Insomnia? Here are three tips from Meir Kryger, MD author of the e-book The iGuide to Sleep. Find your number. Toss out the 8 hours a night rule and figure out your own sweet spot. "Before any coffee, take stock of how you feel twenty minutes after waking. If "rotten" is the answer, hit the hay earlier tonight."
Wind down well. Get a burst of energy around 10:00 pm? Don't spend it wound up watching Homeland. Instead take a warm bath or do a little reading. Do something relaxing. Same goes for computer work. If it is stimulating, save it for another time. Nix the wine at least 3 hours before bedtime. While it may help you fall asleep, once the effect wears off, it can actually keep you from sleeping.
Snack savvy. Don't go to bed hungry! Dairy is high in the amino acid tryptophan, which can help produce the serotonin in the brain that triggers sleep. The B6 in complex carbs also boosts serotonin so before bed, try snacking on a bowl of cereal and skim milk.
Acupuncture has proven helpful for insomniacs. Or try acupressure, acupuncture without the needles. The following sites show the pressure points.
**************************************** from Paul R. Scheele ****************************************
Doing good for others not only makes your heart grow warm, it activates your gray matter too.
The more altruistic you behave, the more gray matter you have in a region of the brain linked to empathy, says a study in the journal Neuron.
When researchers from the University of Zurich set out to determine why some people are selfish and others altruistic, they discovered a strong connection between the volume of gray matter in this region of the brain and one's propensity for giving.
"People who behaved more altruistically had a higher proportion of gray matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobes," said Yosuke Morishima, a postdoctoral researcher and team member.
Volunteers in the study were asked to divide money between themselves and an anonymous other person. They had the option of sacrificing a certain portion of the money for the benefit of the other person, and thus at their own expense. Some were almost never willing to sacrifice money to benefit others while others behaved very altruistically.
In selfish people, this small region behind the ears became active when the cost of the altruistic behavior was low, as seen in MRI scans. In altruistic folks, it only became more active when the cost was very high. It becomes active when people reach the limits of their willingness to give, suspected the researchers, because that's when "there is the greatest need to overcome man's natural self-centeredness by activating this brain region."
Lead researcher Ernst Fehr noted that altruism is not determined by biological factors alone. The volume of gray matter is also influenced by social processes, he said, suggesting it may be possible to promote the development of the brain in this way.
It is, believes best-selling author Marci Shimoff, creator of our Happy for No Reason course. And studies show engaging in activities to help others can increase your own happiness and inspire you to greater achievements. She recommends cultivating an attitude of service.
"Every day for the next few weeks, look for some ways to help someone else. It does not have to be a big 'cause.' It could be offering someone a ride, helping someone across the street, or listening to someone who needs attention," she said.
"As you start looking at your life through the eyes of making a contribution, you may be surprised by the number of opportunities to serve that you come across each day," says Marci. "Take advantage of as many as possible, knowing that by making a difference in someone's life you make a difference in your own life, too."
Altruism is the largest resource for self-change according to studies by Masanori Kanda, a best-selling author and executive trainer in Japan.
In fact, it plays a key role in his unique method of goal achievement called "Future Mapping" that is generating incredible results for leading corporations, entrepreneurs, and government officials throughout Japan.
When you simultaneously set a goal for yourself and you commit to helping someone else become happy, your own self-interest—and all the baggage that comes with it—drops away. Suddenly hidden resources within you that are critical to accomplishing your own task begin to surface in ways that are truly surprising.
When is the best time to meditate? This is a frequently asked question. Here’s a great reply from Ta-tsu-wa who is widely recognized as highly knowledgeable about the subjects of meditation and entrainment…
The biggest obstacle most folks new to meditation encounter is sitting down consistently for meditation at all. They tend to be hit and miss in their practice which is a great part of the reason so many report lack of success with meditation. The benefits of meditation are cumulative, not just over the course of a few days, weeks, months or years, but over one's entire lifetime. Inconsistent practice yields equally inconsistent results. So for newcomers it's true that the best time for meditation is whenever you can find or make the time, but that should happen more or less every day. It's far better to practice at a different time each day than it is to always practice at the same time but to manage practicing only 1 or 2 days per week.
Like the Nike slogan says, "Just do it."
Is there "a best time" in any absolute sense? I don't believe so. Everyone is unique and meditation practice reflects this uniqueness. Some teachers advise always doing your practice in the morning, some say before the sun rises, others say do it at night before bed. Every teacher has an opinion based in part on how they were taught and in part on how things have worked out in their own practice. I cannot find any substantiation for the idea that there is one "most perfect" time of day for meditation.
I believe there is a rough pattern to how our meditation practice develops over the course of our life.
For beginners, do it whenever you can find or make time but do it as close to every day as you can manage so that it becomes a habit.
Once you become somewhat proficient at the art of meditation you will probably find it helpful to pick a particular time each day and try to be consistent in practicing at that time. I think that preference will vary from individual with some preferring mornings, some evenings, others at various times throughout the mid portion of the day.
When your practice has deepened sufficiently you will likely revert back to meditation quite naturally throughout the day at any time.”
I don’t think anyone wants to live with anger, resentment, guilt or any other debilitating emotions that create self imposed limitations and insecurity. Just a few minutes a day, following the above advice for 21 days will cultivate your awareness and insight. As you allow your burdens to fall away you will be free to enjoy the life you were meant to live; a life filled with new perspectives; new ideas; new peace of mind; a new you.
While those who believe in a loving divinity are more likely to be happier and healthier than those who don’t, you don’t have to subscribe to any particular religion or even believe in a higher power to reap the benefits of being more spiritual. Although traditional institutional religious settings offer the benefit of community linked by shared belief, you can also improve your health by being more spiritual in your own way. Spirituality, which has been defined by social scientists as the search for the sacred, can still offer health benefits, as you acknowledge and appreciate the sacred in life— the holiness of nature, the blessing of children, the perception of your work as a calling, the body as a vessel for love in the world, the sanctity of marriage. By imbuing the ordinary with extraordinary qualities, you open yourself up to transcendence, which can elicit relaxation in the body, leading to more happiness and, subsequently, better health. Spiritual people are also happier, have better mental health, use fewer drugs and alcohol, have better coping skills, and live longer than those who don’t consider themselves spiritual. Keep in mind that religion isn’t all roses when it comes to the effect on your health. Like all facets of life, your spiritual life has the potential to stress you out as well as relax you. People for whom religion stirs up feelings of guilt, shame, repression, and fear of recrimination from a punishing God are more likely to experience repetitive stress responses, which result in poor health. So it’s not just spiritual life that can heal you, it’s the right kind of spiritual life, one that is aligned with the truth of what is sacred for you. from Mind Over Medicine: Proof You Really Can Heal Yourself
May you be blessed with an amazingly abundant day today!
May the clouds break and the heavens pour down upon you more joy, more love, more laughter and more money than you could have ever dreamed of.
May the sun shine its golden light of prosperity through every cell of your extraordinary body.
May you be cleansed today of any resistance or feelings of unworthiness that you may still be holding onto.
May your false illusions of doubt, fear and scarcity gently fall away like soft white feathers on a gentle breeze.
May you be willing, simply willing, to allow the Universe to shower you with miracles today.
May the Angels wrap you in their shining wings of opulence.
May the fairies deliver you to their pot of gold at the end of a majestic rainbow.
May your eyes shine with the glorious truth of who you really are and may that truth uplift others in your presence to their own inner knowing.
May your ears hear the sound of perfection ringing in your soul.
May you taste the deliciousness of every precious bite of life as your day unfolds moment by moment with amazing grace, heartfelt love and a bounty of magnificent money.
As this day ends, may you slumber wrapped in an exquisite blanket of enduring peace and profound gratitude.
And may the last words you speak today be Thank You!
From OM To OMG: Science, Your Brain, And The Productive Powers Of Meditation
Using fMRI scans, we can now see what meditation does to the brain. The author suggests it can lead to a happier, more productive, and creative life. And even two minutes a day can do wonders.
By: Beth Belle Cooper
Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about 12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice. It always seemed to be so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me.
More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what a huge benefit it can have for my day-to-day happiness. As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two minute per day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog, where he points out how starting with a tiny habit is the first step to consistently achieving it. So even thought two minutes won’t make much difference, that’s where I started.
Whether you’re as skeptical as I used to be, or you’re well ahead of me with a meditation habit of several hours, I think it’s always interesting to find out how new habits affect our brains. I had a look into meditation to see what’s going on inside our brains when we do this, and what I found is pretty interesting.
There are different ways to meditate, and since it’s such a personal practice there are probably more than any of us know about. There are a couple that are usually focused on heavily in scientific research, though. These are focused-attention, or mindful meditation, which is where you focus on one specific thing--it could be your breathing, a sensation in your body or a particular object outside of you. The point of this type of meditation is to focus strongly on one point and continually bring your attention back to that focal point when it wanders.
The other type of meditation that’s often used in research is open-monitoring meditation. This is where you pay attention to all of the things happening around you--you simply notice everything without reacting.
This is where things get really interesting. Using modern technology like fMRI scans, scientists have developed a more thorough understanding of what’s taking place in our brains when we meditate, kind of similar to how scientists have previously looked at measuring creativity in our brains.
The overall difference is that our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would. We start to show a decrease in beta waves, which indicate that our brains are processing information, even after a single 20-minute meditation session if we’ve never tried it before.
In the image below you can see how the beta waves (shown in bright colors on the left) are dramatically reduced during meditation (on the right). Below is the best explanation I found of what happens in each part of the brain during meditation:
This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.
This part of the brain processes sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down.
The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming information to a trickle.
As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal.
Now that we know what’s going on inside our brains, let’s take a look at the research into the ways it affects our health. It’s in fact very similar to how exercising affects our brains. Better focus Because meditation is a practice involving focusing our attention and being aware of when it drifts, this actually improves our focus when we’re not meditating, as well. It’s a lasting effect that comes from regular periods of meditation.
Focused attention is very much like a muscle, one that needs to be strengthened through exercise.
Less anxiety This point is pretty technical, but it’s really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because we’re actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not.
What happens without meditation is that there’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack.
When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally.Here’s a good example:
For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.
More creativity As a writer, this is one thing I’m always interested in and we’ve explored the science of creativity in depth before. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest thing to study, but there is some research into how meditation can affect our creativity. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas. More compassion Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment showed participants' images of other people that were either good, bad or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing images.
Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala--the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people. Another study in 2008 found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who didn’t meditate. Better memory One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increase their productivity more quickly that those that did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain “their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things. Less stress Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study split a group of human resources managers into three, with one-third participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body relaxation training and the last third given no training at all. A stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups. More gray matter Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain. I didn’t know what this meant at first, but it turns out it’s pretty great. More gray matter can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional stability and heightened focus during daily life.
Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.
Here’s a great infographic that gives an overview of the different kinds of meditation and some tips for fitting in meditation at work. An awesome app to get started with meditation--Getheadspace Note from Leo: One of the best apps I’ve come across to help you get started with Meditation is called Headspace. Invented by a former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, this is meditation geared towards busy people like you and me.
The way it works is that Andy guides you through 10 minutes of simple meditation every day. You don’t have to do anything, just sit down and turn on the app and let Andy’s calm voice (his voice is truly amazing--the app is worth trying just for that!) explain to you how to approach meditation. The best part about the app is of course that it’s completely free! For any beginning meditator, this is the best option I’ve come across to start reaping the amazing benefits of meditation and start on a new path to a happier life.
