the first time again as a date, not just as co-parents.
She wouldn’t call it a date, but I did.
You called it a date. She called it an identity check?
I guess you can say that she told me she wanted to see me, to see if it’s worth getting back into it.
And your big question is, Do I deserve this? You used the word redemption, which is a very big word, and as I was listening to your question, my first thought was, What does he mean by redemption? What is redemption for you?
Redemption is winning her back. She’s always been my home, and I broke her in a very devastating way. I realize that my question is a little bit — I don’t know if convoluted is the right word because I know it’s up to her, really. But I’m having trouble at this moment even knowing that I deserve forgiveness.
That is a good question. Can I ask you, before then — talk to me about your experience of homelessness.
.
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
No one is better at taking two seemingly conflicting concepts and welding them into one shockingly popular trend than the users of TikTok, an app that has successfully combined desserts with skin care, perfume with gynecology, and salmon with ASMR. A major saga currently unfolding on the platform has called my attention to another contradictory phenomenon: Lunden and Olivia, a popular lesbian influencer couple who are blending gay pride with the well-tanned, preppy aura of a private golf club situated in the South.
Perhaps, given that entire vibe, the reason Lunden and Olivia made it in the news this weekend is not entirely surprising. They got married on October 1, only to immediately find themselves in hot water over the revelation that one of them had an old but startlingly frequent habit of tweeting racial slurs. How frequent, it’s now hard to tell, because both her Twitter (now X) profile and screenshots of its contents have largely disappeared from the internet. But, well, let’s take this one step at a time.
Sorry, but who are these women?
Lunden and Olivia Stallings (formerly Lunden Stallings and Olivia Bennett) are the 26-year-old owners and subjects of a popular TikTok account, @lundenandolivia, where they post adoring dispatches from their life in Georgia. Their content is by and large exactly what you’d expect from two southern white women influencing their hearts out online — shopping recaps from Sephora, breakdowns of their date-night outfits, GRWM videos: basically, an unending sorority rush week — except that, amid all the seersucker and starch-white knits, they are constantly kissing, holding hands, and appending the #lgbtq hashtag to their posts. One recent “day in the life” dispatch shows Lunden starting a packed day of meetings with a spiced vanilla fig Target candle, while Olivia embroiders their matching wedding pajamas. You get the idea.
.
Lunden and Olivia in the now-offline apology video. Photo: @lundenandolivia/TikTok
Some content on this page was disabled on April 15, 2025 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Guardian Media Group. You can learn more about the DMCA here:
As neuroscientists struggle to demystify how the human brain converts what our eyes see into mental images, artificial intelligence (AI) has been getting better at mimicking that feat. A recent study, scheduled to be presented at an upcoming computer vision conference, demonstrates that AI can read brain scans and re-create largely realistic versions of images a person has seen. As this technology develops, researchers say, it could have numerous applications, from exploring how various animal species perceive the world to perhaps one day recording human dreams and aiding communication in people with paralysis.
Many labs have used AI to read brain scans and re-create images a subject has recently seen, such as human faces and photos of landscapes. The new study marks the first time an AI algorithm called Stable Diffusion, developed by a German group and publicly released in 2022, has been used to do this. Stable Diffusion is similar to other text-to-image “generative” AIs such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, which produce new images from text prompts after being trained on billions of images associated with text descriptions.
For the new study, a group in Japan added additional training to the standard Stable Diffusion system, linking additional text descriptions about thousands of photos to brain patterns elicited when those photos were observed by participants in brain scan studies.
Unlike previous efforts using AI algorithms to decipher brain scans, which had to be trained on large data sets, Stable Diffusion was able to get more out of less training for each participant by incorporating photo captions into the algorithm. It’s a novel approach that incorporates textual and visual information to “decipher the brain,” says Ariel Goldstein, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University who was not involved with the work.
The AI algorithm makes use of information gathered from different regions of the brain involved in image perception, such as the occipital and temporal lobes, according to Yu Takagi, a systems neuroscientist at Osaka University who worked on the experiment. The system interpreted information from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, which detect changes in blood flow to active regions of the brain. When people look at a photo, the temporal lobes predominantly register information about the contents of the image (people, objects, or scenery), whereas the occipital lobe predominantly registers information about layout and perspective, such as the scale and position of the contents. All of this information is recorded by the fMRI as it captures peaks in brain activity, and these patterns can then be reconverted into an imitation image using AI.
.
Artificial intelligence re-creations of images based on brain scans (bottom row) match the layout, perspective, and contents of the actual photos seen by study participants (top row). Creative Commons
Sleep is a semiconscious state, but there are neurons firing in the brain even when all seems quiet. Now brain activity during the deepest sleep phase could make it possible for people to communicate with the waking world during lucid dreaming.
If someone is lucid dreaming, they are aware they are dreaming and able to manipulate what happens in the dream. Sleep expert Michael Raduga of Phase Research Center has developed a “language” that’s intended to allow people to communicate while in that state. Called Remmyo, the first language of its kind, it relies on specific facial muscle movements that can occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Remmyo can be learned during waking hours like any other language. Anyone capable of lucid dreaming could potentially communicate in Remmyo while asleep.
“You can transfer all important information from lucid dreams using no more than three letters in a word,” Raduga, who founded Phase Research Center in 2007 to study sleep, told Ars. “This level of optimization took a lot of time and intellectual resources.”
Reaching lucidity
It takes about 90 minutes to transition from lighter sleep phases to REM sleep. REM sleep brings on a state of sleep paralysis—arm and leg muscles cannot move, which keeps us from playing out what is happening in the dream. Meanwhile, brain waves, heart rate, and blood pressure all become similar to the levels seen in the awake state. Breathing becomes faster and erratic. Even though eyelids remain closed, the sleeper’s eyes constantly move from side to side, giving the state its name.
This is when most dreams occur, including lucid dreams. Those are still an enigma but thought to be a hybrid of the waking and sleeping states.
Remmyo consists of six sets of facial movements that can be detected by electromyography (EMG) sensors on the face. Slight electrical impulses that reach facial muscles make them capable of movement during sleep paralysis, and these are picked up by sensors and transferred to software that can type, vocalize, and translate Remmyo. Translation depends on which Remmyo letters are used by the sleeper and picked up by the software, which already has information from multiple dictionaries stored in its virtual brain. It can translate Remmyo into another language as it is being “spoken” by the sleeper.
No parent wants their child to know about war. We want our kids to feel safe, loved, and free from worry, but this is not always possible. Wars continue to happen in all corners of the world, and children are going to find out about them whether we want them to or not. They’ll find out at school, from friends, online. And even though it feels terribly difficult, especially when we are deeply afraid ourselves, there will come a time when we need to talk to our kids about frightening world events like war. Here are a few things to consider as you approach these difficult conversations.
Consider their age.
While every child and every family is different, UNICEF recommends that parents try to be mindful of age-appropriateness when discussing big world events like war. Some younger children might not yet have the capacity to comprehend. UNICEF recommends parents “speak calmly and be mindful of your body language” as children are sensitive to our emotional cues and facial expressions.
Stay ahead of the news.
If there is going to be considerable news coverage of a war or conflict, and you know your child will be likely to find out, try to be the first one to explain it to them. Dr. Harold Koplewicz, president of the Child Mind Institute and child psychologist, advises parents and caregivers to try to break the news to their children before they have the chance to stumble across a frightening headline or hear the news from another child. “Don’t delay telling your children about what’s happened … You want to be able to convey the facts, however painful, and set the emotional tone,” Koplewicz suggests.
.
Wars continue to happen in all corners of the world, and children are going to have questions.
Amid the pandemic, TikTok became a fountain of information for, well, just about anything you might be even a little bit curious about. This has brought about a need for social media users to vet their sources, so as to not fall victim to believing and perpetuating the often dangerous misinformation that can go viral. But, thanks to credentialed professionals who have taken to the app, it’s also provided a sense of community, awareness, and access to information about various health-related issues and conditions.
In 2020, Sasha Hamdani, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) specialist based in Kansas City, Missouri, joined TikTok after noticing a need for more evidence-based information about the neurodevelopmental chronic condition on the app. As both a provider and person who has ADHD, Dr. Hamdani is uniquely suited to help others manage their ADHD and understand the way their brain works; she’s also passionate about helping folks with ADHD best care for themselves and prevent burnout.
Posting under the handle @thepsychdoctormd on Instagram and TikTok, Dr. Hamdani’s feed often recounts what living with and treating ADHD is like for her—the ups, the downs, the funny, the wrenching, the frustrating, and all the in-betweens. But the idea that she’d one day share her personal experiences to help so many others manage their ADHD once felt unthinkable.
Dr. Hamdani was diagnosed with ADHD in fourth grade, but didn’t understand what exactly that meant for her until she was in college because her parents had managed her medications and routines—they also hadn’t actually told her what she had.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Photo: Getty Images/Photo by Roo Lewis
Tom Kelley / Getty
Lunden and Olivia in the now-offline apology video. 
Wars continue to happen in all corners of the world, and children are going to have questions.
Burnout
James' World 2 