10 Tips For Raising Resilient Kids

Childhood isn’t exactly stress-free. Kids take tests, learn new information, change schools, change neighborhoods, get sick, get braces, encounter bullies, make new friends and occasionally get hurt by those friends. What helps kids in navigating these kinds of challenges is resilience. Resilient kids are problem solvers. They face unfamiliar or tough situations and strive to find good solutions. Resilience isn’t birthright. It can be taught. A parent’s job…

How Many Days Does it Take to Create a Habit?

Ann Graybiel of MIT’s McGovern Institute has shown through research that neurons change their firing patterns when habits are learned, and then change them again when unlearned. However, as soon as something kicks back in the habit, they are fired back up.  That is why it is so easy to pick back up negative addictions like smoking and drinking, but also why if you establish good habits…

Hidden Personality Traits Revealed Through Your Favourite Ice-cream Flavour

Studies conducted by neurologist Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation, tell you how personality traits are linked to your favorite ice cream flavor. Hirsch uses various standardized psychiatric test results to make statistical correlations, explaining that the same part of the brain (the limbic lobe) is responsible for both personality traits and food preference. Interestingly, Hirsch says the taste…

Top 10 Most Depressive Professions

You think that you have the hardest job in the world and that other people love their jobs? Relax, it’s not true. The proof of this is the rating of the most depressive professions in which you will hardly find yours, which means that you’re luckier than many others. And well, if you can find there yours there’s nothing you can do about it. Either…

Failure Helps Kids Succeed

Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. “We focused on a widespread cultural belief that equates academic success with a high level of competence and failure with intellectual inferiority,”…

Why Summer Makes Us Lazy

Recent research suggests that summer really does tend to be a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do, figuratively, wilt. One of the key issues is motivation: when the weather is unpleasant, no one wants to go outside, but when the sun is shining, the air is warm, and the sky is blue, leisure calls. on rainy days, men spent, on average, thirty more minutes…

Quick Stress Relief Tips Through Your 5 Senses

We all possess the power to decrease the effects of stress in our lives in an instant. Once we learn to identify our stress and the way our body responds to stress we can develop our personalized plan for decreasing stress in stressful situations. The best way to relieve stress is through our senses. Our five senses often hold the key to quick stress relief.…

More Frequent, Not Long Vacations Best for Stress Reduction

Getting away from work or a routine at home is a tried and true remedy for stress relief and mental rejuvenation. However, taking the correct amount of time off can make a difference for returning with renewed vigor, or coming back from a vacation loaded with new stress. Moreover, the small or even unplanned activity may provide more stress relief than a long vacation. “Although…

Sad Music Helps Us Deal with Negative Emotions

                        A new study by Japanese researchers concludes that listening to sad music may actually induce positive emotions. Music that is perceived as sad actually induces romantic emotion as well as sad emotion. And people, regardless of their musical training, experience this ambivalent emotion to listen to the sad music. Also, unlike sadness in…

What to Do with Worry Thoughts

According to professor Mark Reinecke, “The types of intrusive, negative thoughts that anxious, worried people experience differ little, however, from the thoughts of nonanxious people. The difference is in the meaning given to the thoughts.” If you’re a worrywart, or especially anxious, you might think, “This thought is awful. I shouldn’t be thinking this; I have to make it stop,” says Reinecke. But, as he points…