To better understand the cause of her chronic pain and insomnia, Liz Tenuto majored in psychology. Her studies led her to psychotherapy for healing, like EMDR, and a better understanding of how the nervous system operates.

While working as a professional dancer after college, a suggestion from her teacher put Tenuto on the path to becoming “The Workout Witch.”

“It was actually my ballet teacher who noticed that I was very dissociated when I wasn’t dancing,” Tenuto, 40, tells CNBC Make It.

″[They] kind of nudged me to take a somatics class.”

In 2008, somatic exercises were still pretty new to most people. “For me, it just looked like a bunch of people rolling around in their pajamas on the floor,” Tenuto says. “So I was very skeptical at first, especially with an academic background.”

Somatic exercises were created to relieve tension from the body and entail moving in slow and mindful ways that shift the focus from how you look to what you feel. Yoga, breathwork and dance are all considered forms of somatic movement.

“It’s micro-movements. They’re really tiny, and you do very little in a class,” Tenuto says. In the sessions she attended, “we maybe did three or four movements in an entire hour and a half class. And it had profound effects.”

Somatic movements can be beneficial for a number of reasons, but is most widely touted for its effect on the nervous system.

“Our nervous system has different ways that it can be activated — sympathetic activation, which is fight-flight, and parasympathetic activation, which is freeze or shut down,” she says.

In between those two modes of activation is a middle ground called the “ventral vagal state,” which is a state of homeostasis. “You’re balanced, you’re social, you’re grounded, you’re regulated,” she explains.

The polyvagal theory indicates that doing somatic exercises may put you in the ventral vagal state, lead to better emotional regulation and get you out of fight or flight.

“You’re just reinforcing safety in your body as you do them over and over again, and you’re practicing this regulated state,” Tenuto says.

“It’s similar to building muscle. As you continue to build those new neural pathways and practice the exercises, that starts to become stronger than some of your trauma responses.”

During the Covid-19 shutdown in 2020, Tenuto began uploading videos of herself demonstrating somatic exercises to the social media platform TikTok, which was gaining in popularity at the time.

“I was posting the exercises, really to just hold me accountable for doing one exercise per day. Because at that time, I was having a really hard time just getting out of bed,” she says.

“I was very sad at the time. I was going through a divorce.”

Tenuto says sharing that daily exercise was the only thing that helped, and she was stunned when her account went from zero followers to 10,000 in just two to three weeks. Today, she’s at 2.2 million.

Before the pandemic, Tenuto taught Pilates and somatics classes and had private clients who she guided through injury recovery. Seeing how receptive the audience on TikTok and Instagram were to her videos filled her up with a “deep sense of purpose,” she says, and showed that sharing her work online could be just as effective.

Now, Tenuto’s somatic therapy demonstrations for healing trauma, alleviating symptoms of anxiety and shifting out of “functional freeze” go viral.

Tenuto deemed herself “The Workout Witch” because “when people experience these exercises, they do think that there’s some magic, and some like woo woo stuff going on with them,” she says.

“I wish there was, but it’s really just using neuroscience with movement.”

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Parents know all too well what it’s like to deal with a kid who refuses to listen: It’s frustrating.

But after years of studying over 200 parent-child relationships, I’ve noticed something fascinating: Parents who rarely deal with defiance don’t make threats, bribes or harsh consequences. They use language that makes children actually want to cooperate.

Traditional parenting phrases (“Stop that,” or “If you don’t do this, then…”) often trigger a child’s fight-or-flight response, activating the part of the brain focused on survival rather than learning. But when we shift to language that honors a child’s autonomy while still holding boundaries, cooperation becomes natural.

Based on my research, and from practicing healthy habits with my own child, here are five toxic phrases that instantly make kids not want to listen — and what to say instead.

What to say instead: “I know you don’t like this decision. I’ll explain, and then we’re moving forward.”

Why it works: “Because I said so” shuts down communication and teaches blind obedience. But explaining your reasoning, even just briefly, helps your child feel respected.

You’re not debating or negotiating — you’re modeling respectful leadership. This phrasing acknowledges their feelings and reinforces that you’re in charge in a calm, grounded way.

What to say instead: “When you’re ready to do [X specific behavior], we can do [X desired activity].”

Why it works: Threats create defiance because they force children into defense mode. This phrase shifts the power dynamic: It keeps your boundary firm while giving your child agency over when they’re ready to meet it. You’re not removing the limit — you’re removing the struggle.

What to say instead: “I see you’re really upset. Tell me what’s happening.”

Why it works: Dismissing a child’s emotions teaches them that their feelings are wrong or too much to handle. Emotional invalidation leads to disconnection, and disconnected kids don’t cooperate.

When a child feels heard, they calm down faster — and trust you more.

What to say instead: “I’ve asked about this a few times. Help me understand what’s making this hard for you.”

Why it works: This frustrated question assumes the child is being intentionally difficult. But often, what looks like defiance is actually confusion, disconnection or a lagging skill. The reframe invites problem-solving instead of blame — and that gets to the root of the issue.

What to say instead: “Something’s getting in the way of your best self right now. Let’s talk about it.”

Why it works: “You know better” shames the child and questions their integrity.

But the alternative phrase reflects a mindset shift — from punishment to partnership. It assumes the best in your child and encourages self-reflection instead of defensiveness. It sends the message: “I believe in you, and I’m here to help.”

It’s not about controlling your child’s behavior — it’s about creating the conditions where cooperation feels natural.

Children thrive when they feel respected, emotionally safe and involved in the process. These phrase shifts are not just linguistic tweaks — they represent a deeper shift in how we view parenting itself. Instead of treating defiance as something to squash, we begin to see it as a signal: a call for connection, clarity or emotional support.

When we respond with empathy and leadership, rather than control and criticism, we reduce power struggles and raise children who trust us, regulate themselves more easily, and grow into emotionally resilient adults.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of FOUNDATIONS — the transformative healing journal for parents ready to break cycles, do the inner work, and become the emotionally safe parent their child needs. She is widely recognized for her groundbreaking work in children’s emotional safety and strengthening the parent-child bond. Follow her on Instagram.

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Yannique Ivey may be going back to the office, but she’s open about the fact that you won’t catch her first thing in the morning. Wait too long in the day and you’ll miss her, too.

Ivey, 27, works for a tech consulting firm in Atlanta and says she drives into the office once or twice a month. When she’s there, she commits to an 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. schedule — just in time for a catered lunch, to catch up with colleagues for a few hours, and head out before traffic stalls her in a “hellish” commute home, she tells CNBC Make It.

She and her team are open about this arrangement. Spending a few shortened days in the office each month “takes needed time away from the actual work” to socialize and build community, she says, but “I’m a lot more productive when I’m home, so I get started there and wind down from there.”

It’s a new arrangement picking up across the U.S.: Workers are showing up for required attendance, but that doesn’t mean they’re sticking around for the full day.

More than half, 58%, of hybrid workers admit to “coffee badging,” or the act of going into the office building for their morning coffee, earning an imaginary badge for it, and then going home to work for the remainder of the day.

That’s according to a June survey of 2,000 people from Owl Labs, a company that makes videoconferencing devices.

Another 8% of hybrid workers say they haven’t tried coffee badging just yet but are interested in doing so.

Despite the half-days (or less), the coffee badging trend doesn’t mean people are sneaking out and slacking off for the rest of the afternoon, says Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs.

As he sees it, the practice could mean people are seeing the value of their office and enjoy being there some of the time. Survey respondents say they value being in-office to meet with colleagues, catch up with work friends and take meetings.

On the other hand, Weishaupt says, there may be another subset of people who use coffee badging as a way to “show their face in an old traditional way that we used to work” without having to be there for the full day.

Some office attendance guidelines only dictate a number of days bosses want people in, but not always the hours people should be present. So, “coffee badging gives you the opportunity to maintain your flexible schedule, which is incredibly important to employees,” Weishaupt says.

Weishaupt himself does the reverse of coffee badging, where he’ll start his day from home, drive in mid-day to avoid morning traffic, and finish the rest of his day from the office.

“The standard has been set around flexibility in terms of where you work, and now the standard is starting to become flexibility in when you work,” he adds. The traditional 8-hour workday from the office “just doesn’t seem all that relevant.”

In the Philadelphia area, Kynisha Gary, 30, says coffee badging helps her find balance as a parent and Penn State student. She reports to her nonprofit’s office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and sometimes leaves around lunch to pick up her son from school and then finish the day from home.

It’s a major productivity boost, Gary says: “I get all my work done — nothing goes missing on the days I go home and finish work from there.”

She enjoys having control over her hybrid schedule even more than when she worked for a company that was fully remote, she adds. “I looked forward to getting back to into the office and being interactive,” she says. “Being exclusively at home was double the work and harder to get away from work.”

Ivey says the flexibility “helps us feel that we are more in control of our work-life balance and lifestyle in general, not feeling the demand and pressure to have to integrate back into the office all the time.” She says the arrangement feels natural in her work environment, where her company wants to “ensure we’re happy outside of the work we’re doing.”

Men are more likely to show up and leave early (62%) than women (38%). Age-wise, millennials are the most likely generation to do so, followed by Gen Xers, then Gen Zers, and finally baby boomers.

“There are still trust issues between employers and employees as it relates to productivity,” Weishaupt says, and “the reality is we’re in this state where employees want flexibility, they’ve proven they can do it, [and] they don’t need to be hired to be watched doing the job.”

Ultimately, Weishaupt says, “the office still has a place. I don’t think anybody would question that.”

Meanwhile, some companies like Meta, Google, Amazon and JPMorgan Chase say they’re cracking down on office attendance through badge swipes and other methods, The Wall Street Journal reports. Other businesses track not just when their employees come into the office, but how long they stay by logging things like when they badge into another floor or use their phone to print documents.

Office attendance monitoring is “a trust killer,” Weishaupt says. “If I feel like I have to be sitting at my desk at 4:30 on Friday, even though I’m not doing anything productive, [because] my boss might call me — there’s a trust issue there”

“This isn’t grade school,” he adds. “We’re not hiring people to watch them work. We’re hiring them to do a job. And it’s the culture of accountability and leadership setting the right tone to be able to measure productivity that makes all the difference here.”

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Check out: Offices remain half full after latest round of RTO mandates: Taking away hybrid could be a ‘betrayal’

Most people in the early stages of a new romance look for evidence that confirms their compatibility. Not my husband and me.

Despite having chemistry, we started with the hypothesis that we weren’t a good match. We would discover a deal-breaker down the road — something big like how much money we wanted to give our aging parents or something small like what temperature room we like to sleep in — that would lead to our demise.

At the time, we were both tenured professors in the same academic department at the same university. If things went bust, it would be very uncomfortable to go to work each day. Academic jobs are hard to come by, which meant we might be stuck in that awkward situation for life. 

So we created a list of questions, guided by basic principles of relationship science, that are critical for couples to openly communicate about if they want to know whether they’re really compatible. Unlike the questions you find on dating apps, they don’t apply to everyone. We tailored our list to us. If you’re making a list with your current or prospective partner, I’d suggest you do the same.

But to help you build your questionnaire, here are the main themes you should focus on, with a few examples to get you started: 

Conflict over money is a big driver of divorce. Couples fight over big money issues but also small ones, like whether they should spend money on a house cleaner. These issues can lead to a pattern of conflict that is tough to get out of. 

Ask questions like:

• Do you like to spend money as you make it, or squirrel it away for later?
• How much should we each pay for stuff? Split dinners? Share costs of vacations?

The stress we feel at work has an outsized effect on our interpersonal relationships, even influencing sexual function, like the ability to reach orgasm.  

Ask questions like:

• How do you manage workplace stress?
• How important is your job to your identity? 
• How do you feel about making sacrifices for my career?

Money and career are must-discuss topics, and, depending on your circumstances, so are other big categories like kids, parents, and religion. 

Ask questions like:

• Do you want any kids (or any more kids)? 
• What are your thoughts about co-sleeping with kids? 
• How often do you want to visit your parents? 
• How important is it to you that they like me? What if they don’t?
• If I’m religious (or anti-religious), would that bug you?

When we have chemistry with someone and feel aligned with them on big things like values and goals, we assume the daily things will fall into place. But they can be real relationship deal-breakers.  

Sleep is a must on this list; it’s one the strongest predictors of health outcomes and relationship satisfaction. But I also suggest touching on food, pets, humor, and time alone. 

Ask questions like:

• What’s your ideal bedtime? 
• Do you have sleep apnea? Do you see a CPAP machine (a breathing machine used to treat sleep apnea) in your future?
• Do you like to cook, eat take out, or both?
• Do you like pets? Cats and dogs, or fish and lizards?
• Are you allergic to pets?
• Can we poke fun of each other or does that bug you?

When I think about the importance of physical intimacy, I’m reminded of a scene from “Annie Hall.” Annie and her partner Alvy are both in therapy, shown on a split screen. Their respective therapists ask them, “Do you have sex often?” Alvy laments, “Hardly ever, maybe three times a week,” whereas Annie responds in an exasperated, annoyed tone, “Constantly, I’d say three times a week.” 

Despite its outsized effect on relationship longevity and physical health, we don’t have good social scripts for talking about sex. 

Ask questions like:

• How much sex do you like?
• How open are you about your preferences? 
• What are you into? What are you not into? 

What we’re “allowed” to talk about in relationships is based on norms, and when it comes to relationships, these norms are often morally tinged. There’s a category of taboo questions where even thinking them — let alone asking them out loud — violates social norms. 

In some cases, you’re too embarrassed to ask the question. In others, you worry that caring about the answer will reflect poorly on your character. Ours included questions about family history of mental health problems. 

Here are some others I’ve encountered in my work: 

• Have you ever struggled with a weight problem?
• How do you feel about consensual non-monogamy? 
• Have you ever hit a partner? 
• When you die, are you giving everything to your kids? Or is your will negotiable and could include me? 
• Among widows and widowers: Do you want to be buried next to your (dead) spouse?

We often slide into relationships, rather than making thoughtful, deliberate decisions. Going through this exercise won’t make you feel comfortable, but that’s not the goal. 

What good will avoiding that temporary discomfort do when you find yourself lying awake next to the love of your life, his cat that you’re allergic to at the foot of the bed, feeling all hot and sweaty because he likes it balmy at night and you love the air conditioner?   

Tessa West is a social psychologist and professor at New York University. She has spent years leveraging science to help people solve interpersonal conflicts in the workplace. She’s the author of ”Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them″ and ”Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You.” She is an instructor in CNBC’s online course How to Change Careers and Be Happier at Work.

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Right after graduating from university in 2015, Gurmer Chopra, 32, landed his first corporate role at a “Big Four” accounting firm. But after less than a year on the job, he decided to quit.

“Four months into it, I [was] like: ‘I freaking hate it here.’ It was just the most boring work, and I felt like I was making zero difference in the world,” Chopra told CNBC Make It.

“At one point, I [started studying] for my [certified public accountant exam]… Then I opened the book [and] I remember just reading the first page, and I think that’s literally when I realized I cannot do this with my life, or I’m gonna just not be a happy person,” said Chopra.

At that time, he was also working on an e-commerce business on the side with his older brother Dashmeet Chopra. In their free time, the duo went into Downtown Los Angeles to source items such as T-shirts, jeans and shoes at wholesale prices and resold them on eBay.

Their eBay side hustle has since become YoungLA, a lifestyle clothing brand that brought in over $167 million in 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Originally from India, Chopra and his family immigrated to the U.S. in 2002 and spent their first four years in New Jersey before landing in California. Chopra said he got his entrepreneurial chops from his dad, who worked at a souvenir shop after moving to the U.S.

His dad eventually started a wholesale souvenir business and managed some gift shops in Los Angeles. Chopra and his brother became involved in their dad’s business endeavors at a young age.

“That was honestly the start of me becoming an entrepreneur with my brother, because … I was 12 years old, and helping my dad with running this business,” said Chopra.

After some time running these brick-and-mortar stores, Chopra’s dad realized that he had better success by selling their goods online. Inspired by his discovery, the two brothers decided to experiment with e-commerce themselves.

In March 2014, Chopra was studying economics and accounting at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when he and his brother first opened their eBay account.

“Initially, me and my brother pulled together $5,000 and that’s all we’ve ever invested in the company. And we’ve always been able to just reinvest,” said Chopra. The two used this money to source their first few products.

“We were buying jeans, Converse, Vans … Tupac shirts, Biggie shirts … We would just buy a lot of stuff from Downtown LA, and kind of just throw a bunch of things on the wall. Whatever listings that would start popping off, we would [put] more time and effort into that,” he said.

Besides selling on eBay, Chopra and his brother also expanded to Amazon and Shopify, which they decided to name YoungLA.com — inspired by a DJ on their local radio station called “Young California.”

From there, they shifted their focus from only reselling items they bought wholesale to going all-in on the YoungLA brand. Chopra said they began manufacturing their own products and would add the name “YoungLA.com” to the tags of their items to create brand recognition.

The business brought in its first million in revenue in 2017, Chopra said. Ultimately, there were two key successes that catapulted the brand’s growth further: “drop culture” and influencer marketing — both of which are still core parts of the business today.

Drop culture is a marketing strategy where brands release limited-edition items, or “drops,” at specific times, to create exclusivity and buzz on social media.

“In 2018 we started … focusing on our website, and we wanted to kind of create a “drop culture,” said Chopra. “So whenever a new product came out, we would like try to hype it up beforehand and then drop it on the website.”

In 2019, YoungLA signed its first major contract with an influencer, and by 2020, the business had hit over $6 million in revenue, added Chopra. Last year, the business brought in, on average, more than double that amount in monthly revenue.

When asked if he is happy that he left his accounting job, Chopra said: “I don’t think I could be happier. [I’m] very, very satisfied with where we’ve been, but it is definitely stressful.”

“I think a few years into running the business, you realize [that] nobody could have prepared me for this… I think some of the hardest things in the beginning was firing an employee … or just dealing with really tough situations, dealing with stress, getting sued and things like that too,” he said.

“You learn so much when you’re actually in it … But I think figuring those things out teaches you so much about the world, but also about yourself.”

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