With an estimated 1.2 billion women expected to be menopausal or postmenopausal by 2030 and approximately 47 million women entering menopause each year, health experts are calling for greater awareness of one of the most common yet often overlooked symptoms of menopause, sleep disruption.

Despite impacting millions of women worldwide, menopause continues to be surrounded by stigma and remains one of the least discussed areas of women’s health. Sleep challenges, in particular, are emerging as a significant concern. According to the National Council on Aging (NCOA), more than 40% of women in perimenopause experience sleep problems, while between 52% and 64% of postmenopausal women struggle to achieve restorative sleep.

The scale of the issue is further highlighted by research involving women who had experienced their final menstrual period within the previous three years on behalf of REST. The study found that 94.5% reported difficulty sleeping, 92% experienced forgetfulness, 87% reported irritability, 85.5% experienced night sweats, and 83% suffered from hot flashes.

Hot flashes and night sweats are among the leading causes of sleep interruption during menopause. Medical experts explain that declining estrogen levels can make the body’s temperature regulation system more sensitive, triggering sudden feelings of intense heat that frequently disrupt sleep. As a result, maintaining a cool and comfortable sleeping environment has become increasingly important for women navigating menopause.

Responding to this growing need, innovative cooling sleep technologies are helping women improve sleep quality and manage menopause-related discomfort. Among these solutions is the Evercool Cooling Comforter, designed to regulate temperature throughout the night by rapidly absorbing and transferring body heat. Developed using advanced cooling fabric technology, the material is engineered to remain cooler than conventional fabrics such as cotton, bamboo, silk, and Tencel, helping to reduce heat accumulation that can contribute to nighttime discomfort.

In addition to its cooling capabilities, the comforter features moisture-wicking properties designed to draw excess humidity away from the body and accelerate evaporation, helping users stay dry during episodes of night sweats. The ultra-soft microdenier fabric also delivers a smooth and comfortable sleeping experience, while its cooling performance is achieved without the use of chemical additives, making it suitable for individuals with sensitive skin.

As awareness around menopause and women’s health continues to grow globally, sleep is increasingly being recognized as a critical component of overall wellbeing. With millions of women experiencing disrupted sleep due to hot flashes and night sweats, cooling sleep solutions are emerging as an important tool in helping women achieve more comfortable, restorative rest during one of life’s most significant transitions.

Kanaka Raghavan, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, Middlesex University (MDX Dubai)

The way we design has always been a reflection of the tools available to us. As an undergraduate student about two decades ago, the tools we used were quite traditional: A sketchbook, a drafting board, piles of drawing sheets, tracing paper, freshly sharpened pencils, and a half-empty coffee mug. Design was physical, tactile, measured, and every revision cost you something. Technical drawings and models would take days to produce, and critique was received with extreme resistance due to the effort involved in making the slightest modifications. Gradually, digital drawing and 3D modelling software evolved to generating sections and elevations automatically, removing the long nights spent working on these manually. Having computers handle the repetitive, mechanical work has allowed one to pay attention to the most interesting part of the process: the designing itself.

In this mission to outsource dreary, tedious tasks to the machines, it seems like we may have gotten a bit carried away. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) already embedding itself into the mechanics of our daily life – the way we draft a message or edit a photo, it is inevitable for the technology to make its way into the creative process. Unlike conventional design software, which relies entirely on dimensions and constraints manually fed by the architect, AI has fundamentally changed the ideation process. Brainstorming concepts, generating multiple façade options, and exploring design possibilities has become far more fluid, like having a hardworking graduate assistant.

The architecture industry has seen rapid growth in AI adoption. Across early stages in areas like concept visualisation, specification writing, compliance checking, and product selection, as well as day-to-day practice management like report writing, bid creation, and project scheduling. According to a recent report, 59% of practices reported using AI on at least occasional projects, up from 41% the previous year, a sizeable increase.

Bigger studios have acted as early adopters. Zaha Hadid Architects developed bespoke AI software in collaboration with NVIDIA, exploring generative AI across façade patterning, structural optimisation, and urban-scale planning. For MVRDV, data is actively shaping building form from the very start. BIG’s Bjarke Ingels has spoken about how AI reduces the time between intuition and iteration, helping teams move faster through design options. Smaller design studios are finding their footing too. London-based Fu recently launched what has been described as the world’s first fully AI-driven architectural project, a residential scheme at Slovenia’s Lake Bled, where AI helped accelerate iteration and uncover spatial relationships that traditional processes might have missed.

Yet the technology, for all its speed and spectacle, requires scrutiny. Where AI has made its presence felt is primarily in the everyday operational side of practice – drafting emails, managing budgets, transcribing client meetings. Only 13% of practices are currently using AI for actual design and planning tasks. As Zaha Hadid Director, Nils Fischer, puts it, general purpose AI has a “pseudo-understanding of construction,” particularly bad at grasping how building elements actually meet and connect. While it is a capable assistant, AI is still a few upgrades away from playing a meaningful role in the construction process.

So, can the architect be confident about their future in the industry?

Designing buildings is like solving an intricate puzzle, and the architect has always occupied a unique position. Part researcher, part craftsman, part ethnographer, part philosopher. They aren’t just resolving a design; they are learning to understand people. To become a good architect, one must develop an empathetic read of the problem before proposing a solution. The creative process demands that we sit with complexity, allowing the concept to find its philosophical grounding before it becomes form. It is slow, sometimes frustrating, and entirely necessary.

That is where AI can pose a conundrum. When a tool can generate fifty design options overnight, how does the architect still develop the conviction to defend one? And how do they avoid the trap of sameness that AI has been accused of producing, where similar prompts fed into similar models begin to yield unsurprisingly similar results? Research in cognitive science suggests that exposure to others’ ideas early in the creative process can inhibit our thinking.  More unsettling still is the effect of passive AI acceptance. In a post-ChatGPT world, taking the first generated response and running with it has become second nature for many. Researchers are finding, however, that this habit may be rewiring how we think, not just individually, but collectively. And when individual creativity suffers, the diversity of our collective creativity inevitably suffers along with it. This is particularly worth considering for the next generation of architects, who risk treating AI as a silver bullet rather than simply another tool in their arsenal. While it makes connections we sometimes can’t, AI still remains a machine, not a problem solver, not an architect. There is still a vast distance between a striking AI-generated image and a building that can actually be built, specified, and guaranteed. The real skill lies in knowing what to do with that output, pushing it further, making it respond coherently against a brief, a site, a context.

An architect’s empathy is not merely a soft skill, it is the diagnostic tool that determines whether a building serves its people or merely stands. No model trained on images of buildings understands why a space needs to feel welcoming, or how a layout shapes the way people move through their lives. Those judgements cannot be prompted into existence. An architect’s value has never been in the mechanics of drawing, it’s in the thinking, judgment, and empathy behind it. AI can accelerate the process, but if architects let it do the thinking too, they risk losing the very thing that makes them irreplaceable.

By Haya Bitar – leadership and personal transformation expert, founder of Blue Turtle, and wellness advocate.
What stands out to me about the burnout epidemic is that I don’t believe we are necessarily burning out because we are busier than previous generations. I think we are burning out because we have become disconnected from our bodies and because rest has slowly lost its value in modern life.

Somewhere along the way, rest became associated with laziness or lack of ambition. Productivity became the measure of worth. Achieving, performing and constantly moving became the norm while slowing down started to feel uncomfortable for many people. Yet the body was never designed to operate in a constant state of output.

Rest is no longer something that simply happens naturally in the rhythm of the day. In the past, there were pauses built into life. Prayer times, slower afternoons, moments of gathering, quiet evenings and even siestas created space for the nervous system to reset. Today, life has become more flexible in many ways, but flexibility without intention often means we never truly stop.

This is why I believe we need to schedule rest into our lives in the same way we schedule meetings, deadlines and responsibilities. If we don’t intentionally create space for recovery, it simply gets swallowed by the next task.

What matters equally is the quality of that rest. Many people take time off physically while mentally remaining in performance mode. Even during moments of pause, the mind is still trying to optimise, improve and prepare for the next achievement. True rest cannot exist when the brain still feels like it is being evaluated.

I often speak about something I call the art of fulfillment. These small moments of pause become opportunities to acknowledge ourselves, celebrate progress, appreciate the small wins and reconnect with gratitude rather than pressure. Sometimes ten quiet minutes of presence can shift the entire quality of a day.

Mental fatigue is also very real. The brain uses around 20 percent of the body’s energy, which means constant stimulation, decision-making and information overload come at a cost. When the brain never gets moments of recovery, people begin to experience emotional exhaustion, reduced focus, irritability and a growing sense of disconnection from themselves.

This is also where our homes become incredibly important. A home should not only look beautiful, it should feel regulating. The spaces we live in either signal safety to the nervous system or contribute to overstimulation. Lighting, noise, clutter, constant notifications and even the absence of quiet corners all affect how the body feels within a space.

Creating a calmer home does not need to mean creating perfection. Sometimes it is as simple as creating intentional pauses within the environment. A chair near natural light where no screens are allowed. Softer lighting in the evening. Moments of silence. Areas that invite stillness rather than stimulation.

The nervous system responds to what we repeatedly experience. When a home allows space to breathe, slow down and reconnect to the body, it becomes more than a place we live in. It becomes a place that restores us.