7 Things You Really Don’t Know About Meditation

Meditation is something that has numerous benefits, including physical and mental health aspects. Even though there is tons of information on the topic of meditation available online, some people still view it as a mystical impossibility.

I thought I would clear up a few of those misconceptions and maybe change the perspective a few people have about meditation by bringing you these 7 bits of information.

1. You Don’t Have To Twist Yourself Into A Pretzel

Or more specifically, you don’t have to sit in Lotus position, or with your body in any certain posture to enjoy the benefits of meditation. You don’t even have to sit on the floor at all; meditation isn’t strictly about how your body is positioned. There are some who have practiced meditation for several years and they will tell you that sitting with a certain posture will improve your results, but beginners can reap the benefits just as well by laying down or sitting in a chair.

Meditation is the practice of making yourself aware of your breath, paying attention to your thoughts, and tuning into yourself. It can be done standing, sitting in traffic, inside an elevator- anywhere really. It doesn’t matter what is happening outside, it matters what is happening inside. Author of Urban Monk: Eastern Wisdom and Modern Hacks to Stop Time and Find Success, Happiness, and Peace, Pedram Shojai, says, “Anywhere you are, you can drop into a state where you’re becoming aware of your breathing and becoming aware of what you’re feeling. It’s really about understanding how to engage the practice at any time and ideally all at times.”

2. You Do Not Need To Be Religious Or Spiritual To Meditate

Although there are many people who are spiritual who practice meditation, you do not need to be a spiritual person or follow any particular belief system. Meditation is simply a way to release and heal from stress, and it is scientifically proven to decrease anxiety, and improve ones overall health. Regardless of beliefs, you will benefit fro meditation.
Read: Emotional Balance: Why it is So Important in Our Lives

3. You Don’t Have To Meditate For An Uncomfortable Amount Of Time

If you are just beginning to try meditation, and you want to gain a better relationship with your breath, Shojai says that even 10 inutes is enough. Consistency is more important than the amount of time spent in meditation. He explains it by saying, “meditating consistently allows you to draw on that sense of calm when you actually need it. A little bit every day builds a cushion against stress and keeps you from getting knocked off your perch.”

4. Don’t Worry About Having A Silent Mind

Some folks have tried meditation in the past and thought, “I couldn’t quiet my mind. My thoughts were racing. It was too hard.” The fact is, the mind runs on auto-pilot; it’s doing it’s job when it creates thoughts that fill your mind. When you are in the state of meditation, you are aware of all these thoughts going through your mind and your trying to remove them. The idea isn’t to stop all processes of the mind, but to be observant of them.

Remember, the key to being successful with meditation is to avoid discouragement. If you finish a session and feel that you have focused too musch on your thoughts for the duration, don’t let yourself feel bad about that. Allowing yourself to go through the otions has gotten you a full step closer to reaching your goals. Practice makes perfect- sp practice, practice, practice.

5. There Are Many Styles Of Meditation – Keep Going Till You Find One That Fits

Mindfullness meditation, mantra meditation, yoga meditation, visualizations… There are so many different kinds to choose from that surely one will fit into your lifestyle. We all have quirks and things that set us off, or light us up. The great thing about meditation is that there is a style for everyone. Personally, I browse through the guided meditations on YouTube and find ones that are made for whatever I feel I need help with- morning energy, anxiety, worry, stress, etc.
Read: Simple Things You can do Every Day to Make Yourself Smarter

6. You Have The Time

Time is something we all want more of, and think we have too little of. You may think that you are too busy to add a practice of basically doing nothing to your daily routine, but Shojai believes that meditation can improve your relationship to time. He specifically mentions two ways: meditation is restorative to the nervous system, so it can improve your energy which allows you to tackle your daily tasks easier. It can also improve your ability to focus, which will make you more efficient with the time you allow for yourself.

“When I hear I don’t have enough time I’m actually hearing I don’t have enough energy,” says Shojai. “If you can be more efficient and more powerful with the time you’re given then you can use time as your ally.”

7. The Benefits Of Meditation Are Received Immediately

A lot of people incorrectly believe that you need to spend years meditating in order to receive the benefits from it. Because of this, they become discouraged and believe they will not experience any positive results for a long time. This is not the case. There have been studies done that show there are beneficial results on the body and mind after just 1 -2 weeks of regular meditation. One study by Harvard University found that in as little as 8 weeks of regular meditation, there was visible growth in certain areas of the participant’s brains. Those areas were associated with empathy, memory, and even stress regulation.

So as you can see, there are many, many benefits to this practice, and it is easier than you think. You can do it, and you have the time.

By Raven Fon

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What Kind Of Unique Person Are You According To What You See?

Realistic Advice for When Life is Kicking Your Ass

I’ve always said that the only constant in life is that it is always changing. No matter how well-adjusted and emotionally intelligent we may think we are, there are times that life is going to kick our ass. It happens to the best of us and the weakest of us equally. Life doesn’t discriminate when it comes to being tough. That’s why I want to give you some realistic insight into how you can better deal with life’s shenanigans when they knock you on your butt. I now there are a million inspirational memes and quotes floating around out there that may be able to do a better job, but this is just my take on getting back up when you’ve fallen down.

Swing Back

Life is never going to quit trying to kick your ass, so at some point you have to quit crying and swing back. Attitude is the one thing in this world that we have absolute control over, and it is the one thing that dictates how you handle anything life throws your way. If you spend your time worrying about your issues and not doing anything to correct them, how do you expect anything to change? You can’t just wish away the struggles of this world. What you can do is pick yourself up, address whatever you’re facing, and move forward.

Have Faith

Faith is a really simple concept. Whether it is faith in your religion, faith in other people, or just faith in the universe – the point is to believe in something bigger than yourself. Faith isn’t just a simplified form of wishful thinking, faith is an absolute belief that somewhere, somehow there is a design at work. Faith is trusting other people to hold up their responsibilities. Faith is knowing that this too, shall pass.

Be Objective

No one will ever understand your struggles like you will. That being said, if you don’t understand them, how do you expect anyone else to? This is the key component of emotional intelligence that I harp on all the time. Identify WHY you feel something before you express how it is that you feel. Sure, you can tell someone, “I am sad”, but if you have no idea why you are sad what good does it do to even share those emotions?

There is a Light at the End of the Tunnel

Read: 7 Ways to Avoid Negativity in your Life
No situation in life has to be perpetual. There is always going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and even if it is a train – it is still a light. Deal with things as they come, not as you imagine them to be. A lot of times we can worry ourselves in circles, usually unnecessarily. Focus on that light and that end objective.

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Shhh, Keeping Your Goals a Secret May Help You to Achieve Them.

We’ve all done it at least once, come up with that great idea or plan and exuberantly have told everyone we know about it. I’m going to write a book, get fit at the gym for that marathon, start a new inspired school for the town! No harm in sharing the excitement right? Shouldn’t you announce your goals, so friends can support you? Isn’t it good networking to tell people about your upcoming projects? Shouldn’t you visualise the goal as already yours and state your intention in lines with the ‘law of attraction’?

Don’t do it! Tests done show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others simply satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion” and recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?”

He stated that in 1933, researchers found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved.

“(Take) a mother who talks about all the great things she’s going to do for her kids — help them do better in school, get better test scores, give them extra training — while all the other mothers nod in approval,” says Gollwitzer . “The chances are high that she won’t do as much as she could to achieve those goals because she’s already viewed as an ideal mother just by sharing her wonderful intentions.”

He explains the intentions function as a symbol of possessing the desired identity. This is evident in the statement of a “high-order goal,” such as losing weight to become a healthier person, but not in planning to drop three pounds to fit into a dress.

Whether you plan to cure cancer, lose weight or be the world’s best parent, results of a the study suggest you’d do well to keep your mouth shut about it. And not just to avoid annoying other people either. Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn’t necessarily motivate achievement.

On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain “a premature sense of completeness” about the goal.

In a time when funding is scarce and we often have to go public with our plans in order to get them off the ground and over sharing on Facebook is rife, the decision to reveal all needs to be carefully considered as a longterm tactic.

In the research four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.
Read: Define and Achieve your Goals by Asking Yourself These 3 Important Questions

It may seem unnatural to keep your intentions and plans private, but try it. If you do tell a friend, make sure not to say it as a satisfaction “I’ve joined a gym and bought running shoes. I’m going to do it!”, but as a high order goal and in dissatisfaction “I want to lose 20 pounds, so kick my ass if I don’t, OK?”

So this New Year when you are setting your new goals and plans. Keep them to yourself. Follow this and success could be just a shhhh away.

Have you ever announced your great plans and never completed them? How did it make you feel?

What are your tried and tested secrets of completing goals? You can share that, at least, with us below..

 

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St. John’s Wort is Better Than Antidepressant Drugs

The popular herbal extract St. John’s wort is more effective at treating the symptoms of depression than any antidepressant drug, and has fewer side effects, researchers from the Centre for Complementary Medicine in Munich have concluded.

“Overall, the St John’s Wort extracts tested in the trials were superior to placebo, similarly effective as standard anti-depressants, and had fewer side effects than standard anti-depressants,” lead researcher Klaus Linde said.

In a study published by the Cochrane Library, the researchers tested a total of 5,489 participants who were randomly assigned either St. John’s wort, a placebo, tricylclic antidepressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat mild to moderately severe depression. All studies were double-blind, which means that neither patients nor researchers knew what kind of treatment each participant was receiving.

St. John’s wort was found to be more effective than a placebo and at least as effective as both tricylics and the SSRIs, but with fewer side effects. Patients receiving the herbal treatment were significantly less likely to drop out of studies due to negative side effects than those assigned to take tricyclic antidepressants.

The study is claimed to be the most thorough to date, and possibly the first to show that St. John’s wort is effective at treating not only mild, but also severe depression (also known as major depression).

St. John’s wort, known officially as Hypericum perforatum, is a native European perennial herb with distinctive yellow flowers and now grows wild in many parts of the Americas as well. It derives its common name from the tradition of harvesting its flowers on St. John’s day (June 24). Also known as Klamath weed or Tipton’s weed, the plant has been used for centuries as an herbal remedy for depression and sleeping problems.

In recent years, the popularity of the herbal antidepressant has soared as new concerns continue to emerge over pharmaceutical antidepressants, especially SSRIs. In the United Kingdom, it is currently used by two million people. In Germany, doctors regularly prescribe it to children and teenagers. This is because SSRIs have been shown to significantly increase the risk of suicide in those under the age of 18, and evidence suggests that they may have a similar effect on adults, as well. Recent evidence has also linked use of the drugs by pregnant women with an elevated risk of oral and heart-related birth defects.

With Western health care systems emphasizing drugs for the treatment of mental illness, however, many doctors feel they have no alternatives but to prescribe tricyclics or SSRIs, in spite of the risk. The new study may lead more doctors to prescribe St. John’s wort instead.
Read: 10 Ways to Treat Depression Without Antidepressants

Possessing a number of active ingredients, including hypericin and hyperforum, it appears to affect mood, although nobody knows precisely how. So far, the most plausible explanation is that it boosts and maintains levels of the feel good hormone serotonin in the brain.

‘It also has risks,’ says pharmacist Helen Marshall. ‘It can interfere with the effectiveness of drugs including cholesterol-lowering medications and the contraceptive pill, and increases the risk of stroke for anyone on blood-thinning drugs or anti-depressants.’

Of course the quality of products varies considerably. In shops capsules, tablets, tinctures, teas and oil-based skin lotions are available. Be careful which you choose. In clinical trials, only products standardised to contain 0.3% hypericin have been proven effective and doses of 300mg are considered optimal. Many do find that cheerfulness is restored after two to four weeks, with none of the side-effects of prescription drugs.

If you find the right one and take it responsibly then you may really have found yourself a safe and healthy happy pill to see you through to the brighter side of life.

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Loners Tend To Be More Intellectual and Loyal Friends.

There is a big difference between someone who is a loner-by-choice and a socially rejected person. Contrary to what most people think, being a loner is neither good nor bad.

Loners tend to be individuals who enjoy spending time alone as much, or more so, than they do with their friends (yes, loners do have friends). They have a low need for peer acceptance and affiliation and engage with the world in different ways than others by focusing on their own ideas and being stimulated by solitude, as constant social interactions tend to drain them.

Loners generally have a small circle of close friends and have higher standards for their friendship and trust.

They enjoy spending time with their friends but do not depend on and attach to them like others, though they are highly loyal. Loners are generally more intellectual than others, using their time to enjoy and study anything and everything that interests them. Funny enough, both introverts and extroverts can be loners.

A lot of loners make conscious decisions to spend time away from the big social groups mainly because they understand it’s better to be on their own rather than being ‘used up’ by fake friends.

They recognise that they may have a lot of friends, but don’t see everyone as a ‘best friend’ except for those who really resonate with them, those who know all their negative points and still prefer being with them. In this overtly ‘social’ world,  these friends are hard to find and often if they aren’t found easily, loners don’t settle for anybody and everybody for the sake of it, often being a loner is a better option!

Contrary to popular belief, not all loners have a pathological fear of social contact. “Some people simply have a low need for affiliation,” says Jonathan Cheek, a psychologist at Wellesley College. “There’s a big subdivision between the loner-by-preference and the enforced loner. Those who choose the living room over the ballroom may have inherited their temperament,” Cheek says. “Or a penchant for solitude could reflect a mix of innate tendencies and experiences such as not having many friends as a child or growing up in a family that values privacy.”
Read: I Want a Worthwhile Relationship, Not a Perfect One

Their are unhealthy cases of the lonely loners. The lonely introverts’ camp closely borders the land of the socially anxious. Some people, for example, can “pathologically shy” or have bad experiences as children, which likely lays the groundwork for very quiet lifestyles. Those who remain “enforced loners” long to spend time with people, but shyness and anxiety inhibit them from doing so and they become introverts who tend to be alone, they may deep down prefer to be around other people, but because of their shyness, it’s difficult for them to join groups and make friends.

Such loners have several stress-inducing strikes against them: They may get butterflies whenever they have to face in-person encounters, and they are subject to outside pressure to be sociable. When major life problems crop up, loners are also less likely to seek out social support.

John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, has highlighted social isolation as a health-risk factor on par with obesity and smoking. “Loneliness is like hunger and thirst—a signal to help your genes survive,” Cacioppo says. “When you’re lonely, there’s a stress response in your body, and it’s not healthy to sustain that for a long time.”

But though the term ‘loner’ tends to be pitied and and somewhat feared in our up-with-people culture. The introvert or loner can really reap secret joys from the solitary life and actually have a freer and less stressful experience that can lead to creativity, growth, learning and exceptionally deep and fulfilling relationships with those they choose to bless with their time.
Read: 4 Ways To Keep Insecurities From Ruining Your Relationship

Besides doesn’t it take all types to make up the world? It’s not always the quiet ones you have to be wary of, I promise!

Do you prefer to spend time with yourself rather than others? Share your stories with us….

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What this Woman Did For Chldren in New York Should Restore Your Faith in Humanity

Now that we are officially well into the holiday season, I’m always glad to see the media’s focus go from everything that is wrong with people and focusing instead, on the people that are doing some good. Take, for instance, the story of one woman’s kindness that was reported originally by NY 1 News.

Carol Suchman tries every year to purchase and donate as many toys as she can for the children of New York City’s homeless shelters. It’s a small act of kindness that goes a long way to bring cheer to children who need it the most. One day Carol was walking past a toy store that featured a “going out of business” sign in the window, and she got an idea. Knowing that she always tries to donate something each year to children, according to Carol, “When I saw this toy store, I just realized I could do it on a grander scale.” She called the owner of the store and Carol said, “We talked and negotiated and bought the entire toy store.” Yes, an entire toy store, which she then turned over to the Department of Homeless Services. All of the store’s contents, which include thousands of school supplies, toys, and stuffed animals, will be distributed to thousands of children in need.

The director of special events for the DHS, Antonio Rodriguez, said, “I’ve been doing this for many years and we have many generous sponsors — people do toy drives and do a lot of giving — but I have to say, that this is the first time anybody ever bought out an entire store and donated to the children of shelters.” Carol says that she started buying birthday gifts for foster children years ago as part of her individual approach to philanthropy. “Children is always my focus. A lot of foster kids get a lot of used things and I realized a lot of them never had a birthday gift that they actually wanted.”
Read: Charlie Chaplin’s greatest speech reminds us once again to unite for a new world.

You can check out the full interview with Carol Suchman HERE

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Memory-Boosting Brain Implant May Become a Reality

Imagine if boosting you memory was as simple as sliding a microSD memory card directly into your brain. If scenes from the sci-fi movie Johnny Mnemonic just popped into your head, you’ll be amazed to know that this seemingly far-fetched idea might be a reality before you know it. Dr. Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on a DARPA-funded project that is testing a medical implant that can mimic the kind of neural processing that happens in our brains when we store long-term memories. So far, the implant has shown promise in lab rats, monkies, and is now being tested on humans.

Berger admits that over the years, people have told him that he is crazy for thinking that memories can be recorded, let alone stored. The key to memory lies in a region of the brain called the hippocampus and to understand Berger’s approach, you have to first think about what memories actually are. According to Berger, “it’s a series of electrical pulses over time that are generated by a given number of neurons. That’s important because you can reduce it to this and put it back into a framework. Not only can you understand it in terms of the biological events that happened; that means that you can poke it, you can deal with it, you can put an electrode in there, and you can record something that matches your definition of a memory. You can find the 2,147 neurons that are part of this memory. And what do they generate? They generate this series of pulses. It’s not bizarre. It’s something you can handle. It’s useful. It’s what happens.”

After years of research, Berger and his team found that there is a flow of electrical signals within the hippocampus that is the key to what our brains record as a memory. Within our hippocampus, there is an electrical impulse that travels from the “input” or CA3 region to the “output” or CA1 region. When people have a brain impairment, those electrical signals get disrupted, causing a loss of memory and the ability to record new memories. Berger’s theory of being able to create a mathematical model to manipulate memory is based on which neurons fire at each phase of the learning process. The problem that he encountered is that neural pathways don’t adhere to linear math models. So the team started with the task of getting a brain to accept an implant as an addition memory module in the brain.
Read: The Spectacular Science Behind Sonogenetics: Controlling the Brain Through Sound

Berger’s team trained rats to push one of two levers to get a treat and they recorded the neural responses as the rats learned which lever to push, specifically the CA3 to CA1 activity. As the rats learned the team recorded the activity and used it to program an external memory chip with the electrical impulse data. Then, the rats were given a drug to impair their abilities to recall memories, and electrodes were placed in their brains to stimulate the hippocampus with the recorded electrical data. The results were amazing. With the drugs, the rats completely forgot the reward system that they had learned, but when the hippocampus was stimulated by the external memory module they remembered it.

Berger went on to test his theory with monkies, and got similar results. Now, Berger is using what he has learned to boost memory function in humans. His team started with volunteers that already had implants in their brains to predict epileptic seizures. Because epileptic seizures also damage the hippocampus, these patients were ideal for testing Berger’s memory implants. The participants were given a series of pictures to memorize and asked 90 seconds later which ones they remembered. The researchers again recorded the activity between CA3 and CA1 and were able to create a human-specific memory algorithm. That algorithm was able to predict memory functions about 80% of the time, so it is a huge step into creating the same type of memory algorithm that was successful on rats and monkies.
Read: New Research: Brain Imaging can Directly Identify Intelligence

The end result for Berger will be to have an implant in the brain that can enhance or even replace the memory functions of the hippocampus. So far his results have been impressive. Berger says, “The goal is to improve the quality of life for somebody who has a severe memory deficit. If I can give them the ability to form new long-term memories for half the conditions that most people live in, I’ll be happy as hell, and so will be most patients.”

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Can You Actually See As Well As You Think You Can?

What Is Your Secret Psychological Power According To Your Subconscious?

This 15-Year-Old Used Google to Invent Something That Will Actually Save Lives

I remember when I was 15. Just about all I could think about was getting through driver’s education, and getting a car. Oh, the wonderful things I could do with a car. I certainly wasn’t thinking about something as lofty as redefining the methods in which the world detects some of the deadliest cancers. That is exactly what 15-year-old Jack Andraka has done, and he did it without millions of dollars in grants and research money.

In his TEDx Talk, Jack explains that he had a very close family friend pass away from pancreatic cancer and in the light of that tragedy, he wondered why certain cancers, like pancreatic cancer, are so often times not diagnosed until it is too late. What he found was that current detection methods are, at best, invasive, expensive, and 60-years-old. I mean, we are talking about a cancer that 45,220 Americans will be diagnosed with, 38,460 of which will die from it.

Using little more than Google and Wikipedia, Jack has devised a method for cancer detection that takes about 5 minutes, costs 3 cents, and is 90% accurate. Compared to the 60-year-old method for detection that currently costs $800 dollars and misses roughly 30% of diagnoses, Jack’s method is 168 times faster, is 400 times more sensitive, and costs 26,000 times less.

In other words, what this teenage boy has done is revolutionize the detection of some of the deadliest cancers known to modern medicine. The key to surviving these deadly cancers is early detection and treatment, so having such an inexpensive, fast, and accurate method of detection will go a long wy to save millions of lives. Not bad for a 15-year-old. Check out Jack’s TEdx Talk about his discovery and see for yourself what a smart, determined, and inventive 15-year-old can do with some of the most basic online tools:

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New Research Uses Twins to Prove that Stronger is Smarter

There has always been a preconception that there are two divisions of people: brainy and brawny. You see the stereotype in movies and pop-culture all the time. There are the big dumb jock and the little, scrawny nerd. What if I told you that the athletic jock was more likely to be smarter? The problem with correlating strength and smarts has always been one of an environmental nature, because no matter what a person’s genetic precursors for intelligence or strength may have bee, their developmental years may have been different in a wy that set them up for one or the other.

With that in mind, Dr. Claire Steves at the King’s College London examined a set of 162 healthy, middle-aged, female twins from the TwinUK registry to see if the stronger twin was the smarter twin. The reason she used twins is because they are genetically as similar as two people can be, but also had the same environmental factors growing up. Basically, they had the same advantages and disadvantages in their developmental years.

In her research, Steves focused on the twins that had undergone testing 10 years earlier to analyze not only their brain function but their leg-muscle power. The thought there is that our thigh muscles are a great indicator of how strong our entire body is, no matter how often you work out. By concentrating on what the leg muscles could actually do in a test of power, the researchers didn’t have to rely on the recollection of the test subject on how often they worked out.

The 162 pairs of twins were asked to come back tot he lab and repeat the tests from 10-years-ago, and the results were pretty amazing. The 324 twins that had the strongest legs showed the least amount of mental decline. On average, the stronger twins performed 18% better on cognitive skills. Even brain scans showed that the stronger twin had more brain volume and less “empty spaces in the brain”.

Now, even though the research didn’t put a premium on the reported exercise habits of the test subjects, Steves set out to prove that given the same genetic and environmental precursors, stronger means smarter. Naturally one can assume that the twin that was stronger was more active, even if that wasn’t the case 100% of the time. Steves went on to say, “I was quite surprised by the strength of the findings because to be honest, I am someone who has always in the past prioritized work of the mind over work of the body. This study brings home to me that the brain needs exercise to keep fit.”

There you have it, brawny is brainy. So don’t skip leg day.

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Are You More Of An Empath Or A Narcissist?

I Want a Worthwhile Relationship, Not a Perfect One

I, like many of my friends find myself in my late 30’s still single and mildly bemused about it. I’m not unattractive or wildly weird, and it certainly wasn’t quite the situation I had imagined for myself at this age. Sometimes life doesn’t quite work out the way you or society have planned, relationships disintegrate and the parting of ways is often the best solution for all concerned.

There are immeasurable bonuses that come with the freedom of the situation, but on some days it’s a gruelling and somewhat heartbreaking struggle. In the quiet hours I often find myself thinking deeply about relationships and studying other peoples partnerships or witnessing their romantic drama as they unfold. It’s a minefield of perplexity and I’m forced to be really clear about what I want in a potential future partner.

As I observe the relationships around me, the reality dawns that half of the people in the world don’t end up with the people they want to end up with and there is a good chance I’ll never find the love of my life.

I’m not trying to be cynical here, but there’s also a good chance you won’t spend your planetary existence with the love of your life. There of course always exceptions to the rules here, especially amongst the older generations whose dating habits were far more focussed and commitment wasn’t as diluted as with todays modern technologically orientated  and distracted way of interacting with each other.

According to the US Census Bureau, roughly 40 percent of first-time marriages end in divorce. If you’re thinking ‘that’s all right’, because you’ll have better luck next time, they go on to tell us that consecutive marriages only increase the likelihood of ending in divorce!

But we know plenty of couples that have been married for years and are still together, right? Mum and Dad, Aunty so and so and the Robinson’s next door?
Read: Sex With Others Isn’t The Only Way of Cheating In Our Relationships.

Well, keep in mind that the average length of marriages that end in divorce is eight years. So just because they’re still together after five or six years doesn’t seem to mean much.

Despite that, there are many marriages that do go the length — or at least we’ve heard of them. If 40 percent of first-time marriages end in divorce, then 60 percent don’t. Phew…there is hope.

The problem with this statistic is that not every couple that remains married is happily married. I know couples who are practically strangers leading different lives in the same house and on paper are still married. I cannot even contemplate the misery of that, even in my most desperate hours when I really need a second pair of helping hands to help nurse my poorly infant in the middle of the night or lift heavy things in the house or make big decisions. I’d rather struggle on my own sometimes than be that miserable all of the time.

I think that we can all agree that there are a good amount of individuals who remain married even though they don’t love their partner, and don’t want to be married to them. Regardless of what this number may be, you still have over a 40 percent chance of not ending up happily married. That’s a very high probability when you consider how important just about every single person in the world believes finding a life partner to be.
Read: 4 Keys to Fixing a Broken Relationship

The good news is that the glass is half-full. For every person who ends up alone, one ends up happily married or coupled up. So what differentiates those who end up happily coupled from those who end up alone and miserable?

Those who end up alone either are, or at one point were, completely off course.

I don’t think there is any other way to sum it up. Anyone — and I mean, anyone — can find a person to love and be loved by in return, right? Every single person on this planet has that ability. Yet, so many of us end up alone, why is that?

We either don’t appreciate a good thing when we find it — either we don’t understand what we’ve found or we expect to find something better down the road — don’t bother looking hard enough, don’t put in the work to make ourselves appealing enough to the right persons, or we search for something perfect, not understanding that perfect doesn’t exist.

We’re all too good for everyone else. We’re special — we must be because it’s us. We only get to see the world from our own eyes, so we must matter. We must be important. We deserve only the best. We blah, blah, blah.

All the other people in this world believe they are just as special as you are — so they don’t plan on settling either. They’re most likely also looking for perfect. Perfect… such a beautiful and ugly word. It was once something that was strived for. Now it’s something we all want to either buy, or to be given. We feel deserving of perfection when, in reality, no one is.
Read: 4 Ways To Keep Insecurities From Ruining Your Relationship

Definition of the word ‘perfect’: Ideal, model, flawless, without fault, exemplary…

I don’t want perfect.

What I want is someone who’s striving toward some form of perfection — not complete perfection — but perfection in some sense of the word. I want someone who wakes up every morning and wants to better herself and the entire world, too.

I want someone who understands that perfection is something you must work for every single day; someone who understands that even working toward perfection every single day will never allow them to attain that perfection. After all, after perfection, where else is there to go? I want someone who is doing the work, consciously on themselves to strive for better.

It’s very important to find a life partner who understands that perfection is to be forever strived for and never attained. This is the only type of individual who makes an amazing partner, because this is the only type of individual who will continuously work on your relationship and your life together. This individual will expect only the best from you while forgiving you when you make mistakes or fail. More importantly, they will never give up on you or allow the relationship to slip into stagnant complacency.

I don’t want perfect, and neither do you.

What you really want is someone worth it. And the only type of individual who’s worth spending your life with is the type who’s willing to create perfection with you, knowing that if you both beautifully fail, you’ll fail together, and that’s the only thing that matters in the end and makes it all worthwhile.

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8 Things People DON’T Do In A Healthy Relationship

A healthy, loving relationship can enhance many aspects of your life, from your emotional and mental well-being to your physical health and overall happiness. It requires certain skills and lot of time to develop and maintain a healthy relationship and it’s never too late to start working on it. No matter even if you had a bad relationship in your past, you can still make a better relationship by taking these points into consideration. Achieving a healthy relationship requires positive contributions from both partners. Here are few things that couples don’t do in a healthy relationship.

1) They Don’t Rush For A Better Future:

People who are in a healthy relationship enjoy the present. They don’t rush for a better relationship. They live in the present and will love their partner for who they are, not for what they want them to be. They believe the concept ‘Right now is life… don’t miss it!’ They don’t rush the present state of their relationships to get to better times ahead, instead they live their lives. They accept that the relationship will develop in the right way and they would never try to make their relationship progress faster.

2) They don’t stop communicating:

In Healthy relationships, the partners never stop communicating with each other. Whether in the good times or the bad, in every phase of life. To maintain a healthy relationship you need to know your partner genuinely and have to let them know you. For this to happen open communication is a must.
Read: How To Stop Damaging Your Relationship When You’re An Over-thinker

3) They Don’t Keep Secrets:

Hiding something from your partner is something that people don’t do in a healthy relationship. Successful couples don’t keep secrets and this quality allows them to gain their partner’s trust, which is a must for a healthy, happy relationship. Being honest is the only way to be at peace with yourself and others.

4) They don’t stop loving themselves:

You can’t love someone when you can’t love yourself first. Couples in a happy relationship will love themselves first, so they can love their partner too. Loving yourself will help the relationship to succeed.

5) Don’t Expect Relationships to Solve Your Problems:

People can’t expect their relationship to solve their personal problems and they shouldn’t believe that their partner will complete them. They will solve their problems and would complete themselves, instead of expecting their partners to do it.

6) They Don’t Fake Their Feelings & Don’t Hide Who They Are:

Being real is being loving. There’s nothing better for your happiness and your relationships than for you to be at your best. Don’t hide your true self from others and especially your partner. People who are in healthy relationships.

7) They Don’t Bring Up The Past:

People who are in a healthy relationship, won’t bring up the past to win an argument or use it as relationship collateral. ”Let go of your past to embrace happiness of present life” will be their motto. They don’t focus on the unchangeable past and will never bring up any incidents from their past to justify the present.
Read: 6 Ways To Build Trust In A Long-Distance Relationship

8) They Don’t Take Their Relationships For Granted:

People who are in a healthy relationship never take their partner or relationship for granted. They will thank their partner for everything and will be showing their gratitude for everything that their partner does for them. They would never stop showing their concern, love and affection towards their partner because they know that a lack of concern hurts more than angry words.

Research from the University of Washington Says In an Unhealthy Relationship You Will:
*Put one person before the other by neglecting yourself or your partner
*Feel pressure to change who you are for the other person
*Feel worried when you disagree with the other person
*Feel pressure to quit activities you usually/used to enjoy
*Pressure the other person into agreeing with you or changing to suit you better
*Notice one of you has to justify your actions (e.g., where you go, who you see)
*Notice one partner feels obligated to have sex or has been forced
*Have a lack of privacy, and may be forced to share everything with the other person
*You or your partner refuse to use safer sex methods
*Notice arguments are not settled fairly
*Experience yelling or physical violence during an argument

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What Is Your True Personality Color?

What’s Your Mental Attitude To Life?

5 Ways Cold Showers can Improve Your Health

We all have our morning rituals to prepare ourselves for the coming day and for many of us that includes taking a steamy, hot shower. I know that I personally include that step in my morning process. As it turns out, that hot shower may not be the best idea to get you up and moving in the morning. There is a lot of research that supports the notion that our morning showers should be a cold one, as crazy as that sounds. I know, the idea of ditching that morning cup of coffee for an ice cold shower sounds absolutely crazy for some people. Trust me, it sounded insane to me at first too but there are serious health benefits from cold showers:

Immune System Booster:

Research has shown that people that take cold showers have stronger immune systems. This was shown in their higher white blood cell counts as well as higher concentrations of plasma, T helper cells, and lymphocytes.

Increased Metabolism:

Cold water naturally boosts our metabolisms because it makes our body burn more calories to try to keep us warm. There is a point of diminishing return though because cold water also makes our bodies naturally want to store more fat. So keep the cold showers short -which shouldn’t be too hard.
Read: Scientists Conclude: Sweather Weather is Better

Improves Circulation:

This one is kind of self-explanatory. The shock of jumping into a cold shower releases adrenaline which increases your blood flow to your skin to try to keep you warm. This improved circulation also sends more blood to our organs, which is always a good thing.

Improves Breathing:

Jumping into a cold shower helps you regulate your breathing, and not just from the initial gasp or even mild scream that you emit when you first get in. Once the initial shock wears off, and your circulation is working overtime, taking deep breaths helps you to calm your body down a bit. It’s actually very relaxing.
Read: Seven simple things happy, healthy people do every morning.

Mood Enhancer:

Cold showers have been shown to make our brains emit chemicals like noradrenaline, which is associated with improving mood disorders like depression. Besides, how great are you going to feel when that water finally gets turned off, and you are wide awake and refreshed.

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Tesla’s Gigafactory is a True Modern Marvel

Tesla Motors plans to produce 500,000 vehicles a year by 2020, and at the beating heart of that lofty goal is Tesla’s new Gigafactory. The Gigafactory is a giant, cutting-edge battery production plant that is scheduled to be finished by 2017. The facility in Storey County, Nevada is already one of the most incredible factories ever built, because Tony Stark-like Tesla frontman, Elon Musk, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Size

The factory sits on a 3,000-acre plot of land, outside of Reno, Nevada. As huge as the factory is now, the amount of land will give Tesla the ability to expand the facility 50 to 100 times in size. Right now, the factory is approximately 5.5 million square feet. That is 126 acres. Even Musk says, “It will blow your mind. You see it in person and then realize, F—, this is big.” The total space planned to be built will be 13.6 million square feet by the end of 2020. That will make it the second largest building by volume in the world.

Power

The factory will be powered completely by renewable energy. The roof will be lined with solar panels, as well as the surrounding hill tops. The factory will be completely self-sufficient for power.

Design

On major component of the factory is that it was built to be able to withstand an earthquake. For a building that large, it had to be built as 4 separate structures on 4 separate foundations. The foundation alone was reported to cost $16 million dollars. There is a lot of attention that went into every aspect of the factory’s design. For instance, the factory is aligned with true north so that GPS can be utilized to automate certain functions. The factory is also shaped like a giant diamond to not only fit into it’s natural surrounding better but to also help align the solar panels. Musk said in a press conference, “We are taking care to make sure that it looks good, that it fits in with the surroundings. It’s a factory, but we care about aesthetics. So the factory will actually be shaped like a diamond and the reason for that is if you make it a box shape, we would have had to move a lot more Earth. So in order to have it fit more in the environment, we had it shaped like a diamond. He went on to say, “I think it’s kind of romantic to say that it is shaped like a diamond and aligned on the true north, but there are practical reasons for it as well.”
Read: The Real Life Tony Stark: Elon Musk

With a total estimated price tag of $5 billion dollars to be split between project partners Tesla Motors, Panasonic, and Toyota. $2 Billion of which comes straight from Tesla Motors. The end result will be a factory that uses revolutionary techniques to revolutionize the world of lithium ion batteries, which will change many industries in the process.

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Birth Order Doesn’t Affect Personality – But It could Affect Intelligence

The theory that your birth-order affects your personality is entirely incorrect, but it has an interesting
history. It stems from one of the most heated scientific disputes of all time, between Sigmund Freud and
Alfred Adler. Freud, a firstborn child, and Adler, a middle child, had conflicting ideas about this topic.
Adler proposed that first and last-born children suffer from neuroses fueled by their constant struggle for success and superiority, and believed middle children were healthier, more relaxed, and somewhat rebellious. The concept of intelligence, however, was completely disregarded.

The flaw with this theory is the lack of empirical data. Today, we are able to gather information on a
massive scale, therefore finding accurate results.

Speaking of results, PNAS recently published a study that is taking the scientific community by storm, and even Freud and Adler would be impressed with the findings.
Read: 8 Things that People with High Emotional Intelligence Simply Don’t Do

The study, conducted by Rohrer, Egloff, and Schmukle, found that first-born children scored higher on
objective measures of intelligence and self-reported measures of intelligence. However, they found that there were no birth-order effects on other personality characteristics.

In other words, every child after the first-born is likely to be slightly less intelligent than the last. The
researchers examined data from more than 20,000 participants (5,240 from the US, 4,489 from the UK, and 10,457 from Germany) and found conclusive evidence that there is indeed a birth-order effect on intelligence.

Ars technica touches on an interesting part of this study saying, “later-born children not only receive less intellectual stimulation from their familial environments, but they also receive and internalize messages that they are less intellectual than their older siblings.”
Read: The 9 Multiple Intelligences – Which “Smart” Are You?

The researchers on this study speculated a couple reasons as to why this slight decline in intelligence
through birth-order takes place:

• The eldest child may have their parents’ full attention while younger siblings have less time with mum or dad. This may compound, with more and more children.
• Parents tend to place higher expectations on first-borns, succeeding at academics for example, while younger siblings will receive more room to make mistakes.
• Dubbed the “tutoring hypothesis,” a first-born can tutor their younger siblings, guiding them through the rules of life, explaining how the world works, etc. Because instructing is a cognitively demanding activity, first-borns may receive unique mental learning skills.

Researchers have debunked some common misconceptions about the different personalities of siblings (sorry Freud and Adler). Besides IQ tests, the participants were also given personality assessments. While first- borns are often thought to be more outgoing, outspoken, and social, there was no evidence for this. In fact, no personality differences held reliably constant between siblings of different ages.
Read: Emotional Intelligence: Is It More Important than your IQ?

So if there are some of you who are unhappy with the arm-chair psychologists who have diagnosed you based on your “middle-child syndrome” or the like, now you can rest assured they were wrong. And the science is here to back you up.

Written by Raven Fon

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The Science Of Why It’s Better To Spend Money On Experiences – Not Things

Ahh, the pursuit of happiness. It is what most people are after. Some economists believe happiness is the best indicator of how healthy a society is. It seems that even though money can make you temporarily happier, once your basic needs are met, it doesn’t continue to do so. For most of us, figuring out how to spend our money, which is a limited resource, is a question that continues to perplex us. Can  experiences make us happier than a new T.V.?

The majority of people tend to make an assumption when spending money: because a physical object will last longer, it will bring us happiness for a longer period of time rather than a one-time experience like a holiday or a movie outing. However, recent research shows us that assumption is entirely wrong.

A study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology shows people who made expensive purchases on products rather than investing in experiences, immediately started to devalue an item’s worth after buying it.
Read: 4 Reasons to Spend Money On Experiences, Not Possessions

Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University, has been studying the connection between money and happiness for over two decades. “There’s a lot of work in the area of well-being and happiness showing that we adapt to most things,” Gilovich said. “Therefore, things like a new material purchase make us happy initially, but very quickly we adapt to it, and it doesn’t bring us all that much joy. You could argue that adaptation is sort of an enemy of happiness. Other kinds of expenditures, such as experiential purchases, don’t seem as subject to adaptation.”

Maybe instead of buying the latest model sports car, or succumbing to the most recent fashion trend, Gilovich suggests you invest your time and money into going to museums, or travelling.

“Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods,” says Gilovich. “You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences.”
Read: Research says money CAN make you happy…if you spend it on others

You would think this would be obvious, but society is so easily manipulated into buying things they don’t need, it seems that people believe happiness can be bought. Why buy a brand new phone when you could put that money towards visiting a country you have never seen before? Experiences are everything. Let’s try to collect more memories than things.

By Raven Fon

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FINALLY! The US is Retiring the Last of the Reseach Chimpanzees

FINALLY, after a 2-year wait, the final group of 50 chimpanzees owned by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be retired and placed in animal sanctuaries to live out the rest of their lives. This last remaining group of chimps is part of a group of 132 that are all that is left of the medical research chimpanzee in America. Other countries like Austria, New Zealand, and Germany banned research on chimps back in 1986. The US surely isn’t a pioneer in ending this type of research, but at least they are catching up.

Back in 2013, 310 chimps were officially “retire” from testing facilities and sent to sanctuaries, but the NIH was the last organization to continue to use them. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH said, “I think this is the natural next step of what has been a very thoughtful five-year process of trying to come to terms with the benefits and risks of trying to perform research with these very special animals. We reached a point where in that five years the need for research has essentially shrunk to zero.” Part of the pressure to phase out the last chimpanzees that are being used as research animals came earlier this year when the US passed a law that gave chimps the same protection as endangered species.
Read: What Scientists Have Found in South Africa is Rewriting the History of Mankind

The end of chimp research potential is causing a problem for some scientist, though. Specifically scientist that are focused on chimpanzee conservation like Peter Walsh. Walsh was working on an ebola vaccination that would be specific to chimps to protect them from the virus in the wild, but now he has no way to test it. “There really is no other place to do conservation-related trials but the US biomed facilities,” according to Walsh. Other scientists, like Allyson Bennet from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are concerned that the sanctuaries where the chimps will be sent won’t provide the same level of care that they received in funded laboratories. Either way you look at it, I think the testing of chimps for medical research is outdated and am personally glad to see the program being phased out.

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Life and Love: A Collection of Quotes from Sylvia Plath

When it comes to writing about life and love, very few have done it as well as Sylvia Plath. Plath basically defined the art of what is known as confessional poetry. Plath battled with depression and eventually took her own life, but not before writing some of the greatest poetry in American literature. Her most famous collections were The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. Plath was also awarded the Pulitzer prize posthumously in 1982 for The Collected Poems. Plath truly had a way with words that still resonates all these years later. Below is a collection of some of her greatest lines.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
Read: Heart of a Warrior: 15 Timeless Quotes of the Samurai

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest
Read: In Memory of Dr. Wayne Dyer – 21 of his Greatest Inspirational Quotes

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.”

“I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction–every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

“How we need another soul to cling to.”

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How to talk to your family this holiday season. (The enlightened way!)

Let’s face it, holiday season for most of us is an endurance test. We have to put on our bravest smiles and dust off our funkiest sweaters that we only wear once a year whilst dragging our best foot forward as we enter the realm of family gatherings in the season to be merry.

It’s the time when we over enthusiastically eat the predictable celebrational dinner whilst choking on all the unsaid truths and cringing in discomfort at the polite dinner conversation with people we hardly talk to or connect with the rest of the year. The same shit, different year. Over and over and over again. Hopefully this time, we will sail through to escape jubilantly the other side unscathed and free to live our secret lives for another year until next holiday season.

If you are dreading it, this humorous video from Kyle Cease offers us a refreshing and truly enlightened alternative to how dinner time conversation can run with your nearest and dearest this year…if you dare. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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4 Common Reasons You Get Dumped

4 Reasons Why You Get Dumped (Ouch!)

Whatever the case may be, there is always a reason behind every breakup. Just when you think the relationship is going well and you begin to think this person might be ‘the one’, then bam! The breakup happens out of nowhere. Some reasons for breaking up are better than others. The following 4 reasons for getting dumped are some of the most common:

1) Trust Issues:

Trust issues in relationships may seem innocent and common, but they have the power to destroy them. If trust issues aren’t the number one cause of breakups, they are for sure in the top 3. For some people cheating means the end of the relationship because they believe in the concept of ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’. It’s hard to imagine a person who you loved so much will cheat on you.
Common Signs of Trust Issues:
* You check his/her phone (especially, when they are not around)
* The tendency to think of the worst case in every possible scenario.
* Constantly challenging the boundaries you consciously or unconsciously give to your relationship.

2) Distance:

Long-distance relationships are getting more common around the world because of our constant connections to social media, mobile phones, etc. Long-distance love can work for some, but not most. Long-distance relationships lack the most basic things like kissing, cuddling, or any other physical affection, which are all very important in a relationship. Spending time and energy with a person is a must to grow stronger feelings and a real bond. Trust also becomes difficult. Eventually, many couples in long-distance relationships break up because they have nothing more to talk about, other than saying ‘I miss you’ to each other. Also, there is always a chance of meeting someone else and falling in love with them because there is the real potential for actual physical affection.

3) Financial Issues:

Financial stability is a primary factor to any relationship’s success. Yes, the reality is that money matters to many couples. A lack of money can lead to issues, which eventually lead to a breakup. The stress that is caused by financial issues on a relationship can be too much to deal with. In the world we are living in, it’s difficult to pay the bills if only one person in the relationship is working. In a marriage, if the finances are not shared equally, if there is financial secrecy, or if there is stress about financial matters like heavy debts, it can sour the marriage.
Read: Are You ‘In Love’ Or Just Attached? The Difference Is Important

4) Jealousy:

Jealousy is typically a killer of any relationship. Have you ever asked questions like, “Who were you with?”, “Who you were messaging?” Well, there is a good chance that’s why he/she left. Jealousy boils down to trust. If you can’t trust the person you are with to spend time with friends or other people, then maybe you shouldn’t be with that person.

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Epigenetics: The Weird Science Behind Inherited Experience

In basic science classes, we have learned that certain traits are passed along through our genetic material. For instance, the likelihood of having a certain hair color, eye color, or build is all determined by our parent’s genetic makeup. Things like talent can even be associated with DNA, in a way, because of things like intelligence or physical precursors. That being said, up until now, one thing that was thought to not be passed down through genetics is experience. There is new research that is challenging that theory.

In the following video from MinuteEarth, we are shown an experiment where rats are trained to fear the smell of fruit because they are sent and electrical jolt every time they smell it. What scientists found was that as the rats developed their fear of fruit, they also developed more neurons in their noses to detect the smell of fruit. That’s pretty common evolution at work. It was no surprise that the rats offspring were born with these extra neurons as well. What WAS a surprise, is that the baby rats feared the smell of fruit even without ever being subjected to the electrical jolts.
Read: The Spectacular Science Behind Sonogenetics: Controlling the Brain Through Sound

As the video explains, this is a clear indication of a learned experience being passed down through genetic lines. This experiment also raises the question of exactly how much experience can be passed on from parents to offspring. I’ve written before about Holocaust survivors passing on certain behavioral traits to their offspring, and the idea of epigenetics is fascinating to me. Check out this video for a breakdown of the experiment, and see for yourself.

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4 Struggles only People who Work “Non-Traditional” Jobs Understand

Somewhere along the line, we have been told that we need to go out and get a job just like everyone else. For some of us, a typical “9 to 5” job just isn’t what we are looking for. There are those of us who just have to do what it is that we love to earn a living to avoid feeling like we are wasting our lives in a rat race. It never fails, when I tell people that I write for a living they automatically assume it’s like what you see in the movies. I’m here to tell you that it is not, it’s not even close. Working a “non-traditional job is so much harder than anything I ever did working in corporate America. If you’re like me and do something a little different to earn a living, these are struggles you’ll completely understand.

People’s Perceptions

First and foremost, the biggest struggle for most of us who do something different for a living is the perceptions of our family and friends who are still stuck in that same rat race that we try so hard to avoid. People assume that because you don’t put on a suit and tie or a hard hat to go to work that you must be lazy and have your head in the clouds. I can tell you that after a 12-year career in the IT industry, I’ve never worked harder or been happier in my entire life. Those of us who take the risks associated with working a non-traditional job do so because we simply can’t be contained in the normal 9 to 5 box that so many people are in. It has nothing to do with work ethic, it has everything to do with being passionate about what it is that we do.

Working from Home

When I tell people that I work from home, they often tell me how “lucky” I am. The truth is, when you work from home – you NEVER leave your office. When you walk out the door of your office, you can leave work at work. Not when your office is a wall away. For some people who work from home, making the split is easier than others. I personally am to the point where if I could afford office space, I’d get an office just for a change in scenery. Working from home also means your level of distraction is as high as it gets. My TV is always there beckoning me to get caught up on shows I watch. My dog has perfected the art of giving me “that look” that results in a trip around the neighborhood. I can’t imagine what it is like for working mothers who work from home with kids…
Read: Companies Across Sweden are Adopting 6-Hour Work Days and Seeing Amazing Results

Being “Everything” to your Business

Many non-traditional jobs are associated with owning your own business. Back in the days of working for someone else, there was an accounting department, and HR department, and a bunch of other people whose job it was to make sure I could do mine. Now, I am the accounting, IT, HR, operations, marketing, and even janitorial department. That’s on top of what I have to do to make money in the first place. Depending on what it is that you’ve chosen to do, your passion can easily be overshadowed by all the things it takes to keep the ship afloat.

Time Off

A lot of times when you work for yourself or in a job that is a little outside the norm, “time off” is a far away concept. As soon as you stop doing whatever it is that you do for money, you stop making money. Sure, if you manage to make enough money to take time off, which is rare in these types of businesses, often times all you can think about is getting back to work and making more money.

At the end of the day, I simply can’t go back to working in corporate America again. Again, it has nothing to do with organization, structure, or even having someone tell me what to do. It is all about passion, and if you are like me – you completely understand that I am talking about.

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What Is Depression? The Dog In This Video Clarifies Everything

Chances are you know someone who has, or is suffering from depression. Maybe that person is you. Depression affects almost everyone at some point in their life, and nearly twice as many women as men are affected by a depressive illness each year.

In the context of physical illness, depression is commonly unrecognized and therefore untreated. The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation says this about depression:

“Clinical depression is a serious condition that negatively affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. In contrast to normal sadness, clinical depression is persistent, and significantly interferes with daily life.”

I have known several people who suffered from major depressive disorder (MDD), and some who are still trying to tread water despite their feeling of drowning. For someone who has been diagnosed with clinical depression, trying to explain what you are going through or what you are feeling, is impossible. Even getting up the strength to attempt an accurate description is overwhelming.

This short animated video perfectly shows us what it is like to have these feelings- the sullen ebb and flow, the confusing darkness, the wishing for normalcy and so much more that others might not be aware of.

The National Institute of Mental Health understands how vital research is to this area and has plans to study and improve upon the following areas in the near future:

• NIMH will utilize important findings on thought-process research. This research shows evidence that points to the role of negative attentional and memory biases — selective attention to and memory of negative information — in producing and sustaining depression and anxiety.
• NIMH researchers will seek to identify distinct subtypes of this specific mental condition characterized by various features including genetic risk, course of illness, and clinical symptoms.
• Advances in neurobiology and brain imaging technology now make it possible to see clearer linkages between research findings from different domains of emotion and mood.

• An important long-term goal of NIMH  research is to identify simple biological marker that, for example, could be detected in blood or with brain imaging.

Read: 12 Easy Tricks to Fight Against Depression
Do you know someone who has or is suffering from depression? What advice do you have for others in their shoes? Let us know in the comments!

Written by Raven Fon

The post What Is Depression? The Dog In This Video Clarifies Everything appeared first on I Heart Intelligence.

Test Your Science Knowledge

Are you more creative or intelligent?

New Compound may be the KEY to Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease

In the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, the main culprit is a naturally occurring substance known as amyloid beta protein. These toxic proteins are self-assembling and quickly build up into a plaque in the brain that creates the symptoms commonly associated with Alzheimer’s like dementia and memory loss. Back in 2011, scientists began working on understanding these proteins in an effort to defeat them. Professor Richard Head from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said, “Before we can understand the processes involved in the deterioration of the brain, we must determine the molecular shape of the damaging protein. Until now this has proved incredibly difficult because of the protein’s propensity to self-assemble and clump together.”

What we now know about amyloid beta protein is that it is created when enzymes in the brain divide the much larger amyloid precursor protein (APP) into smaller sections. Sometimes when these proteins are broken down, two segments of APP protein join together in a process called dimerization – which ultimately results in the creation of amyloid protein. Scientists still don’t know why dimerization occurs, but they know that preventing it is the key to preventing the amyloid proteins from forming in the first place.
Read: New Alzheimer’s Treatment is Fully Restoring Memory Function

That’s when Carmela Abraham, a professor of biochemistry and medicine at Boston University, came across one of 77,000 molecules that she believed could stop the process of dimerization. This molecule is what is known as a kinase inhibitor, which blocks the activity of kinase enzymes. According to Abraham, “This was the big eureka moment. Once we knew what the molecule was doing, we could search to see what kinase it inhibits and better understand the mechanism.” If researchers can understand what inhibits kinase enzymes, they hope to be able to find the specific molecule that can prevent the enzymes that break up APP. If an inhibitor could be found that stops the enzymes that break up APP, Alzheimer’s disease could be stopped in its tracks. Abraham points out how important that really is: “Alzheimer’s is now the number six killer of adults in the United States. Deaths from breast cancer and heart disease keep dropping, but Alzheimer’s increases every year. Caring for Alzheimer’s patients costs over $200 billion dollars per year. The estimate for 2050 is $1.1 trillion, which means it will completely break the health care system. We have to find a drug.”

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What John Gottman’s “Love Lab” can Teach Us About Relationships

back in the 1970’s, divorce rates started to skyrocket at a rate that had never been seen before. The concern at the time was the impact that these divorce rates would have on the children associated with the divorces, so psychologist began studying marriages in an attempt to see why they were failing. There were a lot of questions about the individual aspects of each marriage being the cause for divorce, or whether or not these marriages had something in common. That’s what lead to psychologist John Gottman setting up what he affectionately calls the “love lab” in 1986 with fellow psychologist Robert Levenson at the University of Washington.

Masters and Disasters

The “love lab” was a place where Gottman and Levenson could watch newlywed couples interact and study their responses to one another. In one such study, newlyweds were hooked up to electrodes to monitor certain aspects of their physiology like blood pressure, heart rate, and sweat production. Not unlike a lie detector, basically. The couples were then asked questions about their relationships like how they met, conflicts, and positive memories. Through this analysis, Gottman was able to break the couples into two groups: masters and disasters.

The disasters appeared calm, but their physiology was a much different story. They all had increased heart rates, higher sweat production, and higher blood pressure. In essence, they were in a constant state of “fight or flight” mode throughout the interview. The masters, on the other hand, showed a very low physiological response, if any. What is interesting about this study was not only that the disasters had a much higher rate of divorce, but the more physiologically active they were – the sooner they got divorced. It almost seemed as though Gottman could predict divorce. Basically, the disasters were in a constant state of agitation while simply having a conversation with their spouse, whether they showed it or not. But why? Gottman believes that the phenomenon boiled down to kindness over criticism.

The Effect of “Bids”

In another study in 1990, Gottman set the lab up to look like a bed and breakfast, and filmed couples going about routine days together. He noticed that throughout the day one or more of the partners would open up an avenue for interaction that he called a “bids”. For example, a partner would say something like “oh, did you see this story on the news?” which creates an opportunity for engagement. The other partner has the opportunity to “turn toward” or “turn away” from the bid by either engaging or ignoring it. If the partner replied “no, what was it?”, that would be an instance of “turning toward” a bid, while replying something negative would be “turning away”.

In the end, the scenario isn’t about whatever the partner is offering up as a bid, it is how often the other partner “turns toward” a bid. Based on that simple principle, Gottman found that couples who had more “turn away” responses to bids had a much higher rate of divorce. In fact, after all these years of research, Gottman can predict whether couples — straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not — will still be together and happy several years later with about 94% accuracy.

Gottman explains, “There’s a habit of mind that the masters have, which is this: they are scanning the social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.” His wife, Julie, went on to add, “It’s not just scanning the environment, it’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
Read: Are You ‘In Love’ Or Just Attached? The Difference Is Important

So in conclusion, Gottman’s “love lab” shows that the spirit of kindness, above all else, is the key to a lasting relationship. Constantly searching for criticism develops contempt on both sides. Contempt alone is enough to ruin any relationship. Gottman found that people who are constantly looking for negative things in their partner miss at least 50% of the positive things that their partner does. In fact, the partners that search for negative things often find them when they aren’t really there. Julie Gottman described how kindness in relationships works by saying, “If your partner expresses a need and you are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”

Keep that generous spirit in mind. It is the key to a long-lasting, loving relationship.

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5 Things We Give Others that We Shouldn’t Expect in Return

We have all had those days where if we had a place to escape to, we’d be off in a cartoonish puff of dust headed to our respective happy places. I know I do. I have them all the time. I’ve always believed wholeheartedly in the statement “before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” I try to be a good guy, every single day. Yet, it never fails, someone will find a way to make me feel bad about myself or my decisions. That’s when I had an epiphany of sorts: my disappointment in other people was based on my expectations of others. That’s the thing with expecting things from others, it opens the doorway to disappointment. So, if you are anything like me and try to be the best person you can be, here are 5 things to quit expecting from others – no matter how freely we give them out.

Consideration

I see a very basic example of this every single day at least once: opening doors. I cannot count how many times I have opened a door for someone and they just walk by like it’s my job to open that door for them. Not even so much as a head nod of recognition. Yet, if someone is ever kind enough to open the door for me, I make damn sure that they know that I am appreciative of such a small gesture of kindness. I know that seems like a somewhat petty example, but consideration is one of those things that we almost expect from other human beings that we rarely get in return. If you’ve ever had a roommate you know exactly what I am talking about. Some people are so self-absorbed that even acknowledging the people around them is a stretch.

Loyalty

I have struggled with this one a lot in my life. It’s not that loyalty is necessarily hard to find, but the level of loyalty rarely matches up. In your career, you can go out on a limb for someone who would throw you under the bus for a happy meal. People don’t seem to understand that loyalty is not a one-size-fits-all condition. Loyalty is a concept. If someone has your back when it comes to something minor but disappears when things get serious, that’s not loyalty – that’s convenience.
Read: Are You a Competent Adult?

Forgiveness

I gave up on expecting forgiveness YEARS ago. I give of it so freely, and it used to drive me crazy when I didn’t get it from others. The problem here is that people are so quick to point out your mistakes, but it is impossible for them to see their own. Therefore, your forgiveness holds no weight with them because in their minds they weren’t wrong. When you accept that you were wrong, and seek forgiveness, it becomes important to you. Again, just because it matters to you doesn’t mean that it matters to the person you are seeking forgiveness from.

Acceptance

Every level of acceptance comes with a level of judgement. There are going to be people in our lives that are so focused on the judgement that they might appear to accept you for who you are, but basically just want something to look down on. What makes this frustrating for people like me is that there is a certain level of acceptance that I think we all strive for, that some people are just never going to give. It’s usually people like family or coworkers, who you can’t just tell to go away.
Read: 6 Signs of REAL Maturity

Support

Again, this goes back to the convenience thing that I talked about with loyalty. I’d crawl on broken glass for people that wouldn’t even help me walk across the street. The difference these days is that I just don’t expect them to do the same for me in return.

I guess the sentiment here is that we shouldn’t quit giving freely of ourselves to other people, just because we don’t get the same things back in return. We need to be realistic about our expectations, or lose them altogether. Trust me, it will do wonders for your sanity.

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