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If You Feel Thankful, Write It Down. It’s Good For Your Health
Over this past year, lifestyle blogger Aileen Xu has kept a monthly gratitude list. Sometimes it was the big stuff: "I'm grateful that my family is so understanding. I'm grateful so many people care." And sometimes it was life's little blessings: "July 2018: I'm grateful for good hair after I shower." Xu started making such lists when she was in college, "at a point when I was just not in a very good place in my life." Now, the 28-year-old lifestyle blogger and YouTuber recommends the practice to her nearly 750,000 subscribers. It wasn't a hard sell.
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The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness
In 1909 five men converged on Clark University in Massachusetts to conquer the New World with an idea. At the head of this little troupe was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Ten years earlier Freud had introduced a new treatment for what was called “hysteria” in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. This work also introduced a scandalous view of the human psyche: underneath the surface of consciousness roils a largely inaccessible cauldron of deeply rooted drives, especially of sexual energy (the libido). These drives, held in check by socially inculcated morality, vent themselves in slips of the tongue, dreams and neuroses. The slips in turn provide evidence of the unconscious mind.
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The Pacific Standard Guide to Gift Giving
If you clicked on the headline to this story, one thing is obvious: You really saved your Christmas shopping until the last minute. That said, here are a few well-researched tips that might come in handy as you start swiping that credit card: --- Don't Feel Too Bad If You Need to Re-Gift You might be deterred from re-gifting for fear that the original giver will find out about your slothful Christmas strategy. But fortunately, those original gift-givers seem to be OK with their present turning into someone else's freebie. A 2012 article in Psychological Science found that the people most bothered by the re-gifting process were actually the guilt-ridden re-gifters, not the original givers.
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Shake It Off; Dr. Maria Kovacs on Mood and Depression
Shake it Off Have you ever had a bad mood you just couldn’t shake? Everyone feels grouchy or irritable some days. But a bad mood or major mood swings that go on too long may signal a bigger problem. The good news is that certain healthy habits can help you boost your mood. “Some people are more moody than other people. Normal mood actually varies from person to person,” explains Dr. Carlos Zarate, chief of NIH’s mood disorders group. That’s because we all have different “temperaments,” or combinations of personality traits that are biologically based. These are fairly stable over time. “Considerable research shows that people really differ in their basic temperament,” says Dr.
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Should You Quit Drinking for Dry January? Here’s What Experts Say
Resolutions go hand in hand with the start of a new year. And Dry January, the annual initiative to stop drinking alcohol for the first month, is one of the more popular New Year’s challenges, drawing in millions of people in multiple countries each year. Should you try it in 2019? Here’s what experts say. Conventional wisdom (and federal guidelines) say that moderate drinking — up to a drink per day for women, or two per day for men — is okay for health.
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Happy New Year! Your Resolutions Won’t Bring You Joy
It is the new year. A time for growth. A time to explore new possibilities in life. A time to sidle up to the person hogging the treadmill you want at the gym and whisper, “This won’t make you any happier, you know.” Yes, that’s trolling. But it’s evidence-based trolling! Whether your resolution is to lose weight, stop smoking, or finally catch that road runner, research suggests that whether you achieve the goal or not might not matter as much for our overall happiness as we like to think. “Changing circumstances won’t make you hugely happier,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside.
