This article was originally published in January 2020. 

According to Health Canada, 1 in 3 Canadians will experience mental illness in their lifetime. That’s a lot of people, and while there’s no shortage of therapists and counsellors across the country, the process of finding the right one for you can definitely be disheartening. Not only are wait times long (in Ontario, it’s often six months to one year), but rates can seem outrageous (a visit to a psychologist can set you back more than $200 for an hour), and a price tag should never be a barrier to getting help.

With that in mind, we’ve narrowed down some places that offer affordable mental health therapy and counselling across Canada’s major cities.

Toronto

Hard Feelings
This unique, non-profit business—founded by social worker and counsellor Kate Scwoen—not only provides low-cost services and support by a welcoming community of counsellors, but also features a warm storefront that sells books, resources and other self-care items. (Even if you aren’t looking for counselling, a trip to this Christie Pits establishment is a must if you’re looking to help someone or yourself.) Individual counselling prices are determined by client and counsellor (based on what the client can afford, of course), and can range from $50 to $80 a session. Hard Feelings also limits the number of sessions per patient to 12, to ensure its counsellors can see as many people looking for help. (hardfeelings.org)

Affordable Therapy Network of Toronto
Like its name says, this network consists of Toronto-based therapists that offer affordable counselling. There are plenty of therapists/counsellors across the city to choose from, and this is a great resource to finding someone who works for you. These professionals offer rates as low as $50 an hour, as well as free phone consultations to ensure the right fit. (affordabletherapytoronto.com)

Vancouver

Gordon Neighbourhood House
In partnership with City University—a non-profit university that provides education in counselling—this Vancouver community centre offers free (yes, free!) counselling. While counsellors are interns, they are supervised, so you are in good hands. (gordonhouse.org)

Tapestry Counselling Centre
Tapestry’s rates aren’t as affordable as most of the counselling centres on this list, but it does offer some group therapy sessions for a “donate what you can” fee. If you’re budget conscious, but willing and able to pay a mid-range price, this Vancouver centre may be a good choice for you. (tapestrycentre.ca)

Calgary

Serenity Now Foundation
If you’re looking for a place that welcomes walk-ins as, as well as set appointment times, Serenity Now is worth checking out. During Mental Health Week in 2018, the centre offered walk-in counselling at reduced rates, which led to a positive response that encouraged Serenity Now to keep the initiative going. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you will be seen, but there’s no harm in giving them a call with any questions beforehand. (serenitynowwellness.ca)

Living Well Counselling Services
While Living Well doesn’t have the lowest rates, it does have a large roster of counsellors that offer sliding scale appointments; each patient’s financial situation is assessed, and they are charged a fair and affordable price in accordance with that set of numbers. It may seem unfair to some, but the system ensures that each patient pays what they can afford without underpaying the counsellor. (livingwellcounselling.ca)

Edmonton

Community Counselling Centre
This Edmonton centre offers what they deem the “most generous” sliding scale appointment rates, ranging from $20 to $140 per hour. CCC is also known for its fairly quick turn-around when it comes to booking (usually within 1 to 2 weeks), so you can breathe a sigh of relief. (communitycounsellingcentre.ca)

Insight Psychological
Sliding scale rates are popular in Edmonton, and Insight Psychological is another centre to offer discounted prices. What really sets Insight apart though is that the majority of its counsellors offer both in-person and online sessions. So if you’re too busy, or not feeling up to making the trip one week, you can work out a time to meet on Skype instead. (insightpsychological.ca)

Halifax

Insight Counselling Services
Halifax counsellor Julia Smith provides valuable tools for coping with anxiety and depression during her hour long sessions. Her rates are lower than the standard, but certainly aren’t as reduced as the rest on this list, so keep that in mind if booking. (insightmentalhealth.ca)

Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Halifax-Dartmouth Branch
CMHA is great at creating a sense of community and encouraging group healing. They don’t provide individual therapy sessions at the Halifax-Dartmouth branch, but they do offer social groups that promote healing through communication, art and empathy. If you’re looking for a place to talk to others who are experiencing feelings similar to your own, it may be a great option. (cmhahaldart.ca)

Ottawa

Capital Choice Counselling
The reviews for Capital Choice are glowing, and it’s not just for its one-on-one counselling, but for its educational contributions. Capital Choice is all about starting a conversation and teaching people the tools to create stronger mental health. For those showing financial need, sessions with an intern counsellor can be arranged for $70 or less. Should you wish to pay more, an experienced counsellor charges $150. (capitalchoicecounselling.com)

CFS Ottawa
CFS Ottawa provides all patients with the sliding scale system, so you will always be paying an amount best suited to you. That being said, if you would like to try a free service first, CFS offers walk-in sessions that are funded by a local health network. What makes it stand out, however, is definitely the groups it offers, many of which are free and specifically aid marginalized communities who are facing more barriers to mental health access. (cfsottawa.ca)

Emergency/crisis resources

If you or someone you know is in crisis reach out to one of the following 24/7 emergency resources or call 911.
Canada Suicide Prevention Service (CSPS): 1-833-456-4566
Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868

The post Where to Find Affordable Mental Health Therapy and Counselling Across Canada appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

There seems to be a new diet trending every other week. Whether it’s juicing celery or intermittent fasting, it’s hard to keep up with the constantly shifting health headlines. But one that’s grown in popularity these past few years is a low-carb and high-fat diet widely known as “keto.”

Dr. Jason Fung is a Toronto-based nephrologist who specializes in intermittent fasting and low-carb regimes—especially for treating people with type 2 diabetes. As a kidney specialist, Fung’s priority is helping patients avoid diabetes by instilling healthy lifestyle practices. Back in the mid-2000s, most physicians would advise their clients to count or restrict their calories in order to lose weight, but Fung felt there needed to be a healthier and more accessible approach. After much research, he began advising his patients to adopt a low-carb diet alongside intermittent fasting.

“Some of the results were just crazy,” says Fung. “My patients were losing weight. Their diabetes was improving. They were able to come off certain medications. It was incredible and that’s where it all started.”

We connected with Fung to debunk a few popular low-carb-related myths and answer the most common questions surrounding the popular diet.

What does following a low-carb diet entail?

The main focus is on cutting down refined carbohydrates, particularly anything flour- or sugar-based, and replacing them with fat or protein, like avocados, fatty fish, eggs and non-starchy vegetables. In the last 10 years or so, people have finally realized that there are good and bad fats, and that eating whole foods that contain natural fats isn’t harmful.

How does it work? 

Carbohydrates stimulate a lot of insulin production because they break down into sugar. This prompts your body to start storing fat and calories as an energy source. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (even healthy and natural foods can cue this process), but refined carbohydrates in particular rank the highest in boosting these levels and spiking weight gain. Therefore, following a low-carb diet means replacing these sugars and processed carbs with healthier proteins and fats to keep your insulin at bay.

What can and can’t you eat? 

Sugar and flour are the main ingredients to avoid or limit. Artificial sweeten-
ers are often questioned as well—not because they have a direct insulin effect, but because they trigger sweet cravings. But it’s less about following a strict diet and more about making balanced choices. Instead of jam and toast, scramble an egg. That will not only be the healthier option, but it will also keep you full for longer and cut down on your snacking, which also causes insulin spikes.

What are net carbs? 

Net carbs are simply total carbs minus fibre. Although fibre is a carb as well, it isn’t absorbed by the body, so it doesn’t really count. (Note: Taking net carbs into account allows those who follow a low-carb regimen to have more options, such as low-carb bread).

Is cutting out carbs healthy? 

There are essential amino acids and fatty acids, but there are no essential carbohydrates. You could lower your carb intake to zero and still be healthy—there’s no nutritional value. So fundamentally, there’s no reason why a low-carbohydrate diet would be unsafe. (Note: People who manage their carb intake, but don’t want to part ways completely, usually stay between 15 and 60 grams of net carbs a day).

Click here to learn more about Oroweat Keto and its selection of tasty goodies.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Cutting Carbs appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

I’m sitting in a dimly lit lounge surrounded by half-naked 30-somethings, each of us listening with rapt attention as Othership co-founder Harrison Taylor gets pumped about the experience before us. There are about 25 people here on a Friday night for the club’s hot-cold session, and by show of hands, I’m the only one who’s yet to take the plunge.

“Put the hot and cold together and the contrast between the two is way more than the sum of its parts,” Harrison continues. “We are doing deep work here together. We are transforming ourselves, physiologically, down to the cellular level.”

Othership, which offers both guided and self-guided sauna/ice bath sessions, was designed to be an alternative to hitting the bar with your friends. Taylor and co-founder Amanda Laine trained in Holland to become sauna masters, learning everything from how to build a sauna to towel-waving dance techniques that move the hot air. Laine is also a Canadian model who you may recognize from the runway circuit. As a child, she would take wintertime dips in the lake near her family’s Ontario home, and it was that tradition that led her to launch Othership in Toronto this past February with additional co-founders Robert Bent, Myles Farmer and Emily Bent.

But the credit for cold therapy’s come-up goes to Wim Hof, an extreme athlete from the Netherlands who developed the Wim Hof Method — a combination of cold water therapy, breathing exercises and meditation. Hof, aka “The Iceman,” professes a bounty of health benefits from following his practice, from a boosted immune system to improved mental health.

 

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Casie Stewart, a marketing director based in Toronto, has been part of a Wim Hof Method Facebook group for a couple of years. In the winter, she takes a chainsaw to the frozen lake near her Ontario cottage to put his methods to the test. And more recently, Stewart purchased a stock tank for her downtown rooftop, where she plunges for up to 30 seconds or three minutes at a time. “Ice baths give me more energy, mental clarity and mental strength. It’s a hard thing you can push yourself to do, and it makes other things not feel so hard,” she says.

Besides Hof, the pandemic is another reason for the cold plunge’s popularity. “I think people probably struggled mentally more than they ever had through the pandemic and sought out tools to help manage their struggle and stress,” says Nick McNaught, the founder of Unbounded, which offers guided cold plunges in Toronto and cold camps at The Trace at Oak Lake in Havelock, Ontario.

“The world right now is catching up on how beneficial this is.”

Exactly how beneficial is cold water therapy, though? Hof has come under fire for overstating the practice’s health benefits, and in chatting with Laine, she tells me about seemingly too-good-to-be-true pros such as the 300 per cent surge of norepinephrine and endorphins and thermogenesis (meaning, the cold plunge triggers your body to burn brown fat to heat itself).

Although the laundry list of purported health benefits is longer than Britney’s conservatorship, the science isn’t there…at least not yet. “Research hasn’t been done on whether a sudden, quick cold stimulus offers long-term health benefits of any kind,” says Stephen Cheung, professor of kinesiology at Brock University. As for the claim of helping reduce inflammation, if you’re an athlete, you’re sitting in an ice bath for a good 15 minutes to reduce blood flow and swelling, he says. “So I would argue that quick cold plunges are too short to have any meaningful, long-term health effect.” The same goes for the thermogenesis claim.

“But if it makes you happy to start your day off with an adrenaline rush, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Cheung adds (unless you have a cardiovascular condition or are very sedentary). ”Just don’t expect it to be this magic bullet that’ll improve your immune system, reduce inflammation and have you burning fat through the day.”

 

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Equal parts skepticism and fear consumed me for days before my Othership session. To keep calm in the intense heat of the sauna, I took slow, deep breaths, and both the icy towel Harrison handed out and the sips of cool water from my huge Nalgene bottle were lifelines. Between his encouragement to pause and think about what went well in our day to his dramatic towel dancing, you’re not wrong to think it’s all a little woo-woo — but it was also entirely enchanting.

After the dry heat of the sauna, I was itching to feel cold water on my skin. When my turn came to get into the ice bath, I immersed myself quickly before I could change my mind, and immediately my feet felt like they were wincing. I focused on withstanding the persistent twinge in my extremities. But with Laine’s soothing guidance, the encouragement of my ice-bath partner, and my stubborn Capricorn nature, 120 seconds ticked by quickly and I emerged exhilarated and triumphant.

After the intense endorphin rush, I slept like a baby. And this once reluctant ice bather now has not one but two dips in Lake Ontario on my calendar. Cold water therapy might not be a cure-all, but my icy trip to the moon is one journey I’d take again.

The post I Took the Plunge and Tried Cold Water Therapy. Here’s What Happened appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

This reproductive surveillance not only perpetuates a culture of obsession with childbearing bodies, it also sweeps much of the physical toll, financial cost and burden under the rug. The result? A huge portion of people trying to conceive are operating under unrealistic expectations, weighed down by guilt and shame, or left out of the conversation entirely.

Dr. Lila Hakim, a psychologist and director at Toronto’s Centre for Interpersonal Relationships, says her patients often express a “confusion around what the norms are” when it comes to conception and fertility, and that confusion can stem from the way fertility is covered in the media.

“It sets up ideas [that the fertility journey doesn’t require] a lot of resources — financially, time-wise, support wise,” Hakim, who specializes in family-building and fertility issues, says. “Rather than seeing the whole, that sliver [of coverage] creates expectations that people then potentially compare themselves to and say, ‘Well, how come that’s not happening for me?’ That can be quite confusing because people don’t necessarily have access to the same resources and no one’s journey is the same.”

There’s also the matter of expectations. When we see a celebrity in their 40s and 50s having a baby, the story behind the pregnancy is told too infrequently. Brigitte Nielsen is one exception. The Creed II actor, who used IVF to have a daughter at age 54, was upfront about the realities of that process. “You’re on a lot of medication. It is very expensive,” she told The Guardian in 2019. “You always think you’re going to get pregnant, but most of the time, the phone call comes and it’s: ‘I’m sorry.’ It is devastating.” Nielsen likened her chances of conceiving to winning a lottery — and she is among a privileged group who can afford the ticket price.

“It’s lonely,” says Canadian clothing designer Laine Gabel, the creative and owner behind the Hasting County, Ontario brand Mildred Handmade, whose struggles with fertility stem from endometriosis, its sister disease adenomyosis, and fibroids. “That’s how I feel when it’s just like a basic pregnancy announcement. I scroll past it quickly, I don’t click. I mean, I still cry every single time I see labour on a TV show.”

Gabel points to the element of ableism inherent in the way we talk about celebrity pregnancy, which fails to acknowledge that everyone’s reproductive organs don’t work the same way. Endometriosis, for example, a chronic health condition that can cause pain, fatigue, organ dysfunction and infertility, can result in scar tissue on reproductive organs that make conception difficult. On top of that, the drugs used in fertility treatments can cause endometriosis flare ups.

“If there was a more general acknowledgement and basic understanding of the complexities of these things, then we would have more empathy for the average person who is infertile. We wouldn’t just be like, ‘So when are you having kids?’ It’s not just this basic bodily function for everybody,” she says.

 

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But that’s slowly changing. While social media feeds continue to be populated with strangers’ rounded bellies and aestheticized portrayals of newborn life, it’s also become a platform for recent breakthroughs in the kinds of conversations we’re having. In early 2020, Amy Schumer used Instagram to detail her IVF experience — right down to the number of eggs retrieved (35), the number fertilized (26), and the number of healthy embryos that came out of it all (one). And this past summer when Chrissy Teigen shared her family’s loss of their third child with a series of personal photos documenting the partial placental abruption that led to her miscarriage, she gave thousands of women an overt and lasting permission to grieve a kind of loss that for so long remained untalked about. It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a ways to go.

“You still don’t hear about people who use donor eggs,” says Dr. Carrie Schram, a Toronto MD whose practice is in fertility and low risk obstetrics. She explains that women in their mid- to late-forties and beyond are often using that method. “I think that’s the area of fertility that remains very taboo… Once you’re looking at donor eggs, there’s no discussion.”

The struggle to conceive continues to be treated like a dark secret or, at best, a private matter while coverage of celebrity fertility focuses overwhelmingly on the tiresome bump watch and over-the-top birth announcements. But across both traditional media and on social media, celebrity pregnancy stories are given a platform because there’s a guaranteed audience — measured in clicks, likes, and reshares. We, the audience, engage with these stories with little consideration about how they turn women’s bodies into objects with a singular purpose: reproduction.

“Reproduction is highly glorified. Sure, it’s a part of who we are and what we do as a species but so does every other species that exists,” Schram says. “I think this creates a lot of binary distinctions that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Fertility’s a spectrum, and whether you have a harder time getting pregnant at 40 or not, it actually has zero relation to your value as a person…I think your value as a person should be, ‘How kind are you? Do you contribute in a meaningful way to the lives of other people?’ Not, ‘Did a sperm reach your egg and implant efficiently?’”

Gabrielle Union put it best when she suggested that the way we currently talk about the subject of pregnancy requires a complete rethink. “For so many women… people feel very entitled to know, ‘Do you want kids?’” Union told People ahead of the release of her 2017 book We’re Going To Need More Wine, where she opened up about having “eight or nine miscarriages.”

“A lot of people, especially people that have fertility issues, just say ‘No’ because that’s a lot easier than being honest about whatever is actually going on. People mean so well, but they have no idea the harm or frustration it can cause.”

And though we don’t expect that notion of entitlement — observable not only in media but in politics and in our day to day lives — to disappear anytime soon, changing the way we talk about celebrity pregnancy could pave the way for more meaningful conversations around fertility in the future.

The post It’s Time to Change the Way We Talk About Celebrity Pregnancy appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

What inspired you to open Moon Juice after being diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and educating yourself on how you might put it into remission?

My journey back to health and balance was really pleasurable. There was nothing that was off about it. I liked making beautiful food and chocolate milk spiked with adaptogens, switching out detergents that were making me ill, getting better sleep and weaning myself off of toxic relationships. All those things are actually a pleasure to do. So, I thought it was my mission in life to tell as many people as possible about this beautiful way of getting back to health, and nobody else would have to spend close to twenty years trying to figure out why they potentially feel so awful.

What would you suggest to those who want to incorporate some healthier ingredients in their daily lives, but don’t know where to start?

Try SuperYou; it’s Moon Juice in a bottle. You take two capsules every morning. You don’t have to understand it or think about it. You don’t have to make any other changes. You just have that small moment every morning and you will be feeling different in a month.

What’s included in The Moon Juice Manual?

The first half of the book is the biology of stress; stress literacy and really understanding what’s happening in our body when we are feeling stress. It’s really an introduction to adaptogens and really simple, accessible lifestyle tips that will help you tremendously. The second half of the book is easy, really simple and delicious recipes anyone can make. I love the chocolate chunk cookie recipe. All of the recipes are grain-free and lower glycemic. You don’t have to change your whole lifestyle. It could be as easy as incorporating this cookie with adaptogens in it.

What are some other small things that can contribute to a healthier life without the need for uprooting your whole routine?

As I always say, great change comes with the small, daily steps that we take. If you’re feeling intimidated by wellness, or overwhelmed by the idea of changing your whole lifestyle, just add one small, daily habit. It could be taking SuperYou in the morning, committing to a 10 minute walk, or prioritizing sleeping eight hours a night. Pick one small, simple step and get a kick out of that until it feels really good and it’s second nature. Then, you can start adding other steps. Adding adaptogens into your daily life really does fill your cup. They give you that reserve of adaptive energy so that you can meet the challenges of each day. Also, putting some limits and boundaries on your phone and computer time. That’s bold self-care and a move you can make right now.

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Aside from the physical features — like the product’s largest display yet, most durable front crystal to date and faster charging capabilities compared to earlier iterations — the Apple Watch Series 7’s new watchOS 8 operating system has some pretty intriguing health and wellness aspects, too. Though at first skeptical of just how much impact one device can really have on my day-to-day life, I actually felt a difference in my physical and mental wellbeing after just one week donning the smartwatch. Here are some takeaways from my first seven days with the Apple Watch Series 7.

My sleep game was no joke

Sleep is a very important part of my day. A perfect night for me, at the ripe age of 22, means tucking in for the night at 9:30 p.m. to enjoy some long, undisturbed shut-eye. But if I’m stressed, I endlessly toss and turn, and quality sleep becomes very difficult to achieve. When I can’t sleep, I find myself reaching for my phone, where I peruse social media or binge watch TV through the late hours of the night. It’s a bad habit that is no doubt a result of my high daily screen time. But since I started using the Apple Watch, I’ve actually been able to achieve longer, uninterrupted sleep.

My Apple Watch forced me to be more intentional about the quality of my sleep. The watch’s Sleep app prompted me to set a goal for my bedtime and include my desired hours of rest. About an hour ahead of the bedtime I set, it would remind me to wind down and prepare for a good night’s rest (meaning no doomscrolling past 9 p.m.!). As I slept, the watch tracked my respiratory rate, heart rate and blood oxygen levels. When I woke up each morning, it congratulated me for meeting my eight-hour sleep target — a small detail but appreciated nonetheless. Can we normalize viewing sleep as an achievement?

Guided meditation reminded me to slow down

The feature I used most on the Apple Watch Series 7 was the mindfulness app — a reimagined version of the Breathe app found on previous versions. Mindfulness offers the option to do Breathe or Reflect sessions. One-minute Breathe sessions guide your breathing by providing visual simulations that coincide with inhales and exhales. In Reflect sessions, you are given the simple task of focusing for one minute while entrancing visuals play on screen. My favourite part of this feature was that I would randomly get reminders throughout the day to slow down and take a minute to do a session. I always obliged — for research purposes, of course — and noticed that these little reminders actually helped to calm the anxiety I often get from working for long periods of time without breaks. It’s like a ready-to-use guided meditation coach on my wrist, something I never knew I needed.

At first, I chalked my newfound ability to chill up to the placebo effect of the jazzy gadget I was sporting. But as the week went on, I noticed the Apple Watch had in fact led to decreased screen time. I’m guilty of getting distracted by my phone — what starts as an innocent notification scan ends with me scrolling through Mindy Kaling’s entire Instagram feed (so many fun cooking videos, how could I not?). With notifications coming to my wrist, I can either dismiss or respond then and there, and the urge to look beyond any one notification dissipated. Plus, responding to messages and emails was sort of fun (what’s happening to me?) on the watch’s new keyboard, which lets you slide a finger to type, and anticipates your next word based on the context of the message.

Working out can be fun? This is news to me!

I don’t often go to the gym, but I do get out for plenty of walks. And while some may not consider that to be a work out, my Apple Watch alerted me that it indeed was — vindication at last! On my daily strolls, the watch detected when I was walking and prompted me to start recording an outdoor walk workout, where it would track my total distance, the amount of calories I burned and my heart rate. Seeing my Apple Watch count walking as me fulfilling my daily fitness goals made me more aware of how this mundane daily exercise can benefit my long-term health. It also kept tabs on more intentional workouts; new with watchOS 8 is the ability to automatically detect a cycling workout. When I went on a scenic bike ride over the weekend, the watch not only tracked my cycling distance, but reported my elevation gain, average speed and average heart rate. And for all you fancy gym-goers, Apple Watch Series 7 can now track two new workout types, Pilates and Tai Chi.

Throughout my week, I also learned about an electrocardiogram, or ECG — a test that assesses the timing and rhythm of your heart beat, to make sure it’s normal — which Apple Watch Series 7 is capable of generating. ECGs are used by doctors to gain insight about heart rhythm and detect irregularities. The test is quick and painless, and all of the information about your heart rhythm, including other wellness data like sleep activity and mindfulness minutes, is saved in the Health app on your iPhone to have on hand should you or your doctor ever need to review.

If you’re anything like me, you can be, at times, oblivious of your health. Whether it’s because of an underlying fear that something may actually be wrong, or just plain willful ignorance, it doesn’t matter — it’s always important to know what’s going on with your body. And my Apple Watch forced me to do just that. Overall, the watch made information about my health more accessible to me, and inspired me to be more intentionally aware of my mental and physical wellbeing. It served as a regular reminder to check in with my body — and honestly, I get the hype.

The post My First Week With the New Apple Watch Series 7 appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

“Oh sure,” she says. “A decade of yoga didn’t help but this will. Good luck, watch!”

My Apple Watch arrives and I’m instantly suspicious of it. I don’t track my fitness (or lack thereof) like all those hard-bodied types that skip around my gym like some sort of possessed Lululemon ad, and the last time I wore a watch was when I got a Swatch for my Bat Mitzvah in 1987. There’s a mindfulness app built into the watch itself that prompts you to do short minute-long meditations, but to get the new full suite of meditation classes you need a subscription to Fitness+ ($12.99 a month or $99/year), which you can then access on your watch, an iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. The new meditation and Pilates classes join a suite of other workouts like yoga, HITT, core and dance. I’m into the all-inclusive model — it’s like having 1000 Jane Fonda workout tapes at your fingertips! But I’m not here to exercise — I’m here to meditate, motherf**ker!

I start small just with the app on my watch. I set a bunch of times throughout the day for it to prompt me to take a minute for a “Breathe” session (where, yes, all you do is breathe, timed to trippy visuals and vibrations) or a “Reflect” session, where the watch suggests something you can reflect on for a minute, like a time when someone was kind to you and how that made you feel. You can accept or decline the prompt, so if you’re in the middle of a conference call or whipping up a paella (me, every day!) you don’t have to do it. Fortunately, I’m a writer so I spend most of my time locked alone in my basement banging my head on a keyboard, so I’m usually available when Watchie tells me it’s mindfulness-o-clock.

At first, a minute feels painfully long. I keep opening my eyes to peek at the clock. “God, only 37 seconds,” I think. “Am I still reflecting?!” But after a couple of days I feel like a one-minute pro, so I level up to the meditation classes on the Apple Watch Fitness+ service. Those come in five-, 10- and 20-minute sessions, and use three basic techniques: Focusing on your breath, the sounds around you or the sensations in your body — and sometimes all three — to help still your mind. There are nine themes, including Purpose, Gratitude, Creativity and Focus, but since I’m mostly interested in improving my ability to chill out and sleep I focus on the Calm classes.

Now, if you’re doing a dance class, then you’ll obviously want visuals, but I actually find watching the instructors meditate on my iPad a little disturbing. “Is he a gargoyle?” I start to wonder. “Is he dead?” Thankfully, you can opt for audio-only, which I quickly select. Apple added two new teachers who specialize in meditation, and the yoga instructors guide some of these practices, too. I like them all, which surprises me, because I hate everything.

JoAnna croons matter-of-factly into my ear against a backdrop of music by Moby about nurturing my ability to feel calm. “We can do this by letting go of what we think we need to get done right now,” she says. “You can think of this like carrying a heavy bag. If we hold it for too long we get tired. After a while we might need to put it down…give our body a rest…take a break. You can pick the bag up again later if necessary. In this meditation we will practice resting our bodies and minds by letting go and being still. Being still can often feel like we’re not productive. Being productive is necessary at times, and so is rest.” Preach JoAnna, preach!

While the meditation classes and the mindfulness app didn’t turn me into a mental master or a champion sleeper, I did notice a few interesting changes after just one week. The first is about my heart.

The watch constantly monitors your heart rate, so now I actually know what my resting heart rate is — a respectable-but-not-great 85 beats per minute (a healthy resting heart rate for an adult is 60-100 BPM). One night I’m getting ready for a work trip and I start flipping out about everything I need to do before I go. As I feel my stress rising, I watch that little heart rate monitor click steadily upwards even though I’m not moving a muscle. It’s an eerily familiar feeling, and I realize that it’s also the cycle I go through when I can’t fall asleep. Do you know what the worst thing to do is when you can’t fall asleep? Panic about not being able to fall asleep! Turns out that my freaking-out heart rate can climb as much as 30 BPM a minute higher than normal. Terrifying? I don’t know. But what I do know is that when I pull out my handy new breathing skills, I’m able to bring my heart rate right back down in under a minute.

The much more unexpected change is my improved ability to just…be. My 10-year-old son Ben calls this “vibing,” and usually I suck at it.

Ben and I don’t share a lot of hobbies, and I often find myself listening jealously as he talks to or plays with his dad for hours. One night Ben and I are about to watch a TV show together. Usually I multitask while doing this — I stretch, I putter, I take off my makeup — but the New More Mindful Me decides that I’m just going to watch TV with my kid. I’m going to be with him and do nothing else for 40 minutes (weird!). I’m not going to check Instagram, I’m not going to pop up to put on the kettle, I’m not even going to have a snack.

And then a magical thing happens. After a while Ben rests his head on my shoulder, then on my lap. When the show is over he actually wants me and not his dad (winning!) to keep him company as he gets ready for bed. I didn’t understand what the Apple people were talking about when they said meditation can lead to feeling more connected, but now I do. Goddamnit, this stuff…works? Ben is certainly a fan because if I get too aggravated with him he just says, “Mommy, relaaaaax. Go do your meditation.”

Ugh, ok, fine.

The post Did the Apple Fitness+ Meditation Classes Cure My Insomnia? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Osaka had announced last week that she would not be participating in any press conferences during the French Open (also called Roland-Garros) for mental health reasons. “I’ve often felt that people have no regard for athletes’ mental health and this rings very true whenever I see a press conference or partake in one,” she wrote in her statement, adding that she hoped any fines she was charged for refuisng to speak with the press would go to a mental health charity.

The 23-year-old athlete was hit with a $15,000 fine by the Grand Slam tournaments, for not speaking to the media after her first-round match on May 30. Osaka then took to Twitter to announce her withdrawal from the tournament altogether, further opening up about her mental health struggles. She wrote that since winning her first Grand Slam title in 2018 at the U.S. Open, she’s “suffered long bouts of depression.”

“I am not a natural public speaker and get huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media. I get really nervous and find it stressful to always try to engage and give you the best answers I can,” the statement read in part.

The announcement was met with an outpouring of support for Osaka from public figures, including tennis legends Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova.

The situation has sparked a larger conversation surrounding the lack of mental health support for high-level athletes, especially those in the public eye. Aside from playing a stressful and competitive sport, players are then expected to give entertaining, quotable answers in news conferences that are replayed in front of the whole world. Osaka highlighted that this is harmful to athletes’ mental health, saying these rules are outdated.

“I’m gonna take some time away from the court now, but when the time is right I really want to work with the Tour to discuss ways we can make things better for the players, press and fans,” Osaka wrote.

The post Naomi Osaka Withdraws From the French Open To Focus On Her Mental Health appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Ever wake up in the middle of the night completely paralyzed but totally cognizant of the fact that you can’t move your limbs? Chances are you’ve experienced sleep paralysis. Here, a breakdown on the ever-so-elusive sleep disorder and what you can do if you have it.

What is sleep paralysis?

Some chalk up sleep paralysis to supernatural causes, or an urban legend dubbed the “night hag.” Well, turns out sleep paralysis is a real thing. It affects approximately 7.6 percent of people worldwide (Kendall Jenner reported experiencing episodes back in 2016), and in Canada alone, it affects “about half of the population at some point in their lives,” says Dr. Brian Murray, head of the division of neurology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

Sleep paralysis occurs during the final sleep stage (we go through a total of five periods during a sleep cycle): the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep stage. “In REM sleep we are essentially paralyzed, except for breathing and eye movements,” explains Murray. “Sleep paralysis is the phenomenon where the cortex is active, but the motor system is inactive.” So basically, it’s when you wake up fully conscious but unable to move; one system wakes before the other, instead of getting up in unison.

What does it feel like?

Besides being unable to move, those who’ve had brushes with the sleep disorder have reported seeing figures (sometimes terrifying, sometimes abstract), feeling weighed down by an object and/or sensing a strange presence in the room. (If you really want to freak yourself out, lots of people have shared their stories online.)

In my case (because, yes, I have experienced sleep paralysis countless times) my limbs are rendered useless, eyes are glued shut and my brain can’t help but focus on my very shallow breathing…. which, in turn, leads me to believe I’m gasping for air or I can’t breathe. While episodes may feel like they go on forever, Murray says they generally last between one to two minutes. “It might often feel longer as it can be frightening,” he says.

What causes sleep paralysis?

The causes of sleep paralysis vary from person to person, but a lack of sleep, for one, can be the culprit, says Murray. Conditions like narcolepsy, seizures and hypertension have also been linked to the disorder, as well as jet lag, sleep disturbances and shift work. Because this sleep disorder is more likely to occur when you’re sleep deprived, Murray says ensuring adequate sleep time is essential, noting that most adults need between seven to nine hours of uninterrupted slumber.

What should you do if you have it?

One way people have cited utilizing sleep paralysis to their advantage is by turning their episode into a lucid dream (something I’ve yet to experience). If you’d rather your body wake up, the best thing to do is remain calm. Try focusing on moving your smaller muscle groups — wiggling your toes and fingers usually helps. During my episodes, focusing on my breathing (and reminding myself that I’m not actually going to die) often helps quell my anxiety. Waiting for it to pass is what Murray suggests, adding that if sleep paralysis becomes persistent or problematic, you may want to consult a sleep physician. The one major takeaway from experiencing sleep paralysis is that the more you experience it, the more you can practise remaining calm, which makes the episodes a little less intense.

The post What Is Sleep Paralysis? Plus, What You Should Do if You Have It appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

It might have been ages since you’ve woken up feeling like you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep, and you’re certainly not alone. As many of our lives get busier with work commitments, social engagements (mostly virtual, of course) and Netflix marathons, it’s little wonder our relationship with shut-eye is on the outs. The consequence of a sleepless night is often an irritable day, as we plot our existence from one coffee jolt to the next. What started as an hour or two of sleep shortage can impact every aspect of our lives, from our mind to our skin and even our heart. Try these five tips to get more ZZZs and behold the bright-eyed results.

Try a supplement

You might have heard of melatonin; however, few people know how it really works. Melatonin is a hormone our bodies naturally secrete to help us sleep. When the sun goes down, our melatonin levels should rise. Because light, or lack thereof, controls our melatonin levels, shift workers and people who travel frequently through time zones can be particularly susceptible to sleep problems. But even for 9-to-5ers and stay-cationers, simple things like light coming through your window or the glare from your phone screen can confuse your body’s processes. “A melatonin supplement can be helpful in improving sleep quality and reducing the time required to fall asleep,” says Sherry Torkos, pharmacist and author of The Canadian Encyclopedia or Natural Medicine. “It helps you stay asleep longer and there are less early-morning awakenings with melatonin.” Keep in mind that it’s always a good idea to check with your doctor before taking any kind of pills.

Get a chic sleep mask

You might think they’re relegated to red-eye flights and swish hotels, but blocking out light via a sleep mask can really help — a luxe one like this can make it all the more enticing. It’s especially good for daytime naps (or uh, for those nights you go to sleep when the sun’s coming up.)

Banish tech from the room — really

We know, the FOMO that comes with not checking Instagram before bed is almost too much to bear, but consider that checking work emails and even texting can keep you from relaxing. “Even reading the news is upsetting,” says Torkos. “I start thinking about everything going on in the world and then I can’t sleep.” And because you rely on your iPhone as your alarm clock, it’s time to go old school and get a real one.

Create a bedtime routine

Sometimes just washing off your makeup can feel like enough of a chore, let alone beginning a whole routine of sleep-inducing activities. But try to wind down at the end of a long day with a series of relaxing activities, says Torkos, who likes to practice yoga before hitting the sack. While we’re conditioned to watch shows that can elicit some extreme, heart-pounding responses, you could use this time to really delve into a pampering routine: Try dry-brushing your skin, stimulating your scalp with a boar-bristle brush and massaging in face oils.

Don’t whine — or wine (too much)

That relaxing feeling you get with a good glass of Bordeaux is temporary. It might help you fall asleep initially and mentally transition from boardroom to bedroom, but that’s kind of where the fun stops, says Torkos. “Alcohol can cause nighttime awakening and it can reduce your overall sleep quality. A glass of wine with dinner is OK, but don’t use alcohol as a way to get to sleep.” Instead, try a cup of herbal tea, like skullcap, which is said to reduce anxiety.

The post How to Sleep Better (and Therefore Improve Every Aspect of Your Life) appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

1. Go for a walk

Sitting for long periods of time is uncomfortable (let’s call for a moratorium on Zoom meetings longer than an hour, shall we?), but it’s also bad for your health. Long periods of sitting can tighten hip flexors and hamstring muscles, affecting balance, and potentially contributing to lower back and knee pain. Break up your day with periods of movement, like a walk around the block. The upgrade: make your walk chicer, for no reason other than personal enjoyment, with an on-trend (and toasty warm) Parajumpers puffer.

2. Put things away when you’re done with them

You’ve been doing this since you were three. Time to upgrade your storage units with new cabinets, like the rattan-inspired ones above from IKEA, and storage boxes and bins. Home is now your office, your gym, your restaurant. It’s important to keep things clutter free. It will look more streamlined, but more importantly, according to CAMH, decluttering may also improve your mental health.

3. Reduce blue-light exposure

In the middle of a pandemic, it would be ridiculous to suggest you cut back on your screen time. Instead, try adding a blue-light shield to your device, like this one from SaveFace available at The Detox Market. (Read more about blue light and how it affects your skin here.) Made with four layers of tempered glass and antimicrobial silver ions it purports to reduce HEV blue light, reducing eye strain.

4. Make your morning coffee better

You are already making coffee every morning, why not stir in some collagen powder for a hit of protein? This one, from Canadian company Organika, boasts 9 grams of protein per serving, and is sourced from fish. (They have bovine and vegan-based options, too.) Start using it now and expect to see stronger hair and nails by May. (It takes about five months of daily use to see the effects.)

5. Take a probiotic

The microbiome in your gut is sensitive to stress, which, uh, we’re all experiencing a little of right now. “The gut microbiome is connected to the brain through the vagus nerve,” health psychologist Dr. Judith Andersen, PhD, told us. “Something that’s good for your body is probiotics.” Support your digestive and gastrointestinal health through eating probiotic rich foods, or make it even easier on yourself and take a once-a-day probiotic, like these gluten-dairy-and-soy free ones from Renew Life.

6. Try another form of CBD

If you’re someone who uses CBD and/or cannabis, consider exploring it in beverage form. While we aren’t making any health claims about this beverage, it’s a swap to consider in lieu of smoking.

7. Try a shorter workout

Remember when we used to attend hour-long boutique fitness classes? Yeah, us neither. We’re not sure if it’s because we’re out of shape or we’ve just learned to be more efficient with our time, but 10- and 20-minute workouts hit harder from home. The next time you’re trying to muster up the motivation to do a 45-minute class, try the great selection of short and sweet workouts – from HIIT to yoga to strength – on Apple Fitness+ instead. (Check out our full review of the new fitness platform for Apple Watch users.)

8. Upgrade your toothbrush

You brush your teeth twice a day (right?). Upgrade to a trendy electric toothbrush from direct-to-consumer Kevin Hart-backed brand, Bruush. The device boasts six cleaning modes (including a very satisfying tongue cleaning option) and ultra-soft bristles so its gentle on your gums. If you get on the refill plan, they’ll auto ship you new toothbrush heads every few months. So fresh, so clean.

9. Add another mask into your rotation

By now, we all know the importance of wearing a face mask to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. We also all know that you are supposed to wash them between each use. In reality, it’s easier to have a few different masks on hand than remembering to wash the one you own each and every time you leave the house (although that should not be that often in lockdown). These ones from Herschel come in a great range of colours, are super comfortable and features an adjustable nose bridge and ear loops for the perfect fit on every face.

The post 9 Wellness Resolutions So Easy, You’ll Actually Stick To Them appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

While the safety and efficacy of MDMA-assisted therapy is still being investigated (and it is not approved by Health Canada for treatment of any mental health conditions), Ronan Levy, founder of Canadian mental wellness company Field Trip Health – the Toronto location of which has been selected as one of the trial sites for the study – points to previous studies that showed promise in the treatment for those diagnosed with PTSD. In a phase two trial conducted by MAPS, 54 percent of participants in the active treatment group no longer qualified for a diagnosis of PTSD after completing treatment.

It’s important to note that this is MDMA-assisted therapy, i.e. using the psychedelic molecule to enhance the work of traditional therapeutic techniques. Patients in the trial will work with therapists before, during and after the treatment.

“As with most psychedelic-assisted therapies, what MDMA does is enable people to look at their lives and see things from different perspectives,” explains Levy. “Very often, these mental health conditions are rooted in trauma or past experiences that people aren’t able to confront or process the emotions around. Psychedelics can enable people to more objectively revisit those moments.”

After using psychedelics, says Levy, there’s a period of neuroplasticity that allows for more cognitive flexibility to change outlooks and/or habits. He likens it to an analogy Michael Pollen makes in his book, How to Change Your Mind: “Imagine two ski tracks in snow,” says Levy. “The more you ski on those tracks, the more entrenched they become, but psychedelics come along and shake the snow globe. All of a sudden you have fresh powder on top of those ski tracks to carve new paths. In very, very simplistic terms, that’s how psychedelic therapies seem to have such profoundly positive effects on treating these mental health conditions.”

There is a particular urgency in finding treatments for anorexia nervosa, which has the highest mortality rate of any mental health disorder. “The trial is going to have significant impact on the quality of life for a number of people,” says Levy. “It’s why we’re so excited to be participating.”

The post Could MDMA-Assisted Therapy Help Treat Anorexia? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Her lightbulb moment came while using a small test strip to identify ketosis when she was on the keto diet. “I thought, they should have this for pregnancy tests,” says Rhind, who discovered strip pregnancy tests do exist and are often used in doctors offices and hospitals. “I realized there was a need to build a trustworthy brand with really high-quality products in a less wasteful, more convenient format where people can order them discreetly from their home.”

Enter OVRY. The Vancouver-based business offers pregnancy tests that are 109 times smaller and use 99 percent less single-use plastic than any midstream test found at the drugstore.  A small box of four OVRY pregnancy tests retails for $18 and a large box of 18 pregnancy test is $36.

Rhind says consumers are vulnerable when it comes to purchasing pregnancy tests. “I’ve been there. You go into the store and look at the cheap version and more expensive versions [of the pregnancy tests available] and just think to yourself, ‘I don’t care if it’s an extra $7, I want to work,’ but you don’t have the information that these tests could all have the same accuracy.”

It’s a common misconception, says Rhind, that the more expensive the test is, the better it is. “Largely, that is not true,” she explains. “Pregnancy tests are highly regulated and must meet high standards or they would not have clearance to be sold.”

Less expensive tests available at some bargain stores may be sold closer to their expiry date. This wouldn’t necessarily make them less effective, but you wouldn’t be able to keep the test on hand as long as others. (OVRY tests, which are manufactured in Canada and approved by Health Canada, have a 24-month shelf life from their manufacturing date, which is clearly marked on the packaging.)

Unlike midstream pregnancy tests, strip pregnancy tests need to be submerged into urine. When used properly, they have the same accuracy as midstream tests, says Rhind. OVRY pregnancy tests are 99.7 percent accurate and its ovulation tests are 99.2 percent accurate. The test strips are also ultra-sensitive, which means they are able to detect the pregnancy hormone HCG at a lower threshold, thus detecting pregnancy earlier than tests that do not offer this.

Since launching in late 2020, the range of people using OVRY has been wide, says Rhind. The biggest consumer has been people trying to conceive, naturally or through IVF, who are going through high quantities of tests. “Athletes who experience irregular cycles are another group we’ve heard from,” says Rhind. “They don’t know if they are pregnant or just training really hard.”

OVRY’s inclusivity has been by design. “We want to ensure we’re not excluding people that don’t usually get spoken to, but that our products are absolutely eligible for,” she says. “When you normalize non-gendered language, it sets the bar and encourages other businesses to follow suit.”

The post Canadian Startup OVRY Aims to Make Pregnancy Tests More Affordable & Sustainable appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

But thanks to the dismantling of discomfort around discussing mental health issues, it’s becoming less taboo to talk about the troubles experienced in one’s personal and professional lives. To inspire your own pursuit of calm and clarity, five creatives share how they’re managing, coping with and nurturing their mental health.

Adam Taubenfligel

Transcendental Meditation (TM) – a mantra-centric practice done 20 minutes a day, twice a day, to be considered effective – came to Triarchy’s creative director, Adam Taubenfligel, at the most opportune time. “I was having brunch with a friend in L.A. and complaining to her about how I just never seemed to be able to snap out of the way of life that I’d always known and that it wasn’t working for me,” he recalls. “It was the same complaints over and over again, and it seemed weird that I kept doing things the way I’d always done them and wasn’t progressing at the rate I wanted to.”

His friend mentioned that post-brunch she was planning to attend an information session about TM. “I felt that I had nothing to lose,” he says of why he decided to join her. It ended up being a moment of great impact, turning Taubenfligel’s attention inward – initially in a powerful, unpleasant way. “It’s brutal because the first few days of doing it, you’re purging so much stuff that it actually manifests physically and you feel it,” he says. “I almost gave up because I didn’t want to feel like that. It was horrendous. But then you get into a groove with it, and I’ve been doing it every day, twice a day, since then.”

Taubenfligel first tried TM six years ago and says that while he always does the morning meditation as soon as he wakes up, the recommended 4 p.m. practice isn’t always feasible given his packed schedule. “It’s hard to get into because you don’t think you can dedicate the time, but when you do, it really changes your output,” he notes. “The days when I do the 4 p.m. one, it is often more effective than in the morning—there are studies that show that 20 minutes of TM give you the same benefits as three hours of REM sleep. There are times when I’ll come out of the afternoon meditation and feel like it’s a whole new day.”

TM hasn’t just given Taubenfligel a renewed sense of time during his day to day and motivated him to pursue other personally beneficial choices, like elective sobriety; it has also driven him to add the mantra “Take a deep breath. Sustainability begins with mindfulness.” to the inside of Triarchy’s ethically crafted garments.

The courses that teach someone TM aren’t free, and Taubenfligel recognizes that this can be a deterrent. But he says that knowing how his money is spent – via the David Lynch Foundation, which manages TM teachings – makes it worth it. “It goes into their programming, where they teach TM in inner-city schools and prisons,” he says, highlighting that the foundation is also able to modify course costs based on someone’s income level. “To me, that’s money well spent because it’s going to the greater good.”

Trish Ewanika

In the early days of lockdown, Trish Ewanika was dealing with the reduced pace of her fashion line’s production as well as the recalibration of orders she had placed for her eponymous boutique. Unlike in the past, when she’d typically work a 12-hour day, reprioritizing meant she could explore different ways of tending to her sense of calm. “I made sure I was home before it was dark because the streets were empty and it was weird,” she recalls of the energy shift in the typically bustling annex neighbourhood where her shop is located in Toronto.

“I’d find myself at home at six or seven o’clock – when normally i wouldn’t be home until 10 or 11 – and wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” she says. “Like a lot of people, I thought a cocktail sounded like a good idea. I’d make one, put a few olives in a bowl and then sit down to read – something i also hadn’t had the quality or quantity of time to do before.”

Noting that she would have been travelling to Palermo, Italy, in may, Ewanika soothed herself instead by “picking up The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa and some novels by Natalia Ginzburg.” Some of the effects of quarantining in Toronto also lent themselves to transporting her to a European destination, including the fact that bars turned into bodega-style storefronts and you’d see more people picnicking in parks. “I hope some of that stays,” Ewanika says of her fondness for a less hurried way of life.

Some of it will change, though, as the winter looms, and now Ewanika – who has returned to doing pilates classes to keep her strength and balance up – is pondering other ways for her mind to escape. “I’m thinking of going back to playing the piano,” she says. a friend who takes lessons inspired her to revisit this skill, which she first studied in her youth, and she says that unlike doing crochet (another suggestion from a friend), which is “too close to her work,” plonking away at the piano is something that will keep her mind occupied in a different way than work does.

Ewanika – known for her minimalist and largely seasonless designs – is also nurturing aspects of simplicity and slowing down when it comes to her work life. “Time isn’t ours to manage the way it used to be,” she says, highlighting how much longer things in her business operations take because of delays and virtual hiccups. “You have to give yourself a break on that account. now, I’ll pack up and leave at eight and say ‘it’ll just have to wait until tomorrow’ because my health and mental well-being override anything that feels urgent at the moment.”

Lauren Chan

“I started therapy around the time that I launched Henning,” says Lauren Chan, a New York-based entrepreneur in the plus-size space. “I decided to do it because I was very stressed out. It was also something that I had heard a lot of female founders talking about—the necessity of keeping yourself well when you’re running a business.” It also helped that in her circle, seeing a therapist wasn’t something to be shy about. “In New York City, it seems like everybody has a therapist, and it’s very normalized in a really beautiful way,” she notes. “Perhaps I notice this because I surround myself with progressive, creative people who want to be in tune with that side of themselves and have that aspect of wellness in their lives.”

She used two digital platforms – Psychologytoday.com and the app Talkspace – to find a mental health professional she felt she could trust and who would understand her. While she used to see her therapist at their office near Washington Square Park, quarantine has forced Chan’s sessions to move online for the foreseeable future; it’s a circumstance that initiates a helpful way of framing the many roadblocks one can encounter in a day. “I can’t control the timeline of when I’m going to physically be back in an office with somebody,” she says. Chan further highlights the ways in which seeing a therapist has helped her reconsider her approach to her work life, which she says had been causing her to lose “the ability to compartmentalize and cope in a lot of ways.”

“The biggest lesson I’ve learned through therapy is to be a little less forward-thinking and to reel back some of the ambition and competitiveness that comes from having a work personality like mine; it has helped me to be a little more considerate and to feel more level,” she says. “It ended up being great timing because now we’re in a massive slowdown in the fashion industry, and these tools, which I had been working on for almost a year prior to the pandemic, have been incredibly helpful,” she says about starting her sessions after kicking off her business in the fall of 2019. “I don’t know – and I don’t want to know – how deeply stress would have affected me during this crisis for small businesses over the past six months.”

Lesley Hampton

Toronto-based designer Lesley Hampton has relied on physical activity throughout most of her life to preserve a sense of determination, clarity and focus. “I started horseback riding every weekend at the age of seven,” she says, adding that when she moved from Canada to Australia as a teenager, she enrolled in a school that had an equestrian program. The mental and physical conditioning required for competitive sports proved useful during her adolescence and provided the self-starter spirit that she needed to found her eponymous fashion brand in her early 20s.

Hampton’s design work has been deeply influenced by her athleticism and her efforts to keep fitness part of her daily routine as her body changed. She says that navigating her feelings toward the typical visuals of what a “physically fit” person looks like is an ongoing obstacle. “Once I grew past the Xl size, it was harder for me to put myself out there in workout clothes,” she says. “It’s something i still struggle with.”

Musemo Handahu

As someone who lives their life on the internet, content creator Musemo Handahu has self-care practices that are intrinsically linked with her career. The Halifax-based fashion blogger, who has over 50,000 followers on Instagram, makes an effort to share how she mitigates the impact of not only the large-scale anxieties of 2020 but also more individualized issues.

“I’m really struggling right now,” she says about the restrictions that quarantine has resulted in. “Travel has always been my most important method of self-care, and not having that has started to take its toll on me. It doesn’t only boil down to seeing family and my best friends; travelling also allows me to experience really important moments of Blackness and Black culture. That’s important to me because where I live, there aren’t a lot of people of colour who are creatives. You can feel like the city is erasing you in some way. Now, I’m wondering, ‘What’s the next step for survival?’ And I wonder if other Black people who live here are feeling the same way.”

To offer insight into how she combats the feelings that come along with this notion of erasure, Handahu is candid about her coping mechanisms. She took up cycling in the summer and was pleased by the unexpected results. “Initially, it was going to be my form of exercise,” she notes. “But when I started riding my bike, it changed to just wanting to get some air. I’m not necessarily concerned about burning calories but about feeling some sort of freedom.” And in an Instagram post in late August, Handahu posted about “the things [she needed] to do to get through a day,” which included “cried – a lot” and “laughed – a lot.”

She divulges this information to give a more well-rounded perspective of herself on her social media feed—something she thinks her community is craving now more than ever. “I think people view me as someone who has a lot of confidence,” she says. “Being transparent about bawling my eyes out shows a level of relatability to my followers. I think we’re all tired of perfection – of always seeing these
put-together people and having this idea that they don’t go through things, when that’s not the case.”

Revealing her need for moments of levity is equally important to Handahu. “It’s about allowing yourself the grace to actually step away from something that’s over- whelming and giving yourself a moment to breathe – that’s what laughter represents to me,” she says, adding that she’ll hang out with a funny friend or watch a stand-up comedy show when she needs a mood-lifting break. “It’s me saying ‘Yes, the world is really screwed up right now, but I need to have a moment of joy. I’m going to take that for myself.’” Handahu notes that it’s important to remember that when you’re opting to take time for these moments, be they happy or sad, being purposeful about it is key. “You shouldn’t feel guilty for allowing yourself to step away for a bit,” she says. “We can’t always be carrying the burden of what’s happening in the world 24/7. It’s not healthy.”

The post How 5 Creatives Manage Their Mental Health appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

At 28, I’ve seen the inside of more hospitals than most people do in their entire lives—thanks to a mix of chronic clumsiness, an assortment of one-off illnesses and what I had deemed up until recently as “mystery pain.” Point being, when it comes to medical circumstances I’ve got pretty thick skin and have a reasonable understanding of how the system works. But in March, right when pandemic fervour was hitting, I felt pain unlike any other I had experienced before: I was fainting, vomiting, hardly coherent and had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital yet again. Months of hard recovery followed before I could even go for a normal walk around the neighbourhood.

Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) was the culprit, and while this wasn’t the first time it had caused a trip to the ER, it was definitely the worst. An under-researched condition, PCOS can be difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat. Symptoms have varying levels of severity depending on the person—PCOS can cause everything from fertility and skin issues to insulin resistance and depression—and you need to meet a number of criteria involving physical and hormonal changes to be diagnosed. But these criteria can be interpreted differently by every physician. 

In my case, I had known something was wrong long before March. For years, I had been going into doctor appointments complaining about this unfamiliar pain, but I felt I was never taken seriously. I was told to take Advil, that our bodies go through unexplained phases, and one time my doctor even suggested I’d injured myself skiing—even though I said I hadn’t been skiing in eight years.

This persistent undermining and dismissive behaviour towards patients isn’t uncommon, unfortunately, especially when it comes to women’s health issues. It’s what Sasha Ottey calls “health care gaslighting.”

“You hear about gaslighting all the time in terms of relationships, but you do have a relationship with your [health care] provider and it’s a rather intimate one” says Ottey, the executive director of the PCOS Challenge, a North American advocacy group based in Atlanta that works with partner countries like Canada, Australia and India on shifting policy and providing education for both patients and practitioners.

Considering that nearly 13% of women are affected by PCOS worldwide and it classifies as a global health issue, Ottey says it’s confusing that it’s not more widely discussed or studied in medical communities. Even where research has been invested, the bulk still focuses on the impact of PCOS on fertility, leaving critical aspects, like how it affects mental health, in the dark.

It’s no wonder then that women across North America report being dissatisfied with the process of getting a PCOS diagnosis and often feel they are left out of the decision making, instead of working as a partnership with their doctor.

“It’s too easy to leave the appointment without feeling heard or agreeing with the treatment,” says Marianne Rodrigue, the community development and outreach coordinator for Le Centre de Santé des Femmes in Montreal. “You have to be willing and ready to speak up.”

Le Centre was started by radical feminists seeking gender equity through health education in the 1970s when women were often struggling to find answers about sexual health within traditional settings. Although the system has improved over the past half-century, Rodrigue says there are still major roadblocks people face when seeking care from province to province. These can be a shortage of primary care physicians, specialist wait times and even online misinformation. 

In Rodrigue’s experience, it’s not uncommon for doctors to make flash assumptions about female-identifying patients that might lead to disappointing or blanketed treatments. Which is why she recommends young people read and ask questions through platforms like Sex & U to get a better understanding of what’s considered normal when it comes to their bodies (and to learn about topics that may not be covered in sex ed curriculums, such as consent, gender identity and self-image).

From a doctor’s perspective, there are a few reasons why misdiagnosis may happen. Dr. Jamie Kroft, a physician and endometriosis specialist at Sunnybrook Health Care Centre in Toronto, says that while women are becoming more comfortable discussing sensitive topics in appointments and are being more proactive in seeking care, there is still an education gap that may cause some conditions to be overlooked, especially in the case of PCOS or endometriosis where the range of symptoms and severity levels are so varied.

“[Patients] could be sort of pursuing one symptom rather than looking at the whole picture,” says Dr. Kroft. “There’s a big overlap between symptoms that are very common and then symptoms that represent a specific disease.”

Given 75% of people who menstruate worldwide experience menstrual pain, it’s understandable why a doctor may not want to jump to conclusions about more serious conditions. But Dr. Kroft says that patients are most often the experts when it comes to their own bodies and know when something feels off. If they can work with their doctors finding the problem, she says this can help both parties figure out the treatment plan.

Rodrigue says one way to work better with your doctor and to combat potential misunderstandings is to do your homework before an appointment and to come in prepared with specific concerns to help narrow down the issue, even if it may feel over-the-top or awkward. “If you’re clear on what you want and how you want to be heard, you can make it easier for your doctor to know where you are at and to work with you to find the best course of action as a team,” she says.

But even if you come into an appointment confident and prepared, the results can sometimes be disappointing. Ottey says that when she was going through the final stages of her diagnosis process, her doctor didn’t help her to better understand the condition beyond giving her a short pamphlet.

“I asked her about my missing period and she said ‘Don’t worry about it, plenty of women would love not having their period,’” Ottey recalls. “I’d already read through the pamphlet before I left her office, so that was how limited the information was in there.” Repeated instances of having your concerns dismissed in this way is a sign it’s time to switch doctors.

With this seeming to be a pretty commonplace experience—only 25% of women surveyed globally report being satisfied with information given to them by their health care providers—it’s natural that one of the first places people turn to find answers and support, and to quell some of the anxieties that come along with a PCOS diagnosis, is the internet. And while this can be a double-edged sword filled with hours of medical doom-scrolling, it can also be a really vital tool for getting localized information and anecdotal recommendations from people in similar situations. 

The latter has been the case for Bianci Ricci. The Vaughan, Ont. resident says that advocate pages like PCOS Support Girl have been useful in acting as a safe space among peers, but are almost entirely U.S.-based. She started her own smaller, Canadian-specific group after going through years of pain and dismissal in medical appointments.

“My family doctor growing up was not helpful at all,” says Ricci. “I had to essentially force the diagnosis.” 

Ricci says she spoke up multiple times in appointments with her doctor throughout her teen years, when her discomfort was substantial enough that she was vomiting and fainting, yet she was told this was just part of having a period and to “deal with it.” It wasn’t until she left for university and began swapping stories with floormates that she realized her symptoms, like weight fluctuations and hair loss, meant she likely had endometriosis or PCOS. 

“I had to be extraordinarily aggressive with [my doctor] in order for her to send me for these tests. I told her ‘I don’t think that this is normal and I’m tired of you telling me that it’s just going to be like this,’” says Ricci. “It went from ‘Oh I’m sorry, you just have painful periods’ to four different diagnoses in a matter of two months.” 

Since getting formally diagnosed with dysmenorrhea, leukorrhea, PCOS and endometriosis, Ricci has looked beyond traditional medicine to treat her various symptoms. She’s taking hormone-balancing inositol, seeing a naturopath and now eats an entirely vegan diet—something she says isn’t necessarily a one-size cure-all, but has changed her own life for the better.

“The only thing I’ve gotten from going a traditional route is a naproxen prescription,” says Ricci. “I find that the doctors really don’t know much about our condition.”

The Canadian medical system has a clear need and responsibility to do better by women and people with uteruses, and while it seems like a far cry for now, work is underway to make it happen. One of the most promising methods researched in Canada so far is the introduction of stronger menstrual education into curriculums. In 2019, the Centre for Pelvic Pain & Endometriosis at BC Women’s Hospital and Health Centre ran a pilot program with high school students that led to young people being able to better identify warning symptoms of PCOS and endo, and to build their comfort levels when discussing sensitive medical topics. 

Philippa Bridge-Cook, Chair of the Board of the Endometriosis Network Canada, is optimistic that this type of program would be a success if scaled nationally. While her group is working at a higher level to co-lead efforts on a government advocacy group called EndoAct, there are still many tools she says patients can make use of to feel better heard in appointments, including support groups and online networks.

“Most people find it really helpful to have a support person with them when they go to appointments,” says Bridge-Cook. “Especially if they’ve faced dismissal from doctors before, it just tends to shut people down and they feel worried or more nervous about speaking out again.”

The current system is obviously failing so many of us, but that’s why work to expose health care gaslighting and bring more attention to women’s health issues is so important—it validates and protects a group being systemically flattened and ignored. “You’re not a hypochondriac as some may try to lead you to believe,” Ottey says. “That’s just dismissing women and our experience when we know that something is wrong.”

The post If This Sounds Familiar, You’ve Probably Experienced ‘Health Care Gaslighting’ appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Whether you have lost your job, are trying to survive with reduced work hours or are job hunting for a new or more stable position than your current one, trying to navigate working during COVID-19 has been turbulent, to say the least. And if I could sum up my own pandemic work experience in one word, it would be tumultuous.

In July, I found myself back on LinkedIn hunting for a new job as my contract as a social media manager within the travel industry felt uncertain. In an attempt to pivot, I began interviewing virtually for digital marketing roles. Soon after, I accepted a job with a Canadian company that manages self-storage facilities across the country. What appeared to be a supportive work environment and an opportunity for career advancement during Zoom interviews turned out to be the opposite IRL. The promise of a safe, remote work environment was broken when I was required to come into the office and attend events during my two-week probationary period. Not only was social distancing almost impossible with a good portion of the staff on-site—as many as 20 people in a small, windowless office that felt crowded—masks were also seldom worn by colleagues in common areas. According to the Canadian government’s Preventing COVID-19 in the Workplace directives, employees are advised to “Wear a mask or face covering whenever possible, or where Federal, Provincial or local Municipal bylaws require it” and because the office was located within a public facility, regulations should have applied within the corporate office as well. 

On top of the pandemic-induced workplace stress, my boss made an intrusive comment about my health in relation to my weight during my first week at work. Then, the staff photographer directed profanity at me in an anti-mask fit of rage when asked to wear a mask in an indoor public facility where we were filming (as per the City of Toronto By-Law 541-2020). When I flagged these concerns to my director, he immediately terminated my role, and I was left unemployed during a pandemic seemingly for expressing concerns about my health and safety. Even though the termination of this role was “without cause” which, during a probationary period, is permissible, I couldn’t help but feel discouraged that this was their reaction to my concerns that their own internal HR policies were being violated. 

“The probationary period is as much your opportunity as it is an employer’s opportunity to determine fit,” employment lawyer Hermie Abraham told me when discussing my situation. “However, if the workplace was abusive in any way, this is a time to speak to an employment lawyer to understand your rights.” 

When I approached Abraham about what happened, she advised me that, “In your situation, your employer may have breached its legal obligations to you in a few ways including making demeaning comments about your appearance, changing your work arrangements, not providing COVID-19 safeguards, and ending your employment when you raised concerns. Even as a short-service employee, you might have been able to obtain some compensation for your dismissal without having significant legal costs.” As it stands, I’m working with Abraham to weigh out my options and figure out my next step.

Sadly, I can’t be the only one dealing with workplace safety issues during COVID-19. After more than seven months of working remotely, many employers are itching to get employees back into a shared space and are trying to develop plans on how to do so. But, like myself, most employees will no doubt look at that plan with their own set of questions or concerns—and they have every right to do so. For those unsure how to navigate workplace safety during this truly unprecedented time, I spoke to career experts to learn how to advocate for your needs through the interview process, and when approached with a return-to-work plan.

Navigating the job market during COVID-19? Do your research  

Avery Francis, founder and CEO of Bloom, a workplace systems design consultancy, has helped to hire more candidates for roles that have started remotely this year than in office. In working with companies to help with their hiring, system building and workplace advancement structures, she has noticed an increased desire for clarity on job security and remote work plans from employees during this second wave of the pandemic. She has even had potential candidates for roles remove themselves from the interview process when an organization could not provide a clear policy-based strategy on how they are handling remote working and return-to-office plans. Over the last few months, she has worked with candidates who are “leaving their workplace and finding new opportunities because of the uncertainty that the company is operating under” and “are looking to make a move where to where the next steps are certain.” She has seen an increased interest from candidates to work for companies like Shopify who have publicly announced their “work from anywhere” Digital by Design plan.

So, how do you avoid joining an organization whose policies may prove flimsy or problematic? According to certified career strategist Chanèle McFarlane, it is during the interview process that you’ll want to communicate your needs and do as much research as possible on the employer. Just as they’ll be looking through your online presence, you should be searching them on Google and Glassdoor or connecting with past and current employees on LinkedIn, says McFarlane.

To take the onus off prospective candidates having to ask the tough questions about COVID-19-related policies and their workplace health and safety guidelines during the interview process, Francis also recommends that companies develop a living document or to share what they currently know about their return to work plans in the job description.

When starting a new job, Abraham recommends reviewing the employment terms with a lawyer or someone knowledgeable in your network to ensure that the contract will work within your particular situation, and to help you negotiate any required changes. There are also many blogs and employment newsletters that are helpful resources for learning more about your rights and benefits as an employee.

Currently employed and working from home? Figure out a return-to-work plan that you’re comfortable with

As companies have begun to develop flexible work arrangements (such as employees alternating days working in the office) and return-to-work plans, the idea of re-entering a shared space is daunting for many employees. While Francis has noticed that many mid- to large-sized companies have dedicated a member of their human resources team to develop a COVID-19, and the Human Resources Professional Association has compiled guides on both working remotely and returning to work, many businesses are still struggling to understand their employees’ needs. If you feel safer continuing to work remotely, McFarlane recommends preparing a plan in advance for how you will continue to work well remotely with your team and a solutions-oriented list of what you’ll need to continue to work efficiently with colleagues that are back in the office. This list could include the communication tools that enable video chat or instant messaging, or project management tools like Asana or Monday.com that would help your team to work together and meet deadlines while not physically together. Providing a detailed workflow or offering resources to your team on how you can work together efficiently while remote (like this playbook from TalentEd Consulting on “How to shift from a co-located workplace to an all-remote one”) will show your team initiative and hopefully reduce any worries that they may have about your performance being judged if you continue to work from home. 

As far as employers go, Francis recommends that they develop an anonymous feedback tool to allow employees to share their worries and concerns without having to self-identify or disclose personal information.  

“We need to have empathy for this unique and unprecedented time,” said Francis. “It is the first time we are all going through this, and we need to work together to destigmatize conversations around anxiety, depression and mental health at work.” According to the Ontario Humans Rights Commission, employers must accommodate employees as it relates to their health, mental health or family status. There has also been an amendment to the Employment Standards Act, 2000, S.O. 2000, c. 41 for the duration of the pandemic that entitles employment protection and legal recourse should you require infectious disease emergency leave. “If an employee needs time away from work to deal with stress, depression or any illness,” says Abraham, “there would be requirements from the employers perspective to accommodate them.”

As an employee, you have the right to outline your concerns and have a conversation with your manager or the human resources department to find a solution. However, if being on site is a bonafide requirement of your job, then refusing to return to work could qualify as job abandonment and lead to your termination. The requirement to be on site is determined by your employer, but according to Abraham: “If there are other people in the workplace who aren’t physically present and are doing the job elsewhere, then that would limit the reasonableness of the employer to tay that this is a requirement.” Abraham also recommends comparing your job requirements with similar roles within the industry to provide an example of how the job can function remotely. 

Not sure what the future holds? Consider your plan B

“Now more than ever, it is important to manage and take charge of your career,” says McFarlane. As an advocate for portfolio careers, McFarlane has noticed a surge of professionals diversifying their careers during the pandemic by supplementing their full-time jobs with gig economy work. A portfolio career combines multiple sources of income (that may include additional freelance or consultant work in addition to your full- or part-time employment), offering versatility and financial security. This includes jobs like freelance copywriting, graphic design or working for an app like InstaCart where you can set your own schedule outside of your regular work hours. Not only will this additional work give you a bit of a financial cushion, if you should find yourself in a precarious work situation because of the pandemic, you’ll have something to fall back on until you secure your next role.

The post I Spoke Out About Feeling Unsafe At Work During COVID—And Got Fired appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Raise your hand if at least two people you know have announced they’re expecting amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Raise your hand again, if, even if someone you *personally* know hasn’t made the exciting announcement, it feels like every single celebrity has? From Emily Ratajkowski and Hilary Duff’s recent bump reveals to Cosmopolitan Beauty Director Julee Wilson’s announcement that she and her husband literally made baby number two to the sweet, sweet sounds of a D-Nice Instagram Live set, it feels like legitimately everyone is preggo. And the aphrodisiac has been quarantine. But, then again, we predicted this.

In March of this year, when the COVID-19 pandemic was really taking off in North America, many people both online and IRL began joking that with everyone sheltering in place, more time at home with partners would lead to a spike in births nine months down the line. (What else is there to do once your sourdough starter is in the oven and your Zoom cocktail hour is done?)

So, seven months out from the internet’s predictions, we have to ask: Is that pandemic baby boom *actually* coming? The answer, surprisingly, is…probably not. While anecdotally it may seem like everyone you know is making the decision to get pregnant during the pandemic, statistically it turns out that people have actually been getting *less* busy—or at least have been extra careful about using contraception while getting frisky over the past several months.

According to a June 15 paper released by Washington, DC-based The Brookings Institute—and based on economic studies of fertility behaviour as well as data presented from the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and the 1918 Spanish Flu, which saw a downturn in birth rates—COVID-19 will lead to what the institute calls “a large, lasting baby bust,” with the paper predicting that there’ll be between 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births in the United States in 2021.

“As economists, we focus on the underlying decisions that drive behaviours and ultimately outcomes, including having children,” the paper notes. “It is important to recognize the critical role that economic conditions play in fertility choices.” Which makes sense, considering that the pregnancy announcements we’re currently being inundated with are mostly from celebs, who arguably aren’t feeling the financial burden of the pandemic in the same way us regular people are. (Need we remind you of KKW’s recent display of what “normal” life looks like for her inner circle?)

And while experts say that Canada won’t see as steep of a birthrate decline as our neighbours to the south (this is due to our overall smaller population but also the fact that the pandemic has been managed differently in both countries), a 2020 survey by Leger has found that about three in four (76%) of millennial Canadian women (between the ages 18 and 40) who’ve used contraception in the past six months, say it’s now more important than ever to prevent an unplanned pregnancy—meaning Canadian women are taking control of their reproductive decisions now more than possibly ever.

ICYMI, people were predicting that there would be a massive baby boom—and it made logical sense

While jokes about an uptick in baby making were meant to be funny, at the time it also seemed plausible. While experts say that the way people’s libidos react to stressful situations really varies depending on the individual, with some people’s sex drives going down during stressful periods, like say, a pandemic; the reality is that, in times of stress, some people actually do engage in sex more, as means of coping. “For some people, heightened stress will heighten their arousal response,” Canadian sex and relationships researcher Dr. Kristen Mark, director of the sexual health promotion lab at the University of Kentucky told FLARE in an April 2020 interview. “In times of uncertainty, it can be helpful to experience the calming effect that sexual arousal and orgasm has.” This phenomenon has even been dubbed as the “apocalyptic hornies” by Men’s Health.

Horniness aside, there are several *other* reasons we imagine people may be deciding to go ahead with their family planning during the pandemic. With our lives effectively put on hold over the past eight months, with stalls in travel, relationships and career, it’s safe to say that for many people their carefully planned timelines have been thrown for a loop. With that in mind, it’s not farfetched to think that perhaps those who were putting off having children due to career and travel goals would decide to throw caution to the wind and have a baby now, while we’re not able to really do anything else. Because honestly, what even is a timeline anymore?

But the tanking economy has created a different reality

While the recent stats from Leger may come as a shock to some, we shouldn’t actually be that surprised that people are more heavily weighing their contraception options and their decision to have kids. Because there’s a lot to be uncertain about at the moment. Namely, the economy. According to Statistics Canada, the national unemployment rate almost doubled between February and April (the heart of the pandemic in North America), landing at a staggering 13.7%. With service industry professionals largely out of work due to the shut down of non-essential services, many Canadians took a large economic hit thanks to the pandemic. While it’s important to note that as of September there has been a recoup of lost jobs in Canada, with the pandemic still ongoing into the winter—and recent rollbacks in provinces like Ontario—there’s still a lot of job instability and uncertainty across numerous industries.

“I wasn’t surprised by that statistic,” Dr. Kristina Dervaitis an Ontario-based OBGYN and contraception specialist says of Canadian millennial women hoping to postpone unwanted pregnancies. “Of course there’s never a good time for an unplanned pregnancy, but particularly during a pandemic when there’s so much uncertainty, patients are looking to make sure that they’re in control of their reproductive futures and their lives.”

Lack of regular access to healthcare is another factor in the decision to delay

In addition to families’ uncertain economic situations as well as fluctuating job security, Dervaitis points to limited healthcare access as another reason some people are delaying getting pregnant. “Whether [a pregnancy] continues to term or whether or not a patient decides to terminate a pregnancy, having access to those services that are necessary became limited during the lockdown portions of the pandemic,” she says. (In fact, for a large portion of the pandemic, people giving birth in many Canadian hospitals had to do so alone and while wearing a mask, due to restrictions around COVID).

Not to mention the fact that, as she says, there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to access to healthcare in the future, as COVID continues to place a strain on our healthcare system. “There aren’t any sort of warning bells to say that we should be advising patients not to get pregnant during the pandemic, but there are obviously still question marks that we’re trying to answer about the effect of COVID on the pregnant woman and on developing fetus. So lots of uncertainties; so now more than ever I’m seeing my patients, say ‘I don’t want to have an unplanned pregnancy during this pandemic and how can you prevent this?'”

In fact, Dervaitis says that a significant change she’s seen in some patients when it comes to contraception is the decision to seek out more long-acting reversible contraception, like IUDs—which provide contraception coverage for five years and are in essence, “pandemic proof.”

“Patients are really drawn to that sort of long-term control,” she says. “Five years of worry-free contraception. Once an IUD is inserted, there’s not really anything to remember to do each day, which is why it is one of the most effective contraceptive options available at a less than 1% chance of pregnancy.” And, as it is reversible, IUDs (some of which can provide coverage up to 10 years), can be removed anytime, meaning “that patient has control over her reproductive future and can remove an IUD at any time and go forth and start trying to conceive right in the next cycle without any concern for future fertility.”

Another reason patients may turn to this type of longterm, reversible contraception is due to accessibility, especially in comparison to other means like monthly birth control pills. “Typically in the past patients would would get a prescription [for birth control pills] for three months at a time,” Dervaitis says. “During crops of the pandemics,  several pharmacies elected to dispense only one month at a time for fear of future drug shortages; which again is a potential concern in terms of access and keeping oneself covered from a contraception standpoint.” (Cutting back on visits to the pharmacy also cuts back on risks of exposure to COVID-19, Dervaitis notes.)

For some, there are other milestones that need to come first—and those have been postponed

Like many of Dervaitis’s patients, 31-year-old Amanda Bernardo also decided to delay her decision to have kids due to the pandemic. While Bernardo says there was a definite boom in pregnancies among her own friend group, with four friends due at the end of 2020 and six due in 2021, the Ottawa-based woman and her partner of nine years decided to postpone their family planning journey because it’s directly tied to their *other* decision to cancel their October 24 wedding ceremony due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’m Catholic, so just based on my religion I want to get married first in order to start moving ahead with family planning,” Bernardo says. When the pandemic first started making waves in North America, back in March of this year, Bernardo says that she and her fiancé—like many people—didn’t think it would affect their planned October wedding in Burlington, Ont. (Remember when everyone thought quarantine was only going to last two weeks? Simpler times). “I was holding on to the very last minute before I needed a decision to postpone,” she says. The couple made a back-up plan for their wedding in April, but with the pandemic seemingly only ramping up, and with Bernardo’s extended family in Italy planning to fly in for the wedding, “[we] pulled the plug in July because our hall and our vendors needed at least three months notice.” The couple have postponed their nuptials until August 2021.

Bernardo’s decision to postpone her wedding—and inevitable family planning—is complicated due to her health. She was diagnosed with endometriosis and PCOS when she was 25–something she’s written about extensively on a blog; a diagnosis that means Bernardo has to actively come off her medication (it helps with pain management) in order to re-start her period and which also means she could potentially have difficulties conceiving. These are all factors she’s taken into making her decision to postpone her wedding.

“When I was first diagnosed I was very, very depressed because I was 25 and was being hit with the information that [I] might not be able to conceive and all these different problems and challenges could arise,” she says. “And so that’s still with me today; and I think it’s really hard to plan and to even think about having a baby with so much uncertainty, compounded by COVID-19. It was really difficult to imagine moving forward.” While Bernardo says part of her does wish she’d just gone ahead and had a small civil ceremony—and then planed a big party with her extended family after COVID—so that they could move forward with her pregnancy journey, another part of her is nervous about starting to try to conceive before the big wedding in case her complications cause her to feel unwell. “If [the pregnancy] journey was not easy, I also want to be happy on my wedding day,” she says. “And I knew how impacted I was from my original diagnosis, [so] if I had to start IVF or if there were complications, I didn’t want to have to have that in the back of my head on my wedding day. I really wanted that to be a happy time in my life.”

And as for what will happen if COVID-19 continues on the same track, postponing the big wedding Bernardo wants even further? “We made the decision we would postpone only once, and that would be it,” she says. “If thing’s don’t look like they’re improving, we’ll just go ahead with the small wedding and call it a day,” she continues. “That decision is very much related to family planning; I’m 31 right now, I turn 32 in July, so I don’t want to keep waiting and delaying my life.”

For others, the impact of the pandemic is indeed speeding things up

Ashlyn and Alison Remillard know the challenges of bringing a young child into the world during the time of COVID. The couple, who work and live in Atlanta, Georgia have an almost one-year-old son, Nash, who was born in November 2019. “We were actually just coming out of maternity leave when the pandemic hit,” Ashlyn says. Back to work in their respective fields  for only two weeks, the couple, who recently celebrated their second wedding anniversary, were using a nanny as they waited to get a spot in an extremely competitive daycare. When everything shut down, the couple were left without any childcare. “We were raising a four-month-old while working two full-time jobs and lots of video conferences and just [were] sort of two ships passing in the night,” Alison says. The lack of help took a toll on them.  “My family is based in San Diego and they haven’t been able to even see Nash since December [2019],” Alison says, pointing to how the community aspect of parenting is completely gone during the pandemic. “That’s a really hard part about parenting during the time of COVID when you’re trying to be as safe as possible for yourself and  your little ones, it makes it really hard to have that community as the parents.”

Still, taking all these challenges into account, the Remillards have actually *accelerated* their decision to have a second child. As a same-sex couple in their mid and late thirties who have chosen to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) (Alison carried Nash via IUI and the plan is for Ashlyn to carry their second, using the same sperm donor, via IVF), the pair knew that age was always going to be a factor to consider when trying to conceive, and it’s the reason why they decided 39-year-old Alison, as the eldest of the couple, would carry their first child, Nash. It’s also why they they then decided that 34-year-old Ashlyn would use IVF. “When we were putting our plan together, knowing that Alison was going to go first  based on her age, we wanted to take the IVF approach for my body so that hopefully we would be able to freeze eggs, knowing that age is such a large factor in women’s fertility.”

In February of this year, Ashlyn began her first IVF cycle (the process through which Ashlyn takes injections and doctors would look to retrieve an egg from her body to be fertilized). But the retrieval was cancelled due to COVID. The couple say that when they initially started the process, they felt they were early, with Nash only a few months old. “[But] then just psychologically being told ‘no’ [and] having that cycle cancelled [as well as] the lack of information around fertility that we had, we started to panic a little bit,” Ashlyn says. ”Like look at all this time that we’re wasting, we’re only getting older as this [pandemic] goes on.”

So once services and clinics re-opened over the summer, the Remillards dove right back into the process. “I think ultimately the pandemic allowed us the opportunity to speed up,” Ashlyn says. Specifically, she says, the work-from-home set-up allowed the couple to attend the numerous medical appointments required when going through an IVF cycle. “In a traditional working environment, if you’re going into an office every day, that would make [these appointments] really challenging.”

“So while we were put on hold in the beginning part of the pandemic, we were able to pick back up once things started to open up a little bit more,” Ashlyn says. In June, the couple had their first egg retrieval.

Regardless of whether individuals plan to move forward with growing their families, in much the same way that young people have started factoring issues like climate change into their decision to have children, the pandemic has emphasized one important point: The decision to bring a child into the world—especially the world we’re currently living in, with a burning climate,  rampant racism and medical uncertainty—is complicated. “The decision to have a child and to bring a life into this world is not to be taken lightly whether or not in a pandemic or just in general in 2020, without considering the pandemic,” Dervaitis says. “As life gets more complex, patients are thankfully putting more thought into their childbearing and their reproductive futures. The pandemic adds yet one more thing to consider in the very complex decision making process and the tremendous responsibility of bringing that child into the world.”

The post So, Is a Pandemic Baby Boom Actually Coming? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Despite incredible advancements in survival rates, according to the Canadian Cancer Council, breast cancer is still the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death among Canadian women. The most recent statistics indicate that 1 in 8 Canadian women are expected to develop breast cancer at some point in their life.

Every year fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands release dedicated collections and products for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with a percentage of proceeds being donated to cancer research and prevention. Below, discover the pieces you can shop this year to help make a difference.

Rethink Breast Cancer

Rethink Breast Cancer, a Canadian breast cancer awareness organization aimed at young women, has tapped more than 20 local and international brands to create pieces for its annual breast cancer awareness collection. Smythe, Deux Lions, BIKO, Ellie Mae, Unika and Gee Beauty are just some of the brands who have partnered with the organization to create limited-edition capsule collections, proceeds from which will be donated to Rethink Breast Cancer’s initiatives. Products include rose gold jewellery pieces, clothing, candles, swimwear, face masks, skincare and more so there’s something for everyone (and everyone you know!).

Discover the collections here.

Peloton

Fitness brand Peloton is supporting Breast Cancer Awareness Month with the release of its Stronger capsule collection, in collaboration with Beyond Yoga, Lululemon and Oliver Thomas. The collection is comprised of eight pieces for men and women, and includes a matching sports bra and leggings set, a loungewear set, a T-shirt, tank, exercise shorts and a tote. The brand will donate 20 per cent of the proceeds (up to $25,000) from the collection – which is available to purchase in Canada – to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF). Myra Biblowit, the president and CEO of BCRF said in a release, “Thanks to research, we know that exercise and a healthy lifestyle play a critical role in mitigating breast cancer risk. That’s why our partnership with Peloton is especially meaningful – improving women’s health is our shared mission.”

Shop the collection here.

David Yurman

1/3

Cable Pink Rubber Bracelet

($25, David Yurman)

Buy Now

2/3

Renaissance Bracelet in Pink Aluminum

($375, David Yurman)

Buy Now

3/3

Cable Classic Candle with Rose Scent in Pink Glass

($95, David Yurman)

Buy Now

2020 marks the 12th year that fine jewellery brand David Yurman has teamed up with the BCRF to help raise funds for the organization. This year, the brand is releasing the Renaissance Cable Bracelet in aluminum and pink acrylic, and a Cable Classic Rose Candle. 20 per cent of the purchase price from these items will be donated to the BCRF. Not in the market for a fine jewellery piece but still want to contribute? The brand has also launched a pink rubber Cable Bracelet to be sold for just $25 and 100 per cent of the net profits from the sale of this piece will be donated to the BCRF.

Shop the collection here.

Estée Lauder Companies

Beauty giant Estée Lauder is going all in on breast cancer awareness this month, with 20 of its brands creating limited edition products or pledging donations in support of the cause. Limited edition products include a hand cream from Aveda, a hair primer from Bumble & bumble, a specially-packaged serum from Darphin, Estée Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex which comes with a bracelet, a sheet mask from GlamGlow, moisturizer from Origins and a fragrance from Jo Malone. Jo Malone also joins Becca, LAB Series, Smashbox and Tom Ford Beauty in making generous donations directly to the BCRF.

Each & Every

Natural beauty brand Each & Every is donating 100 per cent of the proceeds from sales of its Rose & Vanilla Natural Deodorant (up to $5,000) to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. The deodorant is made using natural ingredients, and 100 per cent natural essential oils – plus, every ingredient is hand-selected based on its Environmental Working Group safety rating.

Get yours here.

Jimmy Choo

In support of the BCRF, Jimmy Choo is donating 20 per cent from the sales of a selection of shoes and handbags this month (up to $100,000). The edit is made up of nine items, including heels (like the Seha 100 style pictured above), sneakers and various bag styles.

Shop the collection here.

Cashmere Collection

This month Cashmere Collection is encouraging people to vote for their favourite gown from its annual Cashmere Collection fashion show to help support the Canadian Cancer Society. 15 Canadian designers have created gowns for the event under the theme ‘Masquerade Ball’ – and for every vote, Cashmere will donate $1 to the Breast Cancer case at the Canadian Cancer Society. Furthermore, for the month of October, Cashmere will also donate $0.25 from the sale of every specially-marked package.

Watch the show live on October 6 at 6pm here and be sure to cast your vote once the show is done.

Fruits & Passion

We all know how important a good hand cream is in our lives following our increased handwashing and use of hand sanitizer as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic – and now is the perfect time to add a new one to your line-up. This month, all net proceeds from the in-store sale of every Pink Apple Hand Cream from Fruits & Passion will be donated to breast cancer programs across Canada.

Click here to find your nearest store.

Zenchies

Canadian eco-friendly hair accessory brand Zenchies – which is also now offering face masks – is donating 10 per cent of all net proceeds this month to CancerCare Manitoba Foundation. With the holidays right around the corner, there’s no better opportunity to stock up on chic scrunchies and stylish masks for your family and friends (and yourself!).

Start shopping here.

The post All of the Products You Can Buy Now to Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Trigger Warning: This story contains mentions of trichotillomania and hair-pulling. 

I was in the 9th grade when Jessica,* a close relative of mine, told me she had broken up with her razor and taken to tweezing her underarm hair instead. “It hurts a little at first, but it actually feels so good,” she explained, adding that pulling out the hairs provided her with a sense of satisfaction. I recoiled in horror upon hearing this, knowing just how painful plucking could be. Who in their right mind finds PLEASURE in pulling out their own hair? I thought to myself. That is, until I tried it that same year. I started with a pair of tweezers on my eyebrows, then my underarms, and eventually a spot on the crown of my head where pulling with my fingers got the job done. The next thing I knew, I was pulling out hair when I was stressed, tired and sometimes when I was just plain bored on the couch watching Lizzie McGuire reruns, deriving great pleasure from almost each strand plucked. (IMO, hairs that are wiry and coarse tend to yield a greater sense of satisfaction, and are way more fun to examine, than those that are pin straight.) 

Sometimes I’d mess around with my hair for what felt like five minutes, only to realize a whole half hour had gone by. And while it always felt great in the moment, meticulously searching for the perfect strand to pull, there was one thing Jessica never warned me about: The intense feelings of shame and guilt I’d experience after each binge. 

What exactly is hair pulling? 

Hair pulling, formally known as trichotillomania or “trich” for short, is a body-focused repetitive behaviour (BFRB). ”We think of trich as an OCD-related disorder,” says Dr. Joanne Leung-Yee, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook’s Frederick W. Thompson Anxiety Disorders Centre in Toronto, who cites skin picking and cheek chewing as other common BFRBs. Nail biting, something I also habitually do, is also considered a BFRB, although it doesn’t carry the same stigma as trich.

People with trich feel the irrepressible urge to pull out their hair for non-cosmetic reasons, finding the feeling soothing. Common areas to pull from include the scalp, eyebrows and eyelashes for women, and scalp and beard for men. “Sometimes this compulsion comes with other behaviours,” Leung-Yee says, like rubbing the plucked hair over the lips, examining the hair root and bulb, and chewing on or eating the hair.

It often gets to the point where those who suffer from trich feel embarrassed and distressed by the fact that they are unable to stop. If you’re reading this and thinking, Why don’t you just stop?!—it’s not that simple. “For those who don’t have a BFRB, [think of it] as an itchy mosquito bite that’s 100 times more intense,” Leung-Yee says. “You can stop it in the moment if someone tells you not to itch it, but that itch and bite will still be there; that urge will still be there.”

How common are BFRBs like hair pulling? 

According to Leung-Yee, BFRBs affect up to 5% of the world’s population, while only 1 to 2% have OCD (which is noteworthy, given the fact that OCD is a lot more normalized than BFRBs). BFRBs like trichotillomania usually start during the teenage years and are believed to be genetic. “If you had a huge family reunion with all of your aunts and uncles, chances are you’d see some of them playing with their hair or biting their nails,” Leung-Yee explains.

Why do people pull out their hair?

So, why do people hair pull? “That’s the million dollar question,” Leung-Yee says. “If we knew why people pull then we could actually target a treatment for it.” Aside from the genetic connection, some experts think BFRBs may be triggered by childhood trauma, although how the trauma connects to the act of pulling is not so clearcut. Ultimately, BFRBs like trich serve as a stimulating or soothing mechanism. “If you’re really bored, you may use a BFRB to give you a sort of stimulation,” Leung-Yee says. “And on the other hand, if you’re overstimulated—if you feel really anxious or angry—you may use a BFRB to make you feel a little more soothed or calm.”

How do people with trich hide it?

People with trich will go to great lengths to hide the habit. I know from experience: I was able to hide my hair pulling from my loved ones up until university, simply by parting my hair differently. Others will don hats, scarves and wigs to avoid detection, and even put off trips to the hair salon for fear of judgement. “There’s a lot of shame and a lack of understanding surrounding trich, and that’s one of the most painful parts,” Leung-Yee says. It’s especially hard for women, she says, as men will usually shave their heads or beards after pulling.

Is COVID-19 affecting trich?

As soon as COVID-19 came around, I put a halt on gnawing at my fingernails, for fear of virus transmission. The downside? My now perfectly manicured fingers have been spending a lot more time in my scalp. 

Likewise, Leung-Yee has noticed the impact of COVID on her patients’ progress. Pulling is a rather private act, so WFH life makes it much easier to go on a spree. Additionally, people tend to hair pull in certain areas of the home, like in front of the TV or in bed. “While you might have been someone who pulled after work or at bedtime, now that you’re home all the time you can go into your bedroom whenever [you want] and pull.”

Then there are the video conference calls. “Often, a trigger can be looking in the mirror and seeing that one off-coloured or kinky hair,” Leung-Yee says. 

Being told to stay home can also justify pulling. “It’s like, ‘Oh I’m not going out anywhere, nobody is gonna see me, so I might as well,’” she says. Overall, COVID-19 has been an unusually stressful situation, so if you’re a stress-puller, and you’ve been binge pulling, you’re not the only one.

Is there a cure for trich? 

Unfortunately, there is no magic pill that can rid you of the urge to pull. A 2009 American study found that the over-the-counter supplement N-acetylcysteine, derived from the amino acid L-cysteine, helped reduce urges in nearly 60% of participants. That said, the study had a small sample size and was conducted over a decade ago and scientific research since has been scant. Leung-Yee has many patients who take the supplement and has noticed about 30% of her patients responding to it, and while that’s something, she stresses that the most effective and trusted way of managing trich is through cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), whether in groups or solo. “It’s a lot of work, and it’s hard, but it’s effective and we see a huge improvement.”

Becoming more aware of the urge to pull can also help manage the disorder. Leung-Yee gets her patients jingly bracelets, which act as an audible reminder to not pull when their hands start wandering. Similar to her method, I have a bracelet with the word “stop” on it to help keep me in check, and I always keep a giant scrunchie on my wrist in case I need to throw my hair up in a top knot to avoid touching it.

Thankfully, the shame, guilt and stigma around trich is slowly lifting

I’ll never forget the embarrassment and shame I felt when my parents found out about my trich. I was in my early 20s when my mom questioned the bald spot on my head. Like most things, no matter how hard you try to hide it, eventually someone will notice. I tried to brush it off as nothing, but was so mortified about being caught that I ended up coming clean right then and there. There wasn’t much information available online at the time; now there are forums, Facebook groups, Reddit threads and even Instagram meme accounts that act as a space for those with trich to openly discuss their problems and progress. 

Leung-Yee says her patients are coming in and seeking help a lot quicker now—most of them are in their early 20s—as opposed to older generations. With the abundance of information online, those closest to you can also easily educate themselves on trich. Leung-Yee runs a group session for family and friends on how they can become more helpful. Nowadays, I’m quicker to talk to my loved ones about my struggle, and it also helps to know that I’m not alone in my journey.  

*Name has been changed

The post I Pull My Hair Out—This Is What It’s Like Having Trichotillomania appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

In recent years, secondhand clothing businesses have been seeing exponential growth. Between the unsustainable and unethical manufacturing processes that go hand-in-hand with fast-fashion, one-and-done outfits have been losing their cool with conscious consumers.

Celebrities with a penchant for vintage have certainly upped the chic factor. Kim Kardashian West regularly wears vintage looks, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have chosen to wear archival gowns to the MET Gala for the past several years, and this year’s Oscars red carpet was awash with repeat dresses and suits.

Before the pandemic hit, the resale market was expected to double, hitting $51 billion by 2024, according to a 2020 trend report from ThredUp and GlobalData. Then COVID-19 capsized the retail industry, including both big-name brands and small consignment stores. Resale businesses were particularly impacted by questions around whether the virus could be transmitted through clothing and, if so, would it be safe to shop previously-owned garments.

As businesses get back to a new semblance of their pre-pandemic operations, here’s what to know about vintage shopping  now and what it might look like in the future.

Is it safe to shop vintage?

How likely is it to contract COVID-19 from an article of clothing? Very low, says Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious disease specialist and chief of staff at Humber River Hospital. “The virus that causes COVID-19 really doesn’t live on fabric surfaces very long,” he says. “You’re looking at a day tops and that’s based on studies where they inoculated surfaces with way more virus than what you would expect from somebody just handling a piece of fabric or coughing on it.” He said the real risk comes from being face-to-face with other shoppers. (WEAR. YOUR. MASK!)

Still, the information about how the virus spreads has been confusing, to say the least, as scientists grappled to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. Many customers still feel tentative.

Nineteen-year-old Sarah Johnson, a student from Ottawa, has been shopping vintage for the past two years. Before COVID-19, she never worried about cleanliness, but didn’t love the smell of the strong cleaning product used on the clothes, so would wash anything she purchased at least once. “Whenever I tried on a lot of clothes I would come home feeling gross and take a shower,” she says. “But I was never worried about getting sick.” Since the pandemic, she’s yet to go back to a thrift store, but has admitted she’s gone to the mall at least a few times. Johnson says she wants to go back to thrifting, but feels unsure. “It wouldn’t be the same as before. I don’t think I’d try on the clothes.”

Alyse Stach, a 29-year-old purchasing specialist from Calgary couldn’t wait to get back to Value Village the minute it opened up again. She isn’t concerned about contracting COVID-19 on clothes and during a recent shopping excursion, tried on clothes overtop of what she was wearing in the aisle of the store. “I’ve been able to slip it on in the aisle and if it wasn’t that much I would just bring it home. If it didn’t work, I’d be like, ‘Whatever, I’ll donate it again,’” she says.

What are the new rules for shopping and selling vintage?

The policies around trying on clothes in-store vary. According to its website, Value Village has decided to close fitting rooms, but has extended the exchange policy to 14 days. Calgary-based consignment retailer The Upside started to offer free returns for online orders when the pandemic started, and does not resell any returned items for 24 hours as a precaution.

Courtney Watkins, owner of the Vancouver luxury fashion reseller Mine & Yours, introduced a handful of new procedures for in-store shopping, including limiting the number of customers in store to six, and once someone has tried a piece of clothing on it’s placed in a separate fitting room, steamed at the end of the day and then put back on the floor.

All of the boutiques also offer sanitization stations and have increased cleaning of high-touch surfaces. Britt Rawlinson, owner of Toronto’s VSP Consignment, turned to a friend in pediatric cardiology who recommended a “really amazing cleaning product” that’s natural and safe, something that checked off two concerns of hers—green and effective.

Due to the current by-laws across the country, all consignment and vintage shops require staff and customers to wear masks while they are in-store. Forgot to bring yours? Don’t worry. At The Upside you can buy a mask made from a designer dust bag (not previously used), with a portion of proceeds going to a women’s charity, or they also provide disposable ones. Mine & Yours also offers pink disposable masks to match their branding.

In between TikTok challenges and Netflix bingeing, the other quarantine activity everyone couldn’t resist was purging their closets. Lauryn Vaughn, founder and CEO of the The Upside, has seen a huge increase in the volume of items coming in for consignment. “You can definitely tell people have been like, ‘This was on my to-do list for a while,’” she says. “There’s been a massive influx of incoming products.” Resellers have had to adjust their intake processes to deal with the sudden influx, and make sure they are able to reduce the number of people at their store at one time. Rawlinson says she used to let customers drop off at any time, but now she asks them to send images for pre-approval, which allows the drop-off to be very quick. Watkins has nixed the walk-ins too and now schedules appointments with sellers. At The Upside, the majority of sellers are outside of Calgary, so they offer a prepaid shipping label, meaning all you have to do is pack your items and drop off at the post office.

Can resale boutiques even survive COVID?

Although most places in Canada are now in Stage 3 of reopening, we are still very much in the middle of a global pandemic. With many companies allowing their workforce to work from home for the foreseeable future or even permanently (à la Shopify and Facebook), indoor gatherings still limited to 50, and the uncertainty back to school brings, it’s not a surprise consumers are changing their habits around refreshing their wardrobes, be it due to lack of occasions to get dressed up, financial concerns or, most likely, both.

For some thrift shoppers, those financial concerns have made them put their wallets away entirely. Robin Sharp, a 35-year-old wedding photographer from Toronto, exclusively shops consignment, after realizing how unsustainable buying new was. In March she stopped shopping for clothes altogether, since weddings weren’t exactly happening and she had no income. Once her favourite secondhand stores finally reopened (and she was working again), she made her way back, but found the experience more challenging since she wasn’t able to try on clothes in store. “I’ve been lucky and everything I’ve bought has fit me nicely,” she says, “but it’s also made me a little more selective because if I’m not sure it will fit, I won’t bring it home.”

For others (lucky enough to be employed and have disposable income right now), with nowhere to escape but online—from Zoom calls to retail therapy—online shopping became a pandemic self-soothing mechanism. What people were interested in buying suddenly went from cocktail dresses to sweats. Rawlinson says she knew the minute the pandemic hit, sweatpants and cozies would fly off the shelves (they did), but what surprised her was what luxury items were still being purchased. “We were also still selling Chanel jackets,” she says. “I think it really was a form of retail therapy, like ‘It’s a great deal, I deserve it and it will look great on a Zoom call.’”

For Vaughn, her business took a big hit in March, but to her surprise the numbers began to increase the following months. “We’re continuing to outpace our last year’s numbers and even our projection after that,” she says. COVID-19 has forced a lot of people to reassess their values and priorities, including their consumer habits and how they directly impact the environment. Not only is secondhand shopping more sustainable, but it’s so much more economical than buying fresh off the rack. Case in point: This Smythe blazer is $398 here vs. a new one, which will set you back $795.

Watkins saw her business shift to online, which had its own benefits including making up for lost foot traffic. “March and April were definitely our most hit months [in store],” she says. “Our in-store traffic is still down by 50%, but our online traffic increased by about the same.”

It’s impossible to predict how long the pandemic will be around and what consumers will be craving when life goes back to so-called normal. But there’s good reason to believe that the economy post-pandemic will continue to fuel the popularity of the circular fashion industry. With everyone having Marie Kondo’d their closets, do they really want to fill them back up with more items they’ll eventually toss? Sharp says she purged her closet at the start of the pandemic: “I find it’s helped me figure out what I truly need and wear.”

The post Vintage Shopping Is Forever Changed—But Will It Survive? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

It was a warm fall evening as Molly flitted about, turning off the lights in the sleek downtown Toronto showroom. Cheryl, our mutual friend, and I were in the back, setting up my camera and lights while Molly’s dog, a miniature pinscher named Sir Oxford, perched shakily on a stylish sofa. When Molly was done, she sat down in a chair and took off her white T-shirt and her bra, and I snapped the first picture. She straightened her shoulders, her long, dark hair hanging in the back like a sheeny curtain. Her large green eyes stared into the camera somewhat defiantly and, not smiling, she turned her profile.

Her skin was perfect, dusted with freckles. Her breasts were perfect, too. She looked beautiful, and I told her so. Otherwise, it was almost ceremonially quiet, all three of us aware that this was not just a photo shoot, the delicate intimacy of the event due not just to the fact that one of us was topless. Yet, this was exactly about breasts—Molly’s right one, specifically, the one with cancer in it. With the photographs, Molly wanted to memorialize her body before it underwent surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and, unbeknownst to her at the time, a whole lot more.

Two days after the shoot, Molly had two lumps and some lymph nodes removed. Her right breast was drastically altered. She was 31—cancer and hospitalization seemed absurd at our age, but it was now her reality. Molly’s ordeal would overwhelm most people: tissue expanding (radiation damages skin’s elasticity), drains, painful injections (a needle into the nipple), a bad reaction to an anaesthetic (resulting in an emergency surgery), and weekly hospital visits. But being a silver-lining type of a person, Molly joked that at least she’d get a free boob job out of the deal. And she did.

Ten years later, Molly took another picture of her body without the aid of a photographer. It was an Instagram selfie, taken at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. Underneath it, Molly wrote, “It is crazy to think that the real ones tried to kill me, and then the fake ones did too.”

She was four weeks past her explant surgery, and she was only just starting to improve after a three-year-long battle with Breast Implant Illness (BII), a very real condition that is, bewilderingly, still not recognized as a diagnosable medical illness by professionals. Google “BII” and you will find a handful of articles littered with words and phrases such as “anecdotal,” “self-identified,” “some women,” “wide range of symptoms” and “unverifiable.” This is how BII is described, giving the impression that it is not something to be taken seriously, or at least not something deserving of more mainstream exposure.

Unfortunately, even when BII gets attention it’s problematic, according to one source saying, “The recent increase in patients reporting Breast Implant Illness (BII) symptoms appears to be related to social media(…) This is not to say that social media is the cause of Breast Implant Illness (BII); however, it may account for the rapid increases in patient reporting.” Indeed, most of the discussion is confined to social media groups where thousands of women talk about their experiences with breast implants making them sick.

So, what is Breast Implant Illness?

In 2018, there were more than 50,000 women reporting BII symptoms. By 2020, Facebook groups can easily count twice as many. The symptoms mimic those of autoimmune and/or connective tissues disorders such as lupus, which means fatigue, memory loss and joint pain. The most specific connection between implants and illness is that of a form of T-cell lymphoma (cancer of the immune system) called breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL).

The symptoms of BII can appear as early as six months but then there are reports of women who haven’t had any issues for years only to suddenly develop a plethora of symptoms. These irregularities only add to the confusion of how to define and treat this illness. In Molly’s case, for example, a few years passed before she started noticing peculiar symptoms, such as pain in her feet. It was severe enough that she went to foot specialists, started wearing “sensible shoes” and spent a “crazy amount of money” on tests and dubious cures (including ice socks).

“Throughout this, my doctors…I don’t want to say they didn’t care, but that’s how it felt to me. I could just tell something wasn’t right. And then it went into my hands. Or I would wake up, and one of my knees would get locked, and I would literally have to just pull it to bring it up. I couldn’t get out of bed. I had a pair of slippers beside my bed, and I would just have to sort of shimmy my feet if I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.”

Then it was her wrists, her arms, elbows. (She joked to her doctor she had a “vacuum elbow” from vacuuming too much—and she later found out, to her surprise, this was noted in her medical records as if it were an actual condition.) Her skin dulled, and she says even her eyes got smaller. Then there was brain fog: “I remember saying to one of my doctors, ‘I know I was in to see you last week. I honestly, I can’t remember what we talked about.’” That doctor and other doctors remained baffled.

Finally, Molly’s mom suggested BII—she had read about it in an online article. She kept asking Molly what kind of implants she had. Molly never bothered to check; it wasn’t on the list of priorities amidst all the medical chaos. But there was an implant type—Biocell textured breast implants—linked to anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL). On June 1, 2020, Allergan Canada launched a multi-channel campaign to contact patients who may not have been aware of the July 24, 2019 recall of the implant.

Molly didn’t know if she had the textured implant, but she knew that out of 20 of the symptoms common in BII, she had 18. “So I went to my surgeon and told her that I was experiencing all of these. I had major auto-immune issues and major cognitive issues. And when I asked my surgeon, ‘If I was your sister, would you tell me to remove my implants?’ she said, ‘don’t jump into any conclusions.’” The doctor told Molly to wait. Then Molly went for her annual MRI check-up. Shortly after, while on vacation in Portugal with her fiancée, she got a call from the hospital, saying one of her implants had ruptured, the toxic silicone leaking into her lymph nodes.

Will the medical community ever recognize BII as legitimate?

Dr. Tim Sayed, a San Diego-based plastic surgeon recommended by one of those Facebook groups, says “to date, we haven’t determined or found a replicable pathway that you could analyze in the laboratory environment to explain the presence of the symptoms.” Having said that, Dr. Sayed recognizes BII as a genuine condition and, for the past 10 years, has been specializing in explant surgery. He says he hates that some of his colleagues believe BII is a psychosomatic problem. “Is it possible that at some critical mass in a susceptible patient implant induces an inflammatory reaction? Is it possible that in some people, implants trigger some other systemic symptoms? My observation is that it is, although that’s not the official position of the plastic surgery community.”

It’s clear to him, he says, from his own experience treating women that those who had BII and a variety of symptoms showed significant improvement after having their implants removed. He says how in only six weeks, a woman who’d arrive in his office scared, sick and depressed, could make a 180 after explant surgery, and show up at the follow-up looking bright, and full of energy and smiles. “I can’t objectively put the finger on exactly what it was biologically that is making her feel better. I just know that she had an explant that I did, and this is a new person, and that’s my bias, in terms of the quality of life improvements.”

Today, 80% of procedures performed at Dr. Sayed’s practice are explant surgeries. He acknowledges that there isn’t enough information out there, and women often visit multiple doctors before showing up at his office to ask him to intervene. The biggest difficulty with BII, according to Dr. Sayad and other medical professionals, is that the symptoms are so wide-ranging and almost impossible to replicate in order to pinpoint the exact cause and course of treatment. However there is hope. A new study released in July, “Understanding Breast Implant Illness, Before and After Explantation” in the Annals of Plastic Surgery, showed significant health improvements—no more aches, memory and hair loss, skin irritation, and so on—30 days (and beyond) after breast implant removal among 752 patients. The hypothesis is that it was the foreign object (the implant) that triggered the symptoms and the silicone that accounted for inflammation. Future investigation is recommended by the study to further explain “possible biologic phenomena to better characterize the pathophysiology and mechanism of BII.”

Here in Canada, after getting a petition from women concerned with their implants, Health Canada has formed the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) on Women’s Health designed to address, among other items, issues related to breast implants. They have also “initiated another safety review focusing on systemic symptoms such as rheumatic and autoimmune disorders” and have acknowledged the significant risk of macro-textured implants. The official response to the petition is, “Health Canada will take prompt action and will inform healthcare professionals and the public if there are changes to the safety of breast implants.”

Molly had her implants removed in December 2019, followed by weeks of drains, tubes and bandages. She decided not to get the supposedly safer saline implants after researching more about BII—it seemed no implant was safe, women with implants different from hers were still experiencing BII. Understandably, Molly had had enough of risks and dubious surprises: She had seen her doctor only six months prior, when the Allergen recall was already underway. She says, “There’s no way [my doctor] didn’t know that this was in the works.” She says she feels conflicted about being angry with her medical team as they were instrumental in her recovery from cancer but, “at the same time, I feel like I was hugely let down because they didn’t take [my BII symptoms] seriously. The years building up to this where I kept saying something’s wrong. There’s something wrong.”

Today, Molly’s recovery is remarkable. She exercises again, her skin is bright, her feet and elbows no longer hurt, her period is back. She says her memory feels clear, there’s no more brain fog. One thing is still missing, however: “Throughout all of this, I didn’t have one doctor in my personal network who has said, ‘yes, what you were experiencing is, in fact, Breast Implant Illness. Like, they’re still in denial.”

The post “It Took Three Years For Doctors to Recognize My Breast Implant Illness” appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

After months of Instagram scrolling, Netflix-watching and recipe experimentation of quarantine, we are all itching to get away now that the weather is warmer and businesses are reopening. To help you navigate the complicated flight and travel restrictions across Canada, and internationally, we’ve rounded up everything that you may need to know before you book your next adventure.

Is it safe to fly within Canada?

If you want to travel this year, your best option will be to explore Canada. However, before you book that flight, be sure to research the current provincial and territorial health restrictions, as all travellers by plane will be subjected to health checks at the airport and those vary by location (more on that in a bit). As of July 28, Canadians can freely travel to Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia freely but depending on where visitors to Yukon, Manitoba and Nova Scotia are travelling from, they may be required to self-isolate upon arrival. But that doesn’t mean that flying within Canada is risk-free: Starting on July 1, Air Canada and WestJet have removed social distancing measures on their aircrafts, which means that middle seats are now available for sale. As of July 14, there were 14 domestic flights (and 33 international flights) in Canada with confirmed cases of COVID-19. All passengers aboard these flights have been requested to self-isolate for 14 days following the flight and monitor for symptoms. 

The in-flight experience has also changed, with your safety in mind. Not only have airlines intensified their cleaning procedures to include stronger disinfectants, fogging sanitization (a process using a hydrogen-peroxide based cleaner that kills up to 99.9% of bacteria to thoroughly clean the interior cabin of the aircraft) and the use of hospital-quality HEPA filters to introduce fresh air every two to three minutes, all travellers are required to wear masks both in the airport and for the duration of your flight. Travel expert Waheeda Harris recommends booking your flight directly through the airline instead of a third-party website as they will be able to provide travellers “specific information regarding booking your ticket, their refund policy and what the process will be like at the airport.”

What should I pack because of COVID-19? 

Despite being someone who regularly travels with only carry-on luggage, when Harris went to B.C. last month to visit family, she checked a bag to limit the number of personal items she had with her in-flight to only the essentials (like your phone, headphones, wallet and medications). Travel expert Heather Greenwood Davis suggests packing a thermometer and a few items (such as your own pillowcase and towel to use at your accommodations) that will help to reduce your worries while on the road. Additionally, Air Canada and Air Transat currently provide Customer Care Kits to all travellers that include a complimentary mask (to be worn for the duration of the flight), gloves, bottled water, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, headset and snack, but you’ll want to pack at least your own mask and sanitizer just in case. Harris also recommends packing sealed snack foods for your travels as only select vendors at the airport are open and may be serving a limited menu. 

What are the travel restrictions in Canada because of COVID-19? 

The travel restrictions in Canada because of COVID-19 currently vary by province and territory. For example, any inter-provincial or territorial travel to British Columbia is allowed as long as you “follow the same travel guidelines as everyone else in B.C. and travel safely and respectfully.” Conversely, Prince Edward Island is welcoming travellers from elsewhere in Atlantic Canada after completion of a self-declaration travel form but requiring Canadian travellers from all other regions to self-isolate for a period of 14 days and to submit a self-isolation plan. Residents in the Atlantic Canada travel bubble will need to present personal identification and provide a printed and completed self-declaration form. Seasonal residents must apply for pre-travel approval and self-isolate for 14 days upon entry. To help you navigate through these complex restrictions, Destination Canada has created a user-friendly Interactive Map on CanadaNice.ca that shows current travel restrictions and safe travel requirements by province and territory. 

Similar to what you are noticing at home, hotels, tour operators, local attractions and other tourism businesses all across Canada have added safety measures to your guest experience to keep the staff and visitors safe. As a courtesy to the locals, Greenwood Davis recommends finding a way to limit your interactions with locals and suggests planning a trip to a destination with plenty of outdoor space, or finding accommodations with a kitchen to allow for the preparation of light meals so as to avoid over-frequenting local restaurants. Thankfully, this is pretty doable: Nearly 80% of Canadians live within a 30-minute drive from The Great Trail, over 24,000 kilometres of hiking and cycling paths weaving its way across every province and territory in Canada.

Can you fly internationally right now?

While a growing number of countries in Europe and the Caribbean are opening their borders, the Government of Canada continues to advise Canadians to “avoid non-essential travel outside of Canada and to avoid cruise ship travel entirely until further notice.” Greenwood Davis recommends looking into the terms, conditions, limitations, exclusions and requirements of both your travel and medical insurance policies as there may be exclusions to your travel medical claims with international travel being deemed higher risk by Global Affairs Canada. The Government of Canada has also stated that they will not plan further flights to repatriate Canadians after July and have stated that “any international trips will be the sole responsibility of the individual traveller.” In short, if you choose to travel outside of Canada and get stuck there because of a sudden lockdown, you’re on your own. 

However, should you still wish to travel to the United States and to other destinations internationally, it is crucial to look at the entry and exit requirements of both your destination and the Government of Canada for when you return. Many countries, such as Barbados, require a negative test from a COVID-19 assessment centre (within a specific time period before your flight) and a pre-departure customs form; additional on-site testing may also be required at the airport and when you land. If you have a connecting flight or stopover, it is important to be aware of the government requirements of that destination as well. In some countries, like Bermuda, travellers must complete a pre-depature authorization form and pay a $75 fee for a COVID-19 test upon arrival in addition to providing a negative COVID-19 test prior to departure.

What can Canadians returning to Canada expect in order to re-enter? 

Upon your return to Canada, all travellers who are entering from anywhere outside of the country must self-isolate for the mandatory 14-day period and must provide documentation that they will have a suitable place to quarantine without risking the health and safety of other Canadians. To avoid airport lines, download the ArriveCAN app (available in iOS, Android, or web format) to submit your information easily and securely within 48 hours of your arrival.

The post What Canadians Should Know Before Travelling During COVID-19 appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Chances are that if you’re a person with ovaries, you’ve heard about Polycystic Ovary Syndrome; more commonly known as PCOS. Maybe it was from your BFF, who’d gone for a check up only to find that she had cysts on her ovaries, maybe it was in the news—like when Dutch model Romee Strijd shared in a May 28 Instagram post that she’s expecting a baby, two years after she was first diagnosed with PCOS. Or maybe it’s a condition that you personally have been diagnosed with. Regardless, there are likely very few degrees of separation between yourself and PCOS—because it’s a pretty common disorder.

“[PCOS] affects one in 10 reproductive-age girls, women or people with ovaries, and it’s across all ethnicities,” says Dr. Yolanda Kirkham, an OBGYN and adolescent gynaecologist.”So, it’s fairly common.” And, Kirkham says, the numbers are actually rising. (More on that later.) But, as scary as it may sound, PCOS is actually a very treatable disorder. So, before you head down that Web MD rabbit hole, read up on what the experts we spoke to have to say about your reproductive and ovarian health.

OK, so what *exactly* is PCOS and what causes it?

First of all, although “polycystic ovary syndrome” sounds daunting, Kirkham stresses that people with ovaries shouldn’t be too stressed about the name itself, especially that PCOS is classified as a “syndrome.”  ”The syndrome just means certain things or certain symptoms that we see together as a group,” Kirkham explains. “So women shouldn’t feel they have a ‘disease,’ it’s just that they have this grouping that’s associated with certain factors.”

While doctors don’t know *exactly* what causes PCOS (it’s a multifactoral condition, meaning there are many symptoms that can contribute to someone’s diagnosis with PCOS), according to Women’s Health most experts think several contributors—including genetics—play a role. Some of  these factors include an imbalance in the reproductive and metabolic hormones. Per Women’s Health, individuals with PCOS may have higher than normal levels of androgens (AKA “male hormones”). While all women have levels of androgens, people with higher levels can face complications. For example, these imbalances can create problems in the ovaries; and with PCOS a person’s eggs may not develop as they should or may not be released during ovulation. “We have thousands of hormones in our body, but it’s in particular the ones that can affect how often we get our periods—as periods are also based on the fluctuations of our hormones—that can cause issues,” Kirkham says. As higher than normal androgen levels can cause missed periods, this can lead to subfertility or the abnormal development of cysts (small, fluid-filled sacs) on the ovaries.

In addition to high androgen levels, people with PCOS may have insulin resistance—meaning that their bodies are unable to break down sugar effectively. This can also lead to downstream consequences for people with PCOS, like diabetes, high cholesterol and uterine cancer. And, it seems to be increasing as instances of obesity increase, Kirkham says.

Is PCOS the same as endometriosis?

While PCOS and endometriosis are often conflated and mistaken for one another, they are *not* the same thing. Per a a report by John Hopkins Medicine, endometriosis refers to a medical condition in which people have irregular development of the tissue that typically lines their uterus (called endometrium). During an individual’s regular menstrual cycle, endometrium tissue builds up inside the uterus and is then shed if the person does not get pregnant. But per the report by John Hopkins, women with endometriosis develop this outside of the uterus, on other reproductive organs inside the person’s pelvis or abdominal cavity. Because the tissue follows the same menstrual cycle of building up and breaking down, but in a misplaced area, this results in “small bleeding inside of the pelvis.” This bleeding then leads to inflammation, swelling and scarring of the regular tissue in the abdominal cavity. Endometriosis can be incredibly painful and is considered one of the three major influences of female infertility, with symptoms running the gamut from pain during sex to excessive menstrual flow and extreme menstrual cramps.

According to Bustle, the misdiagnosis of endometriosis as other medical issues (including PCOS) is due in large part to the fact that many of the symptoms of endometriosis are also present in other conditions. And the conflation of the two conditions can even be made by health professionals, which can lead to misdiagnosis when doctors see cysts on a women’s ovary (something all women have…more on this later) and surmise that the pain they’re experiencing must be a byproduct of PCOS. “Women might show up [in the emergency room] because they have extreme pain and they might have endometriosis, but you can’t see that on an ultrasound,” Kirkham says. “But they happen to have an ovarian cyst at that time because they’re about to release an egg, and then they get diagnosed, [with a Dr. saying] ‘Well you have an ovarian cyst, there’s the problem and that’s why you have pain,’ but it isn’t.”

What are the symptoms of PCOS?

When it comes to determining whether or not you have PCOS, Kirkham says doctors  look to the Rotterdam criteria for diagnosis. This criteria mandates two of the three symptoms be present. ”The first one would be infrequent or missing periods,” Kirkham says of one possible PCOS indicator (this means fewer than eight periods in a year). “This is probably what usually would bring a woman or a person with ovaries to a doctor’s office, is that they start skipping their periods or they may be a teenager who is 15 or 16 and has never had a period, or anybody of reproductive age who starts missing three periods in a row.” The second symptom is acne or unwanted hair (otherwise known as hyperandrogenism or high male hormones); meaning that you may have unusual hair on your chin, side of the face, chest, back or stomach. “And the third [symptom],” Kirkham says, “is polycystic-looking ovaries on an ultrasound.”

Does everyone who has cysts on their ovaries have PCOS?

One common misconception associated with PCOS is that *anyone* who has cysts on their ovaries has PCOS. Which isn’t true, because, in fact, everyone has cysts on their ovaries and they aren’t always cause for concern. “This is why I don’t like the terminology of PCOS.” Kirkham says. As she explains it, anyone who has ovaries stores their eggs in cysts (“a little fluid filled ballon”). “So we have cysts every month and then they pop or ovulate and then two weeks later we have a period if we’re not pregnant.” Sometimes, these cysts can rupture—which can be very painful and may take someone to the emergency room, she says—but this popping happens every month and is not indicative of PCOS.

When it comes to PCOS, Kirkham says the main gynaecological basis for the period problems is due to an-ovulation, meaning people stop ovulating and cysts don’t pop. “And so that’s why you end up with a lot of cysts on the ovary,” she says (a.k.a polycystic). As opposed to your typical ovaries, “when they do an ultrasound, it almost looks like a pearl necklace, where all of the little cysts are around the edge of the ovary.”

One thing to be aware of is the fact that a lot of teens can have polycystic-looking ovaries and not suffer from PCOS. “They’re very hormonally active at that time,” Kirkham says, “so their ovaries are really ramped up and there’s a lot of eggs there.” Which is why it’s important to refer to the Rotterdam criteria, and not base assumptions or diagnoses of PCOS off of one symptom alone.

Is PCOS hereditary?

While doctors haven’t identified any specific genes that would indicate PCOS is hereditary (ie: passed along through familial lines), “there are PCOS-specific susceptibility genes that are being investigated,” Kirkham says.

How does PCOS affect reproduction?

If you’ve heard anyone talk about PCOS, chances are you’ve probably heard them talk about infertility. PCOS is often connected to infertility, because people with PCOS may have difficulty releasing eggs (thanks to an excess of androgen hormones). “About 25 to 30% of PCOS patients have fertility issues,” Kirkham says. (In fact, she continues, some places say even up to 80% of individuals with PCOS can struggle with fertility). But, the good news is that—as opposed to other syndromes like untreated endometriosis—the rate for infertility is much lower and can be more easily corrected. Also, we definitely shouldn’t refer to it as “infertility.”

“I wish we would stop using the term infertility because it is usually subfertility,” Kirkham says, “meaning a lot of people with PCOS still get pregnant.” In fact, Kirkham says, the type of subfertility with PCOS is probably the easiest one to treat, because it’s caused by an-ovulation. “So usually all you need is a medication to trigger the release of the egg,” she says. “So people may not need IVF and all of the whole gamut and the expenses of fertility treatment.” In fact, celebs who have PCOS—like model Romee Strijd—have spoken openly about their experiences with subfertility due to the syndrome. In a May 28 Instagram post, Strijd announced that two years after revealing her PCOS diagnosis, she was pregnant after making lifestyle changes. “To the women trying to conceive, believe in yourself and be nice for yourself and your body and don’t let those thoughts get to you too much,” Strijd encouraged her followers in her post. (And FYI, according to Kirkham, 70% of women with endometriosis do get pregnant).

How is PCOS treated?

While treatment for PCOS should be individualized—for example, Kirkham says, “for a teenager or a young person, they may be most affected by self esteem issues that they have with acne or unwanted hair; so in that case, that would be where we want to balance the higher androgens that cause those symptoms. So something as simple as a birth control pill that has female hormones in it will help balance out the antigen side effects”—Kirkham also says that “lifestyle changes; eating well, exercising and weight loss is treatment number-one for PCOS.”  In fact, according to her, 10% weight loss has been shown to lead to spontaneous ovulation, which is why she advises that anyone looking to make lifestyle changes work in conjunction with a nutritionist.

“Nutrition and lifestyle modifications are the primary treatment approaches for [people] with PCOS,” says Trista Chan, a registered dietician and founder of The Good Life Dietician, who works with clients who have PCOS. While Chan says that there’s no ”optimal or gold-standard diet for PCOS treatment,” and treatment varies greatly depending on the individual, she places a strong emphasis on minimally processed, whole foods. “This means whole grains, legumes, nuts, leafy greens, berries and fruit, seeds, fish and chicken,” she says. As people with PCOS typically have  higher insulin and inflammatory markers, Chan advises incorporating more anti-inflammatory foods like fish, legumes, green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds and low-fat dairy, which she says have been shown to reduce inflammation and potentially regulate menstruation. “All of these interventions also usually lead to weight loss and improvement in metabolic and reproductive health,” Chan says. Another important note from Chan? “Exercise!”

It’s important to emphasize that advocating for a healthy lifestyle and exercise doesn’t mean that you need to become thinner or look a certain way. PCOS can affect anyone at any body size. It’s about figuring out what works best and is healthiest for your body.

And while there’s no foolproof way to ensure you won’t be diagnosed with PCOS, “the only thing that you can do to decrease the chance of being diagnosed with it is living a healthy lifestyle,” Kirkham says. “Making sure that you keep your weight stable (with the help and advice of a doctor) and then also knowing your family history, because if it’s in your family and there is some predisposition to it,  you would want to track your periods and make sure they’re happening regularly.”

“It’s not something you can prevent, per se,” Kirkham continues. “You may be predisposed to it just like some people are predisposed to other diseases.”

Does PCOS every fully go away?

While PCOS can never be 100% completely cured, “nutrition and lifestyle modifications can be very effective in balancing hormones and relieving symptoms,” Chan says. And, it’s important to get diagnosed early so that you can increase fertility for those looking to conceive and prevent more long-term effects like diabetes,  high blood pressure, cholesterol problems, sleep apnea, depression and anxiety, and uterine cancer.

And for anyone looking to keep their ovaries healthy and in tip-top shape, whether or not you have PCOS, Chan has some recommendations: “Filling your plate with inflammation-fighting foods is always a good idea,” she advises. “Berries are an antioxidant-rich, low-sugar fruit.” (She recommends eating them three times a week.) In addition, “low-fat yogurt, three to five times a week is also great source of calcium and probiotics to keep a healthy gut; fatty fish—like salmon or mackerel—are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which play large role in reducing inflammation, boosting heart health, and there is increasing research linking it to hormone balance.”

Regardless of which route you take in treating PCOS—or general reproductive health—the most important thing is to consult a doctor and do what’s best for you and your body.

The post Everything You Need to Know About PCOS appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

You may have achieved some personal bests while working out at home during these past few months of lockdown, but now with much of the country in Stage 3 of reopening, and cities including Toronto, Niagara and Windsor expected to join shortly, comes the moment fitness fanatics have been holding their breath for: gyms and studios are reopening. Because let’s be real—non-runners may have dabbled in jogging and Zoom workouts helped fill the void, but for some physical activities, nothing compares to hitting up our favourite fitness facility. From the social aspect of seeing your gym buddies and trainers pushing you to do one more set, to unfettered access to fancy gym equipment (and let’s not forget the delicious juice bar smoothies!), gym workouts are a big part of not only our physical health but our mental well-being, too. 

Michelle Mucilli, for one, can’t wait to get back to her favourite fitness studio as soon as it reopens. When the lockdown came into effect and the two-year client of Body Barre Fitness & Training Studio in Vaughan went from four or five classes a week down to zero workouts, she just didn’t feel right being out of her routine. Although Body Barre started doing virtual classes on Facebook Live, something Mucilli says has been a saviour for her—“I wouldn’t have been able to get through months of quarantine without the virtual classes,” she says—she’s eager to get back to working out there in person.

If you’ve already got your Lycra on and gym bag ready, before you step out to get that endorphin high, here’s what you can expect from your gym workouts in cities moving into Stage 3 of COVID-19 reopening.

There will be fewer people working on their fitness at one time

The social atmosphere of gyms and studios may be a distant memory of the “before times.” With social distancing protocols, the number of people inside a gym or studio will be slashed to 50% of the gym’s capacity. At Toronto’s Sweat & Tonic, classes that once hosted 48 people will be down to 24, for example. Fewer folks in the gym or class may be a bummer for those who thrive on the boost they get from working out as a group to get to that proverbial finish line.

You’ll have to book your workout time

Say goodbye to dropping in for a workout when you’re suddenly feeling inspired to sweat or have been able to carve out time in your day. Having to book your workout allows gyms to manage the flow of clients through the gym and schedule cleaning the premises after each session. Once you’re at the gym, try to be efficient because your workout time will likely have a cutoff; at Goodlife Fitness, Canada’s largest fitness chain, you’ll have 60 minutes to exercise. With these new protocols combined with the limited overall number of guests, expect wait lists for classes and be prepared to sign up early for your gym time.

In addition to hand sanitizer stations and social distancing stickers on the floor, you’ll find plexiglass partitions, shoe disinfectant and more

Upon entering the vestibule at Toronto’s Sweat & Tonic, your temperature will be checked and you’ll be asked to step into some disinfectant. Since there has been some evidence that COVID-19 can be tracked in on people’s shoes, S&T has added this precaution since fewer people change their shoes to workout in the summertime, says Sharon Xie, social media and marketing manager at the boutique gym. Your spin instructor will still be up on the podium, but behind some plexiglass, and plexiglass will divide the rows of cyclists, too. Given this is a less personable experience, says Lucy Ulmer, co-owner of Spin Society in Vancouver, your instructor will be giving more detailed cues so that you can be sure to be able to follow along during the class. This kind of physical distancing is what you’ll experience anywhere you interact with staff at Goodlife Fitness locations, with protective barriers up in spots such reception and consultation areas.

Gyms will be designating more space for each guest working on their fitness and at some gyms, partitions will separate you from the next person working on leg day. At studios like Toronto’s Fit Squad Training, the workout stations have been reconfigured so you have a designated pod to yourself and your trainer. At Sweat & Tonic, you’ll find two treadmills in your workout pod in the HIIT studio, and punching bags moved to your own designated area. Smaller changes you may not notice, though, include ones like at Body Barre Fitness & Training Studio where the fabric handles of the reformer machines have been replaced with synthetic ones that are easier to disinfect. And your newest workout accessory may be disposable gloves; at Sweat & Tonic, although the boxing gloves will be disinfected after each use, you can opt for a pair of disposable gloves to wear inside of them as an extra layer of protection. While fitness facilities will be disinfecting the equipment after each client (including items you borrow or rent such as spin shoes), you will be asked to clean items you’ve used, such as dumbbells and elliptical machines, both before and after your session. 

Your workout will be mostly contact-free

You’ll be able to grab the dumbbells, treadmill, yoga mats and whatever equipment you need for your workout, of course, but be prepared to check in using your smartphone because the iPad you once used to sign in on at some studios, like Fit Squad, has been removed. And there’ll be no more yoga instructor massaging your neck during Savasana, trainer manually correcting your form, or spin instructor won’t be walking by you as you make the tough climb up that hill. When it comes to staying hydrated, Ulmer, who also co-owns Hustle in Vancouver, says they’re encouraging members to bring their own full water bottle (there’s bottled water for purchase as well, and if you must, you can use the frequently sanitized water station to refill your bottle), although you may find your gym has replaced water taps with touch-less water dispensers. Be sure to also bring your own towel since gyms won’t be offering towel service.

There might be a change to the cost of your fitness membership

While many gyms have maintained or raised their prices (which is understandable considering the significant increase in overhead with having to invest in safety measures while running at a reduced capacity), you may find that some fitness facilities have reduced their fees. In light of the limited amenities and fewer services offered (gym showers and saunas remain closed for Stage 3, for example), Sweat & Tonic, for one, has cut their membership fee by about 10%. 

Here’s how to make your gym workout safer: 

With the continuing pandemic and all of these precautions, can you feel confident working out in a gym safely again? Health experts say yes, but to approach your workouts sensibly. “One of the best indicators of risk of transmission of the virus is the overall risk of the community,” says Sumontra Chakrabarti, an infectious disease expert with Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga. So if there’s a higher risk in the community (he used Miami compared to Toronto as an example), don’t engage in higher risk activities. Matthew Oughton, a specialist in infectious diseases at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, adds that there’s no such thing as risk-free, unless you’re staying at home and not interacting at all with the outside world. 

1. Keep up the same COVID-19 safety protocols as you would outside the gym

When going to the gym, both experts recommend keeping up the protocols that have become a part of all of our daily routine now: practice physical distancing of at least two metres, limit what you touch and wash your hands. Although wearing a mask is difficult during a high-intensity workout, Oughton views mask-wearing during your workout as a question of comfort; if you can wear one easily during a lower intensity workout without it causing physical limitations, consider wearing a mask. Otherwise, wear one when you can throughout your gym visit. “There are activities when you can easily wear your mask, like when you’re arriving and departing the gym, or stopping at the juice bar,” he adds.

2. If you can, hit the gym during less busy times

If possible, even though gyms will limit the number of people working out, aim to go during less busy times, suggests Chakrabarti. Consider, too, the type of workout and size of space, says Chakrabarti, when you’re deciding on your exercise class. Doing a high-impact workout in a smaller enclosed space where everyone is breathing heavily? Although he’s a pragmatic guy, he admits that the idea of this currently makes him a bit nervous. 

3. Don’t stress about washing your gym clothes the second you get home

But you don’t have to worry about stripping off your gym clothes and washing them as soon as you get home. “Outside of the hospital setting, the chance of catching COVID off your clothing is essentially zero,” says Chakrabarti. Bottom line? Don’t share your sweaty gym clothes and towels (which you normally wouldn’t anyhow, right?) and just wash them as you normally would, he says.

With Body Barre expected to reopen shortly, Mucilli plans on easing back slowly with two classes a week while maintaining her regimen at home through their virtual classes. “I’ll get back in gradually; no one really knows how this is going to work but with smaller classes of four to six people, this is comfortable to me right now.”

The post Here’s What to Expect When Your Gym Reopens appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

With provinces gradually rolling out their plans for reopening, many people across Canada are excited to start going out to enjoy patio drinks, Sunday brunch and all the other things we haven’t been able to do since quarantine started. However, it’s important to remember that, while things are improving and the number of new cases is gradually going down, the pandemic is still here—and reopening doesn’t mean that things are back to “normal.”

“Since provinces/territories are responsible for coordinating their own reopening plans, the stages are very regionally specific,” says Brittany Andrew-Amofah, senior policy and research analyst at Broadbent (and the host of FLARE’s weekly IGTV series Brittany Breaks It Down). “For most provinces/territories, Stage 2 involves reopening businesses primarily focusing on the use of outdoor space with new social distancing and safety protocols.”

These protocols fall on the responsibility of both restaurant owners and staff, as well as patrons who wish to visit. And while it’s understandable that people want to go out—we’ve been sheltering in place for three long months, and the weather is finally gorgeous!—it’s important to assess the risks to both yourself and others before you decide to hit that patio. (And, keep in mind that ordering takeout and eating your food in the park is another safe option that’s just as lovely!)

Here, everything you need to know about health and safety regulations for restaurants and food services, things you should consider before deciding to dine out, plus how you can make sure you stay safe and act respectful of restaurant staff.

Maintaining physical distance

Physical distancing is still required, which means restaurant staff must minimize contact with customers, and customers must be adequately spaced from other parties. Before ordering, keep in mind that you need to limit unnecessary interaction with staff, so try your best to order drinks, appetizers, mains, etc, all at once.

Most places will have markings on the floor to help maintain that minimum of two metres of distance between groups, as well as physical barriers between tables.

Sorcha King, a server in downtown Toronto, says that customers need to remember that their use of the space is now limited: “One of the new house rules is to avoid unnecessary movement in the restaurant. We’ve had a couple of people wander around whilst taking phone calls, so we’ve had to remind them that they must remain seated unless using the washroom.”

Many establishments will also have designated paths to the restrooms and ask that only one person at a time enter to use them. Keep in mind that staff are required to frequently clean every touchable surface in the washroom, so you’re not expected to put on a mask when you need to go, but it is still good practice to do so.

Respecting restaurant staff

With new health and safety procedures around food preparation in place, expect to wait longer to be seated and/or for your food to be served.

Since restaurants started to reopen, there have been tweets of people complaining about “crappy service.”

Before you think about making a complaint about your food taking too long (or that you can’t get your shredded cheese), be mindful of what the staff has to do. While some of us continue to work from home and have the option to only leave the house when we feel like it, restaurant workers have to risk their health in order to serve people dining out.

The COVID-19 cases in Canada may be much lower than in the US, but there’s still a power imbalance of uninsured restaurant workers having to go back to work during a global pandemic without a vaccine, and people who want to go out and drink their artisanal cocktails without taking precautions.

“I was very apprehensive about returning to work,” says King. “It was a real scramble to get ready for opening since the government gave little notice, so I wasn’t convinced the workplace could be made ‘safe’ in such a short time. Luckily, my manager is very supportive and called me personally to answer all my questions and reassure that my safety was a priority.”

Health checks and sanitization

“We check customers in at the door and take their details for contact tracing purposes,” says King, noting that you may be asked to leave your full name and phone number. Some restaurants are even temperature checking guests with contactless machines and recording their vitals.

In addition to restricting the number of people on site (workers and customers), restaurants are also required to sanitize shared workspaces and equipment, have employees thoroughly wash their hands and encourage customers to do the same—you may notice increased signage to this effect.

Most places will have hand sanitizer accessible—and many are requesting that customers apply some at check-in—but do bring some with you, just in case.

Payment and tipping

Leave the cash at home and bring your debit/credit card instead. While some restaurants have cash points inside, many are requiring patrons to pay at their table with debit or credit cards on wireless machines. If you’re with a group, keep in mind that splitting the bill multiple ways requires extra, unnecessary contact with your server.

Also, don’t forget to tip and, if you can, tip well. A lot of restaurant and food service workers had to take a pay cut due to reduced capacity, on top of having to work in these new conditions.

Consider what you are comfortable with

While guidelines and protocols are in place, every establishment is implementing them in their own way. “I recommend calling a restaurant beforehand and asking them what their protocols are,” says Andrew-Amofah. “I also recommend stopping by beforehand and assessing whether the distancing between tables and restaurant-goers is reasonable. The last thing you want is to be stuck on a packed patio.”

King also says to ask yourself what you are hoping to get out of the experience and have realistic expectations. “Consider what it is that you enjoy about dining out and decide whether it’s worth it for you,” she says. “If you really like to be waited on, and generally appreciate a high level of attentive service, I’m afraid that just isn’t possible right now. I know people are excited to see their friends and eat and drink together, but be self-aware for your own sake and of those around you.”

What it all boils down to: We are living in a *strange* time, so dining out will look and feel a lot different than you remember. If you do choose to go out, be kind to the staff, tip them well and don’t complain about the service being “crappy.” Do take precautions, and comply with the new rules—or just keep cooking at home and ordering take out.

The post Here’s What You Need to Know Before Going to a Patio appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

“How do I get a job?” Six one-syllable words, laden with so much frustration, hope, fear, excitement and potential for existential despair. And that was before 2020 lobbed a grenade into all of our plans. Whether you’re a new grad—or just newly laid off—lining up your next gig is a daunting (and time-consuming) task and, with great respect to our Grade 10 career studies teacher, nobody really prepared us for. (But we do know our Meyers-Briggs type so…)

That’s why we’ve assembled a trio of professional job-getters, armed with tips, tricks—and even a few hacks—to keep you from falling into the Job Board Pit of Despair. Start planning your first day outfits, friends: We’re going to get you a job—even in This Economy!

Do not apply to ALL the jobs

This can be tempting, we get it, especially when auto-fill and one click applications make it so easy. Resist! “This is the last thing you want to do,” cautions Brandesha Sinclair, a career coach at Working Millennial. “It’s just not effective.” For one thing? Many companies use “applicant tracking systems” to scan your resume for relevant information and terms, and, if it doesn’t pick up on them, immediately throws you onto the (virtual) rejection pile. Basically, you’re wasting your time—and being indiscriminate in what you apply for can also expose you to some dodgy stuff. “You can end up applying to questionable jobs that might raise flags if you did your research,” says Sinclair, pointing straight at scammers like “bogus door-to-door commission only” jobs.

Instead, have a “target” job

This doesn’t necessarily have to be your dream job, btw, but it should be something you’ve clearly defined. Otherwise, “it’s like driving your car without a destination in mind,” explains Kamara Toffolo, a resume writer and job search strategist. “It’s aimless, and you’re wasting a lot of gas in the process.” If you have a target job—assistant buyer, software developer, carpenter, whatever—and even a target field—green energy, the arts, financial services—you can begin to tailor your resume, LinkedIn profile and even potential interview answers to landing that. If you have a few different directions you’d like to explore, Sinclair encourages developing a few different resumes, strategically designed to appeal to the various avenues you’re going down.

Ditch the fancy resume template

According to Toffolo, those templates from Canva, Pinterest or Etsy might look cute, but they could be holding you back. “They’re all looks, no substance,” she explains, saying they’re not “optimized” for job searching in a digital age. The text boxes they often use, for example, can’t be read by those applicant tracking systems. Instead, make friends with Mr. Paperclip and draft up your resume in Word, or a similar text application. At the same time, she says, remember that “humans make hiring decisions.” This means designing a resume that is easy to read (no huge blocks of text!), and, most importantly, is relevant to your specific potential employer, and the role you’re applying for. Not sure where to start? Look at the job description and, using your own words, parrot back the attributes or skills they’re looking for that you have.

Do not be part of the 80%

According to Ali Breen, a career coach who works mainly with millennials and Gen Zs, there is a “hidden job market.” Think: The ones that get filled by word-of-mouth, or just posted in a store window, or on the hiring manager’s Twitter. These account for *80%* of the jobs out there. The remaining 20? The ones posted on popular job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor or Workopolis. And yet: “Eighty percent of people are applying for that 20 percent of jobs,” she says, comparing “clicking apply” on those sites to a “dopamine hit” that can fool you into feeling like you’ve done something meaningful. (Getting boatloads of applicants for a role is how those companies make their money. Just sayin’.)

That’s not to say you shouldn’t apply for roles you see on those sites, she says, but that shouldn’t be the extent of your job search. And at the very least, see if you know someone who knows someone at the company you’ve just applied for, and ask them to make a connection for you. Pro tip: LinkedIn has a feature that can show if you have any shared connections with someone.

Hunt for the hidden jobs

So what can you be doing that’s actually constructive? You can start by “reverse engineering,” as Ali Breen calls it. “There’s lots of stuff out there about how employers can attract the best talent,” she explains. “Find out what they’re doing to attract you, and go to those places.” For instance, many companies create “recruitment videos” that they post on social media. If a company you’re into has one, make an HR person’s day and comment on it. “Ask a question,” suggest Breen, “or say, ‘This part of the video gave me chills. I’d love to talk to someone more about that part.’” And while you’re at it, make sure you “show up virtually,” adds Breen. This can mean commenting on their every post, or be as simple as making sure all of your social bios say “I am passionate/curious about…” and then list three things that align with your dream employer’s values or clientele.

And yes, you should be networking

Because “networking” has become a gross word, reframe it as “building connections,” which feels so much less transactional, and so much more like something a real human might do. For Sinclair, this can be as simple as reaching out to people you’re already connected with, and checking in on them. (Another network you may not have considered? Your retail or service job that you might be overlooking. “See if there are any internal opportunities for growth,” says Sinclair. “Take on a supervisor or a trainer role.”)

Don’t know anyone in your target field? Considering joining a relevant professional association, suggests Breen, and just cold-emailing them to say “I’m looking to make a connection with someone in your association because I’m a new grad.” And once you’ve managed to make a connection, always ask them to connect you with three more relevant people. “You’re saving yourself time and energy,” she says. “If you find someone who’s epic, they’re probably going to know epic people too.” Other places to look for potential connections? Alumni associations, local chambers of commerce, community groups. And don’t just limit yourself to people local to you! With the rise of remote work, anything is possible, and a global perspective will never be a bad thing.

The post How to Actually Apply for a Job Right Now appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Let’s be honest: Talking about sexually transmitted infections isn’t super fun. Even less of a hoot? The thought of going for STI tests, like a Pap smear—especially when it’s your first time. From that scary-looking contraption to myths around pain, it can be pretty frightening. But regular STI testing, including a Pap test, is also essential to your health.

Speaking with doctors for this story, I was shocked when I discovered that most Canadians under the age of 30 will contract a strain of the HPV virus that can cause cervical cancer, often without knowledge. HPV, or the human papillomavirus, is the most commonly transmitted STI (and is common in both men and women). It was even more surprising to learn, thanks to a 2017 report from the Government of Canada, that some sexually transmitted infections, including chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis, have been on the rise for over a decade. The good news is that most STIs are extremely treatable and most cases of HPV resolve without complication—but the key is knowing you have them in the first place. This is where regular STI testing comes in.

Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to your sexual and reproductive health. Here’s everything you need to know about Pap smears and STI tests, and why you should make them a regular part of your health agenda. (Seriously, you’ll thank us later).

So, what is an STI test?

STI tests are either (and often a combination of) a blood test, a urine test or a swab during a pelvic exam (a pelvic exam is an umbrella term—typically during a pelvic exam your vulva, vagina, cervix, ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus are checked) . “The only blood tests you do are for HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B, everything else is generally done with swabs,” says Dr. Amanda Selk, lead gynecologist at the Gynecology Colposcopy Clinic at Women’s College Hospital. “Gonorrhoea and chlamydia can be detected with a urine test if you have no symptoms, but if you have symptoms, we typically do swabs.” 

How do you get STIs?

Like the name suggests, sexually transmitted infections, including HPV, are passed through sexual activity. “Any sexual contact—penile-vaginal intercourse, penile-anal intercourse, genital-to-hand touching, oral intercourse—can all spread infection,” Selk says. Barrier contraception like condoms can help decrease the risk, but nothing is 100% effective. And since many of us think of condoms mainly as a birth-control option, and therefore use them only with penetrative sex, there are still plenty of other sexual experiences that can and do spread STIs. “Condoms are the best you can do without not having sex ever,” Selk says. As in, abstinence is the best way to not spread STIs, but condoms are the next best things. And in case you’re wondering…

Can I pass along an STI if I don’t have symptoms?

The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, that’s how most STIs do get transmitted. “The vast majority of things are passed on through asymptomatic people,” Selk says. This is the main reason why getting tested regularly is important so that asymptomatic people can be treated and prevent the spread of infection. “Because all STIs can present with no symptoms, more often people don’t know they’ve contracted one,” Dr. Reyhaneh Ghadaki says .

How can I get tested for STIs in Canada?

This depends on where you are, but access to STI testing is certainly easier in cities that have more facilities. But if you have access to a walk-in clinic, you should have access to STI testing, which is free across Canada. It’s important to ask for STI testing whether you opt to visit an anonymous sexual health clinic or your own doctor, and to ask which specific tests are being done. Since some infections are tested through urine, others through blood and even more through a pelvic exam, you likely won’t be tested for everything unless you ask. This goes for regular check-ups, too—don’t assume your doctor is checking for relevant STIs just because you had bloodwork done. You often need to request them, especially if you’re asymptomatic.

How often should you be tested for STIs?

“I recommend that my patients get tested if they have any symptoms, when they have a new partner or if they are concerned and have had unprotected intercourse,” says Dr. Ghadaki, medical director of the WellOne Medical Centre. But if you’re not showing symptoms or don’t have a new sexual partner? “A sexually active person should be tested yearly, at minimum, for STIs,” Selk says. This includes people in long-term or monogamous relationships, as it isn’t always clear when or how people may get an infection and of course, not everyone shows symptoms. If you are showing symptoms, you should absolutely get checked, even if this is more frequent than the one-year guideline. “When you test, you do find that people have STIs they don’t know about,” she says. “There’s no reason not to check.”

Got it. So, what is a Pap test?

It’s best to know what *exactly* you’re getting yourself into once you walk into your doctor’s office for a Pap test. For the uninitiated, you’ll start by putting your feet in stirrups followed by your doctor placing the speculum (a plastic device that looks like a duck’s beak) into your vagina so that they can clearly see your vagina and cervix. From there, the doctor will use a brush to collect cells from the cervix. It’s normal to have some light bleeding or spotting afterwards. A Pap may be done as part of a more thorough pelvic exam, which can often include your doctor inserting two fingers and palpating your abdomen to check your uterus and ovaries which can help indicate whether there are signs of ovarian cysts or uterine fibroids as well as STIs. Your doctor should be updating you on what they’re doing at every step so you know what’s going to happen next. And, it is fully within your right as a patient to have someone else—like a female nurse—in the room for support, safety and comfort, *especially* if your doctor is male. 

What’s the difference between a Pap test and a vaginal exam? 

According to Selk, because both Pap tests and STI tests use a speculum, people can often conflate the two, and think they’re getting a Pap test when they’re actually being tested for STIs. But there’s a big difference between the two tests—despite the use of similar instruments. “Paps are a specific test where you take cervical cells to test for pre-cancer changes related to HPV.” (Meaning, that Paps *only* test for abnormal cells on the cervix related to HPV whereas STI testing, if done via a pelvic exam, relies on swabs taken from the cervix or inside the vagina).

STI testing can be done in an emergency room (if you’re there for pain or discharge, there’s a chance you’ll get one), but it’s important to emphasize that these are different tests than Pap tests. The two tests aren’t always done together and are testing for different things, despite both using the speculum. “Not all vaginal exams are Paps. Most of the time, it’s just a routine physical exam or [you’re] being tested for STIs, but that communication doesn’t always come across between practitioners and patients,” Selk says. The miscommunication comes when you get STI testing and think it’s a Pap because of the instrument (speculum) and the experience (having your vagina/cervix looked at). But just because you’re getting STI testing done, doesn’t mean you’re also getting a Pap.

As a Pap test only tests for HPV and cancer screening, it often won’t be done in an emergency room and, unless otherwise directed, should be done every three years during a physical exam at your doctor’s office. 

It’s important to know what tests are being done, both so you know when to schedule your next exam or test, but also so you know what feedback, if any, to expect. 

On a scale of one to 10, how much does a Pap test hurt?

Probably one of the biggest questions anyone with a vagina has when it comes to Pap smears is: Will it hurt? While the answer to this question depends on the individual experience (as well as one’s tolerance for discomfort), in my personal experience, the anticipation has been worse than the actual procedure. (FWIW, my doctor once took my blood pressure before a Pap and it was abnormally high. She did the Pap test, and then decided to re-take my blood pressure and it was completely back to normal.)

When should I start going for Pap tests?

If you’re sexually active (and therefore at risk for STIs), you should be getting regular Paps. 

What is HPV?

That *thing* they’re checking for during my Pap test is the human papillomavirus (HPV) which is a viral infection and, as mentioned above, the most commonly transmitted STI. There are many different strains and while some strains will resolve on their own, others can lead to genital warts or cervical cancer.

Don’t we all get HPV anyways?

This is a bit of a misconception but yes, many of us will get an HPV strain, without symptoms, and clear it without issue. In fact, Selk says that almost everyone under the age of 30 (and 70 to 80% of Canadians) will get a strain. Some of the strains cause cervical cancer, though not all of them. The problem is when you don’t clear the infection on your own and that’s what a Pap smear looks for—abnormalities that could lead to cervical cancer.

How can I prevent HPV?

HPV can be transmitted through vaginal, anal or oral sexual activities which makes almost all sexually active people at risk for contracting the virus. The HPV vaccine is highly effective at preventing HPV infections in the first place so they don’t have the chance to turn into cervical cancer—this is primary prevention. Secondary prevention is the stage where you get a strain and healthcare providers try to keep it from causing trouble. “Most people will clear it by themselves, and the biggest risk factor for cancer is when your body doesn’t actually clear it,” Selk says. This could be because of a variety of risk factors (including smoking and being immunocompromised), but sometimes healthy people don’t clear it and doctors don’t always know why. That’s why it’s important to keep up with your regular Pap tests, even if you’ve had the HPV vaccine. “Countries that have good programs for screening, like Canada, have very little cervical cancer, because the programs work very well,” Selk says. “Most of the people with cervical cancer in Canada are those who have never had a Pap smear or who have not been screened in the last five years.”

Should I get the HPV vaccine?

The HPV vaccine is highly effective and recommended for all men and women, and is offered free to grade seven students in Canada. Dr. Ghadaki recommends the vaccine to everyone between the ages of nine and 50 as a preventative measure for HPV infections that can lead to cervical cancer. As an adult, the vaccine is three doses and can cost about $600 in total, though many insurance companies cover the vaccine. “When you’re older, there’s no reason not to get the HPV vaccine other than cost,” Selk says. And even if you’ve contracted a strain of HPV before, you should still consider getting the vaccine as it prevents against multiple strains of the virus.

What does an abnormal Pap test mean?

When you have an abnormal Pap test, it means that your test result isn’t necessarily clear—but that isn’t always cause for concern right away. In fact, one of the main reasons the recommendation for Pap test frequency recently changed to every three years (it used to be every year) was because many factors can contribute to an abnormal result, including having sex the day before your test, a bit of inflammation, even wearing a tampon. (According to Dr. Selk, changing testing every to every three years has shown no increase in cancer diagnoses and has decreased the flagging of mild abnormalities that clear on their own. Nonetheless, this three-year wait can cause a lot of stress. If it’s not time for your test but you are concerned, you can get one and should always talk to your doctor about your scheduled exams as they relate to your health or situation.) 

“There are grades of abnormal, so if there’s something that’s minimally abnormal, and they’re not sure what it is—it’s not a cancer, it may not even be HPV-related—that would be an example where we would just repeat the test,” Selk says. Repeating the test, or having another Pap test before the three-year mark could all be part of the plan to keep an eye on things. And depending on the degree of abnormality, your doctor will likely want to rule out or diagnose a pre-cancerous condition or cervical cancer. From there, you’ll be monitored for changes and in some cases, the pre-cancerous or abnormal cells will be removed via various treatments. 

The post Everything You Need to Know About STI and Pap Tests appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

It’s 2:30 a.m. on a Monday morning and I’ve just relocated from my bed to the couch, trying to stifle my tears so I don’t disturb my husband. I’ve already let my boss know I need the day off tomorrow to monitor my unexpectedly sick partner’s COVID-like symptoms to see if they are worth a call (or worse, a visit) to the doctor. Though my brain is telling me it’s just the flu, a constant COVID-19 news cycle and some symptom-Googling are enough to spike my already sky-high anxiety.

At this point, we’re entering week eight of self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve managed to hang onto my full-time job and while my additional freelance work has significantly slowed, I’m still earning a nine-to-five paycheque. I have shelter and access to food and even a backyard. I’m self-isolating with my husband, whom I love, and our two adorable cats. I’m aware of my privilege every day, but have never felt it more keenly than I do now when so many have lost so much. But, for the first time in my adult life, I’m also recognizing I could use some help managing my mental health.

It’s not that I had fully mastered managing my mental health prior to what can only be described as my (first?) quarantine breaking point. I have, and do, struggle, most notably with anxiety that often has no outlet, and burnout from failing to pause when I feel run down. But when it comes to feeling low or anxious, I’ve often been able to turn it around through prioritizing screen-free time alone, spending time outside, counting my blessings and coming up with a plan. Regaining my perspective and a sense of control through action has always been something that has helped me out of those lower periods (that, and comfort food), but I know this doesn’t come easily to everyone. So, while I understand the benefits of therapy and have seen the positive effects of it on so many of my peers, I’ve never felt bad enough for long enough to seek it out myself. 

Which brings me to 2:30 a.m. on May 4 when a cocktail of sadness, anger, guilt, helplessness and fear are rolling around my brain and in my chest, making it impossible to sleep (though apparently not impossible to write, even though I am exhausted). And despite the truly terrible week I’ve had (another story for another time; just know that a husband showing COVID-like symptoms truly was the straw that broke the camel’s back), I know I can’t be the only one wondering whether talking to someone—preferably, someone impartial with credentials—might help ease some of the non-diagnosed anxiety currently bearing down on me. At this point, I know it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Of course, I’m not alone. Most of us are generally reporting more stress and anxiety with more perceived barriers to treatment and care without in-person appointments. According to Dr. Donna Ferguson, a clinical psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), those who regularly attended therapy pre-pandemic may have halted sessions in the hopes that in-person meetings can soon take place, resulting in a disruption to care. And for those of us who have never been to therapy before, starting now can feel completely overwhelming—with everything going on, where does one even start? With no real end to the pandemic in sight—and no idea of what our new normal will look like—even those of us who felt pretty strong mental health-wise are learning just how much can be chipped away under the right (or in this case, the wrong) circumstances. 

Once I knew I would be researching and writing this story, I checked in on my friends and peers on Instagram, asking a series of questions to learn more about how everyone was doing. Unsurprisingly, 95% of those who answered acknowledged that COVID has increased their stress and anxiety. Despite that, only 50% of those folks have sought out mental health support, whether in the form of online therapy, digital apps or wellness practices like meditation. Up until a few weeks ago, this was me as well.

The truth is, most of us are struggling and for myriad reasons. The good news? You’re not alone and your mental health challenges are completely understandable, whatever they may be. And don’t just take my word for it. I spoke to Dr. Ferguson, as well as Dr. Sabeena Chopra, psychiatrist at Stella’s Place, a support centre for young adults in need of mental health assistance, to understand why so many of us are struggling and, more importantly, what can be done to help manage it.

Your typical coping mechanisms are harder to do now

We all have our coping mechanisms to handle stressful situations. And some of us have been prescribed methods or homework, such as trying to be more social and reaching out to friends and colleagues, as part of the behavioural arm of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. According to CAMH, CBT is a method of practicing skills and strategies for managing mental health that is often used solo or in conjunction with medication for a range of mental health concerns. It’s practical and problem-focused and can include things like activity scheduling for diagnoses like depression. Unsurprisingly, activity-scheduling is difficult when your city is on lockdown. 

While some of us are naturally more solitary creatures, many are not. In fact, many of us rely on socializing—going to a workout class, getting dinner with friends, spending time with our families and congregating outdoors—as antidotes to the stresses we face. While some of these activities are slowly becoming more accessible as provinces begin to relax social distancing rules, for almost three months (and counting, for some of us), they were impossible without great risk. But the truth is, even your replacement coping mechanisms (yes, I’m looking at you sourdough bread and TikTok) may not be providing the relief you’re hoping for. “If you’re having normal ups and downs, things like gardening and baking can be good coping tactics. Walking, exercising—these can be enough for some people, and they all can support your mental health,” says Dr. Ferguson. “But, I’m not sure it would be enough for somebody who is really struggling.” 

Don’t be afraid to seek out external help, like virtual therapy or a mental health app like the ones listed at the end of this story, if alphabetizing your bookshelf isn’t cutting it. Many of us need more support than the delicious, distracting pursuit of the perfect banana bread to feel better—and that’s completely understandable given that your normal coping strategies have likely been upended.

Smaller, usually more manageable, stressors are now amplified

“It would be reasonable to say that everyone’s stress level is amplified,” says Dr. Chopra. “The already existing challenges that individuals are facing are likely amplified as well.” That means that whatever stressors or mental health challenges you were dealing with pre-COVID likely weren’t made any better with the addition of a global pandemic. While a tough week at work is always frustrating, add a dose of job insecurity and an economic downturn and the leap from frustration to panic becomes smaller. And if even the most minor problems feel like they’re hard to handle, that’s because they are made bigger thanks to the magnifying glass that is COVID-19. Focus is key here—as well as recognizing what is in your control and what is beyond it. There’s a lot that is out of our control right now, but if you’re still working, you can focus on your job or (hopefully) ask for that day off should you need it. If you’re currently laid off or furloughed from work, keep reading. 

Your entire life and schedule has changed

For many of us, work gives structure to our days and weeks. Although not universally true, most of us know our work schedules; they are predictable in some way, and we organize our lives around them. But for many of us, our work schedules have changed dramatically, along with our work settings—or they’ve been eliminated entirely. “Our bodies like to know when they are going to be fed and when they’re going to sleep, that stabilizes the nervous system,” says Dr. Chopra. “Now more than ever I encourage people to try to establish some sort of routine. It sounds very basic, but it’s also a foundation of staying well.” Of course, this is easier said than done when you have no work and no social plans. Start small with some examples from Dr. Ferguson: Get up at the same time every morning or set work hours if you’re adjusting to work-from-home life. Go for a walk at the same time every day. Budget alone time for yourself, if it’s possible in a full house, or social time with a friendly video call if you’re alone. But remember to not be too hard on yourself if maintaining a routine is difficult, especially if you’re reeling under the anxiety of losing your job. If it adds another layer of pressure, scale it back until you feel well enough to try a routine again.

The uncertainty of this moment is overwhelming

Uncertainty was the biggest reason people felt stress in my informal Instagram poll, and this was true for me as well. After I cancelled or put all my spring and summer plans on the back burner (which included a years-in-the-making trip and several personal and professional milestones I was hoping to accomplish, not to mention all the smaller social events I was greatly looking forward to), I was lost. I love my plans. I tend to them like so many of my Instagram follows tend to their gardens. And it wasn’t so much the plans that I lost—if the worst thing that happened to me was that I needed to cancel a vacation, then I’m in much better shape than most—but rather the volume. Everything was cancelled with no notion of when it might come back. “If there’s a single stress or a couple of stresses that are short term, most of us can manage that—but COVID is a disruption to routine, financial stress, social isolation, health insecurity and your safety is compromised, and it’s been prolonged,” says Dr. Chopra. “The unknown: When is this going to end? How is this going to be? What are things going to look like? These questions weigh on people. And the degree of uncertainty we are facing today is enormous.” That includes the medical uncertainty as well as we continue to learn more about the virus itself and as we prepare for what many are calling an inevitable second wave. It’s this uncertainty that is my own biggest trigger. 

So, what can you do to manage your mental health right now?

Any of these reasons on their own is enough to reach out for mental health support, and most of us are coping with several of them. There is help, even from a distance. “There are actually increasing resources for people who are having a hard time with mental health,” says Dr. Chopra. Therapy is being offered virtually (though it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of virtual meetings which can include access to a computer and a reliable internet connection and, especially now, a quiet, private and undisturbed place to actually have that meeting). “People are accommodating with virtual,” says Dr. Ferguson. “It’s good to reach out, and not to wait, to do it sooner rather than later. Be proactive so you can start that process and feel like you’re getting on top of the issues.” The cost of therapy is, of course, also a barrier for so many people. Increasingly, there are virtual therapies and apps being offered for free. “If people can get even a bit of support during this time while they’re dealing with a lot of stress, I think it will help,” says Dr. Chopra. This is backed up by my informal Instagram poll—82% who sought out mental health support noted that it had helped them. 

Shortly after my husband’s COVID-19 test came back negative, I had my first virtual therapy session. As you might expect, it did not solve all my COVID-related concerns. My uncertainty lingers and I’m still dealing with a lot of the things that were present in the lead up to my middle-of-the-night sob sesh. But, I can’t deny how helpful it was to speak to someone who acknowledged that I was struggling and that I had every reason to feel how I was feeling. The simple recognition of the burdens that I was carrying was an immense support I didn’t know I needed until I realized I couldn’t carry any more.

And much to my surprise, therapy (and more specifically, online therapy) was much less awkward than I anticipated. It didn’t take much to get me talking in my first session, and just listing off the things that were weighing on me helped. In my second session, more work was done relating to ~feelings~ which I did find more awkward as a first-time patient. Sitting in my feelings is new to me (my trusty compartmentalization tactic doesn’t tend to allow for much emotional time). But, the awkwardness was mine and had more to do with my own hangups about composure than it did about virtual therapy (or therapy at all). Despite my obvious discomfort, it still felt like I was doing important work to understand my own emotional impulses, and more importantly, how I could learn to move through them better, without just placing them in a box to be dealt with later—like, ahem, in the middle of the night.

It may sound a bit cliché, but it’s also been proven over and over again as this global pandemic touches all of us in some way: “We’re all in this together, and we can’t forget that,” says Dr. Ferguson. “We need to remember to lean on each other for support.” In isolation and with distance, it can be hard to remember the simple notion that leaning on each other is incredibly helpful.

As we get closer and closer to a “new normal” (whatever that ends up meaning), I’m hoping my own version of this future includes taking more honest stock of my own mental health needs, and perhaps continued therapy visits (virtual or IRL). I’m hoping the next time something shakes me—whether it’s that tough work week, or a family illness or, yes, even another pandemic—I’m better able to handle it before I find myself crying uncontrollably on the couch in the dead of night. Or at the very least, that if I need to cry, that’s OK, too. I hope I remember that there are people I can lean on, if I need to.

Here are some mental health resources across Canada:  

• If you are in crisis and need immediate support, dial 911 or head to Wellness Together Canada for crisis numbers.
• Check out a comprehensive list of where to find free and accessible mental health care across Canada here.
• “Tolerance for Uncertainty: A COVID-19 Workbook” includes healthy coping ideas with templates, information about emotional awareness and mindfulness practices.
• For app-based mental health support, try MindBeacon Stronger Minds, a free resource to all Canadians that has workbooks and information informed by evidence-based strategies and psychology to help alleviate stress due to COVID-19. Others apps to check out include MindShiftCBT, ClearFear and Moodpath.
• The Canadian Mental Health Association has tips to manage mental health during COVID-19 and offers support through its BounceBack program.

The post I Didn’t Think I “Needed” Therapy—Then COVID-19 Happened appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

SO: Your internship this summer got cancelled. You have three options: Scream into the void, despairing you’ll ever get a job now; accept that 2020 is a dumpster fire, and devote your considerable genius to Animal Crossing instead; or—and this is the option we strongly suggest—you take a beat, mourn the loss of what might have been, and then make this setback a setup for the best thing that ever happened to your career.

We tapped two career coaches (specialization: Millennial and Gen Z workers) for their hot tips on what you can do right now to make Beyoncé-level lemonade out of these pandemic-grown lemons.

#1 This is not the end of the world

Between record unemployment and doom-and-gloom predictions of a Great Depression-style recession, this is not the ideal time to be trying to get a foothold into the workplace. Or is it? “I can gladly say that employers are still hiring,” says Brandesha Sinclair, a career coach at The Working Millennial. “There’s no doubt that certain positions are on hold, but equally there are still opportunities out there.”

In fact, says Ali Breen, a Halifax-based narrative career coach, “this recession is going to create new jobs and new needs that are completely aligned with the soft skills Millennials and Gen Z have.” They’re the things you take for granted—how to communicate online, how to automate for efficiency—that Gen X or Boomer hiring managers might be desperate to have within their team now that many workplaces have shifted to remote offices, at least for the foreseeable future. Put those skills on your resumé!

#2 Use this enforced pause for some self reflection

Oh great! More time alone with your thoughts. But seriously: If you’re someone who’s maybe taken an internship in a field they’re not madly in love with—maybe because you’re doing a degree you felt pressured into, thinking it would result in a steady paycheck, or you realized halfway through uni this wasn’t the course for you—this might be the universe’s invitation to re-evaluate. “Think of it as a permission slip,” says Breen. “Ask yourself what you want, and then what the world needs. Attach those two things together, and boom! You have a career.”

#3 Polish up your social presence

“If you contact me to ask me for a conversation as an employer, mentor or networking contact,” says Breen, “I will Google you—and so will 96 percent of recruiters.” Use this time to make sure your entire online presence (not just LinkedIn!) is Potential Employer-ready. You can make all your accounts look epic, or Breen says it’s totally fine just to lock them down—but with a great bio and an appropriate profile pic. “Employers aren’t just looking for your drunk pics,” says Breen. “They’re looking for things that give them a sense of who you are, because they hire for [culture] fit.” That means if you’re applying for a job as graphic designer, show off some of your latest illustrations on the ’gram. If you’re trying to get in as a paralegal, retweet some interesting articles on recent judgments. “Be purposeful about what you’re posting.”

#4 Continue your education

“When it comes to your career, learning never stops,” says Sinclair. Not only is taking an online course a way to stay busy, she says, it’s also a way to demonstrate that you’re self-motivated to future employers. It’s also an opportunity to learn many of the skills you anticipated picking up during that internship.

In terms of subject matter, she says to consider something in tech, project management or social media, since these are always useful skills regardless of the job you ultimately apply for. “Even if it’s not relevant to your current goals, it’s transferable and can help with building a side hustle.”

On a related note, Breen strongly recommends having a creative outlet for your passions—say, a Youtube channel for reviews if you’re a book-obsessive, or a Soundcloud where you upload your flute solos. “Not only does it help take care of you,” she says, “ but it will give you something to talk about in interviews when they want to know about you as a person.”

#5 Network, network, network

You’ve probably heard this 9 million times: Networking is the only way to get a job in a world where, anecdotally, 80% of jobs are never advertised. But how do you actually do that? “Gently and with purpose,” says Breen. The gentle part refers to the fact that everyone has a lot going on right now, and just because they didn’t respond to your first email it doesn’t mean they hate you. Feel free to follow up, she says, and even consider pinging them on a social network of your choosing at the same time. “That way you look like a keener, and you’re also in their brain at two different times,” she says.

Purpose refers to the message’s content: “Don’t ask a stranger for something without providing them with something first,” says Breen, saying it can be as simple as writing “I see you’re a thought leader in X field” and then sending them an article that either compliments or challenges it, and then asking them what they think of it. Then, you should make a very specific ask, like “Would you introduce me to three people in your field because I want to do informational interviews?” or “I’m looking for a mentor and this is the kind of mentorship I’m looking for.” As for where you can find these people? Sinclair says to start with your immediate connections, yes, but don’t discount the people you follow or admire on social media. “Every post or share is a chance to connect,” she says. “Comment and further the conversation, exchange opinions and resources.”

The post COVID Came For Your Summer Internship. Now What? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Whatever your party style—sweaty dance fest at a club, a dinner that takes a Doodle to wrangle all 25 of your besties, laser tag followed by DQ ice cream cake because 2001 you was onto something—chances are you won’t be able celebrate your usual way this year. (Please don’t make us explain why.)

That is not, however, an excuse to schedule a Pity Party—guest list of one—instead. You and your milestones—a birthday, a graduation, three years of sobriety, the one year anniversary of launching that thing—remain worth celebrating. Perhaps even more so, given all the things we’ve lived through this year (and it’s ONLY JUNE.)

Turn up “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield (or Kool and the Gang, Black Eyed Peas or whatever track is your unabashed cheesy dance floor hype song) and let’s plan some parties—recalibrated for pandemic life, but Grade-A Good Times nonetheless.

#1 PIVOT!

When Jenna Janzen Olstad’s son Lewiston passed away at six months old, she and her husband resolved that his birthday—May 25—would always be a day of celebration, not sadness. Each year, they throw a fundraiser to mark the day, and this year, the fourth, was heading toward a significant milestone: “We were hoping to raise $250,000,” recalls Olstad over the phone from Calgary. “That would mean we’d hit the million-dollar mark for our foundation, which was a huge goal for us to give back to the hospital and critically ill kids.”

Two weeks out, however, Olstad quickly realized that having an IRL event wasn’t possible this year thanks to COVID-19—so she pivoted. “I leaned on a mindset I’ve been cultivating since my son’s death, which is ‘Just because this doesn’t look like how I think it’s going to go, doesn’t mean I throw in the towel and give up.’” Instead, she hosted 24 interviews on Instagram Live over 12 hours, raising $76,000 along the way. The lesson here, even if your derailed celebration wasn’t even remotely altruistic (because that’s totally OK too!)? “Look for the opportunities. Look for the pieces of joy—and if you can’t find the joy, bring it.”

#2 Consider your party a public service

An easy way to bring the joy? THROW THE PARTY (virtually, of course, or appropriately physically distanced if allowed where you are) even if it feels self-indulgent to be celebrating you when there’s so much going on in the world. “Our social calendars are pretty empty right now,” reminds Roxanne Chapman, principle of Proper Plan, a Toronto-based events firm. “A party is a great way to bring people together, and connection is something we all need right now.”

A self-confessed “birthday person,” Chapman is actually in the midst of planning her own virtual party. “I usually plan large parties where I invited 100 people or more,” she says. This year, however, she’s reflected on what “makes a birthday special,” and she’s realized it’s “connecting with friends in smaller, more intimate ways.” Or as Olstad puts it: “Quality time with quality people.” Instead of the dinner with 25 people, she suggests focusing on your two best friends. Drop a bottle of wine off at each of their houses, and then crack it open together over Zoom later. Or, if you’re in the same household, set off a confetti cannon for just the two or three of you. “Just because there weren’t 500 people there, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Olstad says. “I’ve learned to celebrate those quiet, sacred moments when there’s no watching, no camera around.”

#3 …Or feel free to take the day entirely for yourself

If you’re self-isolating alone—or are just one of those people who likes to mark important days solo—dedicate the day to some hardcore Self Care. “Make this day about doing whatever you love to do,” encourages event planner Chapman. “If you love reading, pick up a new book and spend the day in the park. If you love the spa, spend time in the tub with a new bath bomb. If you want a good dinner, some restaurants are offering special menus for takeout.”

In a similar vein, Olstad suggests cultivating a day full of “joy starters,” something she talks about in her recent book, Bring the Joy. “For me, that’s my French press coffee made with my favourite bean in a mug from a local potter,” she says, “and having it during my quiet time before my husband and kids get up.”

And speaking of quiet: We often get reflective around milestones, and Olstad recommends harnessing that with some journalling. “Just grab a piece of paper,” she says, stressing that it doesn’t need to be pretty, and can even just be some bullet points or random words. “When we write, our brain can start to process some of the stuff that’s jumbled up in there.” Personally, she usually writes down what she’s grateful for, and then “I allow myself to dream really big, without judgment.”

And don’t forget the satisfaction that can come from doing something nice for someone else on your special day: “Bless it forward,” says Olstad, throwing out suggestions like buying groceries for someone you might know who needs them, or offering to babysit (in a physically distanced way). “Think how you can show up for someone else. That cultivates joy back in you.”

#4 A virtual celebration doesn’t have to be lame, BTW

Yes, we’re all sick of Zoom and, agreed, we’ll scream if we hear that House Party notification bell one more time. But for most of us, it’s the closest we’re coming to hanging out with our friends en masse anytime soon—so make the best of it. “I would deliver contactless packages to your guests,” says Chapman. Think of it like a party-in-a-box: Decorations for their background, a party hat. “For my birthday, I’m planning on sending a cocktail kit, with all the ingredients and a recipe, with an option for a mocktail.” And most importantly? “Send a game or activity everyone can do together to make the call more exciting.” For an alternate program, Chapman suggests “going to a show together,” by tuning into something like the National Theatre, which streams free productions every Thursday night. They even have intermission, just like in real life—perfect for a popcorn top-up!

#5 Consider creative ways to be together, IRL too

If you live somewhere where small, physically distanced gatherings are allowed, Chapman has a few best practices for your celebration: “All food and beverages should be individually packaged,” she says, also recommending that you stagger your guests’ arrival times. “It takes a bit of scheduling, but this will allow you to celebrate with all your friends and family while remaining safe.” And don’t forget: Most florists and balloon companies are still delivering, so don’t forget to order ahead and book in your balloon arch and/or Kimye-style floral wall.

The post PSA: You’re Still Allowed to Celebrate Right Now appeared first on FASHION Magazine.