Brad Pitt Has Really Pretty Handwriting!: Very nice, Brad! Perhaps you can pursue a career in calligraphy if things ever go sour with the acting! Check out the photo (above) of Brad Pitt's handwritten...
Every person, no matter how healthy, has some stress in their life. The key is not letting it become the dominant force. If left untreated, stress can turn into anxiety. Anxiety is capable of producing negative effects on the human body, perhaps even disease. Read on for more information on ways to deal with anxiety and how you can effectively deal with it.
Music is a powerful counteractive force against anxiety. Playing an album you love can be a great idea when you feel anxiety coming on. Concentrate on the tunes themselves. When you get lost in the music, you can begin to lose those anxious feelings. You will focus on anxiety less with a busy mind.
Anxiety can disrupt your normal breathing, so learning breathing techniques can be really helpful in regaining control. Softly count and breathe, while you let relaxation take over your body. Pick quiet surroundings to make the most of this effective technique.
You should talk with someone about your greatest fear, and be sure to exaggerate about it when you describe it. Once you recount this fear to them again and again, you will soon realize how silly it can be, and you just might end up looking at the problem with a totally different perspective.
Laughter can play a big part in the reduction of feelings of anxiety. Watch a comedic movie, read a funny book or call your funny friend in order to laugh and release negative energy.
Sometimes, people that have a lot of anxiety start to crave salt often. This happens because your body actually needs salt and is asking you to consume it. Raw, unprocessed salt is best, as it contains minerals the body needs and the body can digest it easily.
Consider amino acid treatment to cure your anxious feelings. Some people are lacking certain essential nutrients and do not have normal levels of serotonin. Many good books, including the Mood Cure, discuss treatment plans that help you use over-the-counter supplements to reduce or eliminate your anxiety.
Eating a healthy diet is a very important part in dealing with anxiety. A diet that is balanced contains many helpful vitamins and nutrients which your body desperately needs to stay healthy.
Anxiety is not helped by inaction and thinking dark thoughts while shutting yourself up at home. Keep yourself upbeat and distracted by staying busy. Creative outlets, such as a new hobby, provide a fun way to keep your mind busy and helps to keep it off of whatever is making you anxious.
Try to keep moving throughout the day. When you sit for work, take short exercise breaks. Do stretching exercises to help stretch and release tension in your muscles. When at home, keep busy, take a walk and cut down the amount of time sitting in front of the TV. While you require rest and relaxing time, having too much can increase your anxiety.
Now you know that anxiety and stress are normal aspects of life, though they’re not usually desired. Although we could not entirely eliminate them, we could manage them. By using this article’s advice, you are sure to find a way to decrease and manage your anxiety.
Debunk
- expose the falseness or hollowness of (a myth, idea, or belief).
- to show that something (such as a belief or theory) is not true.
- to show the falseness of (a story, idea, statement, etc.)
But more importantly, it might explain some things.
Posted Feb 22, 2013
There has been quite a bit of research done in the past decade or so on the concept of embodied cognition. The premise is fairly simple: our brains engage with the world through physical movements and sensations, so perhaps certain bodily states prompt certain cognitions even when they aren’t directly relevant. One of my favorite demonstrations of this was done by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh (link is external). In this study, the experimenter, whose hands were full, asked participants to briefly hold their cup of coffee. The trick was that the cup of coffee was hot for half of participants, and iced for the other half. Participants who held the warm cup of coffee later rated a hypothetical person as emotionally and socially warmer than participants who held the cold cup of coffee. They translated the physical sensation of warmth into the social concept of warmth, which might seem crazy, but the metaphor might be based partly on reality. After all, we learn about the concept of social warmth as infants by literally being held close to our parents; at that stage, physical warmth is social warmth. As adults, even though the sensation of warmth through a cup of coffee shouldn’t signal anything other than physical warmth, because the connection is still there, it triggers cognitions related to social warmth, and voila, it influences how warmly we see other people.
Encouraged by this example, the field just exploded with similar phenomena, such as the desire to wash your hands (link is external) or punish yourself (link is external) when feeling guilty. Some of the demonstrations seem to border on the ridiculous, like a study showing that filling out a survey with a weighted (compared to a light) clipboard leads people to take it more seriously – literally giving the issue more weight (link is external). The issue with a lot of this work has often been that it merely shows a phenomenon without really attempting to explain why it happens. Why on earth would some of these metaphors be literally enacted? I’ve written before about how important it is for the field of social psychology that we take great care in our methods in order to be taken seriously as a science, and many of these kinds of studies seem to be a little too good to be true. That is, I, like a lot of other people, have been left wondering whether these phenomena are real, or whether the sexiness (read: newsworthiness) of the findings led the researchers and reviewers to engage in the all-too-human tendency to give the methodological flaws a free pass.
That’s not to say that I think there’s nothing to the idea of embodied metaphors. On the contrary, certain bodily states absolutely do accompany certain thoughts and feelings, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that they can influence each other. However, for any given finding, without a very good explanation for precisely how and why it would work, I’m going to be skeptical. It was with that frame of mind that I read some new work by Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino, and Ata Jami [link], looking at the experience of guilt embodied as a feeling of heaviness (guilt as a heavy burden to carry), soon to be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (link is external). While the paper is certainly not perfect, it definitely makes some progress on that front.
In all of their experiments, they had participants wearing heavy or light backpacks while recalling episodes when they felt guilty. Those wearing the heavy backpacks, which seem to embody the physical sensations associated with guilt, reported feeling more guilt afterwards, and actually behaved more ethically (since they already felt guilty), being less likely to cheat on a test, or eat an indulgent snack.
Where things get interesting is in a final study, where the researchers measure how quickly (fluently) participants are able to recall a time when they felt guilty (or a neutral episode). What they find is that the feeling of heaviness from the backpack leads people to recall a guilty episode (but not neutral episodes) more quickly, more fluently.
This bit is really important, because it explains why, in all of the other experiments, the heavy backpacks don’t seem to make people feel guilty on their own – they only increase the experience of guilt from recalling a guilty episode. Embodying the physical sensations associated with guilt isn’t going to create feelings of guilt out of nowhere; it only influences how we process relevant information – in this case, how easily we can search our memories for a time when we felt guilty.
Extrapolating a bit, maybe this finding can help us figure out which phenomena to be most skeptical about. Does the embodied action appear to create a psychological state (like an emotion) out of thin air? Does it appear to apply to situations that have nothing to do with the relevant physical or emotional state? Is there no obvious means for the embodied action to be influencing cognition (or vice versa)? Does the metaphor itself seem like a bit of a stretch? If you’re not answering in the affirmative, you have good reason to be skeptical.
There she goes, there she goes, there she goes There's nothing better than my beautiful woman Even though, even though, even though It's not always effort, we still fly together
To me you are more than just skin and bones. You are elegance and freedom and everything I know
So come on and Baby let your hair down Let me run my fingers through it We can be ourselves now Go ahead, be foolish No one's on the clock now Lying in this simple moment You don't gotta worry now Just let your hair down
(Woah) Tell me when, tell me when, tell me when When I can steal, a sweet kiss right from you I'm diving in, I'm diving in, I'm diving in The water's warm right here, here
To me you are more than just skin and bones. You are elegance and freedom and everything I know
So come on and Baby let your hair down Let me run my fingers through it We can be ourselves now Go ahead, be foolish No one's on the clock now Lying in this simple moment You don't gotta worry now Just let your hair down
Baby let your hair down Let me run my fingers through it We can be ourselves now Go ahead, be foolish No one's on the clock now Lying in this simple moment You don't gotta worry now Just let your hair down
You don't gotta worry, yeah, oh Let your hair down Woah, oh, oh, oh It's only us here, only us here, only us here It's only us here, only us here, only us here It's only us here, it's only us here, it's only us here Ooh Ooh
They contributed "Writing's On the Wall" to 'Spectre'
Rachel Brodsky // January 10, 2016
Sam Smith and longtime affiliate Jimmy Napes (née Jimmy Napier) have won the Best Original Song Golden Globe for their work on Spectre’s “Writing’s On the Wall.” Taking place in Los Angeles at the Beverly Hilton, Sunday night’s awards ceremony welcomed Katy Perry to present the award, which also included nominees like Ellie Goulding for her contribution to the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, “Love Me Like You Do,” and Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s Furious 7 cut, “See You Again.”
