Study: Believing You’ve Slept Well, Even if You Haven’t, Improves Performance - Julie Beck. Problem: Who even sleeps anymore? You and everyone you know are probably loading yourselves up with coffee or whatever your stimulant of choice is so you can plod through your day as some semblance of an upright human being. Then you get home and you don’t go to bed early enough because this is the only me-time you get, damn it, and if you want to watch three hours of Netflix, then you will. Or you try to go to sleep but you fail and end up tossing and turning, because sleeping is actually kind of hard, and the more you want it, the more it slips through your grasp.
But maybe the knowledge that you aren’t sleeping enough is part of what’s keeping you trapped in your swamp of lethargy during the day. Maybe if you were sweetly, blithely ignorant of your somnial failings, you’d feel more chipper and work more efficiently. Methodology: Participating undergrads first reported how deeply they’d slept the night before, on a scale of one to 10.
15 Signs That You Are Emotionally Intelligent. Emotionally intelligent people aren’t ruled by their thoughts; they are the master of them. Discover your emotional strength today with these 15 signs that you are emotionally intelligent. 1. You’re Fascinated by What Makes People Tick. Emotionally intelligent people are fascinated by human behavior. They notice things like body language, dialect, and personal tics. 2. Emotionally intelligent people know it’s silly to talk the talk if they’re not willing to walk the walk. 3. Emotionally intelligent people know you’re not as weak as your weakest link; you are as strong as your strongest link. 4. Emotionally intelligent people don’t have time for regret. 5. Emotionally intelligent people don’t obsess with future events outside of their control. 6. Emotionally intelligent people don’t merely “get through” their hectic day. 7. Emotionally intelligent people know that “hearing” and “listening” are two different things. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
How To Take Care of Yourself When You're Depressed. So much of depression can be linked back to forgetting to take proper care of ourselves. And the more depressed we feel, the less energy we have for anything beyond basic survival. What does taking care of yourself look like, particularly when you are depressed? While it varies from person to person, there are certain basic habits that help everybody, no matter who they are: drinking enough water, eating whole foods, getting 8 hours of sleep, etc. but people are individuals, and what works for one person won’t work for another.
What is necessary for one person may only be nice (but entirely optional), or even detrimental for someone else. Let’s start by listing everything that sounds remotely appealing to you. Ready? First, eliminate everything from that list that you have never actually tried. Now, look at any item on that list that you dread, and ask yourself a very important question: has this been helpful in the past? Look at your list. How To Take Care of Yourself When You're Depressed.
4 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn. “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” ~ Leo Tolstoy Growing up we learn many basics of life including: We can’t always have our way (never like that one), we need to share (actually found that fun), and Thanksgiving comes before Christmas/Chanukah (I wish someone would tell the people in charge of advertising that having Christmas trees up before we eat turkey is not ok!).
When we’re young we learn a lot without even realizing it, without even trying. We witness how the people closest to us think, behave, and react. Some of the lessons we learn are very beneficial to us, and others, not so much. The latter are the ones to be aware of. These are the ones that need to be rewired, so they can be unlearned. It takes time for lessons to become ingrained in the brain, and unlearning them can be quite the challenge. Below are four beliefs we inadvertently learn that get my vote to top the ‘Unlearn This’ list: 1. Who cares?! 2. 3. 4. No. A novel look at how stories may change the brain. Many people can recall reading at least one cherished story that they say changed their life.
Now researchers at Emory University have detected what may be biological traces related to this feeling: Actual changes in the brain that linger, at least for a few days, after reading a novel. Their findings, that reading a novel may cause changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain that persist, were published by the journal Brain Connectivity. "Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person," says neuroscientist Gregory Berns, lead author of the study and the director of Emory's Center for Neuropolicy. "We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it. " His co-authors included Kristina Blaine and Brandon Pye from the Center for Neuropolicy, and Michael Prietula, professor of information systems and operations management at Emory's Goizueta Business School. The Emory study focused on the lingering neural effects of reading a narrative.
The Body Map of Emotions: Happiness Activates the Whole Body. New study reveals where people feel different emotions in the body. Unlike thoughts, the emotions don’t live entirely in the mind, they are also associated with bodily sensations. For example, when we feel nervous, we get ‘butterflies in our stomach’. Thanks to a new study, for the first time we now have a map of the links between emotions and bodily sensations. Finnish researchers induced different emotions in 701 participants and then got them to colour in a body map of where they felt increasing or decreasing activity (Nummenmaa et al., 2013).
Participants in the study were from both Western European countries like Finland and Sweden and also from East Asia (Taiwan). Despite the cultural differences, they found remarkable similarities in how people responded. Here are the body maps for six basic emotions. The authors explain: “Most basic emotions were associated with sensations of elevated activity in the upper chest area, likely corresponding to changes in breathing and heart rate. Lifehacker.