Salsa dancing reduced depression and anxiety in young adults, Oxford study finds
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Do eight weeks of salsa classes sound like an intervention to you? Show up, learn the footwork, rotate partners, move to music with a room full of people you probably don’t know. And at the end of those eight weeks, if you danced as part of this recent Read More...
5 French principles for eating that Americans would do well to borrow
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Think about the last time you ate lunch without also doing something else. Not at your desk, not in the car, not scrolling. Just sitting with food and letting it be the thing. For a lot of Americans, it’s hard to remember. For the French, it’s just Read More...
The 30 percent parenting rule: how to raise securely attached kids
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM If you're a parent, you've had these moments. Not the big, dramatic parenting failures, the ones easy to identify and easier to learn from. The small ones. You held it together through the checkout meltdown, through the bath time standoff, through the third Read More...
7 simple rituals that help you feel like yourself again
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s a specific kind of "off" that’s difficult to capture or express in words. No, you're not feeling sick or sad. You're not stressed exactly. Just... off. A little irritable, a little flat, carrying something you can’t quite put your finger on. Read More...
Digital decluttering tips that work without clearing your whole schedule
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM You know that thing where you sit down to find one photo from last summer, and somehow it’s thirty minutes later, and you’re in 2019? Digital clutter does that. A chaotic phone or a laptop full of half-forgotten downloads creates the same low-level stress Read More...
What is an admin date? Why experts say it helps with productivity and loneliness at once
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM You probably have something on your to-do list that has been there long enough to feel embarrassing. An email you owe someone. A subscription that sneakily renewed again. A form you have been meaning to file since winter. Every week, it just sits there, and Read More...
5 small habits that make every day feel more meaningful
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The feeling of not mattering, of going through a whole day without anyone really seeing you, sits closer to the surface than most people let on. Jennifer Breheny Wallace has spent years studying this. In her new book Mattering, she frames it as a gap: the Read More...
The parenting habit that builds lifelong closeness with adult children
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Picture two parents, both devoted. Both called every Sunday. Both showed up for birthdays, sent money when things got hard, and made every visible effort. One of them has an adult child who calls with the hard stuff: the job that fell apart, the relationship Read More...
The 3 needs that science says matter more than success and achievement
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing everything right. The career is advancing, the goals are being ticked off, and the productivity is real. And yet something feels off, or hollow, or impossible to name. Modern culture tends to Read More...
New research explains why your dreams feel so strange
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There is something that happens in a dream that never happens anywhere else. A familiar place, a workplace or a school corridor, becomes somehow wrong, layered with elements that don’t belong, approached from a direction that doesn’t exist. That sense of Read More...