Concentration and Focus Using Mental Moods

Or maybe you've been a stay-at-home mom for years, but now your kids can take care of themselves to the point where you can go back to school and finish your education. When you mention this to a friend, he or she reacts by saying how hard it is to go back to school at your age and how your family responsibilities are going to make it really tough to get the grades you need to get a degree. Sometimes bad seeds sprout up as doubts that you've been trying to overcome. You think you're ready to become a manager at your company, but you've never actually had a management position, so you're not absolutely certain. Then someone plants a bad seed by reminding you of a time when you struggled at work, and that chokes off your confidence and makes you question whether you are management material. Maybe instead you're thinking about moving to a new town and starting a new life on your own, but you're worried about doing this because you've always had a big support group around you and you won't have one in this new town. End your shower with thirty seconds of cold water. Sure, it sounds like torture. But studies show that cold showers can improve circulation, boost immunity, reduce your risk of infection, and stimulate alertness--there's nothing like icy water to shock you awake. Maybe unsurprisingly, subjecting yourself to regular cold showers can also help you build resilience and become better at tolerating stress. Write down your goals for the day. Committing your goals to paper will make them more tangible. It will also help you to keep them in mind, increasing your focus and motivation. Researchers at Dominican University found that the simple act of recording your goals and dreams makes you 42 percent more likely to achieve them. Eat breakfast. Eating a healthy breakfast will kick your metabolism into gear, give you energy, and improve your focus as you start your day. In the case of sodas, sports drinks, and juices, the big health culprits are sugars and sugar substitutes. While there are debates about whether or not soda can really take the paint off of your car, studies have shown it will erode tooth enamel. For those living with a green heart, there is even more to consider than the amount of sugar in soft drinks, and it starts with the packaging. We've already discussed the issues associated with plastic bottles, but it warrants saying again.

Plastic is not good for you or the environment. Aluminum cans, which reached a 56. Aluminum recovered from recycling only requires 5 percent of the energy used in initial extraction; Another thing to consider is the can lining. If the can is labeled BPA free, you know it's a better choice, but very few beverage cans have that designation (Spindrift uses a BPA free can, which is marked as such on their labels). And when the Center for Environmental Health tested seventy popular beverage cans, BPA showed up in all of them. The listener and the partner should go through the training either barefoot or in socks. This significantly strengthens the listener's body perception and substantially facilitates self-regulation, while it increases the partner's sensitivity and perception of the listener. If you want to wear shoes, they should be flat and as soft as possible, such as ballet shoes or slippers. Before starting, the partner asks whether it is okay to align the shoulder and head axes of the listener by means of contact, should this be necessary. Proper alignment of the body geometry is key to building a proper hearing perception and to improving hearing. The aim of training is for the listener to correctly identify the location of the sound source (both the running water and the sound of the partner's voice) on the vertical axis from the front. There are two different listening positions along the vertical axis, each having a different distance from the therapeutic seat, according to the sketch above. If the listener is able to orient from where the sound is coming, she is led to the therapeutic seat and seated so that the sound source is behind her. When the listening position changes, the sound source should be clearly and unambiguously heard from behind. This is the natural and correct spatial auditory perception position in the therapeutic seat. Invoking the Stone Age in this context argues against, rather than for, habitual meat consumption. Diverting the necessary resources - water, land, food - to raise the amount of domesticated meat required to satisfy the global appetite threatens to wreak as much havoc on the animal kingdom as if we just went ahead and ate every living thing with fur, feathers, and scales directly. We are a long way from the Stone Age. We live in what some have dubbed the Anthropocene , the age of human influence.

We are still subject to basic laws of nature, however. We can promote our own health by adopting a diet made up mostly of minimally processed vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds - and plain water preferentially for thirst. We cannot protect the health of the planet by doing anything but. Perhaps at odds with some of my vegan friends and colleagues, I cannot reach the conclusion that eating animals is intrinsically unethical. Nature has spawned obligate carnivores, and to suggest that Nature is unethical makes no sense. We might contend that it is ethical for animals to eat animals, but not for humans to do so - but that, too, seems arrogant nonsense to me. One day, you mention your plans to an acquaintance, and that person says, You want to move to another city? You'll be running back here within six months. This reinforces all of your concerns about the move and suddenly makes you feel that you're out of your mind for even considering doing something like that. Many of the worst seeds come from our histories. Our families especially can plant a lot of bad seeds in us because we're so vulnerable to their opinions and approval. If a parent spends a lot of time telling you how much you've disappointed him or her, those seeds are going to leave very deep roots. If you don't deal with this, you could spend your entire life thinking that you're going to let down everyone around you to the point where you don't even try to do more than the minimum. If your sister berated you about your social skills from an early age, you might be convinced you're terrible at talking to people or making friends, and this might cause you to avoid trying to connect with others. If the person saying this was a classmate instead of your sister, you might have blown it off or at least not taken it as seriously. But because it's your sister--someone you look up to and who you think knows you well--this statement becomes part of how you define yourself. Steer clear of sweet cereals and fruit juice, which are high in sugar and can cause you to crash after a few hours. Instead, opt for oatmeal, berries and other fruits, multigrain toast with nut butter, or lean proteins like Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, and eggs. OF THE MANY tools and gadgets that the all-in-one smartphone has replaced (camera, notepad, calculator, address article, road map, dictionary, etc), the alarm clock might be the most obsolete. While lots of people still use cameras and paper notearticles, these days it's hard to find anyone who depends on a reliable old clock radio to wake up in the morning.

But we should. If it strikes you as unnecessary to buy another device when the alarm on your phone does its job perfectly well, here's some incentive: waking up with a physical alarm clock is one of the easiest and most impactful steps you can take to achieve a healthier and more balanced life. Using your smartphone as an alarm clock is bad for sleep hygiene. When your phone is on hand, you're much more likely to scroll through social media feeds, refresh your email, or check the news before turning in. In addition to the blue light your phone emits--which can interfere with your circadian rhythm and make it harder to fall asleep--flipping through your apps will rev up your mind (and quite possibly your anxiety) at the exact time when it should be winding down. It's also bad for relationships: If you share your bed with a partner, the minutes between crawling into bed and dozing off are invaluable time for building intimacy, whether you're decompressing about your day, sharing thoughts and concerns, cuddling, or whatever else you like to do (which is none of my business! I say, avoid cans altogether. The other thing to be aware of is carbonation. What makes carbonated drinks fizzy is carbon dioxide. When you pop open a soda can you are releasing a little carbon dioxide back into the air. My best recommendation is to invest in an eco-friendly reusable water bottle and infuse that water with fresh fruit. It's much more economical and healthier. But, if you have to drink water on the go, look for newer packaging options such as Boxed Water or the plant-based plastics used in products like Just Water. The Real Cost of That Cold-Pressed Juice (from the Modern Farmer) Some people think cold-pressed juice is the healthiest option. It may offer health benefits for you, but it's not doing any favors for the environment. Again, the training described here is training phase 1. Phase 2 training is the training between the trainings, the exercises carried out by the person at home. The goal at this stage is for the listener to try to locate the direction of the sound source clearly and unambiguously first from the front. Ideally this exercise will be carried out while both the listener as well as the partner are standing.

If the person, however, feels uncertain in this position, this phase can be done seated. In this case, a chair with wheels, such as an office chair or a wheelchair, can be used so that the listener can move without having to get up. Make sure that the listener and you (if you are the partner) can move freely on the vertical axis, preferably toward the wall opposite the therapeutic seat. The listener stands on the front-back axis facing the therapeutic seat at a distance of about 1. This is the first listening position in the sketch, position 1. The listener puts on the dark glasses. First, it implies that humans aren't animals, and are somehow a truly disparate expression of life. Second, it ignores the fact that humans adopted meat eating long before a discipline called ethics was invented. While there seem to be some differences of opinion among anthropologists about the extent to which our forebears were hunters vs. Hunting extends even beyond the timeline of our species, to populate earlier entries into the genus Homo. Was it unethical for Homo erectus to hunt and eat what it killed? Since our ancestors presumably ate what survival required, there would be no modern ethical vegans had there been no Stone Age hunters feeding their ancestors, because those ancestors would have starved before ever making babies. The real ethical issue, however, has little to do with whether or not we eat animals. Instead, it has everything to do with how we turn them into food. A growing mass of humanity with a penchant for meat inexorably drives the supply side toward methods of mass production , involving cost-savings and corner-cutting. Animals are fed food unrelated to their native diets. Then there's the history of our circumstances. The situations we grow up in are especially influential in how we see the world later in life. Maybe your parents had a really toxic relationship. They were always cutting each other down and sucking all the love out of the household.