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Years of scolding from health experts about a good night’s rest may be breaking through. Americans are finally getting more sleep — about 18 minutes more per weeknight compared with 2003. It may not sound like much, but researchers say it’s a positive sign. “If we only got more sleep, we would then see that we actually perform better and would probably be more creative and more productive during the day,” said Dr. Mathias Basner, the associate professor of sleep and chronobiology in...

Fanny Ortiz, a mother of five who lives just east of downtown Los Angeles, spent nearly a decade married to a man who controlled her and frequently threatened her. Then, she said, his abuse escalated. “He would physically hit me in the face, throw me on the wall,” she recalled. Ortiz, 43, eventually left the marriage, taking her children with her. A few years later, she learned that the East Los Angeles Women’s Center offered domestic violence services at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical...

Twenty-six individuals from multiple sectors across the state were selected to participate in a training and learning community around building self-healing communities. Participants spent two days with Dr. Robert Anda, Laura Porter, and Kathy Adams learning about the impacts of trauma, the ACE study, and how to support positive change within a community. The energy in the room was palpable. Over the course of two days, not only did the group gain knowledge, but a community was formed. So...

Please check out the inspiring keynote speakers and embodied resilience workshops we have lined up for Echo's 2018 conference . We will be looking at how trauma and resilience are transmitted across generations and learn how to not only be resilient but also thrive despite trauma histories.

I am reading Nadine Burke Harris’s Book: The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity . I will often come across a passage that resonates so deeply with my own life that I have to put the book down and just breathe. The reason for my pause is not about my own Adverse Childhood Experiences, although I have a few; it is because I recognize the path she is on. I first heard about Adverse Childhood Experiences from another professional in my field of practice, prenatal...

Robert Simmons, on left. _________________________ Robert Simmons had been working with incarcerated men since 1998 and thought he’d seen everything. But in 2010, he met a grandfather, a father and a grandson—all of them inmates at Buncombe County’s Craggy Correctional Center. “I saw how things are passed down from one generation to the next. That was a wake-up call for me,” says Simmons. And it underscored his resolve to help thwart that cycle. For years, Simmons had been volunteering at...

When Highland Park, Michigan, a predominately Black city surrounded by Detroit, had its streetlights repossessed in 2011, because of a $4 million unpaid street lighting bill, Ryter Cooperative Industries L3C stepped in to help install solar-powered streetlights in the city’s neighborhoods. Energy cost inequality is a problem in many areas throughout the country. Low-income households spend 10% of their income on electricity—four times higher than the average household, according to a recent...

AUSTIN - There's a new approach to solving homelessness in Austin. It has to do with a one-of-a-kind apartment community that has onsite mental health services plus drug and alcohol treatment. It's called Housing First Oak Springs. At a press conference at the future site of the apartment community in East Austin on Oak Springs Monday morning, Joyce, a former homeless Austinite, talked about what would have happened if she didn't get help. [For more on this story by Jenni Lee, go to...

Editor’s note: This is a continuation of an ongoing series, Your School , that examines what is holding back teachers, principals, parents and communities from helping students realize their full potential, and aims to hold up promising efforts that other places might learn from. Each of them took a side and lifted. From the back of a minivan, Milbridge Elementary School students Spencer Bickford and CJ Lovejoy carried an armchair into the school’s art room one day in November. They hauled...

Excerpts from article in today's Keene Sentine l by Jessica Ricard.

[This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Tiny Buddha] I’ve always lived with a low hum of anxiety in the background, and lately, it’s been harder to keep a lid on it. There are a lot of things to be anxious about these days. We live in a complex and stressful world and anxiety is very common, affecting upwards of 20 percent of the population. Some experience manageable levels; for others, anxiety and chronic stress can be debilitating and self-destructing. Truth is, we...

Today I interview interview psychiatrist Susana De Leon, MD, who explains how early trauma changes our DNA by damaging telomeres, with potentially serious consequences for our health and longevity. We talk about how she helps people build lives full of love and connection, which can measurably change the health of their cells (and the length of their telomeres) for the better. Click here to watch the video .