Drop It Low: The Surprising Benefits of Sitting on The Floor 🧘🏻‍♀️

What do you stand for?

BANNED-AID

It’s been an exciting week of news unless you’re a 15 year old influencer.  Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for putting a warning label on social media, putting the onus on the platforms themselves to prove their safety rather than leaving it to parents to convince kids of the inherent risks.

THEN in the most striking example of cross-party alignment we’ve seen in some time, even Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis agree 🤯 that smartphones should be subject to bans in schools. These are major milestones in raising public awareness of a very serious mental health concern, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.  The even better news is that the dumbphone boom is real, with companies like Dumbwireless crushing it (10x in year-over-year sales)! First it was cassettes making a comeback, now dumbphones- fingers crossed for a VHS renaissance so I can finally unpack those boxes that have moved into six different apartments since 2002.

WAKE-UP CALL

This Juneteenth week is an important time for Black Americans, and given the recent Global Sleep Symposium over the last two days, it’s a good time to shed some light on a concerning problem: Black people experience more sleep deprivation and sleep-related health disorders than other groups. The main contributing factors here are economic, social and environmental in nature, and the long-term implications are grim. Black adults suffer from Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke at higher rates than white adults across the board; childhood insomnia has shown more prevalence among racial minorities with 70% of those cases continuing into adolescence; and a significant disparity exists in sleep apnea-related mortalities between Black and White men. Raising awareness over the importance of quality sleep and its role in our long-term health simply cannot be emphasized enough. That is all.

HERE’S A TIP, MAKE THE CHANGE

If you stand with me on sleep, then sit with me for a moment. Or longer. Turns out, a cheap and cheerful way to naturally improve flexibility and reduce inflammation is right under your tush. Floor-sitting has long been touted by mobility specialists for yielding the above benefits, along with improving posture and core strength, but as usual, you’re gonna need to try it out to make it stick. You can sit with legs in a V, a 90-90 stretch pose which is amazing for hip-opening, or cross-legged (I make it a policy to not perpetuate “crisscross applesauce,” as a grown-ass adult), and you’ll find that you’ll naturally want to keep changing positions, which also helps keep the blood moving far more than couch-rotting. Try the floor for a 15-30 minute break from a desk chair, a standing desk or the couch, just in time to refresh on Season 2 of The Bear where, if I’m not mistaken, we left Chef sitting on the floor of the fridge…

Give it a shot, get low this weekend, sweet deals and extra goodies ahead for paid subscribers!

POTPOURRI

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