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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 ...

When I was being treated for cancer, I didn't look too far ahead into the future. Turns out, no one does.  A new study says that, given the choice, nobody really wants to know when they're going to die , newswise.com reports. Whether it's good or bad, people prefer not to know what lies ahead for them, even if they think those events could make them happy, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.. “In our study, we’ve found that people would rather decline the power to know the future, in an effort to forgo the suffering that knowing the future may cause, avoid regret and also maintain the enjoyment of suspense that pleasurable events provide," says Gerd Gigerenzer, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The length of time until an event would occur also played a role: Deliberate ignorance was more likely the nearer the event. For example, older adults were less likely than younger adults to want to kno...

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...

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...

Guess what? We're really good at looking back on ourselves (and feeling humiliated at our antics in college), but we really stink at looking ahead and predicting who -- and what -- we will be 10 years from now. It's called "the end of history illusion," a fancy term for not knowing what the heck our lives will be like, in the future.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/science/study-in-science-shows-end-of-history-illusion.html?_r=0