Micah Bucey is surprised by how well-guided meditations work over Zoom. Bucey, an associate minister at New York’s Judson Memorial Church, usually leads in-person meditations once a week. But since the coronavirus outbreak, Bucey’s gone digital. “I actually am quite taken by how intimate Zoom feels,” says Bucey, who now leads about 30 participants through guided breathing and meditation every day. “I feel a little bit more vulnerable as a facilitator because people are actually sitting in front of a screen and my face is on that screen, not 20 feet away in a room.”Bucey’s is one of dozens of online offerings meant to help Americans handle the stress of Covid-19. Sure, we had worries and anxiety before. But the era of coronavirus has brought with it a whole new set of fears about running out of food, masks, and ventilators, plus escalating economic woes and concerns about the well-being of loved ones. To help people cope, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is offering an online Morning MeditOcean, during which jellyfish soothingly undulate across the screen. Chefs are creating quarantine cooking shows, and #quarantinebaking has become so popular that Amazon is sold out of popular brands of flour and chocolate chips.
But these are more than desperate attempts at self-soothing. It turns out that housekeeping and self-care activities like meditating, cooking, cleaning, and even just stocking the pantry can help stop cycles of anxiety and depression by changing how the human brain self-regulates. Here’s why stress-baking or cleaning feels so good, neurologically speaking.
When humans perceive a threat or stressor, our amygdala—a small region of the brain associated with facilitating fear, anxiety, and emotion—jumps into gear and becomes more active. This activation can have physical consequences, too. Sometimes people who are anxious report feeling short of breath or have an increased heart rate. That’s because the amygdala is also involved in regulating our blood pressure, breathing, and heart. So when the amygdala gets going, those systems do too.
When U.S. Marine Corp Officer Jake D.’s vehicle drove over an explosive device in Afghanistan, he looked down to see his legs almost completely severed below the knee. At that moment, he remembered a breathing exercise he had learned in a book for young officers. Thanks to that exercise, he was able to stay calm enough to check on his men, give orders to call for help, tourniquet his own legs, and remember to prop them up before falling unconscious. Later, he was told that had he not done so, he would have bled to death.
If a simple breathing exercise could help Jake under such extreme duress, similar techniques can certainly help the rest of us with our more common workplace stresses. The combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and battles for social justice have only exacerbated the anxiety that many of us feel every day, and studies show that this stress is interfering with our ability to do our best work. But with the right breathing exercises, you can learn to handle your stress and manage negative emotions.
In two recently published studies, we explored several different techniques and found that a breathing exercise was most effective for both immediate and long-term stress reduction.
Kimberly M. Wetherell loves watching television after a hard day at work. The 46-year-old audiobook narrator, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y, likes to binge on shows like “Good Omens” and “Fleabag.”
But when it comes time to unwind, Wetherell, like many people, finds herself craving what she calls “comfort TV,” favorite old sitcoms like “The Golden Girls,” or “Seinfeld.”
“When I go to bed, my mind is still racing. My brain will be going over the anxiety of the day. I start overanalyzing things and my brain just won’t turn off,” she told TODAY. Watching ‘The Golden Girls,’ she explained, is “like hanging out with old friends.”
Not only does she have every one of Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and Sophia’s wisecracks memorized, she has a special place in her heart for the show’s canned laughter.
“Something about a laugh track brings me back to when I was a kid and I watched TV in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. There’s something familiar and soothing about it. It allows me to turn my brain off and drift off to sleep,” she shared.
Reruns as a healthy ‘regression’
Will Meyerhofer, a New York-based psychotherapist, and author, says watching our favorite old shows can be a useful tool for dealing with anxiety and mild depression.
“For my clients, these old shows are like the food they grew up with. ‘The Brady Bunch’ or ‘The Facts of Life’ or ‘The Jeffersons’ is like that beloved baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with just enough mayo the way mom used to make,” he told TODAY.
.
Image by Elena Medvedeva/Getty Images
Image by Malte Mueller/Getty Images
Watching “comfort TV” like “The Golden Girls” can help when we’re feeling anxious.NBC via Getty Images
One unlikely day during the empty-belly years of the Great Depression, an advertisement appeared in the smeared, smashed-ant font of the New York Times’ classifieds:
WANTED. Five hundred college graduates, male, to perform secretarial work of a pleasing nature. Salary adequate to their position. Five-year contract.
Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied; five hundred were hired (“they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant”). They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising “a new plan of universal knowledge.” In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars. But when, one by one, they went to an office in New York City to pick up their paychecks, they would encounter a surgeon ready to remove their brains, stick them in glass jars, and ship them to that spooky manor in Pennsylvania. There, in what had once been the library, the millionaire mad scientist had worked out a plan to wire the jars together and connect the jumble of wires to an electrical apparatus, a radio, and a typewriter. This contraption was called the Cerebral Library.
“Now, suppose I want to know all there is to know about toadstools?” he said, demonstrating his invention. “I spell out the word on this little typewriter in the middle of the table,” and then, abracadabra, the radio croaks out “a thousand-word synopsis of the knowledge of the world on toadstools.”
.
The age of data is variously associated with late capitalism, authoritarianism, techno-utopianism, and the dazzle of “data science.”Illustration by Kelli Anderson
Despite being the first licensed Black pilot in the world, Coleman wasn’t recognized as a pioneer in aviation until after her death. Though history has favored Amelia Earhart or the Wright brothers, Coleman—who went to flight school in France in 1920—paved the way for a new generation of diverse fliers like the Tuskegee Airmen, Blackbirds, and Flying […]
Vegetables are an essential part of eating healthy, but getting enough vegetables can be a challenge for those of us who, to be totally honest, never learned to like them. I was once a vegetable hater, so I totally get this. But you can learn to like veggies, even if you despised them as a kid.
If you’re envisioning a banquet full of the same horrible-tasting dishes you turned your nose up as a child, relax. There are two important things to remember. One is that there are far more vegetable dishes in the universe than the ones you’ve already tried, and certainly some of them will be to your tastes.
The other is that our tastes really do change over time. Most of us go through a picky stage as children, then expand our palates a bit as teenagers and young adults. We also tend to taste bitter flavors less strongly as we age. That’s good news if you always felt Brussels sprouts or broccoli tasted too bitter to you. I rediscovered a lot of vegetables in my twenties, and sometime in my thirties, I found myself on the opposite end of the pickiness spectrum, eating pretty much everything I formerly hated—even black licorice.
In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Here’s how it started. I keep a journal and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesn’t happen often, but I logged one in which my mother’s oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an appearance to tell me that she (Rose) had just died. She’d had another stroke, she said, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether Rose was still alive. I guessed not. She’d had a major stroke about 10 years ago and had gone on to suffer a series of minor strokes, descending into a sorry state of physical incapacity and dementia.
I mentioned the dream to my partner over breakfast, but she wasn’t much interested. We were staying in the Midlands at the time in the house where I’d spent my later childhood years. The place had been unoccupied for months. My father, Mal, was long gone, and my mother, Doreen, was in a care home drifting inexorably through the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. We’d just sold the property we’d been living in, and there would be a few weeks’ delay in getting access to our future home, so the old house was a convenient place to stay in the meantime.
I gave no further thought to my strange dream until, a fortnight later, we returned from the supermarket to find that a note had been pushed through the letterbox. It was addressed to my mother and was from Rose’s daughter, Maggie. Her mother, she wrote, had died ‘two weeks ago’. The funeral would be the following week. I handed the note to my partner and reminded her of my dream. ‘Weird,’ she said and carried on unloading the groceries. Yes, weird. I can’t recall the last time Rose had entered my thoughts, and there she was, turning up in a dream with news of her own death.
Smells hover just below our conscious awareness, conjuring up emotions and memories that shape how we perceive and navigate the world.
An unexpected whiff of a long-forgotten snack or a dusty book can transport a person to years past — enabling a kind of time travel that makes hazy memories more vivid.
It’s puzzling then that smell is a sense that, according to scientists, has been largely — and unfairly — ignored in most attempts to understand the past. A growing number of researchers now want to reconstruct ancient aromas and use them to learn more about how we used to live.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people who caught the disease temporarily lost their sense of smell, prompting a newfound appreciation of the importance of odor in their lives. New research projects are underway to understand what the past smelled like and identify what contemporary scents should be preserved for posterity.
“It’s a very vital sense. Smell was also very important in the past and it was probably even more important because in the past not everything was so sanitized,” said Barbara Huber, a doctoral researcher of archaeology at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.
The challenge of finding past smells is how to capture an ephemeral phenomenon: Archaeologists typically find and study things we can touch, and these are the artifacts we encounter in museums.
People are blind to reality and only see what they want to see. Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth. I’m not blind and stupid. I’m just in love. A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there. The only thing worse than […]
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Photograph: Getty Images
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fpocket-collectionapi-prod-images%2F3f6ae79d-c7e8-4970-aebc-db5ae56aa971.jpeg)
Image by Elena Medvedeva/Getty Images:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fpocket-collectionapi-prod-images%2Fa08d69ce-d024-438f-9e9b-d45c06b907a1.jpeg)
Image by Malte Mueller/Getty Images
Photo by Ernst Haas/Getty
