Association Between Diet and Mental Well-Being Jodi Corbitt had been battling depression for decades and by 2010 had resigned herself to taking antidepressant medication for the rest of her life. Then she decided to start a dietary experiment. To lose weight, the 47-year-old Catonsville, Md., mother stopped eating gluten, a protein found in wheat and related grains. Within a month she had shed several pounds — and her lifelong depression. “It was like a veil lifted and I could see life more clearly,” she recalled. Corbitt had stumbled into an area that scientists have recently begun to investigate: whether food can have as powerful an impact on the mind as it does on the body. Research exploring the link between diet and mental health “is a very new field; the first papers only came out a few years ago,” said Michael Berk, a professor of psychiatry at the Deakin University School of Medicine in Australia. “Diet quality” refers to the kinds of foods that people eat, how often they eat them and how much of them they eat. Gut bacteria
14 Daily Habits That Are Secretly Stressing You Out 'Tis the season for completely losing it. The holidays are a worry-filled time for a lot of people, but it turns out that you might be partially to blame for your own pre-eggnog anxiety. But we know (or we hope) you're not purposely trying to sabotage yourself, so here's a quick rundown of things you might be doing without realizing they're actually making you feel worse. Take a deep breath and try to relax. You might be stressed because... 1. If you can't remember the last time you laughed so hard you were blinded by tears, you should reconsider your life choices. 2. Photo by Mike Rosenthal In a study on mice, those that had exercised responded to a stressful cold-water bath with a short spurt of anxiety followed by calm, suggesting brains are more equipped to deal with stress when the body has been physically active. 3. Multiple studies have shown the relaxing benefits of listening to music. 4. Consider your cleaning habits. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Stop that. 13. Also on HuffPost:
5 Principles of Highly Effective Content Share There is a ton of content out there—and it can get pretty chaotic. Large companies, on average, have approximately 39 Twitter accounts, 32 separate blogs, 30 Facebook accounts, and 29 LinkedIn accounts. But let’s face it: a lot of this content is pretty useless. So what’s a content-challenged company to do? 1. Before you begin producing content, identify what you’re trying to say. Clear content is trustworthy. If you want to be clear, keep it simple. 2. Remember when “surfing the web” was a thing? Figure out what your audience needs, then give them content that will satisfy that need. Let’s say you want to build a deck. Image credit: Lowes.com 3. Less is more when it comes to creating effective content. If you’re trying to figure out if you have the flu, you don’t want to read a wordy paragraph on the difference between the bird flu, the stomach flu, and influenza. 4. Self-centered people struggle to make friends. Effective content is about readers. 5. Get Your Blueprint
Meditation Produces Opposite Effect of ‘Fight or Flight’ By Traci Pedersen Associate News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on May 4, 2013 A new study reveals that practitioners of meditation experience changes in gene expression that are the exact opposite of what occurs during the “flight or fight” stress response. Specifically, genes associated with energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion, and telomere maintenance are turned on, while those involved in inflammation are turned off. These effects are more significant and consistent for long-term practitioners. People who practice simple meditation aren’t “just relaxing,” explained the study’s senior author, Dr. It’s been shown that repeating a yoga pose, prayer, or mantra while disregarding other thoughts protects against anxiety and depression as well as physical conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and types of cancer that are exacerbated by stress. All of the subjects’ blood samples revealed changes in gene expression following meditation.
5 Interesting Reasons You Gain Weight When You're Stressed (and 4 Simple Ways to Avoid It) March 14, 2014 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Have you ever found yourself mindlessly eating a tub of ice cream while you brood about your latest romantic rejection or eating a hamburger and fries in front of your computer as you furiously try to make a work deadline? Below are the 5 major reasons stress leads to weight gain and four great research-based coping strategies you can use to fight back. 1. When your brain detects the presence of a threat, no matter if it is a snake in the grass, a grumpy boss, or a big credit card bill, it triggers the release of a cascade of chemicals, including adrenaline, CRH, and cortisol. 2. In the days when our ancestors were fighting off tigers and famine, their bodies adapted by learning to store fat supplies for the long haul. 3. When we have a surge of adrenaline as part of our fight/flight response, we get fidgety and activated.
A Year of TrackMaven Design | TrackMaven's Competitive Intelligence Blog A little over a year ago, I joined TrackMaven as employee number four and designer number one. My year has been filled with two website redesigns, marketing collateral of all sorts, a one-day conference’s brand and collateral, more email templates than I can recall, several new features to the TrackMaven platform, art-direction for our upcoming explainer video, project management in the development of certain features, and even some embarrassing voice overs. I’m still designer number one but 2014 has a lot in store for our design “team” so I wanted to take a moment to look back over the last year and recap some of the important things I’ve learned. One of the benefits, but also challenges, of being the only designer is having the ability to touch literally every piece of the brand. The fonts, the colors, the logo, the icons, what radius for the round corners, what font do we use for a particular call to action? I learned that a brand is a living creature, much like Maven!
How physical exercise protects the brain from stress-induced depression Physical exercise has many beneficial effects on human health, including the protection from stress-induced depression. However, until now the mechanisms that mediate this protective effect have been unknown. In a new study in mice, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden show that exercise training induces changes in skeletal muscle that can purge the blood of a substance that accumulates during stress, and is harmful to the brain. The study is being published in the journal Cell. "In neurobiological terms, we actually still don't know what depression is. It was known that the protein PGC-1a1 (pronounced PGC-1alpha1) increases in skeletal muscle with exercise, and mediates the beneficial muscle conditioning in connection with physical activity. These mice, and normal control mice, were exposed to a stressful environment, such as loud noises, flashing lights and reversed circadian rhythm at irregular intervals. Depression is a common psychiatric disorder worldwide.
5 Profound Insights On Success From A Wharton Prof Devoted To Understanding It If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. --Henry David Thoreau Last summer, Parade magazine and Yahoo! That’s an incredibly sad statistic, of course--especially when you consider that job satisfaction has become the most critical factor to a person’s sense of well-being and overall happiness with life. So how is it that so many people have found themselves in careers that leave them feeling empty and unfulfilled? “I think that for a lot of these people,” says Shell, “they hadn’t thoughtfully defined what success would look like in their own terms before pursuing work that aligned more closely with family, social or cultural expectations. Shell speaks from experience. It was the sudden and life-threatening illness that ultimately shifted Shell’s perspective, and influenced him to dive deeply into understanding his own motivations, interests, and talents. 1. 2. 3.
Eye Tracking 101: How Your Eyes Move on a Website Putting together a great looking website is a great start, but it is just a start. True web design requires you to venture beyond the aesthetic and into the worlds of User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimization. Knowing how the viewers of your site really see it can help to shine light on new and/or missed opportunities within your current design. It may also bring out the need for new elements or changes. While there are plenty of options for improving CRO, eye tracking analysis provides some of the most useful information for optimizing your biggest digital marketing asset, your website. A good design will catch people’s eye, but a great design will keep people on your site and get them engaged with your content. We teamed up with our friends over at Single Grain to put together the infographic below in hopes that it will help everyone get a better, basic understanding of what eye tracking is and what it can do. Eye Tracking 101 About Kathryn Aragon
25 Psychological Life Hacks Social situations are among the most important in our lives. Yet, there is a huge chance that you are oblivious to the plethora of unwritten social rules that structure everybody’s behaviour. Failing to comply to these cultural imprints can cause irreversible damage. 1) Assume comfort in any interaction. Our brain is an incredibly complicated instrument. In most of our social interactions, we find it difficult to feel comfortable among strangers because our brain tries to protect us from exposure. This however isn’t helping us when trying to be social and meet new people, is it? This is why assuming comfort is so powerful. 2) Pay attention to people’s feet when you are approaching them. Interrupting people when they are in the middle of an important conversation is one of the most annoying things to do. When you approach a group of people while in a conversation, pay attention to their bodies. If they turn both torso and feet, it means you are welcome. Admit it. We love validation.
10 Simple, Science-Backed Ways To Be Happier Today | Fast Company | business + innovation Editor's Note: This is one of the most-read leadership articles of 2013. Click here to see the full list. Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by science. 1.Exercise more--7 minutes might be enough You might have seen some talk recently about the scientific 7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it’s actually been proven to be an effective strategy for overcoming depression. The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. You don’t have to be depressed to gain benefit from exercise, though. A study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies, even when they saw no physical changes: 2. 3. 4. 6. 7.
If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This This morning, like every morning, I sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, rested my hands on my knees, closed my eyes, and did nothing but breathe for 20 minutes. People say the hardest part about meditating is finding the time to meditate. This makes sense: who these days has time to do nothing? It’s hard to justify. Meditation brings many benefits: It refreshes us, helps us settle into what’s happening now, makes us wiser and gentler, helps us cope in a world that overloads us with information and communication, and more. How? Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance. Our ability to resist an impulse determines our success in learning a new behavior or changing an old habit. As it turns out, that’s one of the things meditation teaches us. When I sat down to meditate this morning, relaxing a little more with each out-breath, I was successful in letting all my concerns drift away.