Obtaining Powerful Social Connections Can Boost Your Health and fitness

February 2, 2023 Vera

Summary: Powerful bonds with family members can support boost health-connected behaviors, though solid connections with good friends and other social groups were linked with much better overall psychological overall health and nicely-remaining.

Resource: College of Kent

The time men and women invested with family members about the festive period of time could have enhanced their well being, according to new research which examined how social bonds with close social circles and extended teams relate to health and psychological properly-staying.

The review, led by researchers at the College of Kent, Nottingham Trent College (NTU) and Coventry University, applied self-documented facts from more than 13,000 people today across 122 international locations, gathered during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Surveys assessed people’s toughness of bonding with shut social circles, this sort of as relatives and mates, as perfectly as with extended teams, these as country, authorities and humanity. People’s pandemic-similar well being behaviors and mental health and very well-currently being ended up also measured.

Outcomes present that only bonding with relatives, instead than other teams, is connected to partaking positively with behavior which can improve health in this scenario, illustrations involved washing hands, wearing a mask and social distancing.

For illustration, 46% of individuals who had solid household bonds washed palms at the very least “a good deal,” as opposed to 32% who were being not strongly bonded with their spouse and children. Moreover, 54% of people today not bonded with their family members described they under no circumstances wore a mask.

Bonded people have been vastly over-represented amongst those who engaged in health behaviors. Regardless of individuals with sturdy spouse and children bonds constituting only 27% of the whole sample, they constituted 73% of those people who engaged in social distancing, 35% of those people who washed arms, and 36% of all those who wore a mask “a lot” or much more.

The study also identified that possessing powerful bonds with both equally near social circles and prolonged groups is associated with improved mental wellbeing and effectively-becoming. Importantly, the greater number of teams persons experienced solid bonds with, the better their engagement in well being behaviors and the superior their documented psychological properly-being was, with less anxiety and despair.

The study recommends that public health messaging aim on smaller networks as very well as a number of teams, especially in occasions of disaster when people today need to be inspired

Walgreens shares surge on plans to boost focus on health services

October 22, 2021 Vera

Walgreens Boots Alliance’s new CEO Roz Brewer said Thursday that the drugstore chain will sharpen its focus on health care and turn it into the company’s “new growth engine.”

At a virtual investor day, she said the company’s nearly 9,000 stores across the U.S. will become places where customers can go to a doctor appointment, get medical tests and seek advice from a nurse or pharmacist. Those services will be under a new division of the company called Walgreens Health.

“This new Walgreens Health will make a difference and will began to transform us away from retail and just dispensing pharmaceuticals,” she said in an interview with CNBC’s Bertha Coombs. “It will be about the lives that we manage, and the lives that we touch and the lives that we can wrap physician and clinicians around in our buildings, both physically and digitally.”

Investors appeared receptive to Walgreens’ plan. Shares closed up 7.4% at $50.77 on Thursday. So far this year, shares are up more than 29%.

Brian Tanquilut, an equity research analyst for Jefferies, said Walgreens delivered on what many investors wanted Thursday by spelling out how it will become a proactive health-care player.

“Right now, people are saying, ‘It’s a sound strategy and we’ll give you a little bit of credit for that'” he said.

Walgreen’s plan calls for opening hundreds of primary care clinics, shaking up its selection of front-of-store merchandise and taking a stake in several health-care companies.

The company expects that strategy to pay off in the coming years. Next year, adjusted earnings per share are expected to show flat growth on a constant currency basis, it said. But growth will accelerate so that adjusted earnings per share will rise about 4% annually over the next three years. Beyond fiscal 2024, the company’s growth algorithm will lead to adjusted earnings per share growth of between 11% and 13%.

Brewer pointed to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings as evidence that Walgreens is building on a firm foundation.

Tanquilut said the new vision for Walgreens is a notable pivot.

“You are making the pharmacy a health center,” he said. “Instead of having a retail focus, the driver of value is no longer driving scripts [prescriptions] out of the pharmacy. It’s actually delivering care and making the patient loyal to the store.”

Ramping up health services

It recently decided to invest an additional $5.2 billion in VillageMD, a primary

Short home workouts can boost your mood and reduce stress : Shots

October 17, 2021 Vera

Add five-minute stints of fun and easy exercise to your day at home by working with what’s around you, says trainer Molly McDonald.

Cha Pornea for NPR

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Cha Pornea for NPR

Add five-minute stints of fun and easy exercise to your day at home by working with what’s around you, says trainer Molly McDonald.

Cha Pornea for NPR

Of all the ways in which the pandemic has affected Americans’ well-being, perhaps the one we’ve noticed least is how much we’re sitting. And it’s not just bad for our waistlines — it’s hurting our mental health.

More than a year and a half of social distancing and work-from-home policies have led to less time moving around and more time sitting and looking at screens — it’s a potentially toxic combination that’s linked with poorer mental health.

“The sneaky effects of the pandemic that we might not even notice [is] that we’ve changed our sitting patterns,” says Jacob Meyer, director of the Wellbeing and Exercise lab at Iowa State University.

His own research showed that in the early weeks of the pandemic, people who exercised less and had more screen time were likely to be stressed, depressed and lonely.

And though most people saw their mental health gradually improve as they adapted to a new reality, people who stayed mostly sedentary didn’t see get the same improvement, according to a follow-up study by Meyer. “People who continued to have really high levels of sitting, their depression didn’t improve” as much, says Meyer.

The good news is that something as simple as some very light movement around the house to break up all that couch surfing time can make a difference in mood, as Meyer’s earlier research has found.

Scores of previous studies confirm that being physically active boosts mood, lowers anxiety and improves sleep quality.

“We know consistently that the more people are active, the more that they exercise, the better their mental health is,” says Meyer.

For many office workers like me, working from home means we’ve fallen into a routine of spending hours at our desk. With another pandemic winter about to hit us and much of the country and the world still dealing with COVID-19, we are often stuck at home more than we’d like, so it’s time to start sitting less and moving around more.

Meyer and other exercise experts shared some tips