How to Get Your Partner to Stop Snoring

We’ve all been there: You’re snug in bed, moments away from drifting off, only to be jolted back into a state of annoyed wakefulness by a loud, persistent sound coming from the other side of the bed.

Snoring is a pervasive problem, with around 40% of men and 30% of women sawing logs at least some nights of the week, according to the Sleep Health Foundation. And while it can be linked to a variety of health risks in those who are affected, snoring also takes a toll on bed partners who struggle to get some shuteye in the midst of a cacophony of snorts and rumbles.

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When chronic snorers seek a doctor’s help, it is usually at the urging of their partner, says Dr. Megan Durr, associate professor in the department of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. “I see so many patients that are ending up in different bedrooms than their partners, which is impacting their relationship and just their quality of life,” Durr says.

The good news is that she and other experts say that people can take a number of steps to help reduce or even eliminate snoring from their—and their partners’—nighttime routine, ranging from lifestyle changes to surgical interventions in more extreme cases.

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Watch the scale, hold the wine

When we sleep, the muscles at the back of the throat relax. Some people, such as those who are older or overweight, are more likely to have tissue that relaxes too much, or to have excess tissue in their throat, which can cause their airway to narrow too much during sleep. When the person breathes, the loosened throat muscles and smaller airway lead to vibrations that cause the unmistakable snoring sound. While it can be harmless, snoring can also be a sign of a more serious condition called sleep apnea, which is why many physicians urge people to visit a sleep medicine specialist if they’re worried about snoring. 

While it can happen to anyone, snoring is more common as people age. If people are carrying extra weight or have consumed alcohol, the effects of snoring tend to get worse, says Dr. Michael Howell, division director of sleep medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Read More: Is Bed Rotting Bad for You?

People who are overweight or obese can experience more compression on their airway due to the extra pounds they are carrying, which is why it can cause snoring or make an existing problem worse. Losing weight is one of the first interventions physicians turn to when a patient seeks help with snoring because it can be highly effective at getting the problem under control, Howell says. “Even five or 10 pounds can make a difference,” he says.

Cutting out alcohol is also another potential solution. Alcohol can make the muscles at the back of the throat even more relaxed, so it “tends to worsen sleep apnea and snoring,” says Dr. Virginia Skiba, a sleep medicine physician at Henry Ford Health in Detroit.

Change your sleep position

If your partner snores, a simple yet effective solution could be finding a way to help them sleep on their front or their side. Back sleeping, especially if a person is lying flat, is known to worsen the effects of snoring, Skiba says, so some people find success with foam wedges or similar products to prevent rolling onto their backs. Being proposed up with pillows can also help, she says.

While there are sleep vests and other similar products on the market designed to keep people from rolling onto their backs during sleep, Durr has developed a DIY solution for her patients. She advises them to find or buy a T-shirt with a front pocket and place a tennis ball inside, securing it with a safety pin. The person who snores puts the T-shirt on backwards when they go to sleep, and it automatically keeps them from rolling onto their back during sleep.

“The ball kind of pokes you into your back, and then it will shift you to your side,” she says. “So it’s not waking your bed partner up, hopefully.”

Read More: How Much Do You Actually Need to Shower?

Durr says there are other things people can try before they go the more drastic route of sleeping in a separate room from their noisy partner, such as using a white noise machine or wearing ear plugs.

“But a lot of this ends up being on the snorer,” she says. “They end up bearing the brunt of trying to fix this for their bed partner.”

CPAP and surgery

In some cases, snoring is a sign of a more serious condition called sleep apnea, which occurs when people momentarily stop breathing when they are asleep. This can lead to fatigue, irritability, and grogginess the next day and, over time, increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease and other health problems.

For a person to figure out if they have sleep apnea, they must undergo a sleep study, during which they are monitored overnight to identify changes in breathing, heart rate, oxygen levels and other health measures. Sleep studies are typically done in a clinic, but can be performed at home. Howell says a diagnosis isn’t necessary for a person to start using a CPAP machine or other therapies, but it is important for doctors and patients to know if snoring is caused by sleep apnea.“Sleep apnea is hugely underdiagnosed,” he says.

Read More: How Often Do You Really Need to Wash Your Sheets?

There are several available treatments for sleep apnea. One of the first treatments doctors will often recommend is an orthodontic device called a mandibular advancement device that can help prop open a person’s airway when they are sleeping, according to Howell.

A continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine is another tried-and-true sleep apnea aid that essentially cures snoring by ensuring a person’s airway is fully open, says Durr. But it can be a lot for some people and their partners to adjust to, and many people simply find it too difficult to tolerate, she says. CPAP machines are notoriously noisy, which can be disruptive to those wearing it as well as their bed partners, and many people find the mask too uncomfortable or wake up with a very dry mouth.

Although it is fairly rare, some patients with severe snoring problems who have had little success with lifestyle changes or other treatments may require surgery to deal with their snoring, such as a minor procedure to remove some of the elongated tissue from the back of their throat, Durr says. But she says in most instances, it doesn’t take such extreme measures for people to enjoy a relatively quiet night in bed.

“The vast majority of people will get the snoring volume to a level that’s acceptable to them and their bed partner by doing some of the lifestyle things,” she says.

source https://time.com/7008163/how-to-get-partner-to-stop-snoring/

It Ends With Us Can’t Quite Turn Trauma into Drama

A movie or book can address a serious, emotionally wrenching subject and still be a thing you can’t help snickering at, a dramatic pileup that leaves you muttering “Oh, come on!” under your breath. It Ends With Us, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s ferociously popular 2016 novel, works hard to ping all the appropriate notes. This is after all, a story of domestic abuse, a more widely shared experience in real life than most of us want to face up to. (Hoover has said that the book was inspired by her mother, who was physically abused by Hoover’s father.) And the objective reality is that we need movies like It Ends With Us. The classic genre known as the woman’s film—pictures like King Vidor’s 1937 Stella Dallas, or either version of Imitation of Life, filmed first by John Stahl in 1934 and later, in1959, by Douglas Sirk—thrived in the ’30s, ’40s, and beyond by carving out a safe space for emotional catharsis. Women, and sometimes men, often need to cry it all out, and aren’t the movies—a refuge in the dark—the perfect place to do that?

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But It Ends With Us—directed by Justin Baldoni, who also co-stars—doesn’t have the mojo to get the waterworks pumping, not even in a gentle, reserved way. Blake Lively stars as the kookily named Lily Bloom, a thoughtful young woman with a hippie-patchwork wardrobe and a guardedly bright outlook on life. She lives in Boston; she’s about to open her own flower shop, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. In all ways, this is a period of transition. Her father has just died, and she’s not sure what to do with her mixed feelings; as we learn more about the way he abused Lily’s mother, and others, we understand why. Lily has just returned from the funeral, held in her Maine hometown, and with her jumbled thoughts, she has stolen away to a Boston rooftop with a dreamy view. But she doesn’t actually live in the building. And when a handsome neurosurgeon, who is a resident, blusters his way onto that rooftop, you get the sense her life will be changed forever.

His name is Ryle Kincaid—he’s played by Baldoni—and he’s almost criminally handsome, with his sympathetic dark eyes and 10 o’clock shadow, even sexier than the 5 o’clock kind. He’s just got to be a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and in the first minutes of their meeting, it sure seems that way. The two find themselves engaged in the kind of disarmingly frank conversation that can often brew between strangers. He’s had a terrible day; she’s just lost her father, a man she loved despite the fact he might not have deserved it. Ryle listens to her, but he also tells her, “I want to have sex with you,” clearly taken with her haute-hippie-girl breeziness, which glows even through her conflicted grief. And though she calls him out, rightly, on his perhaps overly direct sales pitch, they almost do sleep together—until he’s called away to work. Because a handsome neurosurgeon’s work is never done.

Lily thinks that’s the end of it. A day or so later she gets the keys to her new shop and sets about sprucing it up, both hiring a helper and making a new friend on the same day: rich lady Allysa (the always-wonderful Jenny Slate, who breathes some life into the movie whenever she’s on-screen) just happens to stop in. She wants a job; trusting her instincts, Lily gives her one. The two become fast friends. And guess what? It turns out that semi-scary Dr. McDreamy, AKA Ryle, is Allysa’s brother. What are the odds?

Though Allysa offers a few subtle warnings about Ryle’s romantic history, he and Lily fall in love anyway. Sure, he’s a player. But he makes it clear he wants to try for a real relationship with Lily. She goes for it—and then a love from her teenage years, whom we’ve previously met in flashbacks, unexpectedly steps into the frame. Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), is now a handsome but down-to-earth Boston restaurateur, and when Lily spots him, we can see there’s still a spark between the two. But Lily has already earned Ryle’s trust; she decides to stay the course.

Until this point, It Ends With Us could be your classic but not-too-heavy romantic melodrama, replete with hot but tender sex and dashes of romantic befuddlement. But if you’ve read Hoover’s book, you’ll know what’s coming. Lily herself becomes the victim of domestic abuse, and it doesn’t arrive with loud warning bells. In fact, the first time Lily is injured, resulting in a bruised eye she attempts to conceal with makeup, the event is presented as an accident triggered by a scuffle to remove a burned frittata from the oven. It could happen to anyone. But the second incident is more clear-cut, and the third is unequivocally violent. Still, you look at Ryle, as Lily seems to, as possibly fixable. He’s suffering; his inner turmoil is causing him to act out. The movie is accurate and effective in this sense: for so many abused women, you never know how bad it can get, until it gets really bad.

Yet none of that is enough to make you fully buy what the movie’s selling. Lively has been terrific in other movies: her turn in the 2016 woman-vs.-shark thriller The Shallows was one of the great scream-queen performances of the last decade, and she showed nervy gravitas in Ben Affleck’s The Town. But It Ends With Us lets her down. The men, with their flaws—even kind, stalwart Atlas has a very short fuse, a yellow flag if not a red one—are far more interesting than Lily is. That doesn’t give them the right to inflict violence; but from a dramatic standpoint, it certainly makes them more electric. As Lively plays her, Lily is a blank, glassy surface, the better to reflect the shortcomings of the men around her; that’s not the same as being a person. Even by the movie’s end, she still feels like something of a muted stranger—it’s the men who come off as fully alive, as dangerous as one of them may be.

The problem, maybe, is that It Ends With Us is all about what it’s about, and nothing more. These characters exist to make points about the insidiousness of domestic violence, the way its effects can creep up invisibly even as those who are suffering cloak themselves in protective denial. Admittedly, that’s a lot for a movie to carry. But movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways. It Ends With Us makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving. And despite the prettiness of its Boston setting, it isn’t as visually alluring as it should be. For one thing, this is a movie about a flower-loving florist that’s embarrassingly low on flowers, except for a few droopy, half-dead Victorian-looking things. It’s OK, even in a story addressing a traumatic subject, to dab a little color here and there. Flowers, their short-lived beauty notwithstanding, can often brighten even the bleakest day. In this movie, they’re treated like something we don’t deserve, a blessing closed up tight, instead of a thing worth living for.

source https://time.com/7008496/it-ends-with-us-review/

History Suggests the Memes Might Actually Help Kamala Harris Win

Memes of Kamala Harris talking about falling out of a coconut tree, featuring clips of her laughing and dancing, are all over social media. Set to songs by this summer’s pop stars, from Charli XCX and Chappell Roan to Taylor Swift, the videos include Harris’ now-famous lines. With a laugh, she says: “You think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The quote comes from a May 2023 speech, when Harris told a story about her mother encouraging her to recognize the ways in which the wider world shaped her.

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These videos might seem like they came out of nowhere — but they could be the key to victory for Harris. They counter Republican attempts to define the vice president, especially her laughter, negatively for voters. At a rally on July 20, the day before she became the Democratic Party’s nominee, Donald Trump declared her “Laughing Kamala.” He asked his audience: “Have you watched her laugh? She is crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy.”

The memes sweeping social media challenge Trump’s representation of the vice president. Harris appears cool in them. The popular videos give her a real chance to avoid the fate that befell the first female presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull, in 1872. Woodhull ran as the Equal Rights Party candidate, and she aimed to model what it would look like if women enjoyed full political citizenship and had a true voice in American democracy, with voting rights and much more. 

But the highest levels of American politics had always been reserved for men, and the press lambasted Woodhull for transgressing gender norms. Although Woodhull edited a weekly newspaper, she didn’t have enough of a megaphone to fight back. This doomed her chances of waging a competitive campaign.

Woodhull had broken barriers for women before waging this historic presidential campaign. Born in Ohio in 1838, Woodhull moved to New York City with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, when she was 30 years old. The pair became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and used their profits to start Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, the first weekly newspaper edited by women in 1870. 

In 1871, Woodhull was the first woman to address Congress in support of women’s voting rights. Her speech prompted leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to invite her to deliver a lecture at the National Woman Suffrage Association’s convention. Newspapers with local and wider reach reported on the wealthy female broker who also acted as a spiritual medium for Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Read More: The Kamala Harris Campaign Is Embracing the Memes

At the time, American society expected women to focus on domestic and maternal pursuits. Woodhull’s career challenged these gender norms, which aroused scorn from the media in addition to interest. Yet, it also garnered her a significant fan base among those who wanted to upend these social norms, from women’s-rights and civil-rights activists to spiritualists and free lovers.

In 1872, her popularity prompted the Equal Rights Party to nominate Woodhull for president — at a time when she couldn’t even vote — with the Black civil rights activist Frederick Douglass as her running mate. The ticket represented the party’s goal of racial and gender equality. 

But the media’s scorn for Woodhull doomed her chances of running a competitive campaign. The popular newspaper Harper’s Weekly, for example, printed a full-page illustration of Woodhull as a devil. Thomas Nast, the day’s most famous engraver, represented her with a pair of curling wings and horns. The picture featured a mother in the background who is struggling under the weight of caring for two children and a drunken husband. She says: “Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!” Woodhull was not behaving in the moral, maternal, home-centered manner God allegedly set forth for women. The engraving reflected what men like Nast expected women to do: ignore Woodhull and the lure of equal rights.

In addition to depicting her as evil, newspapers also printed illustrations of Woodhull and her sister as sexually available, wearing shorter dresses and showing off their ankles. The pictures implied the pair were prostitutes. Woodhull promoted free love, which only reinforced this representation. She believed that people should be able to have relationships with those they choose. By the time she ran for president, she had divorced once and married twice.

Other periodicals mocked Woodhull by portraying her in men’s clothing. She failed to be the virtuous care-giving white woman that American society — especially the white supremacist patriarchy that politicians sought to reinforce during the post-Civil War era — relied on.

Because of her newspaper, Woodhull had more reach than just about any woman at the time. Yet this platform was nowhere near enough to challenge the media’s negative portrayal of her and define her public image in a positive enough way to get taken seriously as a presidential candidate.

Woodhull did try to reframe negative stereotypes. For example, she sat for portraits by the famed photographer Mathew Brady wearing a top hat and bow tie. Cartoons had mocked her and other leading female activists by presenting them in this traditionally masculine attire, so she teased her opponents by dressing this way. Woodhull represented what they feared, but she also claimed the power associated with masculine clothing for herself. However, printers could not reproduce photographs in newspapers yet, so this visual statement did not reach nearly as many readers as Harper’s Weekly did.

Read More: Charli xcx Thinks Kamala Harris Is ‘Brat.’ She May Be Right

Everything might have been different had she been able to follow the advice of her cousin John Underwood, who suggested that she redefine the meaning of Nast’s picture and turn it into a positive. He recommended “obtaining the cartoon & publishing it in your own paper” because he felt “satisfied that its effect would be altogether favorable.” By reframing the engraving, it might compel viewers to empathize with the downtrodden mother. That realization, in turn, could have spurred them to see the appeal of Woodhull’s candidacy. Yet, she lacked the production capacity to reimagine the devastating image.

Woodhull’s inability to counter the caricature of her as evil and licentious doomed her campaign. Regardless of her series of important firsts and promotion of women’s rights, this reputation stuck with her. Woodhull worked the rest of her life to shape how people remembered her, distributing her preferred biography and portraits to newspapers in the U.S. and England for decades.

Today, Harris’ supporters are doing what Woodhull could not pull off: reframing Republicans’ negative attacks as positives. Harris seems to be on board with these efforts. When popular singer Charli XCX posted that “kamala is brat” on July 21, Harris’ team recognized that she endorsed the candidate using a reference to her latest album. They adapted her album’s slightly blurred font against lime green for their own social media profile. Then, on July 25 Harris joined TikTok, the platform where many of the current memes originated. Harris’ team needs to mobilize supporters like Charli XCX and her fans to define her public image to a broad audience in a way that would have made Victoria Woodhull envious.

This social media campaign — along with Harris’s advertising, speeches, and interviews—offers a chance to define the candidate’s public image before Trump and his media allies can. While her strategists no doubt will try to create their own narrative, the memes produced by Harris’ followers on social media might be just as valuable as what they produce themselves. The videos can showcase her humanity, expertise, worldviews, and blunt Republican efforts to caricature her. They have the possibility of going viral and feeling more authentic than paid advertising. If successful, they’ll empower Harris to make her own case on her own terms — something Victoria Woodhull never got a chance to do.

Allison Lange is an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She is the author of Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and is currently researching the representations of Victoria Woodhull.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7006329/kamala-harris-memes-victoria-woodhull-history/

Reading This Will Make You Want to Floss

Each time you brush and floss, you’re doing more than freshening your breath and preserving your smile. Research suggests you may also be improving your overall health—and maybe even extending your lifespan.

People often see dentistry largely as a cosmetic specialty, says Anita Aminoshariae, a professor of endodontics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine. But “the mouth is not disconnected from the rest of the body,” she says. Quite the opposite: studies suggest that oral health is associated with everything from heart health to lifespan, even if many people don’t realize it.

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Oral health goes beyond the mouth

Researchers call this phenomenon the “oral-systemic link,” and it’s been showing up in studies for years. Some of the earliest findings on this topic were about links between oral health and diabetes, and it’s now well-established that diabetic patients’ blood sugar levels may improve when they’re treated for gum disease—and that their gum disease may worsen if their diabetes does.

Oral health also seems related to other measures of cardiometabolic health, including patients’ likelihood of developing or dying from heart disease. In a recent research review, Aminoshariae and her co-authors found that people with very poor oral health—those with 10 or fewer natural teeth left in their mouths—were about 66% more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than people with more robust smiles. And another recent study, co-authored by Yau-Hua Yu, an associate professor of periodontology at the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, found that people who describe their oral health as fair or poor are at increased risk of dying and may also be more likely to have cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes.

Read More: Is Bed Rotting Bad for You?

Like most research on the oral-systemic link, these studies can’t prove cause and effect. It’s possible the relationship actually works the other way around: that people in poor health are more likely to have bad dental wellness, Yu says. Other factors, like socioeconomic status and access to nutritious food, may also play a role, she says.

But Aminoshariae believes oral health does directly influence overall wellness. She thinks of the teeth like sand dunes. Just as dunes protect inland areas from the sea, Aminoshariae believes the teeth shield the body from foreign substances that could cause disease. “Once they’re gone,” she says, “it’s like a free for all.”

The microbiome, the name for the legions of bacteria, viruses, and other microbes coursing through the human body, is another possible explanation, Yu says. When you don’t clean your teeth properly, allowing food and other debris to sit on and in between the teeth, the bacterial communities in your mouth can change, potentially contributing to gingivitis and gum disease over time, she explains.

When gum health suffers, the consequences can be wide-ranging. The blood vessels in the gums are “leaky,” explains Yvonne Kapila, a professor and associate dean of research at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Dentistry. When someone’s gums are inflamed or diseased, “this leakiness allows bacteria, viruses, and all these other things that are in the outside world to enter your body” and potentially spread throughout it via the bloodstream, she explains.

Read More: How to Be More Spontaneous As a Busy Adult

In some cases, pieces of bacteria or other microbes may travel from the gums into the bloodstream and cause disease or inflammation in other organs, Kapila says. Bacterial matter from the mouth has been found in cancerous tumors, diseased heart valves and livers, and brain tissue of people who died from Alzheimer’s disease, to name a few notable examples. And, Kapila says, animal studies conducted by her team and others suggest that tweaking the mouth’s microbiome, such as by treating gum disease, may help reverse some of those issues, signaling a true cause-and-effect relationship between oral and overall health.

How to take care of your oral health

The good news is, most people already know what they should be doing to keep their mouth healthy: eat a nutritious diet, brush each morning and night, and floss regularly. Yu’s research suggests inadequate flossing is associated with a higher risk of death, while other studies show that good flossing practices lower the chances of developing gum disease. Brushing for at least two minutes, twice a day, also reduces the chances of developing cardiovascular diseases, according to other research.

“Like you shower every day, you have to brush your teeth every day and clean the gaps [in between] every day,” Yu says. “That is basic stuff.”

Finally, keep up with your twice-yearly dental appointments so a professional can assess your tooth and gum health and intervene, if necessary, before a situation grows serious. “Prevention, prevention, prevention is so critical,” Kapila says.

source https://time.com/7006165/flossing-teeth-benefits/

Our Obsession With Dating ‘Icks’ Is Holding Us Back

“New ick unlocked” read the text on a TikTok I’d just opened. The video showed the back of a man’s head, his earlobe flapping in the wind. I laughed as I typed “ick” into the search bar, curious to see more videos on what gives people “the ick,” and was met with a slew of other videos of small, seemingly harmless things that cringe out daters.

By now, the idea of the ick has become common parlance among Gen-Z and Millennial daters. A person gets the ick when they suddenly feel repulsed by the person they’re dating, often because of one (or even multiple) mannerisms that become overwhelmingly embarrassing to them. In fact, at the time of writing this piece, over 200k TikTok posts have included the hashtag “ick.”

Read More: The Psychology of Why We Get ‘the Ick’

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I laughed at another video, this one displaying a man in an awkward squat, peering through a pair of binoculars. But my smile faded as I browsed through more TikToks. One woman’s ick was “When a guy leaves Starbucks with a Frapuccino in his hand.” She looked away from the camera in disgust. “Order a black Americano like a man,” she said. Another video presented the following as things that could potentially give someone the ick: Talking about your ex early on in a relationship, using 2-in-1 shampoo, and using no punctuation in a text message. And the most egregious example yet: One man’s icks included a “woman who doesn’t do PDA” and “a woman who dresses [in a way that is] too revealing.” “If you want to go around showing off your body, show it to your man,” he shrugged, as if this was a completely reasonable thing to say in this day and age.

Originally a harmless joke on the internet, the ick doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Rather, it reinforces dated and sexist stereotypes. And instead of reflecting genuine red flags to look out for in relationships, the ick often speaks to an intolerance of others’ quirks or vulnerabilities. This is where all daters, whether you share these icks or not, lose: By focusing on the failings of our dates—failings that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things—we prevent ourselves from seeing our prospective partners as nuanced individuals. And we run the risk of writing people off too early.

A 2023 survey commissioned by the dating service Seeking makes it clear that the ick isn’t all one big laugh: 2,000 people were surveyed on their top dating turn-offs, and 49% said they’ve ended a relationship because their date did something to give them the ick. The top turn-offs in the survey suggest that the finicky attitude exhibited in TikToks appears to be bleeding into real life, too. If you go through the survey’s top 40 things that give people the ick, you’ll find complaints as trivial as double texting, having a bad tattoo, wearing dirty shoes or “bad jeans”, creased clothing, and using emojis in texts. This seems a great shame. What does it matter if the person who double texts and wears “bad jeans” is kind, respectful, and funny?

It’s also troubling that many people’s icks speak to patriarchal stereotypes. Men shouldn’t order Frapuccinos. Women should cover up. Even the most lighthearted TikToks reflected a disgust in men who appear awkward, gawky, or fragile. (For example, a man flailing about on an ice rink, or a man looking silly in a pair of swimming goggles.) And if we imply, humorously or not, that men appearing goofy and vulnerable is off-putting, are we not reinforcing toxic masculinity? Is asking men to be “more macho” not a step back?

Another reason the ick is a cause for concern is that it drives single people away from each other, in a time when young people need companionship more than ever. According to a February poll from the American Psychiatric Association, 30% of Americans aged 18-34 said they were lonely every day or several times a week. These days, young people spend more and more time conversing in digital spaces than we do in real life ones, getting our social fix from places like Tiktok, Snapchat, Whatsapp messages, and Instagram DMs. We fill the silence of our homes with podcasts and Youtube videos, fostering parasocial relationships with people we don’t really know. But we desperately need real life connections, too. And the quicker we are to dismiss other people, the more isolated we’ll feel.

As we become more and more disconnected from each other, perhaps we should be focusing on the things that unify us, rather than the ways in which people deviate from us and our personal standards. Maybe we shouldn’t be so fixated on the ways in which people fail to meet our expectations, or the momentary ways they embarrass themselves.

The pursuit of perfection is everywhere we look. We face a great deal of pressure to put our “best selves” forward on our social media profiles. We post the best angles, covering up acne scars and cellulite. We display a highlight reel of our lives so that everyone thinks we’re continually on top of the world; traveling to new places, surrounded by friends. What makes it to social media apps is a heavily curated version of our faces, our bodies, and our lives. We present ourselves in a similarly shiny light on dating apps, agonizing over the pictures we choose and our answers to prompts. And because we place such an enormous pressure on ourselves to come across as “perfect,” we’re increasingly expecting perfection from others as well.

Dating apps encourage us to believe that our perfect match is out there, too. We’re served such a limitless stream of alternatives, it’s tempting to believe that we can eventually find our plucked-from-a-dream, made-for-us match: Someone who never does or says anything embarrassing; someone who never irritates us or makes our eyes roll. Just keep swiping, the apps whisper, and you’ll find them.

Read More: If You’re Dating Right Now, You’re Brave

Realistically, though, that person doesn’t exist—everybody has their flaws. In any relationship, you eventually discover that you both have issues you need to work through. And there will inevitably be things in both of you that will be grating: One of you doesn’t take the trash out enough; one of you is forgetful; one of you snores; one of you crunches their food loudly (guilty). The problem arises when these icks are given too much weight, and when they discourage people from working through their mutual frustrations. Will people stop trying to make things work in the pursuit of someone who will never, ever rub them the wrong way? Will people decide not to go on a second date if something made them cringe on the first?

Alarmingly, it seems that people getting rejected over small turn-offs could be deterring them from dating at all. Hinge’s recent Gen Z report found that “over half (56%) of Gen Z Hinge daters say that worrying about rejection has stopped them from pursuing a potential relationship.” Having high standards when it comes to the important stuff, like your partner respecting you and treating you with kindness and patience, along with sharing your values and approach to life, is great. But if we create an atmosphere in which people are so paralyzed by the fear of rejection that they don’t put themselves out there at all, afraid that they’ll be written off for creased clothes or for their choice of beverage, we’ll wind up in an even lonelier world.

It can’t be good for anyone’s humanness to be written off so early; for a character flaw you’d barely blink at if the pair of you were in a long term relationship. In a long term relationship, you might think: “Yes, it’s off putting that my partner sometimes talks with their mouth full, but they’re also caring and funny and they show up for me. And, actually, I sometimes find the whole talking-with-their-mouth-full thing kind of cute.”

People are not perfect, and sometimes that’s exactly what we love about them.

source https://time.com/7007847/dating-icks-holding-us-back-essay/

What Analysts Say About Triggers of Japan’s Stocks Rout

Japanese stocks had their worst day since 1987, with both the Topix index and the Nikkei 225 Stock Average entering bear markets as investors fled amid a surge in the yen, tighter monetary policy and U.S. economic concerns.

Forced margin selling among retail investors was seen as exacerbating the rout, while UBS Securities cut its index targets for Japan.

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Here is what analysts are saying about who is offloading shares and why, and where the market may be headed from here:

Who’s selling?

Rina Oshimo, a senior strategist at Okasan Securities Co.

“Selling is being spurred by the unwinding of long positions and the involvement of trend-following hedge funds. Valuation and fundamental strategies are not applicable in some areas due to the panic selling aspect of the market.”

Takehiko Masuzawa, head of equity trading at Phillip Securities Japan

Kyle Rodda, a senior market analyst at Capital.Com

“The rapid move in the yen is putting downward pressure on Japanese equities, but it’s also driving an unwind of a major carry trade — investors had leveraged up by borrowing in yen to buy other assets, chiefly US tech stocks.”

Yen and BOJ

Rafael Nemet-Nejat, a senior portfolio manager at Jin Investment Management Pte

“This is a massive deleveraging that is occurring, triggered by the BOJ rate hike and the FOMC likely cutting in September causing a huge unwind in the carry trade.”

“Thus, many people long the weak JPY trades and soft landing scenario are being forced to unwind. The moves are extreme especially in crowded longs even if earnings are huge beats, likely indicating that funds are either blowing up and or experiencing a lot of pain.”

Tim Morse, an analyst at Asymmetric Advisors

“This is all yen driven – sudden plunge from 145 towards 142 makes further technical barrier break seem within reach.”

U.S. economy

Jumpei Tanaka, a strategist at Pictet Asset Management

“Japanese equities were adversely affected by the ‘Sahm Rule’ triggered by last Friday’s announcement of the US unemployment rate rising to 4.3%, which raised fears of a U.S. recession.”

“At the moment, the US Economic surprise index is showing a negative (worsening) trend, and investors are becoming increasingly wary of deteriorating U.S. economic indicators. In addition, the Jackson Hole meeting is coming up this month and the FOMC meeting next month.

Hideyuki Suzuki, a general manager at SBI Securities

“At the moment, the US Economic surprise index is showing a negative (worsening) trend, and investors are becoming increasingly wary of deteriorating U.S. economic indicators. In addition, the Jackson Hole meeting is coming up this month and the FOMC meeting next month.

Outlook

James Salter, CIO of Zennor Asset Management

“Our short-term concerns do not detract from our longer-term optimism on capital allocation change in Japan.” 

We do not expect this to have a radical impact on Japanese competitiveness or even earnings.”

Hiroshi Namioka chief strategist at T&D Asset Management Co. in Tokyo.

“With heightened volatility, the market will likely be rough over the next few days, but towards the end of the week it may rebound.”

Rupal Agarwal, Asia quantitative strategist at Sanford C. Bernstein

“We are at a point in the cycle where bad news is bad news. Do note, for Japan we have been recommending to look at quality stocks and add more exposure to domestic Japan since the beginning of the year, so this sell-off hasn’t changed our view.”

“From a long-term perspective, we still remain positive on the Japan structural story.”

source https://time.com/7007854/japan-stock-market-rout/

Gymnast Sunisa Lee Earns Her Sixth Olympic Medal

The Team USA women continued their streak of standing on the podium in every event in Paris so far.

In the uneven bars final, Sunisa Lee, the U.S.’s only entry, repeated as bronze medalist, earning her sixth Olympic medal, and third in Paris.

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China’s Qiu Qiyuan, who finished seventh in the all-around competition in Paris, laid down the gauntlet with a score of 15.5 with a routine that featured challenging release moves and a 7.2 difficulty score. But she was quickly outscored by Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour, who earned 15.7 with a routine of similar difficulty, but impressed the judges—and Lee, who was jumping up and down with every successful release move she executed—enough to gain 0.2 more points for execution. Nemour won gold and Qiyuan the silver.

Read More: Which Olympic Sport Is Hardest on the Body?

“It just looks like a feather flying over the bars; she’s just so beautiful to watch,” Lee said of Nemour’s skills on the uneven bars. “Everything goes so fast and it’s so smooth and I’m in awe every single time. She does so much—you guys don’t even see but she does a lot of repetitions and she’s super, super good.”

It’s the fifth day of the gymnastics competition for the women, and a week after the qualification round kicked off events in Paris, so the strain showed—two of the eight gymnasts—Zhang Yihan of China and Rebecca Downie of Great Britain, fell off the bars during their routines. The gold medalist from Tokyo, Belgium’s Nina Derwael, finished just off the podium in fourth.

For Lee, the bronze medal, which she said was “super pretty,” and the two medals she’s earned so far in Paris mean the most to her. After being told she wouldn’t be able to go gymnastics again following a diagnosis of two kidney conditions, Lee said “I didn’t even think I’d make it this far. At this Games,” she said. “I’m learning to give myself so much grace. Last time around, you could tell if I was disappointed with a turn or something like that, but this time, I’m like, ‘We weren’t even supposed to be here.’ So everything that I’m doing now I’m like, ‘Wow, this is just so much better than last time, and gymnastics is a lot more fun when you’re having fun.’” Even months before the Olympic trials, Lee said she had moments where she thought about putting gymnastics behind her, and credits her coach’s reverse psychology for keeping her committed to the sport. “When I told him, ‘I think I want to be done; I’m quitting,’” he said, ‘Okay. You don’t have to do this,’” Lee said. “His saying that I think made me want [to keep competing] even more. Because I was like, ‘He’s okay with that, but I’m not okay with that.’”

Read More: What Olympic Athletes Eat to Have All That Energy

Lee was expected to debut a new skill at this event, which would then be named after her, but decided that the risk wasn’t worth jeopardizing her chances for a medal. Her scores on bars, which have been consistent through qualification, the team and all-around events, were good enough to get her on the podium, so she decided to enjoy the routine and make up for the mistake she made in the last Olympics in Tokyo. Even though the end result in both of her Olympic experiences are the same—a bronze in the uneven bars— this one, for Lee, is that much sweeter for the journey she has had from that podium to this one. “I am just having a blast here,” she said.

Lee has one more competition left, on Aug. 5, on the balance beam where she and teammate Simone Biles will compete. Biles and Jordan Chiles will also compete on floor that day.

source https://time.com/7007541/gymnast-sunisa-lee-earns-sixth-olympic-medal/