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