January 15, 2021

Make Your New Year's Wellness Intentions Stick

Traditionally, the New Year brings along a renewed sense of hope and excitement, as we say out with the old and in with the new. While the immense challenges of 2020 may not have been wiped away at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, the start of this new year can still serve as a good moment to look ahead and be thoughtful about how we want to move forward. Physical and emotional wellness are at the core of everything we do at Embr Labs. Knowing that many of us make New Year’s resolutions related to health, we’re sharing some of our best tips on how to manage your wellness goals as you head into 2021.    via GIPHY   1. It’s Not All About Weight Loss There’s perhaps no more classic New Year’s resolution than the desire to lose weight. Each year, people enter January with new gym memberships, new diets, and a new idea of what exact combination of exercise and carb-cutting will get them to their goals this time around. It’s also not news to most of us that despite all of our best efforts, losing weight—and keeping it off—can be a tremendously difficult task.  While there can be potential health benefits to losing weight, the research supports what many dieters already know: the pounds may go away temporarily, but they usually come back, and often with more than what you started with. Our own genetics play a huge factor in determining our body weight, as well as our socioeconomic backgrounds, age, and hormonal fluctuations. This isn’t meant to be discouraging. Many people attribute their failure to lose weight successfully to their own personal shortcomings or lack of willpower, but the myriad of factors that impact our body weight are often outside of our control. Given the low success rates of dieting and even subsequent psychological issues that dieting can give us, reframing health goals away from “losing weight” and towards overall personal wellness may not just improve our physical health, but our mental well-being too.  Instead of thinking about exercise as a means to a smaller waistline, consider creating goals that are tangible and give you a sense of accomplishment, even if the weight doesn’t come off. You might want to run a 10k, try a local sports league, or master a few yoga poses. If you’re looking to change your diet, you can attempt to cook your way through a new cookbook, challenge yourself to limit your takeout ordering, or make a weekly event of trying new food. Whether or not the result of these changes includes weight loss, you can still achieve real goals that help you feel your best.    via GIPHY   2. Make Mental Health Goals “SMART”  As a society we’re beginning to understand the major impact that mental health has on  overall well-being. For many of us, 2020 was an extreme test of  our mental and emotional health, as we all scrambled to figure out how to stay sane during stressful and complicated times.  There are lots of resources out there designed to help you manage your mental well-being. From apps that can help you meditate to CBD supplements that are supposed to relieve stress to the endless slew of products promoting “self-care,” just knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. On top of that, unlike physical health measures, which are marked with concrete numbers or benchmarks, it can be hard to really know what it means to “be less stressed.”  You may have heard of the SMART guidelines, a system of goal-setting focused on creating manageable and quantifiable milestones to help you achieve your objective. While the system was originally created for business management, it can be useful while navigating how to improve your mental health. Here is how it works: Specific:  Make your goals specific. Saying “I want to feel less stressed” is a worthy sentiment, but doesn’t give you something you can work towards. Instead, map out how you are going to achieve what you’re setting out to do. For example, if you want to decrease your stress via meditation, your goal could look like, “I want to dedicate 20 minutes a day for meditation,” and stick to it! Measurable: You need to make sure your goals are measurable. This way, you can actually assess your progress (and feel motivated by it!). Using the example above of daily meditation, you can clearly measure your progress on that goal based on how many days you actually commit to meditation and track how you’re feeling from there. Attainable:  Making sure that your goals are attainable might be the most important step to achieving them. Everyone has different abilities, so what works for someone else may not work for you. If you’re someone who deals with a lot of anxiety, while it would be nice to just be able to stop feeling that, it’s unlikely you can just suddenly become a zen master. Try to create goals that are manageable. If you achieve them, you can always scale up. Relevant:  Contextualize for yourself why you’re trying to set this goal. Why does improving your mental health matter to you? Are you hoping to strengthen relationships with your friends and family? Get better sleep? Accomplish more at work? By making sure you identify why your goals are relevant to your life, you are setting yourself up for a better shot at achieving them. Time-Sensitive: Setting a final deadline for your goal is a great way to hold yourself accountable to getting it done. While mental health improvement is not something you can just “achieve” and move past,, it can still be beneficial to create a milestone to assess your progress. Decide how long you want to give yourself—a month, a year, etc.—and then create smaller deadlines along the way. At the end, you can compare where you are in the present against where you were in the past, and  feel the sense of accomplishment you deserve.    via GIPHY 3. Habit Forming is the Key With wellness goals, it can be difficult to know exactly how to get started. Most of us can make little improvements towards being healthier, but what those incremental changes are may not be totally obvious. So if you’re feeling lost about where to begin, or overwhelmed with the prospect of setting a finite resolution, consider framing your changes as habit building, not working towards a specific goal. The easiest place to start is to think about the habits you already have. Do you check your phone first thing in the morning? Do you walk your dog? Are you finding yourself eating the same meals over and over? Take some time to write down ten habits you have ingrained in your day, and then think about which of those you’d like to leave in the past.  It could be as simple as switching up your night routine to avoid screens before bed or making an effort to go on one walk a day. You don’t need to change everything all at once. Focusing on one or two basic habits could go a long way to achieving a healthier version of yourself. From there, you can figure out what’s really working for you, what changes feel possible, and then you can take on bigger challenges.  These are just a few of our top ideas on how to launch yourself into a renewed, healthy year. Of course, the best place to go when looking for ways to improve your overall health are your doctors and mental healthcare providers. At Embr Labs, we hope all of you have a healthy, safe, and joyful 2021. 

November 25, 2020

2020 was hard. We still have a lot to be thankful for.

Thanksgiving is normally my favorite day of the year. My mom’s side of the family gathers together for a three-day celebration, and a small year is 40 people. This year will be a virtual gathering; but despite the previously unimaginable hardships and challenges, there’s still so much that I’m grateful for in 2020. Virtual gatherings have become the norm since the pandemic started , and the whole Embr Labs team has been working remotely since March, 200 plus days and counting. Yet, in many ways the physical distance has brought us closer together. Navigating the adversity and having honest conversations about our fears and feelings has strengthened the bonds between us. The team during a virtual variety hour in May. Learning to socialize remotely has been a big part of keeping our company culture alive.  Thinking back to March and April, I feel fortunate that we actively made time and space to talk about how scared we all felt. We had spent years creating a culture where our team felt safe and heard, and that translated to open dialogue during the weekly calls we had to check in with one another. Our more senior team members were able to share what it was like to live and work through other moments of great tragedy and uncertainty. They were a voice of calm assurance that, despite not knowing when, this too shall pass. They reminded us that now more than ever, we had to take it moment to moment and day by day, and to set boundaries for social media and checking the news. Many months later, I’m grateful for the collective wisdom of all my co-workers. In addition to wisdom, the Embr team was also able to offer practical suggestions on working remotely, and once again our more experienced team members who had previous experience in remote jobs were able to lead the way. Simple advice like defining rituals to start and end your day helped, like taking a walk around the block (or in my case, wearing an Embr-branded baseball hat while working), helped us create new structures. Months later, we’ve all found ways to make remote working work for us and to focus on the positives, like not having to commute, being able to take an exercise break during the day, and higher quality lunches.  Social meals were the norm at Embr, and while I miss eating with my co-workers during the work day, we’ve created new norms like a monthly virtual team dinner and fun activity. We’ve done a company variety hour (I never realized how talented my co-workers were until I heard one of them bust out a harmonica song), multiple game nights, and most recently, an Embr version of Jeopardy. We’ve been able to take money that would have been spent on company travel and use it to pay for people’s takeout. While it’s not the same as eating together in person, the events always make me smile and feel closer as a team. The Embr team has grown this year too, and one of the unexpected benefits of having to work remotely was being able to recruit team members outside of Boston. As a small startup, we never would have even thought to consider hiring people in different states who couldn’t be in the office on a daily basis prior to COVID. Yet as we settled into the new normal by June and met Dr. Pam Peeke during our search for a Chief Medical Officer, we didn’t think twice about hiring her, even though she lived over 400 miles away. Six months later, we’ve added two more remote people to the team and can’t imagine the company without them. This year has also challenged us to find new ways to deliver for our customers while adapting to unforeseen circumstances outside of our control. Mother’s Day is one of the biggest sales periods of the year, but we were unsure what to expect this past April and May when we launched our sale. When we had the good fortune to see higher sales than we expected, the unexpected side effect was that our fulfillment partner wasn’t able to keep up with demand. While they were able to stay open as an essential business, they didn’t feel safe adding temporary staff and had a much smaller team than normal to fill orders.  Our co-founder and CSO Matt busting out his harmonica chops. They worked as hard as they could; but when the orders kept coming, it became clear that many hundreds of customers wouldn’t get their Embr Waves in time for Mother’s Day. We did our best to make things right with customers who were angry about the extended delays, but most were understanding of the need to prioritize the workplace safety of our wonderful warehouse staff. Now as we enter the holiday season, we’ve worked closely with our partner to better manage capacity and have better systems in place to minimize delays. Our stumbles back in May ended up making us a stronger operation going forward.  Communication has been the constant throughout 2020. While a combination of Zoom, email, chats, and phone calls have replaced in-person interactions, virtual communication comes with its own challenges. In particular, it's not easy to replicate the casual encounters that used to happen effortlessly when we were together in the office. So, over time, we've had to learn how to balance different forms of virtual communication to meet different needs. For example, we've learned that quick questions, which at the start of our remote work might have gotten lost in asynchronous channels like email or Slack, are often better handled using real-time channels like video/phone calls. Plus, these real-time channels also have the added benefit of providing more social connection and the space to ask each other about our days and connect emotionally. That’s helped us check in on each other’s mental health and wellbeing and have a better sense of when someone needs some time off. I’m looking forward to time off for Thanksgiving and seeing what a virtual 40-person family Zoom is like. (Lots of people talking at once, knowing my family.) If there is a quiet moment of reflection during the Zoom, I’ll be thinking about how fortunate Embr is to have navigated this year and still be in a position to serve our customers throughout this holiday season and into the New Year. So even though this year is different, Thanksgiving 2020 will still be my favorite day of the year.