Hello and welcome to another edition of the Lounge Wellness roundup! Every Saturday, we bring you our pick of the wellness stories we have published over the past week, lest you’ve missed any of them.
This week we focus on three things that are very important to well-being: sleep, mental health and nutrition. From an app that helps you sleep better to sneaky sugars hiding in your food and celebrity-led conversations about mental health, our roundup this week will definitely have you reexamining your current ideas about wellness and making some positive changes in your life.
Read on to know more
Have trouble sleeping? This app may be the answer
In an interview with Medha Dutta Yadav, entrepreneur Surbhi Jain, who launched the sleep app Neend in 2021, offers insights on the need for this app, the problematic sleeping patterns of most Indians and how we can sleep better by using Neend. “Our brains are continuously active, and there are too many open threads in our minds. And that has an impact on our ability to sleep and quality of sleep too and thus the quality of life on an overall level. Because if you are not well-rested, it would start impacting all other aspects of your life, be it professional, physical, emotional health etc.,” she tells Dutta, pointing out that roughly 15 per cent of Indians have insomnia, and approximately 20 per cent more are on the edge of the lifestyle disorder.
Can you spot the sugar hiding in your ‘healthy’ snack?
So, you’ve thrown away that jar of sugar, given away the leftover birthday cake and chocolate in your fridge and stopped reaching out for the biscuit jar. Think you’re all clear as far as sugar is concerned—not quite. As Jen Thomas points out, “No matter how healthy your food choices are, there can be a considerable amount of sugar tucked away in the ingredients list unnoticed,” she writes, offering suggestions on recognising and finding the sugars that food producers intentionally use hide in foods.
Do celebrities help begin mental health conversations?
What connects rapper Badshah, Nargis Fakhri, Shehnaaz Gill and Sameera Reddy? They’ve all come out recently to talk about their struggle with mental health. In this deeply-reported piece, Divya Naik explores the phenomenon of celebrities talking about their mental health. “Mental health practitioners have welcomed these accounts for various reasons,” writes Naik. “For one, they definitely help build awareness about mental health. Secondly, they open up multiple avenues for talking about mental health without societal and cultural barriers—something that is missing in our society where people feel that they are immune to mental health disorders.”
