What Happens to Your Brain on Sugar, Explained by Science On the left is your brain on sugar. On the right side is your brain on drugs. Notice the similarities? For comparison, this image shows PET scans of obese and cocaine-addicted brains. Notice that the normal brain has a lot more red stuff highlighted in it — called Dopamine. Let's take another look: Image: Wikimedia Commons This PET brain scans show chemical differences in the brain between addicts and non-addicts. This is what sugar does to your brain — the exact same thing smoking, alcohol and cocaine do. Just how bad is America's addiction to sugar? The Centers for Disease Control project a double- or triple-fold increase in the proportions of Americans with diabetes by 2050. In 2013, student-faculty research at Connecticut College found that in lab rats, Oreos, rich in sugar and fat, may be just as addictive as cocaine. So basically, Oreos are legal crack. Former Coca-Cola executive and COO Jeffrey Dunn explains the sales logic they'd use: "How many drinkers do I have?
How to Break Your Addiction to Work For many of us, working simply feels good. But just because it feeds your ego or makes you feel important, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good for you. How do you break the cycle of working long hours at the office and constantly checking email at home? How do you persuade those around you — similarly work-obsessed colleagues or a demanding boss — that working all the time isn’t healthy? What the Experts Say In a society “where work is considered morally worthy,” being a workaholic might not seem like a serious problem, says Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist and the founding director of the Center for Research on Gender in the Professions at the University of California, San Diego. Redefine success Start by rethinking how you define success. Refocus your attention Next, you need to step back and reflect on how you want to spend your time and energy. Reset expectations When trying to break an addiction, “you can’t do it alone,” says Friedman. Hide your smartphone. Principles to Remember Do:
Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness | TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript So let's start with some good news,and the good news has to do with what do we knowbased on biomedical researchthat actually has changed the outcomesfor many very serious diseases? Remarkable stories,good-news stories,all of which boil down to understandingsomething about the diseases that has allowed usto detect early and intervene early.Early detection, early intervention,that's the story for these successes. But it's not just the mortality from these disorders.It's also morbidity.If you look at disability,as measured by the World Health Organizationwith something they call the Disability Adjusted Life Years,it's kind of a metric that nobody would think ofexcept an economist,except it's one way of trying to capture what is lostin terms of disability from medical causes,and as you can see, virtually 30 percentof all disability from all medical causescan be attributed to mental disorders,neuropsychiatric syndromes. Why does this matter? Are we going to be there soon? Thanks very much.
Ty Dolla $ign has written the biggest song of the year and will happily fix your toilet - FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music. When Ty Dolla $ign starts speaking, his trademark raspy voice is so cracked I can barely understand a word he’s saying until he takes a couple seconds to clear his throat. I would ask how he lost his voice, but just a matter of hours before our chat, I was dancing in the sweat-steamed XOYO basement as he puffed gleefully on a blunt onstage, while telling the ladies of the audience, “I wanna take, like, 10 of you back to my hotel room tonight.” So I’ve got some idea. When his smoky drawl first blew onto the scene in 2011, Ty was spoken of by many in the same breath as The Weeknd, that year’s prince of sexy-but-tormented R&B. Even now the two are working together regularly – Ty’s late to our interview because he’s in the studio working on a verse for Abel, I’m told – but their roles are starkly different. Sign Language, which dropped in August, saw Ty flex his skill for writing fire hooks over more ambitious arrangements and with more diverse collaborators than ever before. In Paris? Cool.
The Hum of the Universe: Shonda Rhimes on Creative Burnout, the Hamster Wheel of Success, and Reclaiming Who We Are from the Workaholic Grip of What We Do By Maria Popova “One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824. But two centuries later, amid a workaholic culture in which we busy ourselves wresting who we are from what we do, we have completely inverted the relationship. We no longer know how to be without doing, having rendered notions of work-life balance vacant of meaning. For those fortunate enough to have a so-called “dream job” — more often than not, driven personalities animated by uncompromising motivation — the paradox can be even more disorienting: While being your own boss grants tremendous freedoms, it also means that in walking this path of your own making, you are taking marching orders from the most demanding, most critical, most merciless boss possible. It’s talk all the more moving in the context of a central pillar of Rhimes’s identity — her self-admitted marrow-deep introversion. What do you do when the thing you do — the work you love — starts to taste like dust?
The model princess who swapped glitz for culture | World ''You can be an actress or a Vogue model in Paris,'' says the former actress and Vogue model Princess Elizabeth Bagaaya of Toro, ''but not an African princess. Being a princess can only be meaningful when you're amongst your people. That's why I live in Toro.'' Elizabeth Bagaaya-Nyabongo gives no hint of missing her international renown of the late Sixties and Seventies, but then she knows that fame is a fickle companion. Such was her build-up that I was in a state of some agitation before our dinner engagement in Kampala at the weekend. The blurb on the back of her 1989 autobiography, Elizabeth of Toro: Odyssey of an African Princess - which was thoughtfully delivered to my hotel - was no less breathless. Could the hotel's gourmet restaurant (''Candlelight dinner with sophisticated food and wines'') possibly satisfy the exacting tastes of such a goddess? She also travels regularly: Paris, Frankfurt, LA.
Workaholics Have Serious Psychiatric Disorders, Researchers Find Are you staying up late to finish “important” emails? Do you take work home on the weekends? You might want to re-examine why you are working so hard, because according to Norwegian researchers, workaholics often have a number of psychiatric disorders. A study led by the University of Bergen examined 16,426 working adults and found an association between workaholism and psychiatric problems. In particular, it was found that: - 32.7% of workaholics had ADHD - 33.8 % had anxiety - 25.6 % of workaholics had OCD - 8.9 % had depression That’s a host of issues, with a third of all workaholics having ADHD and anxiety! "Workaholics scored higher on all the psychiatric symptoms than non-workaholics," said researcher and Clinical Psychologist Specialist Cecilie Schou Andreassen. The scientists encourage further research in this field, stressing the importance of neurobiological deviations in workaholism. Want to know if you are workaholic? How do the results look?
Why Kesha's Case Is About More Than Kesha (Stefania Tejada) Advertisement - Continue Reading Below When I saw the outcome of Kesha's court case last Friday, I felt sick. Actually sick — I wanted to ask my Uber to pull over so I could throw up in a New York City trash can. The photos of her beautiful face crumpled with tears, the legally necessary but sickening use of the word "alleged" over and over in reference to the assault she says she remembers so vividly — it all created a special brand of nausea that comes when public events intersect with your most private triggers. If you haven't been following the case: for the last year and a half, Kesha has been trying to get out of a contract with her former collaborator and producer Lukasz Gottwald, known professionally as Dr. Now Kesha has requested an immediate injunction that would allow her to begin to record without Dr. Sony could make this go away. Sony could make this go away. So let me spell it out for them.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism by Maria Popova “Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity … or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.” “We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come,” Alan Watts observed in 1970, aptly declaring us “a civilization which suffers from chronic disappointment.” Today, in our culture of productivity-fetishism, we have succumbed to the tyrannical notion of “work/life balance” and have come to see the very notion of “leisure” not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy. So how did we end up so conflicted about cultivating a culture of leisure? Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'Open House for Butterflies' by Ruth Krauss. Illustration from 'Herman and Rosie' by Gus Gordon. He writes:
dive deep into hip hop culture with straight outta... the podcast Last year's N.W.A. flick Straight Outta Compton has been back in the headlines lately, mostly due to being snubbed by this year's whitewashed Oscar nominations. Now hip hop fans have been given some significantly more awesome news regarding the could-have-been best feature. The film's screenwriter and executive producer Leigh Savidge, who was one of the few people to receive a nod from the Academy, has low-key been working on a podcast. It's called Straight Outta... "I'm very excited to produce Straight Outta ... with PodcastOne," Savidge told The Hollywood Reporter. Each episode of the weekly podcast will explore a new chapter of hip-hop culture via interviews with its most fascinating personalities.
Workaholism Is Killing You Today being “crazy busy” is a way of life. Americans are taking less vacation time than ever before not only to show dedication, but also to simply keep up with the demands they face. This pressure to stay competitive combined with the 24/7, always-on reality has contributed to a well-documented rise in burn out. In fact, nearly 40% of employees say they actually want to be seen as a “work martyr” by their boss. According to a study by Project: Time Off, a work martyr is defined as someone who feels a sense of shame for taking time off. They are driven to overwork out of fear that they’re disposable or otherwise not valuable if they aren’t burning the candle at both ends. Work martyrs live in a constant state of being overwhelmed, wearing their all-work-no-play status like a badge of honor. While being a hard worker and team player is admirable, the extreme stress of overworking can turn destructive and harm both your health and relationships.
Roxanne Shanté And The First Rap Beef Read our in-depth history of the diss track and its mysterious creator, teen rapper Roxanne Shanté. Hey, did you know raps beefs were invented by accident? We rewind the clock and uncover the source to discover that, just like your relationship, it's complicated. From Meek Mill vs Drake to Jay-Z verbally jousting with Nas, beefs are a mainstay of the rap world on both sides of the Atlantic. The rap rivalry’s origin story, however, is just as fascinating as the Twitter storms that you scroll through today. In 1984, Lolita Shanté Gooden was an aspiring 15-year-old MC who loved to rap on street corners in her native Queens, battling anyone who challenged her. If hip-hop wasn't just going to end up as a novelty fad, the genre needed someone to shake everything up. Listen to the song that started it all, UTFO's Roxanne, Roxanne. The original UTFO song was about a girl who meanly rejected the band’s collective romantic advances. With that, the first rap beef was born.
Gwen Stefani Talks Blake Shelton, New Album Photo: Jamie Nelson. On her new album, This Is What the Truth Feels Like (on sale March 18), Gwen Stefani delves into the giddy blindness of new love while shaking off the remains of a shattered marriage. It’s a complex emotional cocktail — which is to say, it’s classic Gwen Stefani. This is the woman who made the biggest hits of her career by calling out her ex-boyfriend for breaking her heart — again, and again, and again — then fawning over a crush who became her husband. Last August, Stefani called off her 13-year marriage to Gavin Rossdale. A year earlier, she'd met Blake Shelton (who was going through his own separation from country star Miranda Lambert) on the set of The Voice, where they were both coaches. While it’s more dance party than seeping wound, Truth does get dark. Her latest single, “Make Me Like You,” presents a much happier Gwen. Talking to Stefani (as we did last week by phone) feels like chatting with a gal pal. Photo: Courtesy Of Interscope Records.