Hello Friends :)
Welcome to the wabi-sabi letter, the digital newsletter that promotes healthy living, wellness, mental health awareness, fitness, positive habits, and all around happiness. Clear your head and cleanse your inbox with a tiny space for wellness as you set your intentions for the day. Badabing badaboom.
Lifestyle Trumps Genetics, Apparently
A new study by the American Association for Cancer Research found that healthy lifestyle factors such as abstinence from smoking and drinking, low body mass index, and exercise correlated with decreased cancer incidence, even in individuals with a high genetic risk.
UK Biobank participants were surveyed upon enrollment for various lifestyle factors, including smoking and alcohol consumption, body mass index, exercise habits, and typical diet. Based on these factors, the author and colleagues classified each patient as having an unfavorable (zero to one healthy factors), intermediate (two to three healthy factors), or favorable (four to five healthy factors) overall lifestyle.
Among patients with high genetic risk, the five-year cancer incidence was 7.23 percent in men and 5.77 percent in women with an unfavorable lifestyle, compared with 5.51 percent in men and 3.69 percent in women with a favorable lifestyle. The decreased percentages are comparable to the cancer risk in individuals with intermediate genetic risk, the study author shared. Similar trends were observed in all genetic risk categories, suggesting that patients could benefit from a healthy lifestyle regardless of genetic risk.
TLDR; healthy habits can have a measurable impact on health outcomes overtime (even with genetic predisposition involved).
Active Listening in Healthy Relationships
When mbg founder and co-CEO Jason Wachob asked the renowned relationship experts and researchers, the Gottmans, for their advice for new couples on a recent episode of the mbg podcast, John Gottman Ph.D. said that listening is key.
"When you're upset," he told his wife Julie, "the world stops and I listen. And I want to know what's bothering you, because your feelings and your needs are the most important thing to me."
Listening to your partner's frustrations is fundamental to building transparency and healthy communication. It also brings up the importance of recognizing bids for connection—which the Gottmans swear by. If you want to have a great relationship, they say, you'll need to adopt the model of really listening when your partner is upset, and supporting them through it.
Action Item: What exactly constitutes really listening? Learn more about how to practice active listening in your relationships (including work & family!).
After Grief: How to Cope
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You'll likely recognize these five words in succession as the five stages of grief, a psychology model that outlines the way in which we can expect to cope—and heal—upon experiencing loss. But what if we’ve had it wrong all this time—and what if that's actually a good thing?
It’s exactly the point author and grief coach Hope Edelman is trying to make in her recently released title The AfterGrief ($16), a book exploring the long arc of loss.
“When Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced these five stages in the 1960s, it was for terminally ill patients, and they were called the ‘five stages of dying,’ says Edelman, who notes how those stages, in that regard, made a lot of sense—how one could understandably move from denial and anger about a diagnosis to bargaining for change to eventual acceptance of their prognosis.
The problem came, she notes, when those five stages were transferred onto mourners, becoming mistakenly known then as the “five stages of grief.” “It was such a seductive idea to the culture at the time that grief was something that we could work our way through and be done with,” she says. “The media took it and ran with it.” According to Edelmen, “I think of grief more as a constant renegotiation with the facts of a loss and our relationship to those facts—and that changes over time."
Action Item: Read more about Edelmen’s philosophy on grief, power and loss in the full piece published for Well + Good here.
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You're amazing. Enjoy the world today.
Love,
wabi-sabi team