 |
|
|
|||||
Embarking on a personal transformation, often termed a “glow up,” encompasses more than just external changes; it’s about building confidence and holistic wellbeing. While the multi-billion-dollar beauty industry offers numerous products to aid in this journey, an accessible and potent tool is often overlooked: music. Scientific research underscores the profound impact of music on essential aspects of well-being, including sleep quality, stress management, and exercise performance. By integrating music into these areas, one can enhance overall health and, consequently, personal appearance. Music and sleep: Your secret weapon for restorative rest Good sleep hygiene means creating a consistent routine and an environment that promotes deep, uninterrupted sleepand music can be a game-changer when it comes to catching enough zs. Heres what music can do for sleep: Facilitate faster sleep onset: A study involving women with insomnia found that participants who listened to self-selected music at bedtime for 10 nights reduced their time to fall asleep from 27 to 69 minutes to just 6 to 13 minutes. Lower cortisol levels: Cortisol, the bodys stress hormone, can keep you wired when you need to wind down. Music has been shown to reduce cortisol levels, promoting relaxation and deeper sleep. Trigger dopamine release: Listening to music before bed can stimulate dopamine, the same feel-good hormone released during pleasurable activities like eating, exercising, and intimacy. That means music doesnt just help you sleepit helps you feel happier, too. How does sleep impact wellbeing and confidence? It promotes skin repair and regeneration, reduces inflammation, and it improves cognitive function and memory, along with emotional and mental health. Music and exercise: Amplifies performance Music isnt just about setting the vibe for your workoutit has measurable physiological and psychological benefits that can push you to perform at your best. Increases endurance and reduces perceived effort: A study by Professor Costas Karageorghis and colleagues found that syncing music with a runners pace increased muscle endurance by 15% while reducing perceived effort by 12%. In other words, you can work harder while feeling like youre doing less. Boosts performance across different workout types: Research shows that music provides ergogenic (performance-enhancing) benefits in endurance, sprint, and resistance-based activities. It improves physiological responses like heart rate and muscle activation, leading to better results. Elevates mood and motivation: The right playlist can shift your mindset, making workouts feel less like a chore and more like an energizing experience. How does exercise impact wellbeing and confidence? It boosts your mood and reduces anxiety, enhances brain function, while building self-esteem and body image. Music and stress management: A scientifically-proven relaxation tool We all know stress wreaks havoc on our health, skin, and overall wellbeing. The good news? Music is a powerful tool for relaxation, and science is backing it up in the emerging field of biomusicologyan area that fuses auditory neuroscience, psychology, and music cognition. Biomusicology shows that music: Reduces anxiety: A 2021 meta-analysis concluded that music therapy significantly improves anxiety during treatment, providing tangible mental health benefits. Promotes deep relaxation: The most effective relaxation music is slow in tempo, low in frequency, and free from sudden changes or jarring sounds. It helps slow the heart rate and create a calming effect. Supports individual needs: Whether you prefer instrumental melodies or soft vocals, music can be tailored to your specific relaxation goalswhether youre meditating, journaling, or simply unwinding after a long day. How does stress management impact wellbeing and confidence? It reduces premature aging, prevents breakouts, improves sleep, and it reduces anxiety and depression. The takeaway: Music is your free, science-backed glow up tool A glow up isnt just about what you put on your skin or how you style your hairits about how you feel, inside and out. Music is an accessible, research-backed way to improve sleep, maximize workouts, and manage stress, all of which contribute to a healthier, more radiant you. So next time youre curating your self-care routine, dont underestimate the power of a great playlist. By harnessing the therapeutic benefits of music, individuals can support their holistic well-being, contributing to a more radiant and confident self. The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
Category:
E-Commerce
The financial services industry is facing an era of unparalleled fragmentation. Consumers are no longer limited to a single bank or financial provider in an increasingly nomadic digital environment. Instead, consumers can move seamlessly between services and products across multiple platforms. This creates a highly competitive marketplace while still maintaining some degree of segmentation. As fintech disruptors and traditional financial institutions compete for consumers, creating brand differentiation and customer loyalty has become one of the hardest and most critical aspects of growing a business. Adding to this challenge, banks and financial service providers face an environment of unprecedented consumer choice. In the 2024 banking outlook, Deloitte cautions the industry that retail customers are spoiled for choice, and it has become easier for them to switch accounts and diversify deposits across multiple platforms. However, solutions are emerging that can break down the barriers between financial institutions and allow consumers to access a bundle of value-added features and capabilities alongside traditional financial productsall in one place. Lessons from travel and e-commerce industries The financial system is undergoing a seismic shift akin to the transformation that occurred over the past several decades in the travel industry, where consumers now prefer one-stop marketplaces like Kayak or Expedia for their travel needs. Closed loop ecosystems (e.g. I get my banking, personal loan, insurance, mortgage and brokerage all from one bank) are now being challenged by a la carte open systems where products are becoming provider agnostic and more goals oriented. Consumers are often asking, what is the optimal basket of financial products for me today? E-commerce giants like Amazon continue to illustrate changing consumer behavior by providing a range of add-on services, from groceries to online medical consultations. Like the travel sites, customers can do all this on Amazon itself, not separately going to the individual companies and services. Because of todays e-commerce and travel platform experiences, customers are accustomed to one-stop shoppingits become an expectation, not just a want. However, shopping for financial services has always lagged behind the other vertical industries. This has produced a drive to create financial ecosystems with a seamless, holistic shopping and checkout experience. A broad spectrum of companies can come together to offer financial services and products personalized for each consumer, offered in one centralized marketplace. For consumers, this means greater convenience and tailored products and financial solutions without needing to navigate multiple platforms. For financial institutions and service providers, this offers a chance to showcase their products and services to a wider audience, creating loyalty and trust while reducing the cost of customer acquisition. Data and AI can further fuel personalization Data analytics can be a powerful tool in revealing consumer behaviors and demands. Right now, consumers are demanding executable and tailored options, but in a simplified way (as in, a ready to checkout way). The emergence of low-latency deployable AI models in digital interfaces now allows the industry to customize offer deliveries right from the source of truth (e.g. a bank or financial institutions offer catalog) quickly and seamlessly. Again, insights and observed consumer behaviors from the travel industry are instructive in setting the next stage of financial services. An Expedia survey found that 50% of respondents were interested in using generative AI to plan their next trip in 2024. In addition, nearly 40% of travelers said they would use AI to find the perfect stay. Consumers are beginning to trust AI to make informed decisions at a time when the traditional, fragmented financial system is losing trust and loyalty. By using AI tools to provide additional financial options faster and more seamlessly, the industry can rebuild trust and loyalty with customers. Consumers tend to trust when they are given options, rather than being told what to do, and offered little choice. That consumer demand is as equally true when shopping for a hotel as it is when shopping for a savings account. They want to see the full picture rather than one product or service. To achieve this, a more unified ecosystem of financial service providers is needed, built with the help of AI tools, so consumers do not have to dig to find the right options in a fragmented landscape. A critical juncture The financial services industry faces a critical juncture where customer loyalty is being heavily tested by competitive offers and a fragmented digital environment. However, by leveraging AI and data, this challenge will be turned into an opportunity. Just as the travel industry has evolved to meet consumer demands through comprehensive platforms, the financial sector must embrace technology innovation and collaboration to offer one holistic, user-friendly experience. The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
Category:
E-Commerce
A whos who of musicians, actors, directors, and more have teamed up to sound the alarm as AI leaders including OpenAI and Google argue that they shouldn’t have to pay copyright holders for AI training material. In an open letter, submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology, more than 400 members of the entertainment community expressed concerns about the wish lists of AI companies for the U.S. AI Action Plan. Those recommendations, the letter warned, could severely damage the entertainment community, which supports more than 2.3 million jobs whose wages currently top $229 billion per year. The group urged the Trump administration to not sacrifice Americas leadership in the world of entertainment in the race to dominate artificial intelligence. We firmly believe that Americas global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries, the group wrote. Americas arts and entertainment industry [provides] the foundation for American democratic influence and soft power abroad. But AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models. Included among the prominent signatures on the letter were Paul McCartney, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Bette Midler, Cate Blanchett, Paul Simon, Ben Stiller, Aubrey Plaza, Ron Howard, Taika Waititi, Ayo Edebiri, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Janelle Monáe, Rian Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gylenhall, Alfonso Cuarón, Olivia Wilde, Judd Apatow, Chris Rock, and Mark Ruffalo. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) says the AI Action plan is meant to be the first step in securing and advancing American AI dominance. And AI companies had a comprehensive wish list, submitted during the comment period for the bill, which ended Saturday. Among those was stronger export controls for things like chip exports as foreign competitors, such as DeepSeek, which continues to worry U.S. AI firms. Some developers also pushed for more funding for AIs infrastructure and further government adoption of AI. But it was comments about regulation of that AI training that caught Hollywoods attention. OpenAI, in its submission to the OSTP, seemed to push for the right to train its large language models on copyrighted works without the permission of those copyright holders or any compensation. Our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works, the company wrote. Ultimately, access to more data from the widest possible range of sources will ensure more access to more powerful innovations that deliver even more knowledge. Google, meanwhile, discussed exceptions to copyright rules that allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation. Hollywood argued that the ramifications of those sorts of changes could impact far more than the entertainment industry, threatening the work of writers, publishers, photographers, scientists, and basically anyone who generates intellectual property on a computer today. This issue is not just about AI leadership or about economics and individual rights, but about Americas continued leadership in creating and owning valuable intellectual property in every field, the Hollywood collective wrote. It is clear that Google . . . and OpenAI . . . are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit Americas creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. While OpenAIs letter warns that should AI companies in China be given unfettered access to copyrighted data, America will lose the AI race, the entertainment community dismissed that theory, urging the government to leave todays copyright laws unchanged. Access to Americas creative catalog of films, writing, video content, and music is not a matter of national security, the group wrote. [AI companies] do not require a government-mandated exemption from existing U.S. copyright law.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||