Latest news with #postpartumDepression
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
This one Oura Ring setting was a game changer for me after I had my baby
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. I write about fitness tech for a living, but for the first four months of my son's life, I took everything off. I was struggling with postpartum depression, and devices telling me how little I'd moved, slept, or recovered was the last thing I needed. Women's Health Week This article is part of Tom's Guide's Women's Health Week — a series of content that explores how technology and the right workouts can support and empower women through every phase of life. Months later, when I finally felt strong enough to pop my Apple Watch and Oura Ring back on (an insignificant action to most, but a milestone to me), I leaned on a few features that really helped. I paused my rings on my Apple Watch, for example, removing the pressure to exercise on days when all I could do was sit on the sofa with my baby. I also used enabled Rest Mode on my Oura Ring — read on to find out what it does, why I did it and how to use it. According to Oura, Rest Mode allows you to 'focus on recovery when you feel tired, unwell, or need to slow down.' The Oura equivalent of pausing your Apple Watch rings, Rest Mode pauses your Activity Progress Goal, Activity Score and all activity-related contributors, allowing you to focus on rest. The Readiness and Sleep insights will also be adjusted to help you prioritize rest — something I wasn't getting with a newborn, but removing the pressure of not meeting activity goals helped. Oura says Rest Mode is designed for when you're feeling under the weather, when you're injured, sick, or traveling. If your Oura ring notices a spike in your average body temperature, you might get a notification that suggests switching to Rest Mode on your home screen. This is because the ring has noticed your body is under strain, and is suggesting that you should focus on recovery. If, like I did, you're turning on Rest Mode when you're not sick, here's the steps you'll need to follow: Go to the Menu in the top left corner of the Oura app home screen — the menu icon has three horizontal lines From here, scroll down and select the Rest Mode icon Then select Turn on Rest Mode Once you have enabled Rest Mode, the data you see on your home screen will be different. At the bottom of your home screen, you'll be able to see that Rest Mode is enabled. When you're feeling better, simply tap the notification banner at the bottom of the home screen, or go back to the Rest Mode setting on the sidebar and select 'Turn off and delete tags'. It's worth noting that once you turn Rest Mode off, your Activity Goal and Score will slowly return to normal, taking into account the time you've been resting. I had Rest Mode on for a couple of months as I mentally recovered, so it took my ring a week to ease me back into my normal goals. During this period, I was still able to view my step count, active calories, and calorie burn if I wanted to, but I found the mental break from hitting fitness targets was what I needed. Remember, these devices are designed to motivate you, not stress you out. If you're feeling overwhelmed, take them off, re-set, and remember that all movement is medicine, whether you're tracking it or not. How to set up menstrual tracking on your Apple Watch Which fitness trackers are the best for tracking women's health Samsung Galaxy Ring is changing the game for cycle tracking — here's how
Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Die, My Love review — Jennifer Lawrence bombs in a maternal splatterfest
It's only taken eight years, but Jennifer Lawrence has finally delivered a companion piece for her outré mommy-horror Mother! And this one's terrible too, possibly even worse. At least Mother! demonstrated (pretentious) conceptual coherence, with Lawrence serving as a metaphor for the planet while her baby represented environmental destruction. In Die, My Love we're treated to a splatterfest that features Lawrence as a former writer called Grace who moves with her selfish, seedy, beer-swilling husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) to a run-down woodland abode somewhere in middle America and has a baby that triggers an all-consuming psychotic breakdown. Fine on paper, and clearly the subject of postpartum depression can handle more big screen engagement than the few paltry mainstream titles that have attempted it
Washington Post
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Jennifer Lawrence stirs Oscar talk in Cannes for 'Die, My Love'
CANNES, France — Last year, the Cannes Film Festival produced three best actress nominees at the Oscars. This year's edition may have just supplied another. In Lynne Ramsay's 'Die, My Love,' Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play a married couple with a newborn who move into an old country house. In Ramsay's messy and moving marital psychodrama, Lawrence plays an increasingly unhinged young mother named Grace whose postpartum depression reaches darkly hallucinatory extremes.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Die My Love' Review: Jennifer Lawrence Is a Mother Grappling with Postpartum Depression (and Punk-Rock Angst) in Lynne Ramsay's Showy Mess of a Marital Psychodrama
In one of the terrifyingly labored and overwrought scenes that make up Lynne Ramsay's 'Die My Love,' Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who's suffering from an acute case of mental trauma — the film would have you believe it's postpartum depression, though you could make a good case that it's not — has had enough of the noisy dog that her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), brought home for no good reason. The two are living in the country, in a home that Jackson inherited from his uncle, a house that definitely qualifies as a fixer-upper. These two just haven't bothered to fix it up. They have a baby, you see, a sweet little boy, and ever since he came into their lives everything has been falling apart. The dog literally never stops yapping (it's the most annoying dog in history), so Grace, who has brought over a shotgun, asks Jackson to shoot it. He says: Are you kidding that's crazy! So Grace picks up the shotgun and does the deed herself. More from Variety Ezra Miller Speeds Down the Cannes Red Carpet at 'Die, My Love' Premiere in Surprise Festival Appearance Visceral Chilean Docs Head to Cannes for Fifth Annual Showcase, Featuring Chile and Cuba's Parallel Battles, a Chilean Cowboy, an Argentine Sex Worker Man Dressed Up as Bird Shocks Cannes Red Carpet at Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson's 'Die, My Love' Premiere It's clear that she's got a problem. Yet I couldn't help but wonder why Jackson, with a new baby to deal with, brought home that dog in the first place — or, more to the point, why he seemed so flagrantly insensitive to the fact that Grace didn't want a dog. This situation typifies the dynamic of 'Die My Love,' which is as follows: Grace acts out in delirious, raging, violent, inexplicable ways — and Jackson, while understandably dismayed at her behavior, reacts to it by rarely lifting a finger to do anything that would help her. Is he insensitive or just dumb? Pattinson, in a rare bad performance, just plays him as an unpleasant clueless bro. 'Die My Love' presents us with a case of the blind leading the damned. Postpartum depression is a syndrome that was once in the shadows, and there are ways it remains so. It's still misunderstood and under-treated and not empathized with enough. Yet 'Die My Love' serves up a showy yet strange, in many ways baffling hyperbolic projection of what can take place in the hearts and minds of women during the first months (or even years) of motherhood. This is the first film directed by Lynne Ramsay in seven years, since the startling Joaquin Phoenix depravity-and-revenge drama 'You Were Never Really Here' (2017), and what she establishes in the film's early scenes, which feature a lot of in-your-face drinking and fucking, is that Grace and Jackson are a kind of dissolute punk-rock couple, the sort of nihilist parents who aren't going to let having a baby get in the way of their Budweiser regimen. That's okay; they have a right to keep drinking and raise a kid at the same time. But there's very little sense that either of them has decided to become a responsible adult. She's an aspiring writer who says, as soon as the baby is born, that she's done with writing. He's got…some kind of job, that he seems to do occasionally, on the road (we have no idea what it is), but mostly the two are just hanging out in that house. There's very little structure to their lives, or to the movie, beyond Ramsay's art-house showbiz instinct to keep cranking up the shock level of Grace's behavior. It's not really a dialogue-driven movie. Grace and Jackson never have a simple conversation about future plans, or health insurance, or buying groceries, or about how they intend to parent. They just seem like morose post-collegiate slackers who had a baby because they like to fuck a lot and, you know, shit happens. So when Grace starts to act out in a way that makes it seems like she's totally not with the mommy program, the context the movie has created for that is: These two already seem like they're not really with the mommy-and-daddy program. There's never a moment, for instance, when we see them beholding their son with joy; he's more like an accessory they have to take care of. And while there's no simple template for how postpartum depression expresses itself, it can often be incredibly inward. Grace's total alienation from motherhood, on the other hand, is flamboyantly outward. As a filmmaker, Ramsay is a mood poet who favors violence and needle drops (there's a lot of Scorsese in her blood), in this case literal ones, since our two hipster parents have a turntable. Grace first starts to transition into derangement when Toni Basil's 'Mickey' is playing, and the song starts to skip and repeat, and Grace keeps saying 'All right! All right!' and then licks the window pane. Ramsay has a lavish gift for staging that sort of baroque rock 'n' roll breakdown. (A little later, Grace will crash through that same window.) From the start, though, the film almost seems to be getting high on the dysfunctional flamboyance of the behavior it's showing you. 'Die My Love' keeps saying: This may be mental illness…but wow, is it ever cinema! On some level we're watching Grace crack up because wallowing in this much trauma is fixating. In pre-feminist times (say, the 1950s), it was the definition of unenlightened patriarchal myopia to view a woman as 'irrational' or 'overemotional' or — Freud's word — 'hysterical.' But just as many aspects of the past, including those that once seemed retrograde, can be reclaimed with a new consciousness, the notion that a new mother has every right to be irrational in her despair — something that just about everyone in the movie, notably Jackson's mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), tells Grace — is very much at the center of where we are now. That, in its way, is progress. Because it's reality. The burdens of motherhood can be every bit as staggering as the joys. But 'Die My Love,' for all of Ramsay's talent, isn't designed to explore that experience. It's designed, rather, as a kind of thesis movie: reckless on the surface but overdetermined. And I think that's why Jennifer Lawrence's performance feels so explosive but, at the same time, so emotionally reined in. In 'Die My Love,' you feel the power of her presence, the hellbent quality of her rage. When it comes to chewing out a blabby cashier, crawling around like an animal, trashing the bathroom and pouring soap products all over the floor, or bashing her head on a mirror, she's an ace wastrel. But the very force of her destruction makes us want to go: What is happening? We want the film to offer some kind of answer. Jackson checks Grace into a mental hospital, and she gets 'better,' to the extent that that means she emerges eager to bake cakes and hide her darkness behind a sunny agreeability that looks like a parody of happy-homemaker domesticity. But by now we're onto the film; we're just waiting for that façade to crack. Frankly, it looked to me like Grace, whether or not she's suffering from postpartum depression, has borderline personality disorder. But that would be a different movie. By the time 'Die My Love' reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Die, My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence is 'better than ever' in a searing portrait of motherhood
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Lynne Ramsay's 'surreal' and 'intense' study of postpartum depression that has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of cinema's most searing portraits of a woman who doesn't take to motherhood. And the extraordinary British director's new film is almost an unofficial prequel. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz's acclaimed novel of the same name, Die, My Love is a surreal, intense and sometimes darkly hilarious exploration of postpartum depression – although it does seem for a time as it's going to be a lot more besides. Jennifer Lawrence is better than ever as Grace, an aspiring writer who moves from New York to the countryside with her partner Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson with a similar level of vanity-free gusto. The couple's new life has the potential to be idyllic. They are fiercely in love, as the animalistic sex scenes demonstrate, and their spacious clapboard house is surrounded by woods and meadows, so Grace will have the peace and freedom to write a novel. Still, the skittering of rats' footsteps in the opening scene is a warning that this dream home might become a nightmare, so it's no surprise when, once the couple have a baby boy, and Jackson starts working away from home several days a week, Grace is beset by boredom, loneliness and sexual frustration. Then when Jackson comes home with an untrained, perpetually barking dog, her situation gets even more maddening. Die, My Love should probably be shown to teenagers as a warning of how repetitive, exasperating and alienating it can be to look after a baby. Ramsay makes expert use of countless techniques – detailed sound design, insistent music, mixed-up chronology, bizarre dream sequences – to convey the sense that Grace is becoming blearily adrift from reality: she may be even more unstable than the traumatised protagonist of Ramsay's last film, 2017's You Were Never Really Here. What stops the film becoming too stressful to bear is that Lawrence is always tough and vibrant, even at the character's lowest ebb. She never begs us to sympathise with her. And the script can be sharply funny, too. Jackson sees himself as a supportive partner, but he is the kind of man who won't switch off a noisy rock song during a heart-to-heart conversation because, after all, "it's a classic". And Grace's weariness and resentment prompt her to be deliciously sarcastic to any of the folksy locals who have the temerity to be nice to her. As well as building an unsettling, American-gothic atmosphere, the film's first half contains all sorts of omens that Grace's internal strife could soon be shockingly externalised. Her habit of creeping through the meadow clutching a large kitchen knife hints that Die, My Love might become a slasher movie. The motorcyclist who keeps roaring past the house, his identity hidden by his crash helmet's tinted visor, suggests that a home-invasion thriller is in the offing. The references to the suicide of the house's previous owner implies that the film could be a supernatural chiller about a cursed haunted house. And then there is Jackson's recently widowed mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), who has taken to sleepwalking along the road that leads from her house, not far away, carrying a loaded rifle. The sequences shared by her and Grace make the intriguing case that the experience of adjusting to a birth is mirrored by the experience of adjusting to a death. These sequences also promise that some kind of violent confrontation is only a matter of time. It's disappointing then, that none of these various harbingers of doom develops into a storyline. The film has its share of incidents, but it's essentially a mood piece – one long nervous breakdown – rather than a drama with a plot. And because the later scenes keep reiterating the parenting-is-hell theme that was made so clear in the early ones, Die, My Love gets exhausting well before it drifts to the end credits. Ramsay's film-making flair lights up scene after scene, but as the narrative fragments, and reality and fantasy blur, you're left with the urge to read the novel to find out what's actually happening. The film may have communicated its heroine's boredom and bewilderment a little too effectively. ★★★☆☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
