Erin Thompson, Marketing Manager:   In our modern environment, it's not hard to be stressed. Around the country, people are dealing with financial crises and job insecurity, which breed fear, uncertainty, and higher levels of stress, both in the home and the workplace. This can mean a severe drop in employee morale, health and productivity -- which puts your organization in its own financial crisis. A recent Gallup Poll concluded that while 80% of workers admit that they are stres... [More]

Tiffany M. Reiss, Ph.D., Contributing Writer:   Stretching: there is still some debate about how much to do, when to do it, and whether it really helps. In reality, some form of stretching is beneficial, but not in the ways we normally think about it. Most of us have been told to stretch to “warm-up” the muscles prior to activity in order to lessen the risk of injury. Static stretching, contorting our bodies into mildly painful positions and holding those positions for 30 seconds ... [More]

Ryan Crawford, Quit Coach Supervisor, Service Delivery:    "Mozhno strelnut u vas sigaretu?" This is what you ask if you want to bum a cigarette in Russia. And as tempting as it may have been for President Obama to ask this of his ambassadorial hosts while he was on a visit to Moscow, he refrained. Russia is wrought with tobacco. As with many European countries, cigarettes are normalized in everyday Russian culture. Even an international architectural icon like the Kre... [More]

Beth Shepard, MS, Exercise Physiologist, Contributing Writer:   My family can always tell whether or not I’ve worked out or not on any given day ― by how cranky or pleasant I am at dinnertime. It’s no secret that exercise boosts mood ― it’s been used to treat mild depression and anxiety for years. But Dr. Jeremy Sibold and his co-author Kathy Berg, from the University of Vermont, recently found that moderate cardiovascular exercise boosts mood immediately, and that the mood-elevat... [More]