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While you can’t necessarily eliminate the laundry list of stressors going on in the world right now, you can implement strategies to help manage your own emotions to decrease your anxiety. And there’s something you already do all day, every day, that is an excellent tool to tap into: your breath. Yep, breathing exercises for anxiety went mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as many people have found after trying them out, these stress-busting techniques can really come in handy whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed.

ICYMI, anxiety is pretty normal. It’s the most common mental illness in the United States, and it impacts nearly 40 million adults in the country each year, per the Anxiety & Depression Association of America. (That’s just over 18 percent of the population!)

So, how exactly does breathing help? Turns out how you breathe can affect your heart rate, blood pressure, and nervous system, all of which play a role in your body’s anxiety and stress levels, explains Rachel L. Goldman, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in private practice who is also a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

For example, shallow breathing typically involves drawing just a bit of air into your lungs, and taking shorter and faster breaths through your mouth (think: using only your upper chest to breathe). Engaging in this type of breathing can typically cause stress, panic, anxiety, tension, and pain, as it signals to your body that it’s in its “flight” response, Goldman explains.

Deep breathing, on the other hand, usually draws air deep into your lungs through your nose, and uses your chest to bring air into your diaphragm. The result? You’re able to get more oxygen into your brain and reduce your blood pressure and heart rate. Plus, it signals to your body that you can relax, that you’re safe, which is what makes it great for relieving anxiety, says Goldman.

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Breathing Exercises

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https://getpocket.com/explore/item/these-10-breathing-exercises-can-help-you-feel-calmer-right-now

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Several years ago, a British man named Harry picked his nose. A hidden camera recorded him in this private moment, then someone uploaded the video to the internet, and soon Harry’s pratfall exploded into a worldwide meme. Millions of people—most of them in the United States—became obsessed with the video. Everywhere Harry went, strangers shot significant looks at him and touched their nostrils, as if to say, “Hey, you’re that nose-picking guy!”

Harry loved the attention—he described his fame as a “safety blanket” and said he felt as if everyone on the street had become his friend. But there was a problem with Harry’s internet stardom: No one else could perceive it.

In a parallel reality where most of us live, Harry had been diagnosed with psychotic delusions, many of them seemingly borrowed from the YouTube videos he obsessively watched.

His family convinced him to visit a mental health clinic affiliated with the University of Birmingham. There, he enthused to his clinician—Rosa Ritunnano—that he was “the happiest man in the world.” Harry told Ritunnano that he could read and control other people’s thoughts; he deployed his telepathy to battle the lizard-humans and the Illuminati at the center of a web of power. These enemies, for their part, surveilled him through hidden cameras and telepathic spies.

As nightmarish as that all might sound, Harry relished the attention from the imaginary conspirators who monitored him. “If I found out that they [were] not watching me and reading my mind, I would feel alone and crazy,” he explained to Ritunnano.

Though he was engaged in an apocalyptic psi war, Harry was also a remarkably pleasant fellow who seemed to pose no threat to anyone. He did refuse his prescribed antipsychotic medications, but when Ritunnano and her colleagues asked him whether he would submit to a battery of pencil-and-paper tests, he cheerfully agreed. And so the doctors administered some whimsically named tools that are used to measure self-worth, including the Purpose in Life Test, the Life Regard Index and the Existential Meaning Scale. Harry aced them all.

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• By Pagan Kennedy, October 31, 2023

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https://nautil.us

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The benefits of friendship go far beyond having someone to confide in or spend time with – it can also protect you from physical and mental health problems. For example, people with good friends recover more quickly from illnesses and surgeries. They report higher well-being and feel like they live up to their full potential. Additionally, people with good friends report being less lonely across many life stages, including adolescence, becoming a parent and old age.

In fact, friendships are so powerful that the social pain of rejection activates the same neural pathways that physical pain does.

Behavioral scientists like me have tended to focus our research about friendships on their benefits. How to cultivate these powerful relationships hasn’t been as deeply researched yet. Understanding more about what people look for in a friend and how to make and sustain good friendships could help fight the loneliness epidemic.

Traditional conceptions of friendship

Previous generations of behavioral scientists traditionally focused on the notion that people form friendships with those who are similar, familiar and in close proximity to them.

When you look at all the friendships you’ve had over your life, these three factors probably make intuitive sense. You’re more likely to have things in common with your friends than not. You feel an increased sense of familiarity with friends the longer you know them – what psychologists call the mere exposure effect. And your friends are more likely to live or work near you.

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Despite stereotypes to the contrary, men can prefer close, one-on-one friendships. Westend61 via Getty Images

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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Spotting a tick on your body can be borderline terrifying. After all, not only can the insect suck your blood, it can also carry a range of potentially serious diseases like Lyme disease and babesiosis. Fear not: If you forgot your repellent on your last outdoor trek, here’s how to remove a tick head the right way, according to experts.

Naturally, you’ll want to remove the tick ASAP, but sometimes the bug can break, leaving you with the tick’s mouth-parts embedded in your skin. Not only is that gross, it could raise your risk of getting sick. “The more of a tick that’s removed, the less likely it is to be able to spread a pathogen,” says infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Meaning, you really want to try to remove the whole tick—including the head—if you can.

So, how do you remove a tick head after getting a tick bite? Here’s what you need to know.

How to remove a tick

The best way to avoid having to figure out how to remove a tick head is to get the whole tick out in the first place. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends doing the following:

• Use clean, fine-tipped tweezers to grab the tick as close to your skin’s surface as possible.

• Pull upward with steady, even pressure. (Don’t twist or jerk the tick—that can cause the head and mouth-parts to break off and stay in your the skin.

• Get rid of the tick by putting it in alcohol, placing it in a sealed bag or container, wrapping it tightly in tape, or flushing it down the toilet.

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Ugh, a tick!

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Haik Avanian

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https://www.nytimes.com

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Mills believes that modern technology can help reduce friction and barriers within small-business lending. The way she sees it, the two challenges in small-business lending boil down to information opacity — since it’s “nearly impossible” to see inside a small business and know what’s going on — and the sheer variety of small businesses that lenders encounter.

“One day you’re lending to a dry cleaner and the next day to a parts supplier, the next to a hairdresser,” Mills said during a panel discussion at the Money20/20 conference in late October. “How do you get a credit file that allows you to understand that business?”

The answer, Mills suggests, rests with application programming interfaces, better known as APIs. APIs are software intermediaries which connect two applications with one another. If you’ve ever called an Uber or sent money to someone through an online payment system, then you’ve used an API.

Mills is calling for an API to streamline small-business lending. Instead of an entrepreneur photo copying her tax information and compiling financial documents to send over to a lender, have a fintech company plug into the entrepreneur’s financials (like a QuickBooks account). The fintech can then send it directly to the lender.

The underlying thinking is that this enables a fintech company to dramatically shave time from the lending process, which can help small businesses get the money they need faster — and perhaps even highlight businesses that are creditworthy.

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I have an intern who is book-smart and a very hard worker. But there’s one big problem — he’s bad at things he thinks he’s a superstar with. A few examples:

• He thinks he’s an amazing writer, but his writing is awful. He misspells words, leaves out words, has no organization, and generally writes in an unprofessional manner.
• He thinks he’s great at public speaking. In reality, his presentations are disorganized. He speaks very quickly and loudly and uses a lot of insider language that most other people don’t understand. He’s also completely clueless about when he’s lost his audience.
• He thinks he’s good at digital. In reality, the social-media posts he’s written are cringe-worthy. His attempts to edit websites have often resulted in me spending hours fixing his work. His photos and videos are blurry, have bad lighting, and aren’t framed well.

I’ve tried talking to him about slowing down and being more thorough with his work. I’ve also gone through all the changes I’ve done to his work, so he understands why they were necessary. I’ve put him on different types of projects that he claims to be brilliant at, so I could find his strengths and make sure that he is lightening my workload instead of doubling it (which is what is happening now). It’s not working.

Even worse, he’s applied for a full-time job with my company and is convinced he’s going to get it, but his interview was awful and he failed his writing test.

I work in a creative industry. I think he has a lot of potential. But I fear he’s just not a good fit for our industry. Any suggestions on how to manage him for the rest of his internship? Is there a tactful way to let him know I think he’s great, but he’s just not good at this work?

Green responds:

When you say you think he’s great, but he messes up everything he tackles and has no sense of his own abilities, I have to wonder if you really think he’s great or if you’re saying that because it feels like a kind thing say.

There’s nothing wrong with being kind! But I suspect it’s muddying your thinking here, because you have an intern who’s screwing up left and right, and you haven’t told him that, and you need to. So let’s talk about what being kind really means in this context.

Being kind in this situation would mean giving clear and specific feedback about where he isn’t currently strong and needs to work on improving. That’s true for anyone you manage, but it’s especially true for interns, who are supposed to be learning. He can’t learn if no one will tell him where he’s falling short and what it would look like to do better.

Being kind also would mean giving him some feedback on his interview so that he’s not thinking he’s about to be hired when that’s so far from the truth.

It is not kind to let him continue thinking he’s fantastic at things you’ve seen he’s terrible at. He’s going to pitch himself to future jobs based on an inaccurate self-assessment, and if he bluffs his way into a job based on those things, he’s likely to end up getting fired. Maybe repeatedly!

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Photo: Getty Images

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Learning = Stop

Learning requires your brain to analyze and remember instructions and facts. When music is on, however, your brain has to process auditory data on top of processing the instructions and facts. Because of this multitasking, the brain can interpret the instructions and facts improperly, either associating them in odd ways or making mistakes about what’s important enough to store. Thus, if you have to learn something at work, it’s best to turn off your music, especially if you’re learning verbally or through reading and the music has lyrics.

Noisy = Play

If your workspace is noisy, the brain will try to handle all the individual pieces of data in the noise. All that data processing takes energy you otherwise could use to focus on your job. It also increases levels of the stress-hormone cortisol and decreases levels of dopamine. Those hormonal changes negatively affect the prefrontal cortex, hindering executive function. Thus, productivity can go down, even if doing your required task doesn’t require you to learn. In this scenario, listening to music can actually help, because it blocks out the other excessive input that could overwhelm you and keeps you calm.

Repetitive Job = Play

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