ASK THE EXPERT
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON BY KELLY HEITZ
There is a growing epidemic around the world. Burnout. We work too hard. We have accepted a stressed-out life as the norm. We don’ t even realize how sick we are making ourselves. ARIANNA HUFFINGTON wants to change that.
A stress-induced wakeup call ten years ago led Huffington to find the link between well-being and performance. She discovered it’ s not about how hard we work, but how well we take care of ourselves. The evidence was clear.
“ Seventy-five percent of healthcare costs in the U. S. are just about treating preventable, often-stress related conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease,” notes Huffington. So, she sold The Huffington Post and created Thrive Global, a wellness source that focuses on both everyday consumers looking for better health, as well as corporate programs to improve wellness from the top down.
Pulse asked Huffington where her inspiration for Thrive came from and how its principals can be translated to the spa industry.
Pulse: Where did the concept of creating a multi-tiered wellness tool stem from? Arianna Huffington: After I collapsed from exhaustion in 2007, I became more and more passionate about the connection between well-being and performance. And that led me to write my two books, Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. And as I went around the world speaking about them, and our epidemic of stress, burnout and sleep deprivation, I saw how deeply people want to change their lives. So, I wanted to go farther than just raising awareness— I felt the need to turn this passion into something real and tangible that would begin to help people change their daily lives. It was a call to action I just couldn’ t ignore, and so I founded Thrive Global. And since the problem exists on multiple levels, we wanted the company to have both business and consumer tiers.
Join Huffington’ s new movement at thriveglobal. com.
P: You have written a lot about your wellness experiences and principles in your books Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. How do you plan to use Thrive Global to expand those principles among the global wellness market?
H: Thrive Global is meant to accelerate the culture shift away from our current culture of burnout and sleep deprivation. Right now, a lot of the global wellness market is focused on downstream harm reduction, working only on the symptoms. So, what Thrive Global is doing is focusing upstream, on the root causes – burnout and stress. That’ s where the intervention needs to be.
P: What areas of wellness does Thrive’ s consumer platform focus on? H: We go upstream and focus on all the elements that go into
64 PULSE ■ June 2017