10 ideas for a self-care day at home

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

The benefits of taking time to look after yourself have long been studied; researchers say that investing in self-care can help us to reduce stress, improve our emotional health and have an overall better quality of life.

Self-care is essentially any activity that we do purposefully in order to take care of our mental, emotional, and physical health – it could range from something small, like catching up on missed sleep with a lie-in, to a larger activity, like going for an invigorating swim in the ocean.

With many of us taking ‘lockdown leave’ during the current pandemic, there’s never been a better time to nourish your mind and body, by booking in a self-care day.

Instead of telling yourself that you have to make a dent in writing your novel, run a half marathon or record a podcast episode, spend your next free day indulging in one or many of these self-soothing ideas.

Read more at RTE

WHO hails 'great news' from Covid-19 steroid treatment

The World Health Organization (WHO) hailed as "great news" initial clinical trial results that showed a cheap and widely used steroid called dexamethasone can help save the lives of critically ill Covid-19 patients. Researchers in Britain said Tuesday that dexamethasone, used to fight inflammation in other diseases, reduced death rates of the most severely ill Covid-19 patients by around a third. 

"This is the first treatment to be shown to reduce mortality in patients with Covid-19 requiring oxygen or ventilator support," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement late on Tuesday.

"This is great news and I congratulate the government of the UK, the University of Oxford, and the many hospitals and patients in the UK who have contributed to this lifesaving scientific breakthrough.

Read More at France 24