Turning 60 is such a great blessing and it leaves me in a state of awe and gratitude as I reflect on my life over the years. My years have been multiplied 6 by 10 times and so for that blessing I will share 6 proclamations of gratitude as I celebrate life on this day.

1. I am grateful that the Heavenly Father has called me into such a ministry of holistic and herbal medicine. The gift he has endowed upon me has not only been a blessing to me and my family but to countless others.

2. I am grateful for the many clients whom I have been blessed to work with, and have helped along their journey of healing and restoration. Being able to minister to clients struggling with various health issues such as diabetes, heart conditions, fertility issues and more has been a fulfillment of the calling placed on my life.

3. I am grateful for the support of my loved ones who continue to stand by me, encourage me, uplift me and pray for me.

4. I am so grateful for the Finest Herbal Shop (FHS) which has become a central hub for people all over the world to find resources that help guide them on a healthy lifestyle journey. FHS provides connections to various classes and trainings to educate and empower people to take ownership of their of their health. It has truly become a haven for many looking for natural healing remedies.

5. I am grateful and honored to have been chosen to receive the Presidential lifestyle achievement award for my humanitarian efforts by the African and Caribbean International Leadership Conference. This is such a great accomplishment to know that my influence isn’t localized but rather is blessing many individuals around the world.

And lastly…

6. I am grateful for my renewed commitment and dedication to continually use this gift to help heal the world one client at a time. I am committed to the belief that change is indeed possible through educating, empowering and elevating others to a greater level of understanding on the power of herbs and their natural healing elements. 60 years down and I am committed and purposed to continue walking this path for all my days.

If you are wondering how to start your own personal holistic journey of healing and restoration, I am here for you! Whatever concerns you may have in regard to your health ranging from diseases such as diabetes, hypertension or infertility to skin care or hormonal imbalances, I can help you. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk!!

Today I am forever grateful!

Happy 60th birthday to me!!!

Click Here to get a copy of my birthday giveaway.

Show your love and support for my birthday day by subscribing to my YouTube channel 

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Let me know what you’re up to and what’s going on this spring. I love catching up with you and hearing about your life!

For now, it’s time for the weekly Friday Faves party. This is where I share some of my favorite finds from the week and around the web. I love learning about your faves, too, so please shout out something you’re loving in the comments section below.

Friday Faves 4/19

Life:

We had the most amazing date night at Le Rendezvous last weekend. It’s a Tucson classic, and so many people have raved about it, so we finally tried it out. Everything was a dream.

We shared scallops for an appetizer, enjoyed wine, the beef tenderloin for two (with perfect satueed veggies and a lil scalloped potato statck I wanted to live in), and Grand Marnier souffle. YUM. We’ll definitely be back with the girls, especially because they have escargot; their all-time favorite appetizer.

I realized I never posted before and after pics for our great floor project. We had our carpet upstairs replaced with laminate, and they also re-did our bedroom and office, since they used to be hardwood. We just wanted everything to match, and wanted a neutral brown that would be classic.

I’m so so happy with how it turned out!

We also had the railing on our stairs replaced.

This is what it looked like before:

with the safety rail as they redid the railing:

and the after:

A million times better.

We never intended to stay here forever, but we keep making updates to the house (like the pool!) that make us want to stick around longer. Also with the current market, we’re not planning on going anywhere.

The girls and I saw Phil Wickham in concert last night! I had been looking forward to it – the girls were neutral about it lol- for quite a while. We all ended up loving it and were singing and dancing the entire time. He’s incredibly talented, and I loved the overall messaging of the show, too. It was a great positive vibe festival for all of us.

P also received her First Communion this past weekend. We celebrated Mass with the fam and had an epic brunch at Ventana.

Read, watch, listen:

Don’t forgot to check out this week’s podcast episode about tapping here!

Five pick-me-ups.

Fitness, health, and good eats:

Still cruising along with the CBO protocol. I’m finally heading towards the end and it’s been nice to implement more foods into the rotation. Protocols are 20% off right now, including my fave detox. You can also stack the code FITNESSISTA10 for many of the EquiLife products with this link. 

Healthy Trader Joe’s shopping list. 

Fashion + beauty:

Got this dress from Dillard’s and obsessed with it. (I sized down to an XS since I read in the reviews that it runs big.)

It’s similar to a La Vie Style House tunic at a fraction of the price. I got hot pink, but now I want the black one. 

On a totally different note, you may have noticed that the Beautycounter site has gone dark starting today.

Here’s a copy of the email that I sent to my clients this morning:

Back In 2021, the company was sold to a private equity firm, The Carlyle Group. After a few years of discovering a mis-match in the true vision for the amazing company, founder and CEO, Gregg Renfrew (along with other like minded Investors) is buying it back.

This is great news – for you, for me, and for Beautycounter (and its mission) as a whole! I have full trust in Gregg as the leader.

The not-so-great piece of all this is that there will be a bit of downtime during the transition.

Starting today, the Beautycounter website will be DOWN, and not be available to shop again until Wednesday, May 1.

There are lots of rumors flying around that the company is closing, but Gregg has assured us that everything will be back to business as usual (products, ordering process, website, product credit – everything!) once the sale is complete on May 1. It should all look and feel the same at that time.

I have heard that there are some good things planned starting in May, including some new product launches this summer, so stay tuned!

Happy Friday, friends! Have a wonderful weekend and thank you so much for stopping by the blog today.
xo

Gina

The post Friday Faves 4.19 appeared first on The Fitnessista.

Hi friends! How are you? I hope you enjoyed the weekend! Ours was packed with fun events and the girls got in their first swim of the season. I’d love to hear what you were up to!

For today’s post, I wanted to share some cute Abercrombie finds for spring and summer! I fought the Abercrombie resurgence for so many years… it just brought back memories of a popped collar polo with a lacy tank underneath, short frayed denim skirt, and Rainbow sandals ???? I worked at Abercrombie in high school – I wasn’t cool enough to be a “model” but I was a super efficient cashier I tell ya – and spent my entire paychecks on clothes.

Needless to say, when I saw Abercrombie making a comeback for our generation (those who don’t want to look too young but also not too matronly), I was skeptical. Then, I started to see more and more of it, and realized that the quality is still there, but the styles are more classic. It also gives off a Reformation-ish vibe, and I’m here for it. They have SO many cute things right now, so I wanted to dedicate a post to sharing some of my faves.

Here are the goods!

Abercrombie Spring Fashion Finds

These tailored pants.

This everyday mini dress.

This linen blend blazer.

This bodysuit.

These high-waisted denim shorts.

This maxi dress.

This cut-out maxi dress.

This bandeau bikini top + bottoms.

This crochet cover-up.

These straw sandals.

This puff sleeve floral dress.

More Favorites

This pleated active skirt.

This squareneck cropped tank.

Satin sleep shirt + shorts.

This oversized cropped poplin blouse.

You may also enjoy:

• My Favorite Beautycounter Products For Spring
• My Summer Skincare & Makeup Staples
• Fitness Favorites For Spring & Summer

The post Abercrombie Spring Fashion Finds appeared first on The Fitnessista.

How to adapt the pose to your body.

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It's complicated.

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It's an invitation to come home to your body, tend to your nervous system, and revel in earthly pleasures.

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And they take less than five minutes a day.

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Can’t concentrate? Give your mind and body a break with these beginner-friendly poses.

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It’s such a simple way to give back to yourself, others, and the planet.

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It’s a time to break through the limitations that confine you.

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It's a week to actually see what is being shown to you.

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And what they learn from the extreme experience.

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And a look at the eco-friendly measures many studios have put into practice.

The post Why Many Yoga Studios Still Struggle With Sustainability appeared first on Yoga Journal.

This year for Earth Day, Mountain Rose Herbs is joining Earth Day Oregon, a coalition of local nonprofit organizations and businesses dedicated to celebrating Earth Day, protecting the environment, and making a positive impact in our communities. Throughout the month of April, Earth Day Oregon serves as a central hub, gathering and showcasing a diverse array of events hosted by nonprofits and businesses across the state. From tree plantings and river cleanups to educational workshops and sustainability fairs, we are thrilled to be part of the Earth Day movement, bringing together so many incredible community members!

On 20 March, at the opening ceremony for the annual Leipzig Book Fair, the 2024 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding was awarded to New School philosopher Omri Boehm for his book Radikaler Universalismus (Radical Universalism) (Propyläen Verlag, 2022). During a keynote address that preceded Boehm’s acceptance speech, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was interrupted repeatedly by shouting from several demonstrators accusing the German government of complicity with Israeli genocide in the Gaza strip. ‘The power of the word,’ Scholz responded, ‘brings us all together here in Leipzig – not shouting.’

At the start of his formal speech, Boehm reminds his audience of the public conversations about the meaning of Enlightenment among intellectuals like Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn in the 1780s. He also discusses the contemporary friendship between the Jewish philosopher Mendelssohn and the Protestant playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Their friendship was memorialized in Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise and its famous ring parable, which suggests that we judge Jews, Christians and Muslims not by the differing religions they profess but according to their conduct and the similar virtues that make them pleasing to God. 

Public Seminar

‘Jerusalem sky’. Image: Bon Adrien / Source: Wikimedia Commons

***

I was going to read a rather long and philosophical acceptance speech, but, after the disruption we saw earlier this evening, it must become somewhat longer. I’d like to say a word about what happened earlier on.

Speech and public discussion are the vehicles of reason and universalism. But that open speech, reason, and universalism are the answer to the burning injustices of the world and our time cannot be taken for granted. Sometimes – often, even – they serve as a mask that helps preserve an unjust status quo that ought to be challenged. The protesters tonight made an awful mistake. But they were trying to tell us something about open speech – and they were trying to tell us that by their disruption of a speech.

It was and is necessary to stop their disruption. But it is insufficient. We still have to rise to the challenge of showing that speech and open discussion can facilitate necessary, urgent changes – and not just block them. My book Radical Universalism is about that very problem. Defending universalism must go through listening to what these protestors tonight had to tell us. The answer that the book offers is, however, not the same as theirs, but the opposite.

On the night of 31 December 1785, an old Jewish man left his home in Berlin to rush a book manuscript for publication. It was ready the evening before, but it was Friday, and he had to wait for the end of the Shabbat. His wife warned him. It was too cold. He was too frail to leave the house. Four days later, he died of complications of a cold he caught that night. The old man was Moses Mendelssohn, the towering figure of the German and the Jewish Enlightenment. The book that was so urgent to him was titled An die Freunde Lessings (‘To Lessing’s Friends’).

The friendship between Mendelssohn and Lessing is not only the origin of the tragic ‘Jewish- German symbiosis’ – Lessing famously modeled Nathan der Weise after the character of his Jewish friend – but also, not less significantly, it was the model of Christian-Jewish-Muslim understanding: Nathan’s well-known Ring Parable has three rings, not two. This ideal of understanding is a proud European one, but Lessing had good reasons to place its origins outside of the continent – the drama takes place in Jerusalem. Alongside Kant’s well-known essay, Lessing’s Nathan is probably the boldest answer we know to the question: What is enlightenment? Was ist Aufklärung?

For Kant, enlightenment is humanity expressed through the freedom to think for oneself. For Lessing, it is humanity expressed through the freedom to form friendships. At a few crucial junctures in the play, Nathan proclaims: Kein Mensch muss müssen (‘No one must must’). It is only in light of this assertion of freedom that the play’s familiar motto comes to shine, as Nathan stresses in all directions: Wir müssen, müssen Freunde sein! (‘We must, we must be friends!’) But what is the relation between Kant’s enlightenment and Lessing’s, between the ideal of thinking for oneself and that of friendship?

In 1959, Hannah Arendt received the Lessing Prize from the City of Hamburg. Her acceptance speech, Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten (‘On humanity in dark times’), could just as well have been titled ‘To Lessing’s friends’. If bringing things into the sun – into the light of public discourse – normally illuminates thinking, a dark time for Arendt is one in which ‘the light of the public obscures everything’ (Das Licht der Öffentlichkeit verdunkelt). In dark times, public speech, the main pillar of enlightenment, betrays; trust in a shared human life lies shattered. But, says Arendt, ‘Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination,’ which comes from the ‘flickering light’ that, under almost ‘all circumstances,’ some unique men and women ‘shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.’

At such dark moments, we search for alternative pillars. One alternative is brotherhood, fraternité – quite literally the unconditional solidarity that forms among persecuted groups through attachment to their own identity. Arendt doesn’t doubt that such bonding of the persecuted is often necessary and produces true greatness, but she insists that, by reducing humanity to the identity of the ‘persecuted and the enslaved’, it constitutes a retreat into privacy. A logic of universal brotherhood depends on what we have in common with others, not on difference from them. Moreover, the solidarity of the persecuted cannot extend beyond the persecuted group – to those who are in position to take universal responsibility, in love of the world. That’s the origin of Arendt’s familiar critique of identity politics in general and the politics of her own Jewish identity, Zionism.

A second alternative in dark times is truth. Specifically, the ‘self-evident’ truths that can be known by all, regardless of belonging – thereby serving as a pillar of shared existence. Yet Arendt knows well that falling back on truth in dark times has become questionable, since self-evident truths in modern societies have been pushed to the side. ‘We need only look around to see that we are standing in the midst of a veritable rubble heap … [that] public order is based on people holding as self-evident precisely those “best-known truths” which, secretly scarcely anyone still believes in.’

I think that Arendt was right about the demise of truths considered ‘self-evident’, perhaps with the only difference that, in our times, the fact that scarcely anyone believes the ‘best-known truths’ is no longer much of secret. That hardly anyone accepts the proposition, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ is almost too obvious; about the truth of the claim Die Würde des Menschen ist unantasbar (‘Human dignity is inviolable’) people are still willing to dissemble.

The core idea of my book Radical Universalism was to warn that such post-humanism is not just a theoretical nuance, not just noise that’s generated by the petty scandals of cancel culture, but much more dangerous; and to try to draw on Kant in order to show that it is possible – in theory and in practice – to rehabilitate our relation to such truths, as opposed to identity or a narrow brotherhood of the oppressed. The book’s goal was to insist on Kant’s idea of humanity as a moral rather than a biological category, thereby stemming the tide of the dark post-humanism that has infected the identitarian Left, the identitarian Right and, no less importantly, the identitarian center, whose alleged opposition to identity too often amounts to a narrow brotherhood of the privileged.

But Arendt doesn’t go there. She goes with Lessing, not with Kant, namely with his ideal of friendship as the alternative to both identity and truth: more specifically, the ideal of friendship that Lessing had rehabilitated from Aristotle, as a public affair, rather than a private, personal matter as we have come to think of it in modern societies. The main characteristic of such friendship is (allegedly) its opposition to truth. In the name of friendship and Menschlichkeit (humanity), truth must be put aside. To quote from Arendt: ‘The dramatic tension of [Nathan der Weise] lies solely in the conflict that arises between friendship and humanity with truth … Nathan’s wisdom consists solely in his readiness to sacrifice truth to friendship.’ In this sacrifice lies not just Nathan’s wisdom, but his ideal of enlightenment. Indeed, for some people the tension Arendt alleged to exist between cold truth and warm friendship has become almost axiomatic.

But I think Arendt’s interpretation of friendship is false. There’s no tension between what I call ‘radical universalism’, the Kantian Enlightenment, and the idea of friendship. On the contrary.

To see why, it’s worth returning to Aristotle. One of his most familiar statements is Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas (‘Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend’). At first glance, it seems the philosopher of friendship has chosen truth over friendship. But on closer examination of the text, Aristotle doesn’t prefer truth to friendship; for when he chooses truth, it is precisely because truth is a better friend. His statement has to be understood in light of Aristotle’s account of friendship. For Aristotle, the ideal of genuine friendship can only be achieved in the relation between virtuous individuals, and virtuous individuals cannot assume that a statement of truth contradicting the other can constitute personal harm – indeed, just the contrary. Therefore, when Aristotle is out to undermine Plato’s theory of the forms with the statement Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas, he says this because he must, he must be Plato’s friend.

And Kant? It is striking that whereas the Aristotelian interest in friendship almost disappeared in subsequent philosophy, it was Kant, the philosopher of autonomy, who rediscovered it as a philosophical topic and ventured to explain our ‘duty to friendship’ as a ‘schema’ – the Kantian technical term – of the categorical imperative, that is, of treating humans as ends rather than means. As such a schema, the idea of friendship serves as the bridge, a necessary one, between the abstract notion that stands at the height of Kant’s whole philosophy – treating humans as ends – and concrete experience. If you want to generate an image showing what treating humans as mere means amounts to, think of slavery. For an image of treating them as ends, think of friendship.

Now recall that for Kant, enlightenment is thinking for oneself. But, crucially, thinking for oneself isn’t something that can be done alone. Kant argues that we would not be able to think very ‘much’ or even ‘correctly’ if we could not think together ‘with others’ with whom we ‘communicate’. The big Kantian discovery was that Öffentlichkeit (that is, the public sphere) is necessary to enlightenment and reason. Yet Kant is aware that under some circumstances we cannot but be ‘constrained’, holding back significant parts of our judgments in public. We’d like to discuss our positions about ‘government, religion and so forth’ but cannot risk sharing them openly.

But if we have a friend we can trust, we can ‘open’ (eröffnen) ourselves to them and thereby are ‘not completely alone’ with our ‘thoughts, as in a prison’. The word eröffnen is at the very heart of the idea of friendship. In dark times, when the Öffentlichkeit and the light of publicity necessary to thinking for oneself dims, friendship allows us to continue to open – eröffnen – our thinking, preserving the transformative power, even the revolutionary potential, of thinking for oneself.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that every friendship is ‘a sort of secession, even a rebellion … a pocket of potential resistance.’ Kant would agree.

Looking at the Kibbutzim on Gaza’s border on October 7 – as complete families were slaughtered, children murdered in front of their parents, women systematically raped, and hundreds of hostages taken – and then witnessing the moral bankruptcy of those alleged radicals who call this ‘armed resistance’; looking at the flattening of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of women and children, the catastrophic starvation – and then witnessing alleged liberal theorists delegitimize for months a humanitarian ceasefire in the name of ‘self-defence’:  in this shouting match between the proponents of the ‘armed resistance’ doctrine and the ‘self-defence’ theory we see what a dark time looks like – when the light of the public obscures more than it reveals.

Perhaps at this moment, speaking of friendship between Israelis and Palestinians could seem too rosy, naïve, or utopian. Even worse, it could seem grotesque.

But no. Jewish-Palestinian friendships do exist; and where they do, the difficult demands that they pose offer light – and perhaps the only true source of enlightened resistance.

Israeli and Palestinian friends could not pretend that what happened on October 7 happened in a vacuum, just as much as they knew that speaking about this mass murder as ‘armed resistance’ was humiliating, first and foremost to proud Palestinians who rightly demand freedom. My Palestinian friends know that whoever calls what my country is doing in Gaza ‘self-defence’ humiliates my identity to the core. Israeli and Palestinian friends can talk to each other, and in public, about the catastrophe, and about the catastrophic failures of our brothers and sisters, knowing that if, after we speak, we are unable to look our friends in the face, we will also be unable to look in the mirror. Friendship was always the test that protected us from the catastrophic failures of brotherhood and the grotesque abuse of abstract ideas about armed resistance and self-defence.

In 2010, Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset, gave a Holocaust memorial speech: ‘This is the place and the time to cry out the cries of all of those who [are struggling] to unburden themselves from the scenes of death and horror.’ And he continued: ‘On this day, one must shed all political identities’ and ‘wear one robe only: the robe of humanity.’ This robe of humanity isn’t abstract humanism, but humanism expressed as the Freundschaftserklärung (the declaration of friendship) of a Palestinian representative who shares with Jews, as Tibi said, ‘the same land and the same country.’ This Freundschaftserklärung was uncompromising, even radical, and posed Israelis a provocation, because friendship with Jews requires equality. But no one can doubt in good faith that the man who gave that speech, and people represented by him, had any patience with the violent nonsense of alleged radicals who spoke of October 7 as ‘armed resistance’.

On the Jewish side, I cannot but think of the words of Amos Oz, uttered in a completely different time: ‘The idea of expelling and driving out the Palestinians, deceitfully called here a “transfer” … we must rise and say simply and sharply: it is an impossible idea. We will not let you do that … Israel’s Right must know that there are acts that, if attempted, will cause the split of the state.’

This was said decades before the people that Oz addresses – the religious Right – had become a major force in the Israeli government. That’s why his words only make sense if they are repeated today. His use of ‘we’ and ‘you’ in this paragraph means everything: the acts that ‘we’ will not let ‘you’ do are the ones that fracture Jewish brotherhood. If we don’t repeat Oz’s statement as we look at Gaza today, knowing that the idea of transfer is anything but impossible, we will not be able to look our Palestinian friends in the face.

And what about Jewish-German friendship? Where it exists – and in some places, it does – it is a true wonder, one that is very personally dear to my heart. But this wonder now has to be protected from debasement. No Jewish-German friendship could exist if it cannot, in our dark times, have room to acknowledge the difficult truths that must be stated publicly in the name of Jewish-Palestinian friendship. Any other notion would humiliate Mendelssohn and Lessing’s model: Nathan’s ring parable has three rings, not two, and there will be no less than three rings for us.

Truth does not have to be put to the side in this dark time. For as Kant knew as well as Lessing, we ought, we ought to stay friends.

Since the collapse of socialism, demographic change has emerged as one of the biggest Rashomons of contemporary societies, especially in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Understood as a palpable concern by some and dismissed as a political construct by others, it is becoming increasingly prominent in public discourse. In a region with contested yet increasingly liberal social norms, including declining childbearing preferences, conservative governments from Budapest to Warsaw and Belgrade have sought to turn back the societal tide encouraging people to have more children. Financial assistance for parents, especially when coupled with abortion restrictions, have attracted a considerable liberal backlash. But should pronatalism be seen as a conservative cause? Or could raising the birth rate – currently at an all-time low in the region and lower than in most of the continent – bring palpable benefits for states and societies?

Demographers point out that low fertility, which together with increasing life expectancy results in ageing populations, raises a wide range of questions about the future sustainability of pensions, healthcare and overall living standards. Of course, concluding that these challenges can be best addressed by encouraging more births is a leap of faith. Babies increase the share of dependents in a population before decreasing it decades into the future.

Other solutions are more immediate but less feasible or popular. Immigration, especially from outside of Europe, has been shunned by the same pronatalist governments allegedly concerned about unfavorable demographics. Adaptation, for instance by lengthening the amount of time spent in work, tends to draw massive popular opposition. Automation carries electoral risks of its own and can prove challenging to implement even if the political will is found. Free from such obstacles, pronatalism has become the name of the game.

One child fewer than preferred

Even the biggest critics of CEE pronatalism could not dispute the scale and speed of the region’s fertility decline. Despite varied economic and political landscapes, CEE countries share strikingly similar fertility figures. From Budapest to Vladivostok, birthrates hover close to the EU average of 1.6 children per woman, with notable exceptions being Ukraine and Poland, where the figures dip even lower.

Beneath this overarching narrative of decline, however, lies a complex tapestry of desires and realities. Contrary to the prevailing notion of a burgeoning ‘childfree’ society, opinion surveys suggest a persistent CEE preference for larger families: most individuals aspire to the traditional two-child ideal. However, they find themselves constrained by a multitude of factors, ranging from health-related issues exacerbated by lifestyle choices and delayed parenthood to overestimations of the efficacy of reproductive technologies.

Cultural trends also exert a significant influence. Traditional divisions of labor within the home, which assign the bulk of domestic and caregiving responsibilities to women, are increasingly at odds with contemporary social norms. Faced with the ‘double burden’ of work and care, more women are opting for employment over children. Obsolete understandings of family life paradoxically keep birth rates low, much to the chagrin of traditionalists and many progressives alike, as evidenced by the persisting average preference of about two and a half children per woman.

Children’s hands as puppets. Image by jacquelinetinney via Flickr

Voluntary or not, the otherwise European-wide trend of low birth rates poses a more pressing challenge to CEE. Unlike population trends in most of Western Europe, and to a large extent because of Western Europe, net emigration characterizes CEE’s demography. Italy is a key example of a Western European country also with a low birth rate, ageing population and high level of emigration, especially of young people.
While migration data tend to be patchy, it is evident that the balance between births and deaths, even though negative in most places in the region, is insufficient to explain key demographic changes. The EU’s ‘big bang’ enlargement into CEE in 2004, while enormously beneficial for the region, has also reduced its populations, as millions of people opted for an immediately higher standard of life in Western Europe as opposed to the near-assured yet incremental prospect of progress at home. Contrary to what pro-EU policymakers would like to hear, the exacerbating effects of EU accession on brain drain do not bode well for the Western Balkans, further strengthening the case for pronatalist policy.

Three or four children, no more, no less

At first glance, pronatalism seems equally widespread on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The biggest star at the 2023 Budapest Demographic Summit A biannual international gathering of pronatalist policymakers, activists and church officials hosted by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
was not an East European politician but Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who has taken measures against a declared population crisis in her country. A similar pan-continental picture emerges from the official stances of European governments regarding their desired fertility levels: in 2019 81% said they wanted births to go up, with no major geographical differences.

However, if one scratches beyond the surface of self-declarations, it appears that, apart from Meloni, it is mainly CEE policymakers who are putting their money where their mouth is. While the regional pioneer of pronatalist policy was Russia, which unveiled its Maternity Capital programme as early as 2007, it has since been surpassed – in both financial ambition and political saliency – by three other countries: Hungary, Poland and Serbia. All three nations share important similarities beyond the regular participation of their pronatalist schemes’ creators at the Budapest Demographic Summit.

First, all three countries were ruled by conservative and less-than-fully democratic governments at the time of the introduction of these policies. Of course, pronatalism is not the only topic on which Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, which moved into opposition last autumn, are worth mentioning in the same sentence. From Budapest to Warsaw and Belgrade, pronatalism has coexisted with – and arguably strengthened – the popular appeal of these parties as the alleged protectors of their respective nations and core values. There is no better illustration of the uncontestable status that pronatalism has acquired in these countries than the fact that Poland’s new prime minister, Donald Tusk, has embraced and even vowed to expand the pronatalist policy he used to vehemently oppose.

Second, in all three cases, the pronatalist instrument of choice has been financial assistance for parents, which have mostly been designed to prioritize pronatalist goals over societal gain. On the one hand, pronatalism is not a zero-sum game: more cash can help current parents raise their children as much as it can encourage people to have (more) children. And the cash has definitely been flowing in spades. In Hungary, among other incentives, parents of three are exempt from paying income tax until the third child has turned 18 (as of 2019); parents of four are exempt for life (Orbán himself is a father of five). In Serbia and Poland, parents of four effectively receive an (additional) average monthly wage, which may not make a huge difference in Belgrade and Warsaw but often doubles the income of rural households.

Parents of one and two, however, don’t receive much more in Serbia and Hungary than they would elsewhere in Europe, even when accounting for the lower cost of living in the East. The Polish package is more balanced, even though it also carries some premiums past the second child. This can only be explained on pronatalist grounds: most people have one or two children regardless of policy, so the point of incentives is to encourage them to give birth to three or more. But this approach sacrifices social goals. Due to economies of scale, parents need less money for each additional child, as children in large families can share rooms and babysitters (or, in the case of large differences in age, babysit each other), pass down clothes and benefit from in-bulk food purchases. In Serbia, the timing of the support can also be problematized, as some of it is provided as a lump sum upon childbirth, possibly as a further nudge to parents. Even though it is usually older children who have more expensive consumption needs for anything from extracurriculars to clothing and entertainment.


Thus, despite the pronatalism of their governments, Hungarian and Serbian parents with one or two children – which will always make up the majority of the population regardless of policy – are poorer than they would be if they were childless. Policymakers offer them the opportunity to at least ‘break even’ but only if they have two additional children. Interestingly, however, the support becomes less generous – and in Serbia disappears altogether – from the fifth child onwards, possibly in an attempt to exclude Romani households, which face regular discrimination in both countries. Moreover, the tax-based nature of the Hungarian package serves an explicitly anti-egalitarian function, as the tax deduction, which is expressed as a share of income, translates into larger amounts for higher-earning families.

The fact that the packages provide the biggest boost to, say, well-off farmers with three or four children, while doing little to help low-income or even middle-income urban households meet the cost of living in large cities, speaks volumes about their political dimension. Our three countries of interest are no exception to the global realignment of voter loyalties away from class and towards more cultural concerns. The conservative governments in Hungary and Poland recognized a long time ago that an appeal to tradition is their strongest election winner: abortion restrictions (which have typically not been framed in pronatalist terms), for instance, gradually established themselves as one of Orbán and Kaczyński’s signature policies. As their voter base centres predominantly on the low-educated often from rural areas, who are more likely to have large families, pronatalism might have served as a key draw for this demographic. CEE pronatalist policymakers often like to take credit for having spotted the challenge of demographic change before ‘it is too late’, but the most cunning thing about their obsession with birth rate might have been their recognition of its enormous political value.

Cash alone won’t lead to more births

Even if CEE pronatalism serves a strong political function, its potential benefits in helping ageing populations mitigate their future public spending pressures and maintain their living standards remain valid. If pronatalism works, it might not matter if policymakers are embracing it for self-serving reasons. It shouldn’t be dismissed as missing the mark completely, especially since it has been around in its current form for what is still a rather short time. In Serbia, only since 2018.
But its success is at best debatable.

The effectiveness of pronatalist policy is notoriously difficult to measure, as birth rates might change for reasons other than policy, including cultural trends and the age structure of a population. If a country happens to have many individuals of reproductive age at a given time, it might see a misleadingly high number of births. Similarly, if it is undergoing what is known as ‘fertility postponement’, or the usually gradual shift towards having children later in life, which European countries have indeed been experiencing over the past few decades, then births might seem misleadingly low in the short term.

It is reasonably safe to conclude, however, that pronatalism has not yet been a resounding success in any of the three CEE ‘poster countries’. Hungary’s birth rate, the highest of the three, is hovering around the EU average despite offering some of the strongest incentives on the continent. Poland saw births go up in the first few years since the introduction of its pronatalist policy in 2015 before declining again to currently one of the lowest levels in Europe: 1.3 children per woman. Serbia is, for now, seeing an increase but probably no more than a few hundred new births annually can be attributed to policy.

There are plenty of possible reasons for these underwhelming results. The prioritization of third and fourth children, while seemingly conducive to pronatalism, might not be the best way to boost birth rates in countries where most people don’t want to have more than two children. Moreover, in Hungary’s case, the focus on high-income individuals, not only through the tax-based nature of the support but also through the availability of housing top-ups, Only meaningful to those already close to being able to afford a home.
might be counterproductive, as wealthier citizens tend to be less sensitive to policy nudges in the first place. Additionally, all three countries are characterized by some of the lowest levels of trust in government in Europe, indicating that citizens have little faith that the policies will be around long enough to be relevant to them, which might lead potential beneficiaries to exclude the packages from their family planning-related reasoning. Finally, the national-conservative and less-than-democratic climate in these countries might be deterring the more progressive layers of their populations from imagining a future at home, with or without policy.

Decoupling pronatalism from the likes of Orbán

Demographic change is a powerful thing: there is no developed country known to researchers, apart from perhaps Israel, whose context is for various reasons impossible to replicate, where population ageing and decline have been fully avoided. Yet, demographers also tend to agree that pronatalist policy is not pointless either: all family policies, including childcare, parental leave, and, yes, financial assistance, can do their small part in boosting birth rates, or more likely, in slowing their decline. Across CEE, governments have been providing more cash to parents, while at the same time curbing its pronatalist potential by failing to make childcare more accessible and affordable: the region continues to record some of the lowest enrolment rates, especially among children aged 0-3.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic once quipped that ‘if we don’t increase the number of children, we might as well “turn out the lights” behind us’. Inflated demographic alarmism aside, the real question might not be whether CEE can survive demographic change, but whether pronatalism can outlive the conservative agendas it is currently associated with. The case to watch right now is Poland: can progressives start embracing pronatalism if it no longer comes with abortion restrictions and ethnonationalist scaremongering? Demography, after all, is the science of hard numbers. The best thing policymakers and voters worrying about demographic change can do is to approach it free from ideological bias – be it from the Left or from the Right.

But the political situations in nation states and regional unions often bring the jurisdiction of borders into question. There are states determined to acquire more land. And those pushing to restrict legal entry. Forced migration, caused by environmental crises, war and poverty, has become a particularly keen topic for inhospitable hosts, focusing on both exclusion and expansionist solutions. The European Union’s bid to extend its border to third-country processing facilities for asylum seekers is a case in point.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Graz, collaborating with Eurozine on a new focal point, calls this phenomenon ‘Elastic Borders’: ‘Thinking of borders as elastic offers new avenues to understanding not only how state borders stretch and retract, but also how they create fields of stress and violations in the processes of extension and retraction.’ With contributions from the NOMIS foundation-funded research project and Eurozine partner journals, articles range from contemporary field work on contentious border practices in Greece, Spain and Tunisia to the legal and technological enactment of elastic borders.

Measuring the mobile body

Laura Jung’s article on border and surveillance technologies takes us on a historical trawl. Her research draws parallels between late nineteenth-century criminology and contemporary data processing techniques. From painstakingly exact facial measurements to fingerprinting, the line between keeping a record of potential repeat offenders to profiling criminal types was easily crossed in the past. Enthusiasts enlisted scientific scrutiny for deviant ends. As Jung writes, criminal anthropologists ‘enumerated a list of so-called “stigmata” or physical regularities found in the body of the “born criminal”.’

Highlighting the crossover between criminology and eugenics, Jung references Frances Galton and his composite photographs of convicts. The process of attempting to identify markers of delinquency is itself now recognized as criminal.

And yet EU authorities utilizing biometric data processing to register migrants risk a similar transgression of human rights today. The Eurodac database, which records arrival points, fingerprints, photos and other forms of identification, may be espoused for its objectivity, supposedly eradicating human error and increasing ‘fairness’. But the notion that automated processes reduce bias is a simplistic argument. While machine learning may relieve the need for ongoing, incremental decisions, the system’s parameters will have been pre-set. Ethical biases, based on cultural prejudices and political allegiances, determine who will be targeted, how and when.

A tendency to criminalize in advance has resurfaced. And now that ‘the minimum age of migrants whose data can be stored has been lowered from fourteen to six years old,’ even the innocence of very small children is being corrupted by the system.

One way or another

Ongoing instability, due to conflict, environmental crises and economic hardship in parts of Africa, forces many to migrate. Chiara Pagano, focusing on Black migrants who make it to Tunisia’s borders, reports on state violence and informal trading. As a witness to this volatile situation, Pagano describes the disappearance of those attempting to make it to Europe. Once arrested, migrants are often brutally deported back across the border: ‘for over a month, Tunisian state authorities committed over 300 more migrants to their deaths; not readmitted, they were de facto trapped on the desert fringe between Tunisia and Libya under the scorching July sun’.

The European Commission, in paying the Tunisian government a €127 million first instalment in financial aid to combat what is deemed ‘irregularized migration’, is playing a pivotal role in this murderous scenario. ‘This move exemplified the EU’s active support of … the institutional, social and physical racialization of “sub-Saharan migrants” throughout their migratory path’, writes Pagano.

However, the strategic payment didn’t result in the closed border that the EU had hoped to leverage. And a subsequent transfer of 60 million euro was ‘dismissed as a disrespectful form of charity’. But the real reason for such a refusal seems to be based on a more pragmatic reality: ‘Keeping borders open is strategically more convenient to the Tunisian government than responding to EU blackmail, also due to the use that citizens and non-citizens on the Tunisian-Libyan frontier make of informal cross-border trade to navigate the country’s economic crisis.’ Pagano asks whether the EU’s failing cash for immobility plan is anything more than the legitimization of Tunisia’s authoritarian regime.

Tearing down fortress Europe

Writing for the Green European Journal, Aleksandra Savanović recognizes that safeguarding the dubious concept of a ‘European way of life’ has serious implications for migrants. Though indispensable for economic growth, new arrivals, who endure militarized border systems, face a future of privatized detention centres. Here, the EU also blatantly reveals its willingness to extend union borders when it suits ulterior motives: ‘member states … advocate for detention in 22 countries in the Balkans, Africa, Eastern Europe and West Asia … with the intention to eventually establish offshore processing facilities.’

Savanović asks whether a new focus on common goals could provide the necessary end to these dehumanizing practices: ‘What if, instead of investing in detention centres, we invest in elaborate social infrastructures that facilitate immigration by providing appropriate shelter, subsistence, and guidance?’ As with Jung, she proposes learning from a chequered past and repetitive present: ‘A place to start is turning away from utilitarian approaches that permit migration on the basis of need – like labour shortages or ageing populations – and, instead, taking a proactive, subject-centred view on migration futures.’

Chiara Pagano’s and Laura Jung’s research has been carried out during the ongoing project ‘Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century’ based at the University of Graz.

 diabetes stands as the formidable third-largest killer in the United States. At its pick lies a malfunction in the production of insulin by the pancreas. Insulin, the vital agent facilitating the body's utilization of glucose, when deficient, leads to a buildup of sugar in the blood. Consequently, individuals with diabetes resort to alternative energy sources like proteins and fat stores, leading to weight loss and weakness.

This condition also triggers increased hunger, often resulting in overeating. Moreover, diabetes unleashes a cascade of complications, affecting wound healing, susceptibility to infections, and various vital organs such as the eyes, kidneys, nerves, and heart.

Contributing Factors:

Various factors can precipitate the onset of diabetes. Stress, obesity, pregnancy, and certain medications can all play pivotal roles. Additionally, dietary choices laden with sugar and white flour can exacerbate the risk. Surprisingly, even hypothyroidism and parasitic infections, especially in children, can serve as causative factors.

Natural Remedies:

Embracing a holistic approach to combat diabetes, incorporating natural remedies can significantly alleviate symptoms and enhance overall well-being. Here are some practical steps:

Dietary Adjustments: Opt for smaller, well-chewed meals, avoiding late-night indulgences. Emphasize vegetable broths, fresh fruits, and a high-fiber diet to reduce reliance on insulin. Protein from vegetable sources and a fat-free regimen aid in blood sugar management.

Power of Raw Foods: Incorporating raw garlic and onions, alongside a diet rich in raw produce, can substantially lower blood sugar levels.

Essential Vitamins and Minerals: Supplementing with vitamins such as C, E, B6, B12, and minerals like chromium, magnesium, and zinc can enhance glucose tolerance and mitigate nerve damage associated with diabetes.

Herbal Allies: Explore the potential of herbs like fenugreek, onions, uva ursi, and huckleberry, known for their blood sugar-regulating properties.

Lifestyle Modifications:

Beyond dietary interventions and herbal remedies, lifestyle adjustments play a pivotal role in managing diabetes effectively. Here are some practical tips:

Exercise Regimen: Regular physical activity, especially aerobic exercises, aids in insulin sensitivity, facilitating glucose uptake by cells.

Stress Management: Incorporate stress-reducing practices like deep breathing and outdoor activities to mitigate the impact of stress on blood sugar levels.

Hygiene and Body Care: Opt for colon-cleansing enemas, hot baths, and cold showers to assist the body in eliminating toxins and regulating blood sugar levels.

Type II Diabetes Management:

For individuals grappling with non-insulin dependent diabetes, adopting a comprehensive approach is paramount:

Nutritional Balance: Prioritize whole foods rich in fiber and nutrients, while steering clear of sugary and fatty indulgences.

Chromium Supplementation: Consider supplementation with chromium polynicotinate to support glucose tolerance.

Herbal Support: Explore the potential benefits of hypoglycemic herbs like garlic, olive leaf, bilberry, and mulberry leaf in managing blood sugar levels.

By integrating these natural remedies and lifestyle modifications, individuals can embark on a transformative journey towards better diabetes management and improved overall health. Remember, proactive self-care and informed choices serve as the cornerstone of diabetes management, empowering individuals to reclaim control over their health and well-being.

The post The Hidden Costs of Ignoring Health and Safety in the Workplace appeared first on Health and Natural Healing Tips.

Say what you want about the 80s, but one thing’s certain: they really knew how to get your heart pumping with their music. This fun dance workout plays some of the best songs from that era and leverages light steps and fist pumps to get your heart going (and going strong!) for a 20-minute workout that will fly by.


Taylor Swift Dance Party
MadFit
 

This one’s for all the Swifties out there. Combine your love of America’s favorite pop star with some beginner-level, full-body cardio dance movements for 15 minutes of smiling and sweating.


2000s Dance Workout
Growwithjo
 

Jo knows how to host a cardio dance video, and this proves it. You don’t need any equipment and only 15 minutes to get your groove on. Jo also ensures beginners can modify steps until they learn them — all along the beats of stars like Usher, Sean Paul, Missy Elliot, and Rihanna.

80s Dance Party Workout
MadFit
 

Head back to the 80s by getting your sweat on with this cardio routine featuring music from Madonna, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and more. Reviewers love it, and many have even found themselves adding more minutes of dance because of how much fun it is!


Savage Fun Dance Workout
Megan Thee Stallion and 8 Fitness
 

This particular YouTube dance video graces many lists rounding up the best dance workout videos — and for good reason! Reviewers love this video because it’s focused on actual choreography and movement and is led by the engaging personality of Megan Thee Stallion. It’s one most people find themselves returning to again and again.


Full-Body Disney HIIT Workout
That Disney Girl
 

Bring back your childhood with this dance fitness video from creator Emily Thorne that pumps your heart to some of your favorite Disney classics. One reviewer says she “never smiled or had more fun doing a workout.”


Boy Band HH
Emkfit
 

NSync, The Backstreet Boys, One Direction, and The Jonas Brothers all grace this video’s soundtrack — and boy, is it something. Certified PT Emily is committed to making working out less awful and more fun, and her heart-pumping, calorie-torching boy band workout video here proves it!


 

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Author: Caitlin H
Diet-to-Go Community Manager

Caitlin is the Diet-to-Go community manager and an avid runner. She is passionate about engaging with others online and maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle. She believes moderation is key, and people will have the most weight loss success if they engage in common-sense healthy eating and fitness.

 

One of the biggest struggle areas many of us have is undoubtedly around our bellies. Belly fat often seems to be the quickest to burgeon and slowest to go away.

Unfortunately, studies show belly fat increases the risk of things like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. It also can be uncomfortable and make finding clothes that fit challenging.

Thankfully, there is good news for those of us who want to target this problematic area — and the solution may lie in boosting your soluble fiber intake.
 

What is Soluble Fiber?

Soluble fiber is a carbohydrate that can slow down how fast your stomach releases digested food into your gut when it mixes with water. It’s a bit different than its counterpart, insoluble fiber, which helps our bodies form stools.

What are the Benefits of Eating It?

Several studies explore the benefits of increasing how much soluble fiber you consume. In one 2012 study, researchers found that participants who increased their soluble fiber intake by 10 grams had a 3.7% lower risk of gaining belly fat.

Another 2012 study found that higher insoluble fiber consumption meant lower belly fat and inflammation. Still, another 2009 study concluded that participants who reduced their fiber intake had a higher risk of gaining belly fat.

People who eat soluble fiber also have a higher number and diversity of good bacteria living in their guts. These bacteria assist with vital physiological processes like creating vitamins and processing waste. A 2016 study found a link between gut bacteria variety and lower belly fat, and several others found the same link with better health outcomes in life.

What’s more, soluble fiber is a potent appetite suppressant. That may help you reduce the number of calories you eat, which in turn can help with weight loss.

What Foods are Good Sources of Soluble Fiber?

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture recommends men consume 30-38 grams of fiber per day, and that women should aim for 21-25 grams daily.

Experts recommend people who don’t currently eat high levels of soluble fiber increase their daily intake gradually to avoid unpleasant side effects like bloating, diarrhea, and stomach aches.

Foods with high levels of soluble fiber include: 

• Apricots

• Oranges

• Apples

• Pears

• Oatmeal

• Legumes

• Brussels sprouts

• Broccoli

• Sweet potatoes

• Flaxseeds

• Hazelnuts

• Sunflower seeds

• Barley

• Carrots

• Beans

• Peas

• Avocados

• Turnips

• Figs

    Can You Take Supplements to Boost Soluble Your Fiber Intake?

While it’s best to get soluble fiber by eating the foods that have them, it is possible to use supplements, too.

Soluble fiber supplements come in various types, with the most popular being:

• Inulin

• Psyllium husk

• Glucomannan

  
Some studies have looked at how each of these supplements impacted belly fat and found ????  

• Inulin: A 2015 study found that people at risk for type 2 diabetes who took inulin rather than cellulose (insoluble fiber) lost significantly more belly fat and weight.

• Psyllium husk: A 2012 study found a belly fat reduction in teenage boys who took this supplement.

• Glucomannan: A 2012 study found that men taking this supplement saw a reduction in belly fat.

---

Ultimately, incorporating more insoluble fiber into your diet can go a long way toward helping you reach your goals and may reduce your belly fat. Consider talking to your doctor or a nutritionist to create a plan for gradually adding foods rich in insoluble fiber into your meal plan.
 


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Author: Caitlin H
Diet-to-Go Community Manager

Caitlin is the Diet-to-Go community manager and an avid runner. She is passionate about engaging with others online and maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle. She believes moderation is key, and people will have the most weight loss success if they engage in common-sense healthy eating and fitness.

• Boosts mental health and cognitive function
• Reduces stress and perceived ability to deal with stress
• Improvement in depressed psychological states
• Stimulates brain activity
• Lowers risk of developing psychological disorders
• Positively correlates with lower obesity and Type 2 diabetes rates
• Increases sleep quality and duration

Activities in nature are also a boon for your physical health, typically requiring movement and exercise, which can improve your cardiovascular and muscular health.

With that in mind, we rounded up eight outdoor activities to boost the time you spend in nature — things like hiking and biking for those who are mobile to gardening and boating for those who need to go the lower-impact route.
 

High-Impact

Hiking is a definite go-to for getting out in nature — and for good reason! Not only is it an excellent full-body workout, but it’s also one of the best ways to explore new settings and take nature in on every level. It’s also an activity perfect for groups and families, offering options for people of all fitness levels. With more than 400 national parks across the U.S., you can enjoy a unique experience with nature year-round.
 

Find any nearby trail on a warm spring or summer day, and there’s a good chance you’ll find bicyclists of all levels out enjoying it. Cycling is the perfect activity for covering lots of ground with the wind in your hair and the sun on your face to make it all the more pleasant. You can go as fast or slow as you want and see all the incredible things nature has to offer along the way.
 

Rock climbing outdoors is not for the faint of heart, but if you’re game to give it a try, you’re unlikely to be disappointed. Rock climbing offers a tremendous workout and a truly exhilarating way to enjoy nature, with challenging courses and one-of-a-kind views waiting for you at every turn. It also can help with cognitive health by fostering problem-solving skills, and it typically has a tight-knit community for increased social interaction.
 

If you’re a fan of water sports, get out on the nearest river with a water activity like kayaking, canoeing, or white water rafting. Each of these will engage your core and offer a strenuous workout, making them ideal for exercise and taking in nature alike. Rivers also provide a unique view of the world around you, carving through canyons or flowing alongside rows and rows of trees for truly breathtaking sights you won’t find anywhere else.
 

Low-Impact

Planting seeds for flowers or fruits and vegetables and helping them sprout leaves and grow into something new is itself profoundly rewarding. Add in the time spent outside in the sunshine and the functional movement that goes with it, and you’ve got a recipe for some serious mental health boosts. Plus, tending to your plants can provide a significant stress reliever after a busy day, and growing and eating your own fruits and vegetables can even improve your diet.
 

Walking is one of those simple things that you can do anywhere and at any pace, making it a perfect go-to for everyone to get outside to take in some fresh air. You can go on scenic, nature-friendly walks at the local park, around your neighborhood, along green belts, or even at national and state parks. Go at your own pace and breathe all of nature’s beauty in along the way.
 

If you live near a beach, a day outside soaking in the sun and listening to the waves lap against the shore is a definite recipe for a mental wellness boost. Pack a picnic lunch and grab your towel and flip-flops for a relaxing day on the sand. If you’re feeling up for it, consider rolling in a fun activity like shell-hunting or kite-flying.
 

Fishing is one of the best activities for stress relief. It gives you a peaceful way to explore nature in all sorts of different ways and places while simultaneously requiring physical activity that improves health. Plus, people who fish also tend to find their patience and concentration improve and that it lowers stress levels.



 

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Author: Caitlin H
Diet-to-Go Community Manager

Caitlin is the Diet-to-Go community manager and an avid runner. She is passionate about engaging with others online and maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle. She believes moderation is key, and people will have the most weight loss success if they engage in common-sense healthy eating and fitness.

 

What’s going on this weekend? P has a basketball game and a birthday party, and it’s her First Communion. We’re having brunch to celebrate with the fam. Liv has dance, it’s our nephew’s bday, and the Pilot and I have a date night. We also want to plant all of the spring/summer flowers and veggies! I let everything die last year with the eye saga, so I’m looking forward to starting over. I’d love to hear what you have going on.

(Pic from a fun event last weekend with friends)

It’s time for the weekly Friday Faves party! This is where I share some of my favorite finds from the week and around the web. I always love to hear about your faves, too, so please shout out something you’re loving in the comments section below.

Friday Faves. 4.12

Read, watch, listen:

So excited to be a guest on the IHP Coach Success podcast this week. You can check out the episode here.

Devouring this book! Abby Jimenez is one of my fave spring/summer authors because her books are perfectly light and fluffy, with fun storylines and witty banter.

The best advice I’ve heard in ages.

(Crepe date with my little loves.)

Fitness, health, + good eats:

LOOOOOVE this chocolate zucchini cake from Baked by Melissa. My friend Betsy posted about it weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It definitely lived up to expectations.

I’ve been enjoying the High Performance Health modules and have learned so much already. I’m excited to implement these strategies with my 1:1 clients (and myself!). If you’re interested in this certification, you can check it out here and use the code FITNESSISTA for $100 off.

Spring mocktail recipes. 

Get a copy of my wellness resources master list.

Fashion + beauty:

I have my eye on this Free People dress but am not sure about the color. I adore the lace and the cut, so I might go for it.

Beautycounter Second Skin! I took our fragrance quiz, and it told me to try Hyper Rose (which I already adore) and Second Skin. This one smells so luxe and ages beautifully as it dries. It’s floral with a warmth from the amber, and I can definitely see why it’s a bestseller. The fragrance discovery set is here. This is my favorite way to try all of them, and see which one works the best on your skin.

New Amazon set:

(they have a ton of colors, too)

Happy Friday, friends! Have an amazing weekend and thank you so much for stopping by the blog today.
xo

Gina

The post Friday Faves 4.12 appeared first on The Fitnessista.

Hi friends! Happy Monday! How was the weekend? I hope you had a great one! Ours was the perfect mix of low-key and productive. We have some fun events, planted all the things, and continued watching Indiana Jones as a family. It’s pretty intense (and borderline terrifying) but we’re all enjoying it.

For today’s post, I wanted to share a roundup of some of the latest and greatest Amazon purchases. I’ve been *trying* to be a little better with the online shopping – I want to take P to Spain to visit her bestie, so I try think about that before any random buys – but have made some solid purchases lately.

Here are some of the goods!

Things I’ve bought from Amazon lately (and love)

1. This set!

I’m still all about sets and Amazon ones are decent quality for an excellent price. (I also have this one in a couple of colors, and this one!) This set is for sandals and a low bun and I can already tell I’m be wearing it a lot this spring. They have a ton of colors, too!

2. Two Air Doctors

We had some other air filters in the past, but wasn’t super impressed with the quality or design. I know that Air Doctor is the best, and finally decided to go for it. I’ll do a full review post on air filters and all of the different options, but I’m definitely impressed with these so far. I took a peek at the filter after a few days of use, and was shocked. We breathe in so much dust, pollen, and yuck throughout the day!!

3. This pet ultrasonic dental tool

aka my foray into amateur pet dentistry haha (I’m NOT telling you do this. I’m just sharing what I do)

Bella and Caroline both had horrible teeth, and we collectively spent thousands of dollars in dental cleaning fees throughout their lives. A huge goal with Maisey was to stay on top of her dental health, so I brush her teeth almost every day. Even so, she had a little bit of plaque buildup that I wanted to get rid of. I used some regular scaling tools, and even though she was a champ and let me try to get the plaque, it wouldn’t come off. I read some review online for this handy tool, and decided to go for it. It makes a little whirring sound, which could be alarming to some animals, but with some treat bribes, Mazer has let me clean her teeth with it. The plaque comes right off!

4. Souper Cubes

I’m not sure why I haven’t tried these before, but I bought them for Maisey’s homemade dog food (recipe coming tomorrow!). They’re so convient and WAY better than freeze things in plastic bags. You can freeze in individual portion sizes, too. Here is the link!

5. Tineco Vaccuum

I was influenced to buy this and have been blown away by how well it works. (I only wish I would have gotten the bigger model with the self-cleaning function.) It vaccuums and mops simultaneously, and the battery charge lasts for our entire house. Check it out here.

6. Owala water bottles

My good friend Julie posted about these, and when she said they didn’t leak, I knew I needed to order some. I love my Stanley, but I can’t travel with it, because it would leak everywhere. These are much more portable, and the straw is optional; it works with and without it. I definitely recommend these, especially since they have larger sizes and they don’t leak!

7. Pastel CGM covers

I inserted a Nutrisense CGM (you can check it out here and use GINA50 for $50 off!), and got these pastel covers to use in the spring and summer. Thery’re a little more aesthetically pleasing than the sporty black cover, but last just as long.

8. Rebounder!

This is one of my favorite ways to break up the work day, and an easy way to support the lymphatic system. I have a full post coming about rebounding, but it’s fun, it has so many potetential benefits, and the kids love it, too. This one is on sale right now, too.

9. Barre socks

I’m definitely into the crew barre socks trend that’s going around, and ordered these on Amazon from my favorite barre socks brand. They have lots of great colors and prints, too!

So, tell me, friends: what are some of your latest favorite Amazon purchases? Please share the goods in the comments section!

xoxo

Gina

The post Things I’ve bought from Amazon lately (and love) appeared first on The Fitnessista.

Hi friends! How are ya? I hope that your day is going well! Today, I’m off to the kids’ school to volunteer and am looking forward to some time in the sauna blanket after a workout. It should be a pretty low-key day!

For today’s post, I wanted to share Maisey’s latest obsession with you: homemade dog food. This simple recipe is PACKED with nutrients and she goes crazy with it.

(See the crazy eyes?? She’s INTO IT.)

TBH, I always felt a little bad giving her packaged dog food because this creature LOVES fresh food. She’s constantly begging for scraps of broccoli and bell pepper (her two faves), has stolen an entire brisket off the counter (and ate it on our new white couch..), a whole chicken breast (bones and all, and thankfully didn’t get sick), as well as ramen and curry. Knowing her flavor profile, I would pour her kibble into her bowl and feel a little bad for the gourmet gal. To spice things up, we would put Fresh Pet on top from Whole Foods (SO expensive and still felt like a block of packaged meat), but I knew there had to be a better way.

I started researching a ton, and found a recipe online that inspired me to finally make our own.

I’m excited to share all of the details with you! It’s less expensive than Fresh Pet, with certified organic, farm fresh, and wild-caught ingredients, and I love that I know everything that went into it. No preservatives or extra stuff.

Healthy homemade dog food recipe

Benefits of Homemade Dog Food:

Making your dog’s food at home can have a ton of benefits, including:

Control Over Ingredients: By preparing your dog’s food from scratch, you have full control over the quality of ingredients used, ensuring that your furry friend gets only the best.

Avoidance of Sketchy Ingredients: Conventional dog foods often contain questionable ingredients such as fillers, artificial preservatives, and low-quality meats that can be harmful to your dog’s health.

Tailored Nutrition: Homemade dog food allows you to tailor your dog’s diet to their specific needs, whether they require a certain protein source or have allergies to certain ingredients.

Increased Digestibility: Whole, fresh ingredients are more easily digestible for dogs, leading to better nutrient absorption and overall health.

Ingredients and Their Benefits:

The recipe that inspired this one is Dr. Judy’s Puploaf. She has the full post here and you can actually order it online! Since this is more of a topper – Maisey still gets some I and love and you Nude Super Food kibble (you can order it from Thrive Market) in her bowl – I didn’t have to be as specific with ratios of ingredients.

Ground Beef: A excellent source of protein and essential amino acids for muscle health.

Organ Meats (Heart, Liver, Gizzards, Spleen): Rich in vitamins and minerals, including iron, zinc, and vitamin B12, vital for your dog’s overall health.

Butternut Squash: Packed with vitamins A and C, fiber, and antioxidants to support immune function and digestion.

Sardines: A great source of omega-3 fatty acids, which promote healthy skin and coat, reduce inflammation, and support joint health. Sardines are one of Maisey’s all-time favorite foods!

Leafy Greens: Provide essential vitamins and minerals, such as vitamin K, calcium, and folate, for overall health and vitality.

Eggs: Rich in choline, protein, and essential nutrients. If you’re using farm fresh eggs, you can also add the shell. Since these were organic from the grocery store, I used the membrane inside the egg.

Oysters: High in zinc and selenium, important for immune function and thyroid health.

Cranberries: Rich in antioxidants and beneficial for urinary tract health.

Broccoli: Contains fiber, vitamins, and minerals, including vitamin C and calcium, for optimal health.

Bell Pepper: Provides vitamin A, vitamin C, and antioxidants to support immune function and eye health.

Flax Oil: A source of omega-3 fatty acids for healthy skin and coat, as well as joint support.

Ginger: Has anti-inflammatory properties and aids in digestion.

Healthy homemade dog food recipe

Directions:

In a large bowl, combine ground beef, organ meats, butternut squash, sardines, leafy greens, oysters, cranberries, broccoli, bell pepper, and ginger. I keep the flax oil in the fridge and drizzle on a little before serving.

Mix the ingredients thoroughly to ensure even distribution.

Transfer the mixture to a baking dish and lightly bake for 20-30 minutes at 325°F.

Allow the food to cool before serving to your dog. Keeps in the fridge for up to 5 days, and you can freeze the rest in individual portions. I used Souper Cubes.

Healthy homemade dog food recipe

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This healthy homemade dog food recipe is based on Dr. Judy’s pup loaf recipe. It’s a great way to give your dog fresh food with tons of nutrients!

• Author: Gina Harney // Fitnessista.com

Ingredients

2 lbs organic grass-fed ground beef

1 cup of chicken hearts

Add in any other organ meats, like spleen, gizzards, or liver – we used a blend from a local farm that contained heart, spleen, and liver

2 cans of sardines in water

2 cans of mussels in olive oil

3 eggs (if farm fresh, use the shell. If from the grocery store, use the egg membrane on the inside of the shell)

1 cup butternut squash, chopped

1 cup of broccoli, chopped

2 bell peppers, seeded and chopped

a handful of leafy greens (I used chard), chopped

1 teaspoon of freshly grated ginger

1/2 c dried cranberries (make sure there is no added sugar, and no extra ingredients)

cold-pressed flax oil, to serve

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

In a large bowl, combine ground beef, organ meats, chopped butternut squash, sardines, leafy greens, oysters, cranberries, broccoli, bell pepper, and ginger. I keep the flax oil in the fridge and drizzle on a little before serving.

Mix the ingredients thoroughly to ensure even distribution.

Transfer the mixture to a baking dish and lightly bake for 20-30 minutes at 325°F.

Notes

Allow the food to cool before serving to your dog. Keeps in the fridge for up to 5 days, and you can free the rest in individual portions. I used Souper Cubes.

It feels so good to give Maisey fresh food that’s also packed with nutrients!!

So, tell me, friends: do you make your dog’s food? Are there any brands you love?

xo

Gina

Homemade dog treats are here

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I’m so thrilled to have Brittany Watkins on the podcast today. She is AMAZING and has so much knowledge to share. I hope you love this episode! She’s offering her 7-day challenge for free for listeners here.

158: Using tapping to overcome weight loss struggles and finding balance with Brittany Watkins

Here’s what we chat about:

Why You Self-Sabotage Your Weight Loss Efforts with Emotional Eating and Binge Eating

How tapping works and how it impacts your body and brain

The Difference Between Cravings and Emotional Eating

Subconscious Weight Loss Blockers

Why You Overeat or Overdrink at Parties

and so much more.

Here’s more about Brittany and her background:

Brittany Watkins is a renowned speaker, author, and creator of The Echo Tapping Method™, a groundbreaking technique in Food Psychology. Recognized as a leading expert in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT or Tapping), especially for weight loss and emotional eating, Brittany has built a remarkable career over the last 15 years. She has changed the lives of over 100,000 women by addressing their food cravings, emotional eating, and self-sabotage. She focuses on finding and fixing the root causes of these issues quickly. She developed The Echo Tapping Method™, an innovative approach that rapidly speeds up the healing process. This unique psychology biohacking modality has been shown to provide the benefits of ten years of therapy in just a few sessions. Brittany’s core professional dedication has been to provide quick and lasting change. Brittany has also trained more than 400 medical professionals, therapists, and counselors in her method, who are helping thousands of patients every year. Her work has been recognized in major publications like Psychology Today, Shape, and Women’s Health and Fitness Magazine. Plus, her techniques have reached over 10 million women worldwide via Facebook and YouTube, establishing her as a key figure in psychological healing for emotional eating.

Check out her Instagram here and her website here.

Join her 7-day challenge for free here.

Partners:

I’ve been using Nutrisense on and off for a couple of years now. I love being able to see how my blood sugar responds to my diet and habits, and run experiments. You can try out Nutrisense here and use GINA50 for $50 off.

Join us for Fit Team! This is my online fitness community and you can try it free for 7 days.

I love love love the meals from Sakara Life! Use this link and the code XOGINAH for 20% off their meal delivery and clean boutique items. This is something I do once a month as a lil treat to myself and the meals are always showstoppers.

If any of my fellow health professional friends are looking for another way to help their clients, I highly recommend IHP. You can also use this information to heal yourself and then go one to heal others, which I think is a beautiful mission. You can absolutely join if you don’t currently work in the health or fitness industry; many IHPs don’t begin on this path. They’re friends who are passionate to learn more about health and wellness, and want to share this information with those they love. You can do this as a passion, or start an entirely new career.

You can use my referral link here and the code FITNESSISTA for up to $250 off the Integrative Health Practitioner program. I highly recommend it! You can check out my review IHP Level 1 here and my review of Level 2 here.

I’m still obsessed with my sauna blanket. This is one of my favorite ways to relax and sweat it out. I find that it energizes me, helps with aches and pains, I sleep better on the days I use this, and it makes my skin glow. Link to check it out here. You can also use my discount FITNESSISTA15 for the PEMF Go Mat, which I use every day, and the red light face mask, which is a staple in my weekly skincare routine.

Get 20% off Organifi with the code FITNESSISTA. I drink the green juice, red juice, gold, and Harmony! (Each day I might have something different, or have two different things. Everything I’ve tried is amazing.) I’m currently obsessed with the shilajit gummies!

Thank you so much for listening and for all of your support with the podcast! Please be sure to subscribe, and leave a rating or review if you enjoyed this episode. If you leave a rating, head to this page and you’ll get a little “thank you” gift from me to you. 

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Hi friends! How are ya? I hope you’re having a lovely morning so far! I have a Spanish lesson today and am getting my nails done this afternoon after a bunch of client calls. I hope you have a wonderful day.

For today’s post, I wanted to talk about something I’ve loved for years, but have just recently implemented into my daily routine: rebounding!

In the world of fitness, rebounding has gained popularity in recent years – bouncing on a mini-trampoline. But is rebounding just a trendy fad, or does it offer real benefits for your health and fitness?

Let’s chat about what rebounding is all about, its pros and cons, and whether you should consider adding it to your routine.

What is rebounding and should you add it to your routine?

What is Rebounding?

Rebounding involves bouncing on a mini-trampoline, often to music or following a structured workout routine. It’s a low-impact form of exercise that can be adapted to suit individuals of all fitness levels.

Pros of Rebounding:

Low-Impact: Rebounding is gentle on the joints, making it suitable for people with joint pain or mobility issues. When you bounce, you can also keep your feet on the rebounder at all times and will still get benefits from the motion.

Cardiovascular Fitness: Bouncing on a rebounder can provide an effective cardiovascular workout, helping to strengthen the heart and improve overall fitness. It can definitely increase your heart rate!

Lymphatic System Support: Rebounding stimulates the lymphatic system, which aids in detoxification and immune function.

Improved Balance and Coordination: The act of bouncing requires coordination and balance, which can be beneficial for overall stability. Proprioception – knowing where our body is in space – is an important skill to maintain as we age to help prevent falls and balance issues.

Stress Reduction: Rebounding can be a fun and enjoyable way to relieve stress and improve mood, thanks to the release of endorphins during exercise. Bouncing is super fun!

Muscle strengthening: Rebounding engages multiple muscle groups, some of which you might not often work (like calves).

Increased Bone Density: Rebounding is a weight-bearing exercise, which can help to improve bone density and reduce the risk of osteoporosis over time.

Cons of Rebounding:

Risk of Injury: While rebounding is low-impact, there is still a risk of injury, particularly if proper form is not maintained or if the trampoline is not stable.

Space and Equipment Requirements: Rebounding requires a mini-trampoline and sufficient space to use it, which may not be feasible for everyone.

Limited Variety: Some people may find rebounding to be repetitive or less engaging compared to other forms of exercise.

Pelvic floor concerns: The bouncing may cause pressure on your pelvic floor, especially if you suffer from organ prolape or bladder concerns. If this happens to you, seek out the help of a pelvic floor physical therapist. Your pelvic floor may be weak, or it may also be too tight, which inhibits full range of motion and decreases function. So often I hear moms joke about how they can’t jump on a trampoline because they’ll pee their pants. It doesn’t have to be this way, and you can absolutely heal! A pelvic floor PT can change your life, I promise.

Should You Add Rebounding to Your Routine?

Whether or not you should incorporate rebounding into your fitness routine depends on your individual preferences, goals, and physical condition. If you’re looking for a fun and effective way to improve cardiovascular fitness, balance, and lymphatic system function, rebounding could be worth exploring. However, it’s essential to consider the potential risks and limitations, especially if you have any pre-existing health conditions or concerns. Always talk with your doctor before making any fitness or nutrition changes.

My favorite low-cost rebounder is here!

You can also download a free list of my favorite wellness resources here.

xoxo

Gina

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I am a four-season sandal wearer. I love allowing my feet to breathe and the feeling of being unconfined. During rain, shine, and sometimes light snow, my feet are ready to be bare at a moment’s notice. If an impromptu forest bathing opportunity or grounding session calls my name, I don’t have to worry about laces, ties, or the other constricting elements of standard shoes. My feet are free!

Last week, I attended the Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, California, an annual gathering that brings together innovators and thought leaders to explore solutions for social and environmental challenges. The conference featured a diverse range of speakers, workshops, and presentations on topics such as sustainability, social justice, climate change, regenerative agriculture, and Indigenous knowledge.

First impressions play an important role in shaping our perception of the world around us. Although lasting a mere few moments, our initial encounters with a new person, place, or thing, can leave a lasting impact that sets the tone for how we make decisions in our day-to-day interactions. First impressions are particularly persuasive when our sense of smell is involved, as our emotions and memories are tied closely to our olfactory system.  

We love lemon essential oil for its wellness benefits, its bright and sugary citrus aroma, and its uplifting and energizing constituents. It’s a wonderful oil in skin and hair care formulas and for diffusing in homes and offices. We also love that this cost-effective oil makes an excellent cleaning agent and leaves our homes smelling deliciously like freshly cut lemons. It’s the 76% (=)-Lionene in lemon oil that makes it so good at polishing furniture and cutting grease and sticky residues. We’re revisiting five of our favorite lemon oil-based cleaning recipes that are easy to make, safe to use, and leave our homes smelling citrus good.

When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country’s great ‘originality’, ‘special path’ and a ‘unique mission in the world’, it’s a sure sign they’re facing mounting problems in forging a modern democratic polity, civic nation and respectable international identity. Contemporary Russia is a case in point. Its new foreign policy doctrine, signed into law by President Vladimir Putin on 31 March 2023, is an astounding document declaring Russia’s civilizational uniqueness. Never before had a leader officially stated that Russia is a sui generis civilization. True, Catherine the Great, known for her occasional cockiness, was reported to have once said that ‘Russia itself is the universe and it doesn’t need anyone’. But the empress was quick to qualify her arrogant statement, adding that ‘Russia is a European country’. Yet Russian elites now appear ready to cut their country loose from its European moorings.

This radical ‘civilizational’ reorientation is of course the direct result of the war Russia has unleashed against Ukraine and the resolute and united response of Western democracies to the war. But Russian military aggression, driven by the Kremlin’s nationalist obsession, is in itself a manifestation of post-imperial Russia’s deep identity crisis. More the 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, four key issues remain unresolved: Where do the boundaries of Russia’s political nation run? Are Russians capable of building a truly democratic polity or are they ‘historically’ destined to be ruled by authoritarian leaders? Is Russia a federation – as characterized in its Constitution – or is it a quasi-imperial entity? What is the ultimate objective of Russia’s historical development?

Kremlin leaders don’t give clear and straightforward answers to these questions. Instead, they obfuscate the real problems and set forth the idea of Russia as a ‘unique civilization’, while claiming that the West is in ‘terminal decline’ and ‘on its last legs’. The political implication of this rhetorical maneuver is not hard to fathom: the suggestion is that Russia need not follow ‘advanced’ Western nations as the latter are not ahead of Russia but, on the contrary, have lost their way and found themselves at a ‘historical dead end’.

Yet the notion of a special path (or Sonderweg), alongside the trope of the West’s decline, have a long intellectual pedigree. The Germans who coined the term, have managed to reinterpret their complex historical experience and turned Sonderweg into a research method: a historiographical tool, which has proved especially handy in the field of comparative studies. Most Russians, however, continue to view their historical experience as ‘unique’, eagerly embracing the notion of Sonderweg as the basis for self-identification and self-understanding.For a perceptive discussion of the Russian Sonderweg thesis, including in comparative perspective, see M. Velizhev, T. Atnashev, and A. Zorin, ‘Osoby put’: Ot ideologii k metodu, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2019; D. Travin, ‘Osoby put’ Rossii: Ot Dostoevskogo do Konchalovskogo, Izd. St. Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2018; A. Zaostrovtsev (ed.), Rossiia 1917-2017: Evropeiskaia modernizatsiia ili ‘osoby put’, Leont’evskii Tsentr, 2017; E. Pain (ed.), Ideologiia ‘osobogo puti’ v Rossii i Germanii: istoki, soderzhanie, posledstviia, Tri kvadrata, 2010.


Russia’s historic yardstick

Catherine the Great (detail), Vigilius Eriksen, 1760, Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. Image via Wikimedia Commons

In his last letter to Pyotr Chaadaev from 19 October 1836, where Alexander Pushkin critiqued his friend’s idiosyncratic view of the Russian past, he also posed an intriguing question, wondering how a ‘future historian’ would see nineteenth-century Russia: Croyez-vous qu’il nous mettra hors l’Europe? (Do you think he will place us outside Europe?). A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols, ed. M.A. Tsiavlovskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1938) 4: 432.
Pushkin, a consummate European who corresponded with Chaadaev exclusively in French, appeared to have been somewhat apprehensive about future historians characterizing Russia as a non-European country. Little did he know that statements advancing the thesis of Russia’s special path and proclaiming Europe ‘rotten’, ‘decrepit’ and even ‘dying’ would come from closer quarters.

Mortally wounded in a fateful duel in 1837, Pushkin didn’t witness the beginning of the grand debate on Russia’s identity, distinctive features of its historical development and its relation to Europe that was unleashed by the publication of Chaadaev’s first ‘philosophical letter’ – a debate that is still ongoing. It wasn’t a future historian but another nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tiutchev, four years Pushkin’s junior, who coined a paradigmatic formula of Russia’s samobytnost’ (originality): ‘No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness: She stands alone, unique’. F.I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 6 vols. (Moscow: IMLI, 2003) 2: 165


But how original were Tiutchev’s historiosophical musings about Russia’s originality? As a Russian diplomat, Tiutchev spent more than 20 years abroad, mostly at the Bavarian court in Munich, where he came under the strong influence of the German Romantic movement – a cultural phenomenon that was instrumental in Sonderweg’s emergence. During the wars of liberation against Napoleon, the German national consciousness and collective identity were formed in contrast to those of the French. Nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke saw German history as unique: ‘each nation has a particular spirit, breathed into it by God, through which it is what it is and which its duty is to develop.’ L. Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Moreover, it was deemed ‘the most important’, as Germany was thought of as ‘the mother’ of all other nations. Ibid.
Enthused about the founding of the new Reich in 1871 and proud of Imperial Germany’s economic power, many historians and political thinkers came to believe that a ‘positive German way’ existed. They readily contrasted strong, bureaucratic German state, reform from above, public service ethos and their famed Kultur with the Western notion of laissez-faire, with revolution, parliamentarianism, plutocracy and Zivilisation.

Not unlike their German counterparts, Tiutchev and other young Russian nobles (who would soon become known under the moniker of Slavophiles) saw a huge upsurge of Russian national feeling following victory over Napoleonic France. Twentieth-century philosopher Alexander Koyré aptly wrote, ‘national reaction was quickly turning into reactionary nationalism’. A. Koyré, La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle, Champion, 1929.
Against the backdrop of epic battles from 1812 to 1815, the representatives of early Russian Romanticism found the idea elaborated by their German intellectual gurus – Herder, Fichte and the brothers Schlegel – exceptionally appealing. They subscribed to the premise that German originality was based on a special type of culture, which couldn’t be conquered by brute force. The triumphant entry of Russian troops into Paris seemed to have upended the customary cultural hierarchy. The defeated French were cast as ‘barbarians’, while the Russians’ victory was attributed to their ‘national spirit’ rooted in the Russian language, historical traditions and Eastern Christian values.

When the grand debate, provoked by Chaadaev’s controversial publication, kicked off in the late 1830s, it zeroed in on two principal questions: Should Russia be compared with Western nations or is it following its own unique historical trajectory? And, are Russian ways superior or inferior to those in the West? Notably, both representatives of Russian ‘official nationalism’ and Russian Westernizers shared the view that Russia and Europe’s trajectories were identical. However, they sharply disagreed over who was in the lead: St. Petersburg imperial bureaucrats insisted on Russia’s superiority, while Westernizers argued that Russia was underdeveloped and lagging behind Europe. It was only the faithful disciples of German Romantic thinkers – Russian Slavophiles – who spoke in favor of Russian exceptionalism and produced what could be called the first interpretation of Russian Sonderweg.

The school of thought that exalted Russia’s divergence from Europe and the West, born from heated discussions from the 1840s to the 1850s, has remained central to the country’s intellectual life ever since. In the 1870s and 1880s, Neo-Slavophiles/Panslavists developed core Slavophile ideas of cultural oppositions: idealism vs. materialism, sobornost’ vs. individualism, selfless collective work vs. profit-obsessed capitalism, deep religious feeling vs. amoral cynicism. Nikolai Danilevskii’s theory of ‘cultural-historical types’ is a case in point.
Eurasianists then delivered a complex theory on the vision of ‘Russia-Eurasia’ as a unique world unto itself in their writings of the 1920s and 1930s.

Two key aspects of Eurasianist political philosophy are especially influential on present-day Kremlin leaders. First, Eurasianists resolutely rejected a model of the nation-state, arguing that ‘Eurasia’ is a geopolitical space destined for imperial rule: the Russian/Eurasian empire was considered a ‘historical necessity’ based on a vision of the organic geographical, cultural and historical unity of the ‘imperial space’. Second, Eurasianists contended that Western-style parliamentary democracy was an alien institution, ‘culturally’ incompatible with Russian/Eurasian political folkways. They argued that the Eurasian political model was an ‘ideocracy’ – an authoritarian, one-party state ruled by a tightknit ideologically driven elite.

Eurasianists formulated their extravagant theories while keeping a close eye on events in the Soviet Union; there is no denying that Soviet policies and practices strongly influenced Eurasianist theorizing. But what, more specifically, of Soviet communism? Shouldn’t it also be analysed through the lens of the Russian Sonderweg paradigm? What is the historical significance of the Soviet period (1917-1991) if defined in relation to both European political practice and pre-revolutionary Russian political development?

Questioning Russia as exception

Soviet exceptionalism is a tricky case. On the one hand, as scholar Martin Malia perceptively notes, it ‘represents both maximal divergence from European norms and the great aberration in Russia’s own development.’ M. Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the bronze horseman to the Lenin mausoleum, Belknap Press, 1999, p. 12.
Yet, while departing from European ways in terms of its practices and institutions, the Soviet Union was very much European ideologically. The combination of Marxist precepts and Russia’s poor socio-economic conditions ultimately shaped the Soviet experiment. Paradoxically, some Russian émigré thinkers suggested that the European far-left ideological foundations of the Soviet state might even force dyed-in-the-wool Russian conservative nationalists – the champions of ‘Holy Russia’ and detractors of Western publics’ ‘godless materialism’ – to reevaluate their anti-Western attitudes and embrace the ‘West’ they were living in. After the 1917 Revolution, poet Georgii Adamovich wittily noted, ‘the West and Russia seemed to have changed roles’: the renewed (communist) Russia ‘suddenly bypassed the West on the left’, abandoning its Christian vocation, while the West came to represent Christianity and Christian culture. G. Adamovich, Kommentarii, Aleteia, 2000, pp. 184-185.
‘Very soon,’ wrote Adamovich sarcastically regarding Russian émigrés, ‘we, with our Russian inclination towards extremes, would probably hear about “West the God-bearer.”’ Ibid.


The official position within the Soviet Union, however, supposed that it represented a higher stage of universal civilization, much superior to that of the ‘capitalist West’. Even in the supposedly ideologically monolithic communist system, the old debate on Russia’s ‘uniqueness’ hadn’t died out. After a series of earlier iterations – Slavophiles vs. Westernizers, Populists vs. Marxists, Eurasianists vs. Europeanists – the notion resurrected in the form of a vibrant discussion between those who supported the idea of ‘building socialism in one country’ and the champions of ‘communist internationalism’. The discussion produced an intriguing paradox. Mikhail Pokrovskii, a leading Marxist historian, backed Stalin’s vision of ‘socialism with Soviet characteristics’, while Leon Trotsky called for the need to de-emphasize the idea of Russian historical peculiarity. Ironically, when Pokrovskii formulated his theory of merchant capitalism in the early 1910s, he was a staunch opponent of Russian exceptionalism and denied not only the existence of any significant Russian socio-economic samobytnost’ but also that of Russia’s backwardness vis-à-vis European nations. Trotsky, for his part, in his ‘German articles’ from 1908 and 1909, emerged as a strong supporter of Russian exceptionalism, emphasizing Russia’s divergence from Western ways.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, heralding the end of Soviet exceptionalism, seemed to provide Russia with the opportunity to demystify its homegrown Sonderweg thesis and return – according to the phrase, popular with both rulers and citizens in the early 1990s – to ‘the family of civilized nations’. Even historian Richard Pipes, who placed a special premium on Russia’s ‘un-Western’ traits, appeared convinced that Sonderweg was at an end for Russia. ‘I think that now Russia has only one option left – turning West’, he argued in a short essay written in 2001 for the European Herald, a liberal, Moscow-based journal. By ‘West’ he intended a political community that comprises not only the US and the European Union but also such ‘Eastern’ nations as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. ‘Nowadays it seems to me that for Russia a “special path” makes no sense.’ Dismissing the notion out of hand, he wrote in conclusion, ‘I don’t even know what it actually means.’ R. Pipes, ‘Osoby put’ dlia Rossii: chto konkretno eto znachit?’ Vestnik Evropy, No. 1, 2001, https://magazines.gorky.media/vestnik/2001/1


Russia’s cultural borrowing

And yet, 20 years on, the idea of ‘uniqueness’ and demonization of the ‘collective West’ are all the rage in Putin’s Russia. Why is this? The reason, I think, is twofold. First, unlike in 1960s and 1970s Germany, post-Soviet Russia didn’t see a vigorous nationwide debate among the country’s historians on the fundamental issues of Russia’s historical development. Some promising discussions that began during the twilight years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika didn’t bear much fruit and petered out in the chaotic era of the early 1990s. Second, as the Russian political regime has become increasingly authoritarian under Putin, the Kremlin has come to believe it is expedient to deploy the notion of Russian exceptionalism to buttress its position both domestically and internationally. Ukraine favoring ‘Europe’ has motivated Putin’s regime to rethink its international identity.

And yet, all the intellectual groundwork for deconstructing the idea of Russian uniqueness had already been laid by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. Several generations of pre-revolutionary Russian, émigré, Soviet, and international scholars had amply demonstrated that Russia is no more unique than any other country. Russia’s historical process, its social structure, state-society relations and political culture are indeed marked by sundry peculiarities, but these stem from Russia’s geopolitical position on the periphery of Europe: it sits on the eastern edges of the European cultural sphere and extends all the way to the border with China and the Pacific Ocean. Like many other countries, Russia borrowed its high culture from elsewhere, and did this twice: first, from Byzantine Constantinople; and then, in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, from the more advanced Western European cultural model. In both cases cultural norms, values and practices came from without. Russian cultural development should be understood as the process of mastering a ‘foreign’ experience.

Cultural borrowing does not mean, however, that Russian culture lacks a creative element. When Russia adopted certain aspects from another culture, the borrowed cultural models would find themselves in a completely different context, reshaping them into something new. These cultural phenomena would differ from both the original Western models and ‘old’ Russian cultural patterns. Perceptive Russian scholars like Boris Uspensky and Mikhail Gasparov note this paradox: it is precisely the orientation toward a ‘foreign’ culture that contributes to the originality of Russian culture. See: B.A. Uspensky and M.L. Gasparov, Russkaia intelligentsiia i zapadny intellektualizm: istoriia i tipologiia, B.A. Uspensky (ed.), O.G.I., 1999.


Yet such orientation contains significant tension in itself: the gravitation toward a ‘foreign’ culture is dialectically, and antithetically, linked with a desire to protect one’s own ‘authenticity’ and shield oneself from foreign cultural influences. The following dynamic ensues: the emerging inferiority complex gives rise to prickly nationalism, the search for a special path, mythologization of history, messianism and assertion of one’s special mission in the world. There is another paradox here that Uspensky also notes: it is precisely this nationalist backlash against a ‘foreign’ cultural tradition that is usually the least national and traditional. Craving for ‘authenticity’ and ‘national roots’ is most often the result of foreign influences – in the Russian case, the influences of Western culture that Russian intellectuals sought to repudiate. This is what puts early Slavophiles and German Romantics on the same page: the Germans felt they were culturally ‘colonized’ by the French and rebelled; the Russians borrowed the philosophical language of German Romanticism and applied it to their own situation. In both cases, this was a Sonderweg point of departure.

Unexclusive difference

But if we reject the existence of a sharp dividing line between ‘West’ and ‘East’ or between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’, acknowledging them as social constructs, what would a more suitable model explaining similarities and dissimilarities between national trajectories across the Eurasian continent be? The West-East ‘cultural gradient’, an understanding that there is a softer gradation and unity as one moves from Europe’s Atlantic coast eastwards all the way into the depth of Eurasia, is one option. See C. Evtuhov and S. Kotkin (eds.), The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Pavel Miliukov introduced the idea in his multivolume Essays on the History of Russian Culture, which he thoroughly reworked in the 1920s and 1930s when in exile in Paris. Conceptually, the essays are based on two main theoretical principles. First, Russia’s historical evolution repeated the same stages through which other ‘cultured peoples of Europe’ had passed. Second, the process of this development was slower than in other parts of Europe: ‘not only in Western but also in Central Europe’. Miliukov’s bottom line was this: there was nothing particular or unique about Russia in this respect. ‘Peculiarity is not an exclusive feature of Russia. It shows up in the same manner in Europe itself, in a growing progression as we move from the Loire and the Seine to the Rhine, from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper to the Oka and the Volga’. P. N. Miliukov, ‘Sotsiologicheskie osnovy russkogo istoricheskogo protsessa [1930]’, Rossiiskaia istoriia, No. 1, 2008, p. 160.


Miliukov’s ideas were further developed by émigré economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who positioned the European gradient at the basis of his highly influential model of industrial development. Gerschenkron’s thesis suggests ‘the farther east one goes in Europe the greater becomes the role of banks and of the state in fostering industrialization, a pattern complemented by the prevalence in backward areas of socialist or nationalist ideologies.’ M. Malia, Russia under Western Eyes, 440; Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Belknap Press, 1962.
Gerschenkron exerted a powerful intellectual influence on Richard Pipes’ lifelong opponent Martin Malia – a prominent Berkeley historian who perfected the concept of the West-East gradient. It became the essence of Malia’s exposition of the process of Russia’s social, intellectual and cultural development. ‘The farther east one goes,’ Malia contended, ‘the more absolute, centralized and bureaucratic governments become, the greater the pressure of the state on the individual, the more serious the obstacle to his independence, the more sweeping, general and abstract are ideologies of protest or of compensation’. M. Malia, ‘Schiller and the Early Russian Left’, Harvard Slavic Studies IV, 1957, pp. 169-200.
 While Malia understood ‘Europe’ as a more or less coherent cultural sphere including Russia, he maintained that ‘Russia is the eastern extreme … she is the backward rear guard of Europe at the bottom of the slope of the West-East cultural gradient.’ M. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, The Free Press, 1994, p. 55.
Another useful concept, as antidote to the discourse on backwardness, is Maria Todorova’s idea of ‘relative synchronicity within a longue durée development’. In analysing various European nationalisms within the unified structure of modernity, Todorova redefines the ‘East’ – Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia – as part of a common European space. M. Todorova, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of East European Nationalism’, Slavic Review, Vol 64, No. 1, 2005, pp. 140-164.


The European bloc

By the end of the 1980s, conceptualizing Russia within the pan-European context had become mainstream among Moscow governing elites. One of the key aspects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ was the idea of a ‘common European home’. Boris Yeltsin talked of the need to ‘rejoin the European civilization’. Remarkably, as late as 2005, in his state of the nation address, Putin contended that Russia is ‘a major European power’, which for the past three centuries has been evolving and transforming itself ‘hand in hand’ and ‘together with other European nations’.

Two problems, however, weighed against Russia’s smooth identification with Europe. One was the age-old quest for status: Russia’s self-understanding as derzhava (a great power). The awareness of the derivative nature of Russia’s modern culture and of its ‘civilizational’ dependence on Europe clashed with the grand idea of Russian greatness. As Russia grew richer and stronger during the 2000s, the Kremlin leadership found it increasingly difficult to perceive themselves as ‘learners’ going to school with Europe. ‘Great Powers do not go to school’, quipped political scientist Iver Neumann. ‘On the contrary, they lay down the line and teach others.’ I. B. Neumann, ‘Russia’s Europe: Inferiority to Superiority’, International Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 6, 2016, p. 1397.

The other problem, which is relatively recent, concerns how ‘Europe’ is constructed. In the late nineteenth century, the autocratic Russian Empire, even when it was looked down on by the liberal elites of Great Britain and France, could still be regarded as perfectly ‘European’ in the company of other Old Regimes, being part of Dreikaizerbund (League of the Three Emperors) together with Wilhelmine Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary.

Yet in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, the situation changed drastically. The emergence of the European Union and its expansion eastward, along with the parallel expansion of NATO, another ‘Euro-Atlantic institution’, meant that institutionally Russia was being set apart from what came to be understood as ‘Europe’. This process of the institutionalization of ‘Europe’ presented Russia with a tough dilemma: either join this ‘European bloc’ or revisit the issue of self-identification. The issue has been exacerbated by Moscow’s tense relations with its ex-Soviet neighbours – above all with Ukraine – who are seeking association with the EU, and ultimately membership. A tough question started haunting Kremlin strategists: if European orientation is fully compatible with Russian identity, then on what grounds is Moscow preventing other post-Soviet nations from joining the EU? Various conservative political thinkers called Russia’s politics of identity ‘deeply flawed’ and clamored for an urgent conceptual rethink. Predictably, the suggested solution was to proclaim that Russia and Europe are distinct civilizations, each producing a gravitational pull and possessing its own sphere of influence. B. Mezhuyev, ‘‘Ostrov Rossiia’ i rossiiskaia politika identichnosti’, Rossiia v globalnoi politike, Spetsvypusk: Konservatizm vo vneshnei politike: XXI vek, May 2017, pp. 108-109.

This is precisely what Russia’s new foreign policy doctrine has done.

Back to square one

But if Russia is not ‘European’, what is it? Kremlin spin-doctors tell us it is following its special path as a unique ‘Russian civilization’. See: A. Kramarenko, ‘K voprosu o tsivilizatsionnom samoopredelenii Rossii’, Rossiia v globalnoi politike, 4 May 2023, https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/o-czivilizaczionnom-samoopredelenii/; V. Popov, ‘Rossiia – samostoiatelnaia evraziiskaia tsivilizatsiia’, Rossiiskii sovet po mezhdunarodnym delam, 22 January 2024, https://russiancouncil.ru/analytics-and-comments/analytics/rossiya-samostoyatelnaya-evraziyskaya-tsivilizatsiya/
However, it isn’t clear, as the late Richard Pipes notes, what that actually means. Remarkably, Kremlin-friendly political thinkers promoting the idea of Russian ‘uniqueness’ appear to be confused about this issue themselves. At the discussion held in late April 2023 on the eve of the XXXI Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy for Russia’s elite group of top security analysts, speakers acknowledged that Russia’s departure from its European self-identification and the former foreign policy tradition occurred ‘partly by her own will, partly because of unfavorable external circumstances’. Although Russia was viewed as a country ‘marked by originality’, it was considered ‘premature to assert that the Russian civilizational basis has already been formed’. Revealingly, some analysts argued that ‘Russia does not yet know exactly what it wants, its goals and desires are yet to be formulated.’ To fulfil this difficult task, analysts paradoxically highlighted ‘an urgent need to turn to the Russian intellectual legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, specifically to the works of Russian anti-Western and nationalist thinkers such as Fyodor Tiutchev, Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont’ev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Gumiliov and Vadim Tsymburskii. E. Kulman, ‘Rossiia kak tsivilizatsiia tsivilizatsii: Krugly stol v preddverii XXXI Assamblei SVOP’, Rossiia v globalnoi politike, 24 April 2023, https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/czivilizacziya-czivilizaczij/


And so, we appear to be back at square one. Like in the mid-nineteenth century, current calls for the Russian Sonderweg remain a rhetorical figure, a metaphor meant to conceal Russia’s perennial inability to transform itself and finally come to terms with (European) modernity. Yet there is hope. In his 1930 lecture delivered in Berlin, at the time of Stalin’s ‘Great Break’, Pavel Miliukov presciently noted: ‘The Russian historical process is not ending; it is only being interrupted at this point… Despite [social] earthquakes and eruptions, and most often with their assistance, history continues.’ Miliukov, ‘Sotsiologicheskie osnovy russkogo istoricheskogo protsessa’, p. 164.


Imagine a workweek that wraps up after four days, leaving you three days to relax, enjoy quality time with loved ones and follow personal pursuits. Through pilot projects or full legal recognition, the four-day workweek is no longer a pipedream, but the reality of many employees across Europe and around the globe.

Pilot projects have been run in several countries, and the results have been surprisingly positive. Among them is the United Kingdom, where a six-month trial involving 61 companies and 2,900 employees achieved an astonishing 90 percent retention rate.

Employees continued to receive full pay while working 80 percent of their previous hours, on the condition of maintaining 100 percent productivity. The results were telling: productivity was not just maintained, but increased.- Work-life balance improved and employers and employees alike expressed satisfaction.

In a groundbreaking move in 2022, Belgium became the first European country to legally endorse the four-day workweek without loss of pay. The catch? The same number of work hours, just packed into fewer days. So far, less than one per cent of Belgian employees have adopted the four-day workweek.

Image: Evan Blaser / Source: Wikimedia Commons

So, although Europe is starting to flip the script on the standard nine-to-five and five-out-of-seven, it seems not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. What factors have hindered the Belgian model’s popularity, compared to the UK’s? And in a landscape where certain sectors (such as the gig economy) operate under different rules, are we collectively prepared to bid farewell to traditional working hours and clock out earlier?

Not the first time the workweek changes

Current pilots and experiments in overhauling the workweek have historical precedents. In 1926, the industrialist Henry Ford trialed a 40-hour, five-day workweek in the United States in his automotive plants. This marked a departure from the prevalent six-day workweek, with Ford opting to close his plants on Saturdays and Sundays.

Despite initial opposition from employers and the media, Ford’s experiment proved successful: his factories maintained productivity levels, and the additional free time for workers resulted in increased spending within their communities. By the 1930s, the five-day workweek had become the standard, eventually being enshrined in US law in 1940.

The work landscape has evolved significantly since then. In the 1970s, a shift from farming and manufacturing to the technology sector transformed the job market. The rise of the service sector and knowledge-based economy introduced white-collar cubicle jobs that relied on mental skills, problem-solving and communication, rather than physical labour. Although these new types of jobs were more intellectually strenuous, the government took no measures to reduce the workweek.

On the corporate front in the US, however, there was a growing trend in the early 1970s to embrace the compressed four-day, 40-hour workweek, with sixty to seventy companies adopting it  per month. By 1978, hundreds of businesses and around one million Americans had shifted to a four-day schedule. But contrary to  early expectations of it becoming the norm, interest declined in the 1980s.

Workers were hesitant about working longer hours and factors like the rise of part-time employment and changing economic policies (keyword Reaganomics) encouraging longer work hours and productivity gains contributed to the shift away from the four-day workweek.

Since the 1980s, technological advancements have persistently reshaped the work environment, by automating processes, replacing workers with machines in various production sectors, and fostering a continuous surge in productivity. The emergence of new communication channels and digitalisation enabled novel work formats, such as teleworking and hybrid working.

But despite this wide array of changes, work days and hours have stayed the same since 1926. Officially, that is. Unofficially, an increased demand for performance has pushed many employees into working extended hours. This together with the erosion of work-life boundaries is leading to increasing levels of burnout, recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 as a work-place syndrome resulting from chronic stress.

The pandemic push: a UK success story

The four-day workweek regained momentum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which not only established remote work as the standard but also underscored the importance of wellbeing and mental health.

Leading the charge has been 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to reshaping the future of work. Its six-month pilot projects across the globe empower companies to test-drive this model. In the UK, the nonprofit facilitated a trial for businesses across diverse sectors, including finance, marketing and retail, spanning from June to December 2022. The pilot project involved reducing working hours to 32 per week.

Among the participating employers was Bookishly, a Northamptonshire literary gift company led by Louise Verity. Reflecting on the pandemic’s impact, Verity said  that ‘The pandemic changed everything about the way we did things and also the way that I felt about the staff. We felt like a closer team.’

‘The pandemic made me realize that providing fulfilling jobs was part of Bookishly’s mission,’ she added. Together with her team of eight, Verity identified and tackled key concerns surrounding a potential four-day workweek at Bookishly. Questions like ‘How do we manage interactions with customers and trade partners?’ and ‘Can we decide on a day when we don’t post and people can’t get a hold of us?’ were collectively addressed.

The team agreed to designate Wednesday as a day off for everyone. Breaking the week up like that makes it now feel like small, two-day weeks. It helps with attention span and has not affected output,’ says Verity. ‘This “mini-week” structure also created a work routine, with dedicated tasks allocated across Mondays and Thursdays, and Tuesdays and Fridays.

Not all companies approached the four-day workweek in the same way. Aliyah Davies, representing the 4 Day Week Campaign, another actor involved in coordinating the UK trial, highlighted the varied setups. Some businesses chose Fridays or Mondays off, while others staggered the days to ensure coverage for all five workdays. Some companies implemented it only for select departments, where the transition could be smoother,’ Davies noted. The campaign avoided advocating for a one-size-fits-all approach, as long as the proposals ensured 100 percent pay and reduced hours.

After extending the trial for an additional six months beyond its original duration to observe seasonal changes, especially during Christmas, Bookishly joined 17 other companies from the initial trial in permanently adopting the four-day workweek. This decision is now included in Bookishly’s employment contracts, meaning all new hires follow a four-day work schedule.

While not all companies from the pilot project have opted for the same contractual adjustments as Bookishly, they nearly unanimously retained the four-day workweek. Davies says this decision stemmed from the fact that ‘they found that it made their employees happier and gave them a better work-life balance, while benefiting the business, with productivity often massively increased’.

The impacts on  employee welfare are remarkable, but questions arise about how companies measure productivity-related success. In a society already burdened by over-productivity and overwork, should firms continue to prioritise increased output as a key achievement metric for the four-day workweek? Together with wellbeing indicators, could embracing sustainable productivity levels for both humans and the environment be a more constructive approach? These issues are yet to be addressed.

For now, the potential effects of legally implementing the four-day workweek across the UK remains uncertain. Apart from anything else, the government has shown no support for such a move. On the contrary, in October 2023, it issued a guidance statement instructing local authorities to cease any four-day workweek trials immediately, citing concerns that a 20 percent reduction in local authority capacity does not provide value for money. This stance may partly be influenced by a three-month pilot project launched by the South Cambridgeshire District Council in January 2023, which despite legal threats and funding cuts from UK lawmakers was prolonged until April 2024.

The Belgian model: employers not fully on board

In Belgium, the results of the government’s top-down approach to legalising the four-day workweek in November 2022 have been underwhelming, with adoption rates remaining extremely low. Unlike the UK’s model with reduced hours, Belgium requires employees to cram the same 38-hour workload into four 9.5-hour days.

Trade unions sounded the alarm early on. The President of the General Labour Federation of Belgium denounced the measure as a ‘murderous stab in the demand for the collective reduction of work’.

Employers were also wary. A survey published in November 2022 by Securex, a leading Belgian social service provider, revealed that around 25 percent of 1,340 sampled employers were sceptical about the feasibility of a four-day workweek in their respective sectors. This sentiment was prevalent among employers in manufacturing, hospitality and retail. Only 13 percent were open to approving shorter workweek requests.

Kristen du Bois, a doctoral researcher at the University of Ghent focusing on the four-day workweek and employee wellbeing, has explored the reasons for employers’ scepticism, conducting interviews with 17 company leaders. A key reason is the legal provisions, she discovered. Employees are obliged to follow a fixed schedule, obliging them to give up flexible work hours that allow them to determine when their workday begins and ends – a valued perk of their work arrangements.

Administrative hurdles added fuel to the fire, du Bois explained: ‘While a full-time workweek in Belgium is 38 hours, many individuals work 40 hours. If they request a four-day workweek, the employers must negotiate a collective bargaining agreement allowing the employee to work 10 hours a day. This is perceived as a burden.’

If the legal and social barriers are too high, du Bois pointed out, employers are more likely to ‘informally agree with their employees to four instead of five days without registering it’. This might mean that in Belgium, the number of people working a four day workweek could in fact be higher than reported.

A case in point involves a young woman in the nonprofit sector who chose to remain anonymous. She reached an informal agreement with her employer for a four-day workweek. Her timesheet, however, indicates she works five days. She is nevertheless satisfied with the arrangement. Interacting with people from different time zones often entails both early morning and late-night meetings.

‘Working longer hours for fewer days helps me hold onto my time more easily,’ she explained, even though a heavy workload sometimes compels her to work on her day off.

Not everyone feels the same way. Agnieszka Piasna from the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) explains that, for most, the nine-hour work schedule ‘would be really difficult’, especially considering that commuting time would stretch the workday to ten or eleven hours.

‘It essentially eliminates any opportunity for private or family life during the workdays: you cannot take your kids to school or pick them up, and having dinner together becomes impractical. It erodes the entire free time within a given day, and that spans four days in a week.’ Piasna stressed that the Belgian model should not even be referred to as a ‘four-day workweek’, but as a ‘compressed workweek’.

A gendered issue

Through the right to opt-in on an individual basis, the Belgian government shifted responsibility for securing the four-day workweek to employees, who must negotiate with their employers and establish a formal process.

Piasna warned that this approach ‘is more likely to have adverse effects on women compared to a collectively agreed upon and applied system’. Collective solutions eliminate discrimination among employee groups, ensuring everyone’s equal access.

‘Women are more inclined to seek reduced working hours, similar to flexible options,’ explains Piasna, ‘as they still bear the primary responsibility for caregiving, including children and the elderly, as well as household chores. This is not always viewed favourably by employers, who may perceive it as a diminished commitment to work.’

This, in turn, can impact on career progression, including promotions. It can also affect employability, since there might be a presumption that women will be more inclined to request a shorter workweek. Consequently, women often refrain from requesting reduced working hours.

Piasna also challenged the argument that certain women-dominated sectors facing labour shortages, such as hospitality and healthcare, cannot accommodate a four-day model. She argues that this view indirectly restricts women’s access to reduced hours, despite evidence from studies suggesting that a shorter workweek would improve working conditions and attract more workers, potentially alleviating shortages.

‘Long hours, demanding tasks, and the need for significant skills and effort often drive people away,’ according to Piasna. Reducing the workweek, she argues, could address these challenges, making these sectors more appealing and retaining talent.

The gig economy: a more complicated outlook

While the four-day workweek sparks conversation in many sectors, some workers find themselves left out of the equation – those entangled in the gig economy. This is due to the fundamental difference in their employment structure.

Unlike traditional jobs, gig workers lack regular schedules and often rely on non-traditional payment structures based on minutes or seconds worked. This model fails to account for crucial unpaid time investments, such as waiting for tasks, dealing with clients, or being ‘locked in’ if freelancing. ‘Until these fundamental issues are addressed,’ ETUI’s Piasna emphasized, ‘discussing a shortened workweek for gig workers remains premature.’

Some hope remains, however. The EU’s proposed Platform Work Directive, projected to be enacted by 2025, could become a game changer. The legislation introduces the ‘presumption of employment’, requiring platforms to prove workers are genuinely self-employed, not employees. If classified as employees, gig workers could gain access to minimum wages, social security and the right to collective bargaining. These changes could pave the way for more structured work hours and, potentially, shorter workweeks.

More EU experiments

The adoption rate of the Belgian four-day workweek could see improvement with certain key changes. Du Bois revealed that the government has launched a pilot study on a four-day workweek with working-time reduction. Results are yet to be disclosed.

The momentum for the four-day workweek is gaining traction in Europe. On 1 February 2024, Germany initiated a six-month trial involving 45 companies, spearheaded by 4 Day Week Global. Portugal has also been undertaking a similar project since 2023, involving 39 companies.

At the EU level, the European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights Nicolas Schmit says that ‘there is no need for new legislation on this at the moment: a four-day working week is already possible to implement under the current EU legislation’. He added also that the European Parliament is currently carrying out a pilot study on the feasibility and impact of the four-day workweek, by looking at worker and company level.

The Belgian and UK cases highlight the potential benefits and challenges of the four-day workweek, contributing to the vision of a reimagined work model benefiting employees, employers and society.

With a projected 40 percent increase in productivity in developed countries by 2035, driven by artificial intelligence, there is a pressing need to reassess gain distribution. Will we continue to invest in welfare and allow company owners and shareholders to pocket the profits, or prioritise leisure opportunities for an increasingly exhausted, overworked workforce?

From the public school superpower Finland to arch-capitalist Britain, education varies widely across Europe. Across this spectrum, one factor remains constant: early childhood education constitutes a necessity for most families, as it defines the future of their children’s academic careers. 

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What we recognize today as nurseries and kindergartens originate from early 19th-century experiments: Robert Owen’s Infants’ School in Scotland opened in 1816, while Teréz Brunszvik championed ‘angel gardens’ in Hungary beginning in 1828. The term ‘kindergarten’ – meaning children’s garden, can be credited to Friedrich Fröbel, a German pedagogue who founded the concept in 1840. The idea soon crossed oceans: the first public-school kindergarten opened in the 1870s in St. Louis, USA, and by 1880, there were over 400 kindergartens in 30 US states. 

Today, this professional field serves a complex function, integrating children of varying abilities and backgrounds, experimenting with methodologies, and enabling working families to even exist. Aside from making plenty of macaroni art, these institutions develop skills, support children’s personal development and socialization, integrate minorities, teach language manners, as well as foster intellectual and emotional growth. 

But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns in the early education realm; across Europe, many countries have been continually reducing their spending on education since the 1990s, consequently putting strains on professionals and making the cost of childcare a significant burden. Additionally, early education for migrant and refugee children is something that needs to be tackled, following especially the 2015 ‘crisis’ and more recently the war in Ukraine. While the EU was arguably better prepared for the former in terms of providing care and education, it has had to find ways to adjust to the latter group more quickly, with challenges still arising for both. 

Early childhood education plays a tremendous part in supporting families and children’s development. They are a cornerstone of society, and in many places across the continent, they need more support than they currently have. 

Today’s guests

Viktória Szücs is the president of the  Democratic Trade Union of Crèche Employees in Hungary. She’s a loyal advocate for enhancing the professional landscape for pedagogues, ensuring they have the resources and support they need to nurture the young minds of tomorrow.

Maria Roth is the director of the Montessori Adult Education Center in Munich with 50 years of experience. She is a recognized AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) trainer specialising in the developmental age of 3 to 6 years

Flóra Bacsó is a mediator, restorative facilitator, trainer, and project manager at the Partners Hungary Foundation, invested in the integration of Roma pupils into education systems. She is also a teacher of Related Education, a trauma-informed methodology that aids parents and educators. 

We meet with them at the Library of Central European University in Budapest. 

Sources

Monitoring the provision of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services for Ukrainian refugee children and their families in Europe by Ecorys

How is Europe welcoming Ukrainian refugee children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services? by the European School Education Programme

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Margarita Lechner, writer-editor
Salma Shaka, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director
Judit Csikós  project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

Video Crew Budapest

Nóra Ruszkai, sound engineering
Gergely Áron Pápai, photography
László Halász, photography

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
István Nagy, video editor
Milán Golovics, conversation editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota  closed captions, Polish and French subtitles; language versions management
Farah Ayyash  Arabic subtitles
Mia Belén Soriano  Spanish subtitles
Marta Ferdebar  Croatian subtitles
Lídia Nádori  German subtitles
Katalin Szlukovényi  Hungarian subtitles
Daniela Univazo  German subtitles
Olena Yermakova  Ukrainian subtitles
Aida Yermekbayeva  Russian subtitles
Mars Zaslavsky  Italian subtitles

Hosted by the Library of the Central European University, Budapest

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.