I’m the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change technology company with the mission of improving health and helping us move from merely surviving to thriving. I also founded The Huffington Post and have written 15 books, including Thrive and The Sleep Revolution.

I’m originally from Greece (and still have the accent to prove it!). When I was 17, I moved to England and studied economics at Cambridge University, where I frankly spent most of my time debating at the Cambridge Union.

I live in New York but also spend time in Los Angeles, and love being a Yiayia (Greek for grandmother) to my almost three-year-old grandson Alexander and his newborn sister Annabel.

My journey to focusing on health began with a fall. In April 2007, I collapsed from exhaustion and burnout and hit my head on my desk on the way down, breaking my cheekbone.
 
In the wake of my fall, I found myself going from doctor to doctor to find out what was wrong. Doctors’ waiting rooms were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.

After all the tests, it turned out nothing was wrong. Except for the fact that everything was wrong. I was suffering from an acute case of burnout. I had bought into the myth that burnout was the price I had to pay for success. 

I became more and more passionate about the five daily habits that drive so much of our health: nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management and connection. That led me to write Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. 

The books struck a chord, but I wanted to go beyond speaking and writing to helping people move from awareness to action. So in 2016 I founded Thrive Global, which helps people transform their health by combining Microsteps — small, science-backed daily steps — with technology, storytelling and community. And last year, with the OpenAI Startup Fund, we launched Thrive AI Health to build an AI health coach to democratize access to health coaching.

Arianna Huffington

"My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve."

Great advice and powerful perspective from Warren Buffett, in one of his final letters sent as CEO to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, about the helpful lessons he learned from friends over the years. 

As he put it: "Get the right heroes and copy them.”

Founder and CEO at Thrive Global | Passionate about Health and AI

Love this 💜

🎨: To You From Steph via Instagram

We all feel anxiety and fear — it’s part of life.

One way to manage it is to look at the things we can control.

And the things we can control start with our own daily habits.

Loved being with Erin Burnett OutFront on CNN talking leadership, women, and finding glimmers of light in the turbulence.

There's no better time to start. 

Love this from YUCH Studio.

“When the world feels fast and fractured, it’s the slow, steady, and deeply present love of a parent that can change everything.”

That’s from Dr. Amit Sood’s great new book, “Dancing in the Elevator,” that he co-authored with his daughter, Gauri Sood, where they unpack decades of lessons in parenting, friendship, and growing up.

As they write, “Think of this book as a small care package from our family to yours—filled with science, stories, and practical skills, all wrapped in the promise that you are not alone. May it help us, together, nurture a kinder, happier, and more hopeful world for every child.”

Diagnoses and job descriptions tell us what we have or what we do — never who we are.

Because if we’re defined by our labels, we’re also confined by our labels.

No label, however authoritative, and no job, however important, can ever contain the full constellation of who we might become.

"I’m still placing my bets that AI can be a force for good. But it remains an open question. Right now, we’re at a fork in the road, where two different futures are possible.”

That’s from my conversation with Lucy Handley in Big Think in which we talked about the possibilities of AI and why it’s important for us to use our agency and build the AI future we want.

Want to slow the aging process? 

Instead of supplements and serums, get a little help from your friends. In a study by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), researchers found that those who were more socially connected actually aged slower on a cellular level and had lower systemic inflammation. It’s more evidence that our daily behaviors are one of our most powerful medical interventions. 

As Luigi Ferrucci, chief scientific director at the National Institute on Aging, put it, “The next great step in aging science will be understanding how lifestyle factors slow down aging.”

How often do you connect with your friends?

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How young is too young to give a child a cellphone?

Catherine Pearson of The New York Times reports on a study that found that children who had smartphones by age 12 were at higher risk of depression, obesity and poor sleep.

“When you give your kid a phone, you need to think of it as something that is significant for the kid’s health — and behave accordingly,” said Dr. Ran Barzilay, lead study author and a psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Dr. Barzilay is careful to note the study isn’t meant to shame parents. He has three children, and two of them got phones before age 12, but his 9-year-old won’t be joining them anytime soon.

“It doesn’t mean that every kid with a smartphone has a problem for life,” he said. “All it means is that us as parents — and, I hope, also policymakers and society — are going to do something about it together.”

What age do you think kids should be allowed to have a smartphone?

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced that they’re going to refocus their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative on AI and biology not just to cure some diseases, but to cure all diseases. As they put it in a statement, “When we started, our goal was to help scientists cure or prevent all diseases this century. With advances in AI, we now believe this may be possible much sooner.”

I’m always puzzled when people say they’re going to use AI to cure or prevent all diseases, since it completely ignores the established science on the profound role our daily habits and behaviors — what we eat, how much we move, how we sleep, our stress levels, our social connections — have on the incidence and progression of disease. To take just food as an example, around 85% of all healthcare spending is related to the management of diet-related chronic diseases. And obesity is connected to at least 236 conditions and diseases.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative statement talks about “training new biological AI models to create virtual cells and immune systems and engineer our cells to detect and treat disease.” I’m all for it. As well as investing in AI to create better diagnostics and more lifesaving drugs. But there’s so much we can do with what we already know about the science on our daily behaviors.

At a launch event, Priscilla Chan said that “we want to make every single scientist better, to take on more risk, to ask the most brave, curious questions so that they can find out what's true in biology.”

Here are two of my curious questions: Isn't it about time we realize that the ultimate limiting factor of the impact of AI on health is going to be human nature? And given that, shouldn’t we begin to invest in humans as much as we're investing in machines? Yes, AI, and, no doubt, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, will have a hugely positive impact on health. But AI can have an even bigger impact by being applied to something we already have a lot of data on: helping humans improve their daily habits can dramatically transform their health.

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