#music-and-wellness

#music-and-wellness

Tight or weak shoulders affect not only our functioning in daily life, but our yoga practice. Poor posture and tight shoulders limit our muscles' freedom of movement.

Chad King, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, has not let the disease hinder his music career. He continues to create and perform, showcasing resilience and determination.

The turtle technique is often introduced to children to help them manage strong emotions, guiding them to pause, breathe, and step back before reacting. It sounds simple, yet it carries depth when practiced with intention.

"Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it."

In frightening times, it makes a huge difference not to feel alone. Creating art with others in community enhances agency and strengthens self. Creativity requires an open heart; love enhances hope and diminishes fear.

Yin yoga is an effective antidote to the desk effect by encouraging your body to stretch, lengthen, and release from a perpetually hunched position.

I'm very sensitive to sound, so the smallest noises can be distracting. Silence is sometimes loud for me. After the diagnosis, Sussman's parents switched him to a school that specialized in helping students with learning differences. His mom also started playing brown noise to help him relax or fall asleep, after she read that low-frequency (lo-fi), deep rumbling sounds-like heavy machinery or strong rainfall-can soothe those with ADHD.

When the Academy Award Nominations were announced late last month, you could be forgiven for thinking they were lifetime achievement awards. In the Best Supporting Actor category, 74-year-old Stellan Skarsgård is competing against 73-year-old Delroy Lindo. (Sean Penn, at 65, and Benicio Del Toro, at 58, also in the category, are mere babes.) Amy Madigan, 75, is up for Best Supporting Actress. One of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees is in their sixties, and one of the Best Original Screenplay nominees is in his seventies.

Wooden spoons as microphones, siblings spinning in socks across the floor, a mother laughing as Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" fills the room for the third time in a row-this is love. Long before children understand romance, they learn connection this way, through synchronized movement, shared joy, and the safety of familiar songs. Research on rhythm and social bonding suggests that moving in time together can regulate the nervous system and strengthen feelings of connection.

There is a specific high that comes with outrunning your own limiting beliefs - a chase that has previously landed me in an Austrian fasting clinic, on a half-marathon start line in Madrid, and sitting ten days of silent meditation in the English countryside. But even I, a glutton for punishingly offbeat wellness trends, would have laughed you out of the juice bar had you told me a year ago that I'd soon be yodelling my way to self-improvement.

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tubingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park.