Latest news with #Sonja
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
A Few Pro Tips For Newbies Trying To Navigate Costco
Thinking about joining the club? Here's some sage advice about making the most of your shopping experience at one of the the world's biggest wholesale warehouses. Costco is the go-to warehouse wholesaler across the globe, but some find this membership-only ... More experience daunting. (Photo by) I love the idea of Costco, but the thought of shopping in a massive warehouse kind of freaks me out. The vast aisles crammed with giant packages, those hard-to-navigate carts, the ginormous crowds. And that's just in the parking lot! Yes, I love in-store grocery shopping, but Costco has always been a mystery I've yet to solve even as friends and family sing its good-deal praises. So, I hit up a friend whose family has been members since the Northwest-based global force debuted in 1984. 'It was a wholesale only warehouse back then,' said Sonja Groset. Sonja's probably the most organized person I know – she's a project manager in the tech sector – so I asked her if she'd be willing to show me the ropes. Sure, she replied, and we set a date. Weekdays are best, late morning, around 10 and you'll likely miss the biggest crowds, she advised. I've been meaning to join the club – shopping at Costco requires a membership – since the company stood firm on its pro-DEI policies, even doubling down on its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. That stance was rewarded by a flood of new memberships. So, yes, sign me up! But wait, will I use my membership if the shopping experience triggers the kind of stress I felt when I got lost at the San Francisco airport when I was a kid? Where the heck am I? Calm down and follow me, Sonja reassured. Shopping at Costco can be stressful for newbies, but there are some sound strategies for making the ... More experience less daunting. We vowed to walk up and down every aisle of the vast store in Seattle's industrial neighborhood known as Sodo. (Which stands for south of the dome, though the Kingdom was leveled more than 20 years ago.) By the end of our journey, we had logged more than 1,000 steps, and Sonja had a cart full of staples from her list and a few impulse buys. Because Bodum mugs are cool. Oh, and that ham was a screaming deal at $3.99 a pound. When I first began contemplating jumping on board the Costco juggernaut, I posed the question on my Facebook page asking: What are your go-to purchases? The responses ran deep and wide: That torrent of positive energy fired up a serious case of FOMO, so I guess I'd better give it a shot, right? The $1.50 Costco hot dog and soda combo has remained the same price since the 1980s. (Photo by ... More Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images) When I stepped up to the membership desk just inside the door, a friendly dude whose name tag read Tay Tay ('my friends thought they were being funny') explained the different levels of membership. Sign on for the basic at $65 a year or bump it up to the executive level and go for a Costco Visa card and get cash back on purchase at the end of the year, plus a $50 bonus for signing up. Tay let me know that if I was dissatisfied, I could cancel at anytime. He was friendly and efficient and just like that, I was a card-carrying Costco member. Costco stocks an ever-changing inventory, including Bodum mugs. Sonja expertly guided the cart up and down the aisles. No, we're not in the market for new appliances, mattresses or a water filtration system, but should the need arise, the price is right. 'When you see prices that end in 7, you'll know those are going away soon,' she advised, adding that sometimes those made for the best kind of deals. Here are a few more general tips for Costco newbies from Sonja: She led me through the chilly room dedicated to produce and pointed out some good deals in the bakery, where I spotted a cute rainbow-themed happy birthday cake. Right on. In the meat and seafood area, the season's first halibut was priced way lower than most supermarkets and pulled barbecued pork looked legit, as did other ready-to-heat-and-eat meal options. It's just that those packages were so huge. 'You can always split them up among friends or family,' Sonja advised. Costco's Kirkland brand rotisserie chickens are just $5, which is cheaper than the ingredients used ... More to produce it. As much as I appreciated Sonja's assist, I was still nervous about going on my own, so my husband got on board. He'd already been in and ordered prescription sunglasses and was thrilled with the results, so he didn't need much convincing to join me. This trip, the store seemed downright chill and we easily filled our list. The cart still felt clunky, but fellow shoppers were gracious when I mistakenly strayed out of my lane. This visit, I also noticed a number of moms with kids and friends casually browsing together, snacking on the many samples. Like this was something fun to do, not a frenetic version of Guy's Grocery Games. (Which is now in its 38th season!) I also overheard a worker offering advice to another newbie: 'You just have to dive in," he said. Word. By the time I checked out and pushed my purchases out to the car, the lunch rush was heating up and there were drivers anxiously waiting for me to load up and get the heck out of the way. By that time the line for gas was twice as long as the very long line for hot dogs, so I hit the road. But I'll be back soon.
New York Times
01-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding
Growing up in Maryland, Sonja Lyubomirsky could see that her mother was unhappy. When Sonja was 9, her parents moved the family from Moscow, where her mother taught literature at a high school, to the United States, hoping to offer their children more opportunities. In their new country, Sonja's mother could no longer teach, so she cleaned houses to help the family get by. She missed her old career; she longed for her home country; she was frequently teary. She was unhappy on a Tolstoyan scale. Sonja understood her nostalgia and frustrations, which were compounded by a miserable marriage, but she still wondered: Were Russians just less happy than Americans? Was her mother destined to be unhappy anywhere, or was this a result of life circumstances? What, if anything, might make someone like her mother happier, if not wholly content? In 1985, Lyubomirsky left for college at Harvard, where, her adviser reminded her years later, she frequently brought up the topic of happiness, even though his expertise was in the social psychology of the stock market. At the time, the study of happiness was far from the wellness mega-field it has become today. In the '60s, a researcher making a rare foray into the subject noted that very little progress on the theory of happiness had been made since Aristotle weighed in two millenniums earlier. That paper concluded that youth and modest life aspirations were key components of happiness (findings later called into question). Many scientists at the time believed that happiness was essentially random: It was not something to cultivate, like a garden, or to reach for, by setting and achieving meaningful goals. It was something that happened to people, by virtue of their genes, their circumstances or both. 'It may be that trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller and therefore is counterproductive,' the authors of a 1996 study concluded. When Lyubomirsky arrived at graduate school for social psychology at Stanford in 1989, academic research on happiness was only beginning to gain legitimacy. Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who would eventually be known for his work in the field, waited until he was granted tenure before tackling the subject, despite harboring a longstanding interest in it. Lyubomirsky, too, was wary of choosing happiness as a specialty — she was a woman in science eager to be taken seriously, and anything in the realm of 'emotions' was considered somewhat soft. Nonetheless, on her first day of graduate school at Stanford, in 1989, following an energizing conversation with her adviser, she resolved to make happiness her focus. Lyubomirsky began with the basic question of why some people are happier than others. A few years earlier, Diener published a survey of the existing research, which touched on the kinds of behaviors that happy people seemed inclined to engage in — religious observance, for example, or socializing and exercising. But the studies, which sometimes had conflicting findings, yielded no clear consensus. Lyubomirsky's own research, over many years, pointed toward the importance of a person's mind-set: Happy people tended to refrain from comparing themselves with others, had more positive perceptions of others, found ways to be satisfied with a range of choices and did not dwell on the negative. But Lyubomirsky knew she couldn't separate cause and effect: Did being happy encourage a healthy mind-set, or did adopting that mind-set make people happier? Were people like her mother doomed to live with whatever their natural level of happiness was — or could they take control of their mood, if they only knew how? Even if you could change your mind-set, that process seemed to take a long time — people spend years in therapy trying (and often failing) to do it — and Lyubomirsky wondered whether there were simpler, easier behaviors they could adopt that would quickly enhance their sense of well-being. She decided to put it to the test. Lyubomirsky started by studying some of the habits and practices that were commonly believed to be mood boosters: random acts of kindness and expressions of gratitude. Each week for six weeks, she had students perform five acts of kindness — donating blood, for example, or helping another student with a paper — and found that they were happier by the end of that period than the students in her control group. She asked a separate group of students to contemplate, once a week, the things they were grateful for, like 'my mom' or 'AOL Instant Messenger.' They, too, were happier after doing so than a control group. The changes in well-being weren't particularly large in either study, but Lyubomirsky found it remarkable that so small and low-cost an intervention could improve the quality of students' lives. In 2005, she published a paper based on those studies arguing that people did have considerable control over how happy they were. Lyubomirsky's research came out just as the field of psychology was reconsidering its objectives and even its purpose. When Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, took the helm of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he expressed a concern that he and his colleagues had spent too much time focusing on dysfunction and not enough devoted to fostering life satisfaction; he encouraged his peers to pursue 'the understanding and building of the most positive qualities of an individual: optimism, courage, work ethic, future‑mindedness, interpersonal skill, the capacity for pleasure and insight and social responsibility.' He called for a return of the field to its origins, 'which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive.' Psychologists heeded the call, bearing down on new fields of research, including well-being and happiness. They conducted thousands of happiness-intervention studies over the next 15 years: acts-of-kindness and gratitude studies, like Lyubomirsky's, but also forced-smile studies, 'looking on the bright side' studies, diet studies and meditation studies. Many of them seemed to show that people could, in fact, make themselves happier, but most of the effect sizes were small, the results were short term and the options seemed endless. Those aspiring to greater happiness might even have suffered from the paradox of choice: With the limited time they had, should they devote it to journaling? Practicing gratitude? Meditating? The public would have to wait another two decades for a more decisive answer to break through — delivered by a researcher who presided over the longest-running happiness study in the field's history. In 2003, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger accepted a new job at Harvard, where he had long been affiliated, overseeing one of its most prized research projects. Waldinger, a psychoanalyst by training who would later be ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest, had always been preoccupied by questions 'with an existential flavor,' which is why, when the university asked him to take on the longest-running wellness study in American history, he readily agreed. It was the rare study that surveyed people over the course of their lives, from young adulthood through old age, and it held clues about the choices and circumstances that lead people to look back on their lives with regret or satisfaction. The study began in 1938, in an attempt to discern the habits of healthy and sound young men. Two doctors who tended to Harvard students were running it with a grant from a Midwestern retail mogul whose goal, Waldinger says he was told, was to figure out what made for a good department-store manager. The researchers' goal, by contrast, was to reverse the usual trajectory of medical research, which was to study those who were ill in the hope of finding ways to make them well. Instead of examining patients after their troubles began, the doctors hoped to 'attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal young men.' In search of young men who could, as one researcher put it, 'paddle their own canoe,' the two doctors recruited a group of 268 Harvard undergraduates from the classes of 1939 through 1944, among them John F. Kennedy and the future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. The students (all of whom were white) were handpicked by their deans as exemplars of a kind. 'All of us need more 'do's and fewer 'don'ts,'' the doctors wrote in a news release announcing their aims. The college students were studied from every conceivable angle. They spoke for more than 20 hours each to psychiatrists; their family histories were explored; their parents were interviewed about their childhood foibles, and they were given a barrage of physiological tests. They had their insulin tolerance assessed, along with their respiratory function and how their bodies responded when they were asked to run on a treadmill to the point of exhaustion. They were measured from head to toe in a pseudoscientific pursuit of a connection between body shape and personality. Once they left college, a majority of the men continued to submit to regular medical exams and filled out lengthy questionnaires that asked them about their lives and their state of mind; roughly once a decade, a researcher traveled to interview them in person. In the 1970s, the researchers brought another group of men into the study — the so-called Glueck cohort, 456 men, mostly white, from the Boston area who came from disadvantaged backgrounds. Sheldon Glueck, a professor at Harvard Law School, and his wife, Eleanor, a social worker and researcher, had begun interviewing them when they were still boys in 1939, originally hoping to compare their fates with those of another group of young men from their community who had been labeled juvenile delinquents. Some 30 years after the study first started, the psychiatrist and researcher George Vaillant had taken it over, switching the emphasis away from a search for the inherent qualities of those considered the best and brightest and toward deeper questions about how much people change over time and what makes them happy and healthy in the long run. The survey asked open-ended questions that captured the shifts in the men's worldviews and sense of self. 'I have a drive — a terrible one,' one Harvard student initially told the psychiatrist who interviewed him. 'I've always had goals and ambitions that were beyond anything practical.' He added that he was suspicious of 'sneaky liberals,' so much so that he had torn up 'propaganda' from the Harvard Liberal Union. In his 30s, that same man said that his goal was no longer to 'be great at science, but to enjoy working with people.' By 50, he had resolved, the researchers reported, that 'the world's poor were the responsibility of the world's rich.' Many of the study participants served in World War II; they went on to work in fields like marketing, bricklaying, banking, real estate development and furniture moving. Sixty-five years after they first submitted themselves to investigation, many from both the Harvard and Glueck cohorts found themselves on less-than-hospitable shores, while others continued to glide along in the sun. In 2001, when the men were in their late 70s and early 80s, Vaillant published some of his most significant findings: He found that for both cohorts, one of the best predictors of the men's overall well-being in their old age was how happily married they were at age 50. Waldinger, who worked as a therapist for many years, had always felt that his primary goal was to help his patients have more satisfying emotional lives by enabling them to sustain meaningful relationships. But he was fascinated to find that the Harvard study bore out his intuition so clearly. Asked to name a regret, one man answered: 'Wish I'd spent more time with my wife. She died just as I'd begun to taper down with work.' When Waldinger came on board, one of his first initiatives was to expand the study to include the wives of the Harvard and Glueck men. One 80-year-old woman interviewed said she wished she had spent less time getting upset about 'silly things' and instead focused more on 'more time with my children, husband, mother, father.' Waldinger knew that being married was associated with overall well-being, but he was intrigued by other, more recent studies that found that marriage alone wasn't enough — how happy the marriage was mattered. Waldinger decided to do some research of his own: He followed 47 octogenarian couples from the study over an eight-day period, noting how much time each person spent with their spouse and with friends and family. He found that for those in happy marriages, socializing with others in their circle contributed to their happiness. If they were in pain or ill health, however, it was only spending time with their spouses that seemed to protect them from the mood-dampening effects of physical suffering. Other research he conducted found that the people who scored highest on measures of attachment to their spouses were also the ones who reported the highest levels of happiness. Waldinger, the fourth steward of the Harvard study, was moved by the consistency of his own research and the work that preceded him — the thousands of questionnaires, saliva samples, genetic analyses, cholesterol reports, dental records, I.Q. tests, wide-ranging interviews and brain scans. Much of it added up to one key insight: 'The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period,' he said in a TED Talk in 2015. Strong, long-term relationships with spouses, family and friends built on deep trust — not achievement, not fortune or fame — were what predicted well-being. Waldinger had worried that his big reveal was so intuitive that he would be laughed off the stage; instead, the talk is one of TED's most watched to date, with more than 40 million views. Waldinger's work was building on other prominent research about happiness and relationships that had been drawing attention in the field: Ed Diener and Martin Seligman found that happy people spent less time alone every day than unhappy people, and a large study published in 2008 found that those who were more socially engaged — attending church, belonging to organizations — were consistently happier, as were those with large social networks. And yet at the same time the field was also recognizing weaknesses in its methods. The Harvard study, like a lot of other happiness research, posed that same question of cause and effect that had bedeviled psychology for so long: It was hard to know, for example, if happy marriages made for happier people at the end of their lives — or if happy people were simply more inclined to have happy marriages. In much of the work that researchers like Lyubomirsky conducted, the sample sizes were often too small to yield meaningful findings, and critics within and outside the field charged that psychology journals allowed researchers too much discretion in how they analyzed their data. A new generation of psychologists started re-examining the field's practices and trying to prove, using more rigorous methods and new statistical tools, some of its core findings. Julia Rohrer, who arrived as a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in 2016, was part of that new cohort. Eager for her work to have real meaning, she tried to find a rigorous way of looking at the connection between happiness and social relationships. Three years after Waldinger's TED Talk, Rohrer analyzed a survey that asked nearly 2,000 Germans to write down ways they thought they could make themselves happier, or at least as happy, in the future. She coded the answers into 'nonsocial' answers ('get a better job') or 'social' ones ('spend more time with friends and family'). Rohrer found that people who proposed a social goal had taken more steps toward that goal and were happier a year later. She concluded that 'socially engaged pursuits predict increases in life satisfaction,' as she put it in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. Rohrer's work was published around the same time that other researchers were finding, in high-quality and replicated studies, that even fleeting social interactions could improve happiness. Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, researchers both then at the University of Chicago, conducted an experiment in which they asked people to interact with strangers on public transit — to try to have a moment of connection — and found that the commuters seemed to get a mood boost from the exercise. Epley and Schroeder's research and other studies have found that people underestimated both how much they would enjoy the experience and how open the strangers would be to it. That work was important beyond the decision about whether to talk to a stranger on a train, says Waldinger, who considers these findings some of the most helpful in recent years. 'We have this innate reluctance to socially connect, particularly with strangers — and then we're happier when we make ourselves. I find it a really useful thing to know.' Finding purpose in serving others, spending more time with others — it all points toward the same thing, Lyubomirsky says. 'After all these years, it hit me,' she says. 'The reason that all of these interventions are working is because they make people feel more connected to others. So when I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more connected to my mom. When I do an act of kindness, it makes me feel more connected to the person I'm helping, or just humanity as a whole. Yes, you could go running, and that would make you happier, and meditation doesn't necessarily have to be about other people. But I would say that 95 percent of things that are effective in making people happy and that have been shown to be true through happiness interventions are because they make people feel more connected to other people.' Although social media has come to be associated with negative moods, the research on its effects on happiness is actually more mixed, Lyubomirsky says, because it does provide a certain kind of connection. In her own research, Lyubomirsky has found that when people talk to someone — whether in person, by phone or video chat — those simple interactions seem to boost happiness equally, and that they are all preferable to texting. 'Maybe it's just because our brains are not wired for that,' she says. With the exception of passive scrolling on social media — behavior that often inspires the scrollers to compare their own lives unfavorably with those of the posters — she believes connecting with old friends or possible new ones on social media is better than making no connections at all. That strong marriages and family relationships make people happier — yes, that's intuitive, Lyubomirsky acknowledges. What she found more surprising was just how effective even having smaller points of connection throughout the day could be for happiness — and how achievable that is, if people could only overcome their own hesitation. 'If someone were to ask me what's the one thing you could do tomorrow to be happier, that's my answer: having a conversation with someone — or a deeper conversation than you normally do,' she says. Talking to strangers — on trains, in a coffee shop, at the playground, on line at the D.M.V., in the waiting room at the doctor's office — could be dismissed as an exercise that simply makes the time pass. But it could also be seen as a moving reflection of how eager we all are, every day, to connect with other humans whose interiority would otherwise be a mystery, individuals in whose faces we might otherwise read threat, judgment, boredom or diffidence. Talking to strangers guarantees novelty, possibly even learning. It holds the promise, each time, of unexpected insight. A few weeks after I first talked to Waldinger by phone, I flew down to Florida, where he was spending a month with his wife in the borrowed home of a dear friend. I was struggling to come out of a low mood that came on in recent weeks after an injury. I had greatly underestimated the length of the drive from my hotel to the house, and I was reminded of research from about a decade ago finding that for every 10 minutes of extra commuting time, the likelihood of having symptoms of depression increases by 0.5 percent. By the time I arrived, I was irritable and my back was hurting, so much so that for the first 10 minutes of our conversation, I felt a dual consciousness: I was both listening and thinking about my pain, monitoring its level, worried it would only increase. On a small patio by a very small pool, Waldinger and I talked about the rise of the happiness industry — the countless podcasts, conferences, best-selling books — and his own role in it. He gives considerable thought to maintaining his own happiness in the face of becoming a kind of influencer, someone called on to travel around the world to speak about happiness at conferences, sometimes to crowds of very wealthy people, repeating the same turns of phrase and giving the same advice about deep relationships. As a Zen priest, someone accustomed to reckoning with his place in the world, Waldinger is acutely aware of the tension between achieving status and doing work that demands humility. Before becoming the steward of the Harvard study, he walked away from a high-profile job as the director of training and education at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, after deciding that the prestige of the role didn't offset his lack of enthusiasm for the administrative work it demanded. At age 45, he started over, taking a major pay cut to pursue work he found more fulfilling: working under the guidance of Stuart Hauser, a psychiatrist recognized for his work in adolescent development. That professional step, of course, led Waldinger to the Harvard study and the work that has catapulted his visibility far beyond that of his previous career. He reflected with honesty about how much thought he gives to keeping his newfound fame in perspective. 'I grapple with the feeling that it's important,' he told me, as we sat over turkey sandwiches his wife had made; ordinarily, the two of them have lunch together, a small moment of connection they started sharing during the pandemic. The work is meaningful, he said; it was the feeling of ego gratification that he struggled with. 'It feels important,' he said. 'But it's really not. I work at a hospital where every water fountain is named after someone who was once maybe famous. But now no one knows who they are.' The badges of achievement — that's the least important part of who he is, he tries to remind himself. Because otherwise who would he be when the calls from The New York Times, from Aspen, from TED, stopped coming? Even knowing that Waldinger was a Buddhist priest, I felt somehow surprised by how quickly our conversation had moved past the discussion of research and deepened into something that felt bracingly and reassuringly honest. When we finally said goodbye after a few hours of talking, mostly in the sun, I left feeling that I had connected with someone who was, just a few hours earlier, a stranger. I noticed, as I got in the car and remembered my concerns about my back, that it was incontrovertible: I felt better.
Daily Mail
24-04-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Palace issues health update on Queen of Norway - after she was taken to hospital with 'breathing issues'
Queen Sonja of Norway has now been discharged from hospital - after the 87-year-old royal was admitted following 'breathing difficulties' earlier this week. As revealed by the royal palace, her Majesty is now back from Rikshospitalet, Oslo University Hospital, after the 'situation has normalised'. A statement read: 'The Queen is on sick leave for the rest of the week.' On Tuesday, she was 'transported by medical helicopter from the royal chalet in Sikkilsdalen, where the royal couple were spending the Easter holidays'. It is understood that the family has spent most of the holidays at the chalet this time of year, according to the NTB news agency. Sonja was also briefly hospitalised in January after experiencing cardiac fibrillation, a rapid and irregular heartbeat. She then had a pacemaker installed, a procedure the palace described as 'successful.' The queen is married to King Harald - Europe's oldest reigning monarch at 87 - who has also had a pacemaker inserted last March after contracting an infection during a private vacation in Malaysia. Both Sonja and Harald appeared to be in good spirits earlier this month, as they welcomed the President of Iceland for a gala dinner at the Royal Palace in Oslo. The couple hosted Halla Tómasdóttir, 56 and her husband Björn Skúlason, 51, at an opulent evening with their Scandinavian neighbours. Also in attendance were Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit, as well as their eldest daughter, Princess Ingrid Alexandra. The young royal, 21, was the image of elegance in a pastel blue dress with a ruffled bodice - which she adorned with various regalia, including a stunning tiara. Her mother, meanwhile, was sophisticated as ever in a champagne gown with a fitted silhouette and trumpet sleeves. Intricate flower embroidery across the frock elevated the design, as Mette-Marit, 51, swept her platinum blonde tresses back into a sleek updo. Meanwhile her husband Haakon, 51, was dapper in his uniform for the distinguished guests. King Harald stepped out with Halla - who donned a striking navy frock with a bedazzled neckline - while Queen Sonja, 87, who was stunning in a sunny yellow ensemble, walked along next to the President's husband, Bjorn. Princess Astrid of Norway, 93, was also in attendance. Photos from the event showed the glorious palace interiors and the spread that was offered, with food and drinks for 196 guests. And it's already been a busy year for the Norwegian royals. Last month, Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway was snapped enjoying a ski-ing competition in Oslo as she watched from the stands with her husband Prince Haakon. The couple put on an animated display as they cheered on competitors taking part on day two at the annual FIS World Cup Nordic competition. Starting on March 13, the competition hosted events on March 15 - when the royal couple were snapped enjoying the action, and March 16. At one point during the day's action, Mette-Marit was snapped hugging her husband Crown Prince Haakon. In a bid to stay warm amid the bracing temperatures, Mette-Marit wore a black padded coat, which she removed at times to show a warm, long-sleeved white top. Meanwhile, her husband also donned a warm black coat, topped off with a navy beanie hat and sunglasses. Queen Sonja and King Harald V were also snapped at the event, meeting Norwegian skier Therese Johaug who won the Women's Interval Start 20.0 km Classic race in the cross-country ski-ing category. Mette-Marit's day out watching the skiing came after it was announced the Crown Princess's chronic disease had progressed. The Norwegian Royal Court confirmed earlier last month that the royal is having daily symptoms due to her pulmonary fibrosis and requires 'more rest'. 'The Crown Princess needs more rest, and her daily routine changes more quickly than before,' the palace said in a press release, adding: 'This means that changes to her official schedule may occur more frequently and at shorter notice than we are used to.' The court warned late last year that Mette-Marit's pulmonary fibrosis may interfere with her planned duties. The most recent statement read: 'Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit's chronic disease pulmonary fibrosis has progressed. 'The Crown Princess has daily symptoms and ailments that affect her ability to perform her duties. 'The Crown Princess needs more rest, and her daily routine changes more quickly than before. This means that changes to her official schedule may occur more frequently and at shorter notice than we are used to. 'The Crown Princess has a strong desire to continue working, and therefore we will organise her official programme in the future in the best possible way so that her health and work can be combined.' Mette-Marit's health condition was first made public in 2018, when it was revealed she had been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis or the thickening of lung tissue. At the time, Mette-Marit issued a statement explaining that the condition 'means my working capacity will vary' to accommodate her treatment including 'periods of time without an official programme'. 'For a number of years, I have had health challenges on a regular basis, and now we know more about what is involved,' the mother-of-three said. 'The condition means that my working capacity will vary. 'The Crown Prince and I are choosing to make this public now partly because in future there will be a need to plan periods of time without an official programme to accommodate treatment and when the disease is more active.' Pulmonary fibrosis is incurable and worsens over time, but the Norwegian royal's doctor, Professor Kristian Bjøro at the National Hospital, said they'd been monitoring her condition for several years and the 'disease progression has been slow over this period'. Not much is known about the unusual variant of fibrosis that was detected in Mette-Marit's lung but, according to the Royal House, 'there is broad consensus that, unlike other more common types of pulmonary fibrosis, it is not related to environmental or lifestyle factors'. The fact that the disease was detected at an early stage improves Mette-Marit's prognosis, as per the Palace's official statement. 'Even if such a diagnosis will limit my life at times, I am glad that the disease has been discovered so early. My goal is still to work and participate in the official programme as much as possible,' the mother-of-three said. According to the NHS, the symptoms of pulmonary fibrosis include shortness of breath, loss of appetite and weight loss, extreme tiredness, a persistent dry cough, and swollen fingertips.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Queen of Norway Was Air Lifted to Oslo Hospital After "Breathing Difficulties"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Norwegian royal family has been through its fair share of health emergencies and headline-making legal worries over the past year, and on Monday, April 21, the royal house of Norway announced that Queen Sonja was rushed to an Oslo hospital. The 87-year-old queen was spending time with husband King Harald at the royal chalet in Sikkilsalen, Norway, over the holiday when she experienced "shortness of breath" that caused her to be air lifted to Oslo for observation. The Norwegian royal family released a statement on Monday night stating, "Her Majesty the Queen was admitted to the National Hospital this evening for examinations due to shortness of breath. The Queen was transported by air ambulance from the Prince's Cabin in Sikkilsdalen, where the Royal Couple spent the Easter holiday." On April 22, the family issued an update stating that Queen Sonja was discharged from the hospital. "Investigations show that the situation has normalized," the statement read. "The Queen is on sick leave for the rest of the week." This isn't the first health scare Queen Sonja has experienced this year. In January, Queen Sonja was hospitalized "after experiencing an episode linked to her existing heart condition, atrial fibrillation, while on a ski trip," according to Hello! magazine. She had a pacemaker fitted on Jan. 16 during a procedure at Rikshospitalet in Oslo. King Harald, who at 88, is the oldest reigning monarch in Europe, has also suffered from recent health problems. The Norwegian king was hospitalized with an infection during a vacation to Malaysia last year, forcing his son, Crown Prince Haakon, to act as regent. King Harald was later fitted with a pacemaker. Queen Sonja's hospitalization follows some concerning news regarding Crown Princess Haakon's wife, Crown Princess Mette-Marit. In March, the Norwegian royal household announced that the future queen's pulmonary fibrosis had worsened and she now faces "daily symptoms and ailments." Mette-Marit, 50, was diagnosed with the serious lung disease in 2018, and suffers from increased symptoms that are impacting her ability to carry out royal duties. "This means that changes to her official schedule may occur more frequently and at shorter notice than we are used to," a statement read.
Daily Record
22-04-2025
- Health
- Daily Record
Royal airlifted to hospital after suffering sudden illness on Easter weekend
The 87-year-old royal was flown to the Royal Hospital in Oslo. royal was airlifted to hospital after suffering a sudden illness on Easter weekend. Queen Sonja of Norway was raced to hospital in her home country after experiencing "breathing difficulties". The 87-year-old had been flown to the Royal Hospital in Oslo last night from the royal chalet in Sikkilsalen, where she and King Harald of Norway had been spending the Easter weekend. The Mirror reports that royal duties have since been suspended for the week ahead. In an update released yesterday, the Norwegian royal palace said: "Her Majesty the Queen was admitted to the National Hospital this evening for examinations due to shortness of breath. "The Queen was transported by air ambulance from the Prince's Cabin in Sikkilsdalen, where the Royal Couple spent the Easter holiday." It comes after Sonja had a pacemaker fitted earlier this year with the procedure said to have been successful. In recent weeks she took part in a state visit to Norway by the President of Iceland, Halla Tómasdóttir, and her husband Björn Skúlason. She was there for the welcome ceremony in the Palace Square as well as for the gala dinner. Her husband, King Harrald, is Europe's oldest monarch, reigning at the age of 88. The couple married in 1968 and have two children, Prince Haakon, who is the heir to the throne, and Princess Martha Louise. The Norwegian royal house has been the subject of controversy over the last 12 months following the arrest of the stepson of Haakon. In August, Marius Borg Hoiby, 27 was arrested and charged with assaulting an ex-girlfriend and threatening to set fire to her clothes, which he admitted to. Borg Hoiby has no royal title and is the eldest son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit - a product of a brief relationship the future Norwegian Queen had before she met and married Crown Prince Haakon. Mette-Marit was born a ' commoner ' and was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis - a chronic lung condition - back in 2018, which has forced her in recent months to take an extended sick leave. When her diagnosis was announced, she noted that her "working capacity will vary" as she moves forward and that she would have to take on less official engagements if her health worsened. Another point of controversy for the Norwegian royal house has been Princess Martha Louise, who stepped back from any official royal duties after marrying a so-called "shaman" - Durek Verett. Harald, 88, himself has also faced health challenges in the last year, with a serious infection seeing him admitted to hospital during a visit to Malaysia, as well as having to have a pacemaker fitted. The monarch now uses crutches, but has said he has no plans to step down from his position as King, and the oldest European monarch.
