As lockdown eases, travelling by bike will be a safe, healthy and potentially addictive option

There are many reasons you might want to think about cycling for commuting or other transport when the coronavirus lockdown starts to ease, particularly if you live in a city.

With physical distancing remaining in place for some time to come, capacity on public transport will be limited. If more people drive it will create gridlock.

With so much time on our hands, it’s easy to dwell on loss, says Mariella Frostrup. Try distracting yourself with online dates, box sets and classic novels

The dilemma Several months ago my partner of five years left me very suddenly. He’d gone abroad to work, but as far as I knew everything was fine. I even had flights booked to go and visit. The break-up was a huge shock that left me in a low place. After a few weeks I felt I was beginning to come out of the fog and start moving on with my life, going out and seeing friends, going to classes, etc, but then the lockdown was imposed. Being shut away in my flat all day, alone with my thoughts, I seem to be going backwards.

I’m very aware that we are in the middle of a global crisis and it’s awful for everyone. Luckily, I’m in a good position regarding pay and I’m not paying rent, so I really don’t have any reason to complain. However, all I can think about is my ex. It’s driving me a little bit mad. Do you have any advice on dealing with non-Covid-related troubles during this crisis? Talking to others about it is hard, and I don’t want to make it all about myself.

I am not that kind of person and have made it clear I don’t want to hear from him. What more can I do?

Before the lockdown, I had a boyfriend with whom I had been for 16 months. He said he wanted to experiment sexually with another couple, which I found shocking. I am not that kind of person, so I broke up with him. Despite the breakup, he is still constantly texting me, even though I stopped texting him a while back and made it clear I don’t want to see him. The situation hurts me so much, and any help you could offer would be much appreciated.

Joining another couple for erotic fun is not uncommon; many people enjoy it. In fact, there are many communities of people who regularly participate in this sexual style. But it is not for everyone, and jealousies and insecurities can arise no matter how sexually open a person is. “Swinging” is advanced sexual play that requires a couple to be well bonded and requires each partner to be psychologically stable as well as sexually mature.

When life is necessarily small, the more negative feelings we’ve managed to keep in abeyance can loom large, says Annalisa Barbieri

I had adjusted to living alone after I was widowed six years ago, and since the lockdown friends have telephoned frequently and I chat to neighbours at a distance.

Although I feel I am one of the lucky ones and should be fine, I miss, above all, hugs and physical closeness. I have also started to resent people with partners, children or cuddly pets (which I have not done before).

We can expect psychological difficulties to follow as we come out of lockdown. But we have an opportunity to remake our relationship with our bodies, and the social body we belong to. By Susie Orbach

When lockdown started, I was confused by bodies on television. Why weren’t they socially distancing? Didn’t they know not to be so close? The injunction to be separate was unfamiliar and irregular, and for me, self-isolating alone, following this government directive was peculiar. It made watching dramas and programmes produced under normal filming conditions feel jarring.

Seven weeks in, the disjuncture has passed. I, like all of us, am accommodating to multiple corporeal realities: bodies alone, bodies distant, bodies in the park to be avoided, bodies of disobedient youths hanging out in groups, bodies in lines outside shops, bodies and voices flattened on screens and above all, bodies of dead health workers and carers. Black bodies, brown bodies. Working-class bodies. Bodies not normally praised, now being celebrated.

Waking up without a hangover after a night of getting plastered is the world saying: here, have one on me

Brace yourself. That is the first thing that enters one’s head after a heavy night out, before the eyes are even open. Sometimes, listing nausea or a banging in the brain is what wakes us in the first place. We all know that if someone invented a cure for hangovers – and boy, have they tried – that person would be very rich indeed. Or worshipped as a deity. Most likely both.

It doesn’t matter if it has been one too many after work drinks or cracking open a second bottle of wine with one’s partner… the consequences of over-indulgence patiently lie in wait.

‘I’ve heard of women rejecting a guy for his size, then making fun of him to others’

I was 15 when I realised my penis was below average in size. Feeling increasingly ashamed, I gravitated towards humiliation pornography (in which women demean men over their size) and that only made me focus more on my anxieties. I used to upload pictures of my penis anonymously on to sites such as Reddit, and the comments were all about how small it was.

I’m 22 now, and have never had a girlfriend, which I attribute to my low self-esteem. I think that in a loving relationship you accept each other’s faults – that is what I’d try to do – but I’ve heard stories of women rejecting a guy for his size and then making fun of him to other people. I’ve asked out a female friend or two while drunk, but always been rejected. Hell, I’d have rejected myself – I have overeating issues, an introverted personality, no banter. There are a million factors, but I can’t help tying them all up with having a small penis. I used to blame my inability to date on anyone but me, and for a while I gravitated towards incel [involuntary celibate] groups, but I soon realised that their ideology is toxic. I don’t believe women owe men sex.

Ask yourself Carl Jung’s question: what did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?

I hesitate to suggest what anyone else ought to be doing to stay on an even keel, psychologically, in these frightening times – partly because I don’t always manage it myself, but also because any such advice tends to turn into yet another item for the to-do list. You’ve noticed, for example, how quickly all those online yoga classes and Zoom cocktail gatherings, intended to add some lightness to lockdown, began to feel vaguely like a chore. (You’re not imagining “Zoom fatigue”: experts say video conversations really are more tiring.) Likewise, “self-care” practices easily turn into new duties, so people end up forcing themselves to be kind to themselves, which doesn’t make much sense.

This is why what I think we probably ought to be doing, to whatever extent possible, is having more fun. Not meditation or gratitude journalling or jogging (unless you find those fun). Not things you think are supposed to be fun. I mean the things you actually find fun. This distinction matters, partly for the aforementioned reason that self-care, however important, isn’t synonymous with fun. But it’s also because in the modern attention economy, all sorts of things – celebrity memoirs, bad new TV dramas, expensive consumer goods – want you to believe they’re the funnest thing you could be doing. Conceivably, for any given person, they might be. But true fun – “deep fun”, as the fun scholar Bernie De Koven called it – is a subtle and personal thing, and not necessarily in anyone else’s commercial interests.

Related: No spare time in lockdown? That's not such a bad thing

Jill Wallis says she has never had so much contact with family and friends as she has had since the lockdown began

You have published many articles about the challenges of isolation, most recently your long read (Patterns of pain: what Covid-19 can teach us about how to be human, 7 May). But there is one interesting outcome you may not have considered.

Many of those of us who always live alone are finding we are much more in contact with loved ones than previously. I’ve lived alone since being widowed 16 years ago, and I’ve never had as much contact with my family and even my friends than I’ve had since the lockdown began.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

The expectation is the U.S. won’t return to normal until there’s an effective vaccine against COVID-19  — and almost everyone in the country has been vaccinated.

Exactly one week since Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp began reopening the state's economy, small businesses shared early success stories as customers welcomed their return. But at what cost? Business owners say only time will tell.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already affected the lives of every American. And while politicians and experts disagree on how best to confront the disease and mitigate its economic ramifications, there is a broad understanding that we are entering a “new normal” — an upending of our lives that will continue at least until a vaccine is developed — and perhaps well beyond that.

Florida health officials have halted the publication of up-to-the-minute death statistics related to the coronavirus pandemic that have, by law, been compiled by medical examiners in the state.

Hydroxychloroquine, the much-touted, much-maligned drug initially championed by President Trump as a “game changer” against the coronavirus, but which was later shown to have potential risks to patients, is still being used to combat the pandemic in hospitals across the country.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

In New York, the number of patients coming to the ER with COVID-19 symptoms has dropped and there is hope that the worst is behind us. As we look to the future, many of my colleagues on the frontline are eager to know if they have antibodies.

With higher education forced online amid the coronavirus pandemic, students say the quality of their education has decreased. Do colleges owe them a refund?

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

Long before the coronavirus outbreak turned him into one of the least popular governors in the nation, DeSantis of Florida was something of a conservative golden boy.

The Coast Guard is increasing its presence in the Caribbean in an attempt to forestall a potential COVID-19-inspired surge in illegal migration and human smuggling from the region.

With the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus mounting, President Trump on Monday took aim at MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. The cable news host responded by telling Trump to let Vice President Mike Pence “run things for the next couple of weeks.”

As millions of Americans are following social distancing guidelines from the White House coronavirus task force, inside the White House many of these rules are not being observed.

The Trump administration has issued an intelligence analysis claiming China purposely delayed notifying the World Health Organization about the spread of the coronavirus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is quietly projecting a stark rise in the number of new cases of the virus and deaths from it over the next month.

Sara Cherry, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, feels safer at work than almost anywhere else. That’s because she works inside a biosafety level 3 laboratory on the Penn campus in Philadelphia, where she is the scientific director of the High-Throughput Screening Core.

Most schools in the country are closed for the rest of the school year. What steps need to be taken for them to be ready to welcome students back in the fall?

The tech giants shared details Monday about the tools they’ve been developing to help governments and public health authorities trace the spread of the coronavirus.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

The sight of heavily armed, camo-wearing demonstrators at the state capitol building last week was “very bad, very disconcerting,” Rep. Debbie Dingell told Yahoo News.

Trump said that the death toll would be lower than projected due to mitigation despite states beginning to reopen even though they're falling short of suggested federal guidelines.

Thousands of people have volunteered to be exposed to coronavirus if it means a vaccine can be developed more quickly. Should we let them?

President Trump is looking to wind down the White House coronavirus task force in the coming weeks despite the fact that the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. continues to rise.

Despite his reputation as a Trump loyalist, Rep. John Ratcliffe repeatedly pledged that he would, if confirmed as the next leader of the U.S. intelligence community, seek out and deliver the unvarnished truth on a range of national security issues.

The Trump administration’s nominee for inspector general overseeing billions in Treasury Department coronavirus relief funds is facing skepticism from Democrats who fear that he will not show sufficient independence.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

The New York metro area’s seven-day average has been declining for weeks. For the national daily case count to stay the same, other areas must be making up the difference. In other words, the virus isn’t receding. It’s relocating.

Arizona's Republican Gov. Doug Ducey's administration disbanded a panel of university scientists who had warned that reopening the state now would be dangerous.

Blogger Ed García Conde, who runs the Instagram page Welcome2TheBronx, captured contrasting park photos on May 2 that show differences in how the NYPD is enforcing social distancing.

Amid the pandemic, many people are trying to avoid touching cash, which could be contaminated with the coronavirus. Is it time to go cashless?

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany denied on Wednesday that the Trump administration had blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci from testifying before a House committee.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

From 1918 to 1920, the Spanish flu pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions worldwide. Yet the U.S. emerged with a roaring economy in what became known as the Roaring ’20s. What lessons can we take away from that crisis 100 years ago?

The unfavorable comparison between the current president and his predecessor is one of the clearest signs to date of an emerging dynamic that will define the remainder of Trump’s term and the presidential election.

Five top pediatric heart, infectious disease or critical care specialists told Yahoo News they are tracking a serious new syndrome they believe is related to Kawasaki disease, affecting children infected with the coronavirus.

Rep. Sarah Anthony told Yahoo News that her security detail, made up of local black and Latino activists, came together because the armed protesters bearing white supremacist symbols represented a “different level of terror.”

Breaking with the leader of his own party, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., called for “tens of millions” of diagnostic coronavirus tests to be administered to Americans before the country can begin to return to normal.

After years of financial struggles, the United States Postal Service has been brought to the brink of collapse by the coronavirus outbreak. Can it be saved?

A new study has found that hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug recommended by President Trump as a possible treatment for coronavirus, does not help patients hospitalized with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.