Today we’d like to introduce you to Megan Mazzocco.
Hi Megan, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
I have 14 years of editorial experience in the fashion, paper, and interior design industries writing with a focus on sustainable systems and wellbeing. I studied at the Instituto di Lingue Moderne in Italy, interning at the Milan Bureau of W magazine.
Stateside, I graduated with a BA in International Studies from Illinois Wesleyan University. While in school for interior design, I discovered Architectural Products Magazine as a source for many projects and I began to write for AP as its interior editor.
After a decade as Senior Editor for Architectural Products, Net Zero Buildings, and Architectural SSL Magazines, I became fascinated with the built environment’s impact on collective health outcomes and began reporting from the intersection of place and wellbeing as the A+D Yogini.
I became a certified yoga instructor and started my practice yogaXdesign to bolster the well-being of architects and designers.
Last summer, I became a WELL AP, the professional wellness designation in the architecture and design industry, and began consulting as Sustainability and Wellbeing Director at Spring Architecture in Westport, Connecticut.
My consulting firm, AD Inexplorata provides thought leadership linking individual wellbeing to overarching sustainability goals and explores best design practices for collective health outcomes.
In an ongoing effort to link design and wellbeing, I collaborate with GBBN Principal Angela Mazzi on a movement called Architects as Healers: Buildings as Medicine to broadcast how evidence-based design practices impact health. We’ve presented at Smart Cities Expo Miami, NeoCon, and The Midwest Regional Green Umbrella Conference. We just applied to speak at South by Southweset, so please go vote for us in the SxSW Panel Picker!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
At one point in my career as a journalist, I became so fatigued I couldn’t think and I could barely move my body. I was completely burnt out and I also had undiagnosed Lyme Disease.
In order to recover, I focused on sleep, yoga, and meditation practices in order to renew and restore my mind and body every day. When I noticed burnout in the A+D industry, I became a certified yoga instructor and started my practice yogaXdesign to bolster the well-being of architects and designers. That was the genesis of The A+D Toolkit for Daily Creative Renewal CEU–a series of micro-practices based on the foundations of health to help designers sustain creativity-on-demand.
In my research for my recovery, I discovered that sleep is the number one predictor of health outcomes–physical and mental health outcomes and that the WHO (World Health Organization) has declared sleep deprivation an epidemic in industrialized countries, so I wrote The Sleep System: 28 Days to Better Sleep. It is a pragmatic guide to designing the sleep you love.
The Sleep System book and journal uses the DERE design thinking process coined by renowned industrial designer Ayse Birsel, to deconstruct unhealthy sleep habits and reconstruct healthy sleep hygiene.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I see all things as systems and parts of larger systems, so as a WELL AP and certified yoga instructor, I was able to see where those place and wellbeing intersect to create yogaXdesign and AD Inexplorata.
I am most proud of being able to parent my two boys while serving an industry that is designing the future framework of society and has the power to affect the positive transformation of society through collective health outcomes.
As the author of The Sleep System, I aim to redesign the conversation around sleep and redesign the modern world for sleep, because getting adequate sleep reduces public health burdens related to mental health, cancer, Alzheimer’s, inflammatory diseases, and other poor health outcomes. People with more sleep makes for a saner, more peaceful, sustainable world.
What were you like growing up?
As a kid, I was intensely creative. I loved to dress up in costumes, wear ridiculous amounts of my mom’s Mary Kaye eye make-up samples, and organize neighborhood variety shows. I was always using random materials like a deck of cards, crayons–even Peeps–to make art, sculpture, and jewelry. Once, I used yarn to weave a 3D sculpture that covered my entire room; the yarn web was connected to the closet door pulls, and expanded and contracted every time I opened and closed my closet. I collected things from nature, and used my toothbrush and hand soap to scrub the dirt off rocks in the bathroom sink. As an adolescent, I was obsessed with retailing my closet by color, interior designing my bedroom by rearranging my furniture over and over again, and styling friends’ hair.
Pricing:
- Interior Environmental Quality Consult $100
- 1:1 Total Health Consultation – Complimentary
- The Sleep System: 28 Days to Better Sleep
- The A+D Toolkit for Daily Creative Renewal CEU
- Women’s Vitality Circle – Complimentary –1 week/month
Contact Info:
- Website: yogaXdesign.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yogaXdesign/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yogaXdesign
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/megatorial
Image Credits
Yancy Wright
