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16 Scientifically-Backed Ways To Boost Your Happiness Almost Instantly (INFOGRAPHIC)

16 Scientifically-Backed Ways To Boost Your Happiness Almost Instantly (INFOGRAPHIC)
Whether you have five minutes to relax or a year to focus on building lasting habits, here are 16 scientifically-backed ways to boost your happiness levels. Go for a run. Physical activity boosts the brain’s release of endorphins, feel-good neurotransmitters that can improve mood and well-being. Pray. Laugh. Go for a stroll in the park. Perform an act of kindness. Listen to happy music. Walk tall. Meditate. Keep a gratitude journal. Go on vacation. Play with a puppy. Take a nap. Enjoy a nice cup of tea. Volunteer. Have sex. Think of happy times. Related:  Mental Health

Association Between Diet and Mental Well-Being Jodi Corbitt had been battling depression for decades and by 2010 had resigned herself to taking antidepressant medication for the rest of her life. Then she decided to start a dietary experiment. To lose weight, the 47-year-old Catonsville, Md., mother stopped eating gluten, a protein found in wheat and related grains. Within a month she had shed several pounds — and her lifelong depression. “It was like a veil lifted and I could see life more clearly,” she recalled. Corbitt had stumbled into an area that scientists have recently begun to investigate: whether food can have as powerful an impact on the mind as it does on the body. Research exploring the link between diet and mental health “is a very new field; the first papers only came out a few years ago,” said Michael Berk, a professor of psychiatry at the Deakin University School of Medicine in Australia. “Diet quality” refers to the kinds of foods that people eat, how often they eat them and how much of them they eat. Gut bacteria

50 Bad Ass Inspirational Quotes to Live by - Devoted2Greatness I think everybody loves inspirational quotes. They are powerful words of wisdom condensed into just 1-2 lines. Whenever you read them, you are inspired to take action immediately. Therefore I thought it would be a great idea to come with the ultimate list of 50 inspirational quotes to live by. Also Read: Why You Need To Man Up and Chase Your Dreams 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. Also Read:- 15 Amazing Paulo Coelho Quotes that will change your life Also Read:- 43 Awesome Highly Inspirational Quotes That will Kick you in The Ass! Also Read:- 44 Of the Best Motivational Quotes You Will Ever Find Thank you for reading 50 Inspirational Quotes to Live by, I hope you enjoyed them.

14 Daily Habits That Are Secretly Stressing You Out 'Tis the season for completely losing it. The holidays are a worry-filled time for a lot of people, but it turns out that you might be partially to blame for your own pre-eggnog anxiety. But we know (or we hope) you're not purposely trying to sabotage yourself, so here's a quick rundown of things you might be doing without realizing they're actually making you feel worse. Take a deep breath and try to relax. You might be stressed because... 1. If you can't remember the last time you laughed so hard you were blinded by tears, you should reconsider your life choices. 2. Photo by Mike Rosenthal In a study on mice, those that had exercised responded to a stressful cold-water bath with a short spurt of anxiety followed by calm, suggesting brains are more equipped to deal with stress when the body has been physically active. 3. Multiple studies have shown the relaxing benefits of listening to music. 4. Consider your cleaning habits. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Stop that. 13. Also on HuffPost:

5 Principles of Highly Effective Content Share There is a ton of content out there—and it can get pretty chaotic. Large companies, on average, have approximately 39 Twitter accounts, 32 separate blogs, 30 Facebook accounts, and 29 LinkedIn accounts. But let’s face it: a lot of this content is pretty useless. So what’s a content-challenged company to do? 1. Before you begin producing content, identify what you’re trying to say. Clear content is trustworthy. If you want to be clear, keep it simple. 2. Remember when “surfing the web” was a thing? Figure out what your audience needs, then give them content that will satisfy that need. Let’s say you want to build a deck. Image credit: Lowes.com 3. Less is more when it comes to creating effective content. If you’re trying to figure out if you have the flu, you don’t want to read a wordy paragraph on the difference between the bird flu, the stomach flu, and influenza. 4. Self-centered people struggle to make friends. Effective content is about readers. 5. Get Your Blueprint

Meditation Produces Opposite Effect of ‘Fight or Flight’ By Traci Pedersen Associate News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on May 4, 2013 A new study reveals that practitioners of meditation experience changes in gene expression that are the exact opposite of what occurs during the “flight or fight” stress response. Specifically, genes associated with energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion, and telomere maintenance are turned on, while those involved in inflammation are turned off. These effects are more significant and consistent for long-term practitioners. People who practice simple meditation aren’t “just relaxing,” explained the study’s senior author, Dr. It’s been shown that repeating a yoga pose, prayer, or mantra while disregarding other thoughts protects against anxiety and depression as well as physical conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and types of cancer that are exacerbated by stress. All of the subjects’ blood samples revealed changes in gene expression following meditation.

10 Things I Wish Someone Told Me 10 Years Ago At the start of every year, I like to review my goals. I pull out the list of goals I set for myself last January, and then grade myself on how well I did. This year is quite different than past years. Everything changed after Cassie was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly, nothing was important except her health. It’s been tough. Although I didn’t do any of the fighting — you have Cassie and her doctors to praise for that — I did get caught up in the ride. Here I am now, happy that 2010 is upon us, wondering what else to write about. I’m glad for how things turned out. I suppose that I’m afraid if I don’t talk about it, the only other thing I can say about 2009 is that life was on pause for a while, so nothing else was accomplished. The other thing about 2009 is that I feel so detached from everything I experienced throughout it. I think that the dawn of a new decade is an excellent time to reflect upon the last ten years, and figure out what life lessons I’ve managed to learn from them:

5 Interesting Reasons You Gain Weight When You're Stressed (and 4 Simple Ways to Avoid It) March 14, 2014 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Have you ever found yourself mindlessly eating a tub of ice cream while you brood about your latest romantic rejection or eating a hamburger and fries in front of your computer as you furiously try to make a work deadline? Below are the 5 major reasons stress leads to weight gain and four great research-based coping strategies you can use to fight back. 1. When your brain detects the presence of a threat, no matter if it is a snake in the grass, a grumpy boss, or a big credit card bill, it triggers the release of a cascade of chemicals, including adrenaline, CRH, and cortisol. 2. In the days when our ancestors were fighting off tigers and famine, their bodies adapted by learning to store fat supplies for the long haul. 3. When we have a surge of adrenaline as part of our fight/flight response, we get fidgety and activated.

A Year of TrackMaven Design | TrackMaven's Competitive Intelligence Blog A little over a year ago, I joined TrackMaven as employee number four and designer number one. My year has been filled with two website redesigns, marketing collateral of all sorts, a one-day conference’s brand and collateral, more email templates than I can recall, several new features to the TrackMaven platform, art-direction for our upcoming explainer video, project management in the development of certain features, and even some embarrassing voice overs. I’m still designer number one but 2014 has a lot in store for our design “team” so I wanted to take a moment to look back over the last year and recap some of the important things I’ve learned. One of the benefits, but also challenges, of being the only designer is having the ability to touch literally every piece of the brand. The fonts, the colors, the logo, the icons, what radius for the round corners, what font do we use for a particular call to action? I learned that a brand is a living creature, much like Maven!

How physical exercise protects the brain from stress-induced depression Physical exercise has many beneficial effects on human health, including the protection from stress-induced depression. However, until now the mechanisms that mediate this protective effect have been unknown. In a new study in mice, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden show that exercise training induces changes in skeletal muscle that can purge the blood of a substance that accumulates during stress, and is harmful to the brain. The study is being published in the journal Cell. "In neurobiological terms, we actually still don't know what depression is. It was known that the protein PGC-1a1 (pronounced PGC-1alpha1) increases in skeletal muscle with exercise, and mediates the beneficial muscle conditioning in connection with physical activity. These mice, and normal control mice, were exposed to a stressful environment, such as loud noises, flashing lights and reversed circadian rhythm at irregular intervals. Depression is a common psychiatric disorder worldwide.

Energy Psychology Therapy 5 Profound Insights On Success From A Wharton Prof Devoted To Understanding It If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. --Henry David Thoreau Last summer, Parade magazine and Yahoo! That’s an incredibly sad statistic, of course--especially when you consider that job satisfaction has become the most critical factor to a person’s sense of well-being and overall happiness with life. So how is it that so many people have found themselves in careers that leave them feeling empty and unfulfilled? “I think that for a lot of these people,” says Shell, “they hadn’t thoughtfully defined what success would look like in their own terms before pursuing work that aligned more closely with family, social or cultural expectations. Shell speaks from experience. It was the sudden and life-threatening illness that ultimately shifted Shell’s perspective, and influenced him to dive deeply into understanding his own motivations, interests, and talents. 1. 2. 3.

Eye Tracking 101: How Your Eyes Move on a Website Putting together a great looking website is a great start, but it is just a start. True web design requires you to venture beyond the aesthetic and into the worlds of User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimization. Knowing how the viewers of your site really see it can help to shine light on new and/or missed opportunities within your current design. It may also bring out the need for new elements or changes. While there are plenty of options for improving CRO, eye tracking analysis provides some of the most useful information for optimizing your biggest digital marketing asset, your website. A good design will catch people’s eye, but a great design will keep people on your site and get them engaged with your content. We teamed up with our friends over at Single Grain to put together the infographic below in hopes that it will help everyone get a better, basic understanding of what eye tracking is and what it can do. Eye Tracking 101 About Kathryn Aragon

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