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I learned abou t gratefulness when I was diagnosed with cancer.  Not that I was grateful to have cancer!  But it opened my eyes to what was good about my life, and to celebrate it, because who knew what the future held? I used to live only in the future.  Living in the present seemed like a nice idea, but I could never do it.  There was always that next project at work, or would my boyfriend ever marry me (he did), then dinner with my in-laws (with whom I did not get along).  Let me get through that first, and then I'll worry about the present, I thought. But cancer's a funny thing.  When you're told you have it, you kind of don't want to live in the future anymore, because who knows what it holds? I had a friend who was diagnosed with Stage 4 renal cancer when I was going through treatment.  Friends and I would go sit with her when she was having chemo (I remember running hot water over her hands to try to get her veins to open up).   But ...

Whether your candidate won or not, this election season was one of the worst.  And if you're still feeling anxious and upset (count me in), there's one way to pull it all back. According to newswise.com, it's mindfulness .  Now, that's not a new concept.  But it's about being in the moment, something most of us just cannot do.  Count me in again. When I was diagnosed with cancer twice, I swore I would never let go of this precious moment again.  But life interfered and before I knew it, I was projecting into the future,and mourning the past, and well, just about anywhere but in the present. If your candidate was on the losing side, you may be feeling a sense of profound disappointment, anger, even a sense of hopelessness about the consequences of the election result, experts say. Again, count me in. Even if your candidate won, you may feel a need to wind down from weeks or months of stress and anger. The technique of mindfulness—living in the present m...

It's pretty much the same old story. But it's still a good one. Live in the moment.  But now researchers say it will help with motivation , too. Their point?  Enjoy the task at hand, according to newswise.com.  A new study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds people value having a positive experience when they are in the middle of an activity, although this matters less to them before or after they start the activity. For example, people value that their work is engaging more when in the middle of a current job then when thinking about future work.  Because when people look forward to or back on an activity, they tend to underestimate how important it is to actually enjoy doing it, people also underestimate in advance how much the presence or absence of a positive experience will influence their persistence on a task. And further, people may come to regret selecting activities that provide a less enjoyable experience when th...

Do you meditate ?  I know, I know.  It calls to mind girls with long dirty hair wearing love beads, VW vans and the sharp acrid smell of mj everywhere.  It's what the Baby Boomers thought they discovered.  And now it's being rediscovered by, well, just about everyone, and for a really good reason. It turns out doing it has actually proven to be good for your health. According to medicalnewstoday.com, it can actually change your genes -- or how they're expressed, or activated.  A new study has found " specific molecular changes in the body after a period of mindful meditation," the Web site reports. You may also have heard of mindfulness, which can be part of meditation, but we'll get to that later.   For the study, researchers compared the effects of a day of intensive mindful-meditation in a group of experienced meditators with a group of untrained subjects who enjoyed a day of quiet, non-meditative activities, medicalnewstoday.com notes. " Aft...

Did you know that the taller you are, the further from now you live?  Sound crazy?  Well some very smart guy named Michael on YouTube posits that "We can't live in the 'now,' the very newest moment in time," because the information about what's happening right now takes time to get to our brains. And the taller we are, the longer it takes.  Thank goodness I'm only 5'2!  I need every brain cell I can have. What our brain is telling us is happening now is really 80 milliseconds in the past.  I don't quite understand all the scientific reasons for this, they're quite involved, but the gist of it is that what we think is now, isn't.  "We can never be fully aware of what we call 'now' because it takes time for our brain to process 'now,'" says Michael in the video. The simple truth is that,as much as we think we don't, we live in the past.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTOODPf-iuc