Mario Chamorro has built a career on being a happiness activist and his most recent venture is OYE, a creative wellness app that’s set to improve the narrative of global mental health. Together with J Balvin, Chamorro has co-founded a bilingual and culture-inclusive take on mental wellness. The CEO walks us through how OYE got its start, how his own career and personal life have been transformed by mental wellness and happiness, plus so much more.
Read MoreMarisa Renee Lee is an Obama-administration alum, a consultant, and most recently, an author. Her book Grief Is Love is an exploration of her experience losing her mother and navigating adulthood through the lens of this loss and her grief. In our conversation we talk about grief, her writing process, and the power of connecting with others when in the depths of your grief. Most importantly, we dive into how even after death, our relationships with our loved ones continue.
Read MoreTraveling alone is one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do in my twenties. The experience of getting on a plane, landing in a new town, and learning my way around has become a healing, fulfilling practice. But, like any habit you want to build, it does take practice and some forethought.
Read MoreNational Grief Awareness Day is this Tuesday and with it (hopefully) will come an onslaught of conversations, posts, or videos, about grief. I’m 19 years into my relationship with grief and I know a lot and not much at all. It rattles me some days just how fickle my relationship with grief can be. In moments of frustration, I wish it was more compact and that I understood it better. In moments of peace, I wish I didn’t know it at all.
Read MoreI was first introduced to SFK when a friend took me to her live show in NYC — I've been a fan ever since. I sat down with the social media powerhouse writer, creator of Let's F*****g Date, and the Queen of Confidence to talk about how she created SFK in the first place. We deep dive on building an online personality, how creators can safeguard their own mental health, and her current read.
Read MoreI’ve been off the pill for almost a full year (this October) and there are so many things I wish I would have known before coming off. Unfortunately, wellness and women’s health in general are such hard topics to find information about on the Internet. I read a really great article in the New York Times this week that outlined just how poorly the healthcare system treats women and ways that anyone (but especially those who are oftentimes mistreated by the healthcare system) can advocate for themselves more forcefully.
Read MoreAs humans we’re amazing at one very specific thing, convincing ourselves that we are the only ones in the world going through any very specific thing. The experience doesn’t matter — it can be full on heartbreak or giddy blissful joy — we’ll exist in a vacuum all the same. It’s comfortable there, we get to process, enjoy, or suffer through those feelings without having to contend with others’ opinions on them.
Read MoreI used to hate cooking. My lack of confidence in the kitchen went beyond not trusting if I could follow a recipe. When I moved into my first adult apartment, all of these old fears surfaced and made cooking something I had to learn was fun. I started off by leaning on HelloFresh. I would order the 3-meal boxes so that my job was limited to simply following directions. I loved that I didn’t have to shop for groceries and that most of the veggies or meats already arrived ready to cook.
Read MoreI started a podcast last May just as Mental Health Awareness Month kicked off. It is one of the most fun projects I am currently a part of. On each episode I get to talk to experts, authors, creators, and coaches (most of them friends or people I’ve admired in the space forever) for an hour and then share that conversation with you.
Read MoreThis August my priority is about embracing and uncovering more of the parts of myself that had to go dormant through the pandemic. I want to fold them in with the parts of myself that I’ve recently discovered. I want to see what the hodgepodge of a Vivian who likes working out looks like when she goes on solo trips. I want to know how the part of me who has a deeper appreciation for storytelling and lyricism shows up when she’s going to a small Nashville writer’s round.
Read MoreThis feels like a Jay-Z, “allow me to reintroduce myself” kind of moment. I realized that while I have built a career around talking about mental health, I don’t regularly check-in about how my own journey with anxiety is going. If you’re new around here, I have been going to therapy since the end of 2013 and it was there that I realized that a lot of the “feelings” I had (and have had since I was a child) were actually anxiety.
Read MoreI’ve been reading a book per week lately. Some longer than others, but all books. I’ve gotten better at mixing in personal development books with BookTok’s favorite romance novels (and I’m all the better for it). As we start inching towards a new season, I know that the “back to school” feeling isn’t limited to kids. As adults, we ache for something that helps us determine a before-after or helps propel us to the next chapter.
Read MoreHave you felt the energy shifting around us? I know that everyone keeps talking about this New Moon in Leo — I’m a believer of astrology without ever truly fully understanding what “New Moon in Leo” actually means. BUT, I believe the energy is different around me and that momentum is building for all the good things.
Read MoreLast week we took our first vacation in over a year. It was the first time I completely unplugged and didn’t touch my computer for days — even now, as I write this, I’m doing so on my iPad so that I don’t have to open my computer until after. (It’s actually one of the challenges I’m posing to myself, more below.)
Read MoreDr. Sarah Oreck is our new resident therapist on the podcast. I could not be more excited. For her first introduction, she’s unpacking what the last few weeks (if you can imagine it’s only been that long) have done to our nervous systems and trauma responses. She speaks on why it’s okay to focus on your immediate needs, even if the world is on fire, and how to navigate your first go at breathwork.
Read MoreOver the last few months I’ve been reworking my relationship to money. I’ve documented it openly in hopes that it would help others feel less alone if they were learning how to manage their finances too. I’ve learned that an easy day for impulse spending are holidays that offer heavily discounted items you had no plans to purchase before the discount. Amazon’s Prime Day is this July 12th and July 13th and it's hard to ignore or to not want to add a million things to your cart.
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