Maslow studied healthy people, most psychologists study sick people. The characteristics listed here are the results of 20 years of study of people who had the “full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc..”
- Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you.
- Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
- Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
- When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
- Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
- Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
- Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not.
- Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses–and then finding the courage to give them up.
Check out the full article: Maslow Self Actualization
FaceResearch.org allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices.
This is a lot of fun, check it out: Make an Average Face
The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.
Check it out: Speech Accent Archive
Professor Richard D. Feinman says;
It is true that your brain needs glucose, but glucose can be supplied by the process of gluconeogenesis; that is, glucose can be made from other things, notably protein. This is a normal process: when you wake up in the morning, between thirty and seventy percent of your blood glucose comes from gluconeogenesis. There is no requirement for dietary glucose.
Source: Why You Don’t Want the “Experts” to Tell You What to Eat
- Eat healthy foods and avoid junk foods
- Exercise.
- Take time to do things you enjoy.
- Get something done that you have been putting off.
- Do things that make use of your own special talents and abilities.
- Dress in clothes that make you feel good about yourself.
- Give yourself rewards.
- Spend time with people.
- Make your living space a place that honors the person you are.
- Display items that you find attractive.
- Make your meals a special time.
- Learn something new or improve your skills.
- Begin doing those things that you know will make you feel better about yourself.
- Do something nice for another person.
- Make it a point to treat yourself well every day.
Check out the website here: Social Anxiety Support
Greg Battaglia is a member of the HumanaNatura community and has written a very interesting article about eating once a day. Below is a snippet, and be sure to check out the link below it to read the rest of the article.
When viewing meal frequency through an evolutionary scope, one can easily conclude that humans certainly did not evolve to consume food very frequently. In nature there is no absolute guarantee that food will be available or when it will be available. It is likely that humans would have been subjected to many hours or even days without food throughout the entirety of our evolution. It is also likely that when food did become available, for example, after a vigorous but successful hunt, that our ancestors would have consumed a large quantity of calories to make up for the deficit created during the fast. Once a kill and any gatherings were completely eaten, the fast would then begin once again and this cycle might continue as the basic template for a typical hunter-gatherer (H/G) eating pattern.
Read the article here: http://www.humananatura.org/viewarticle.php?article=168
Rusty from the Fitness Black Book has written an excellent article about intermittent eating.
He says;
when I turned 30 I wanted to lose that last bit of body fat…but I always had a layer of fat covering my abs. I could never get really lean following the “eat six small meals per day strategy”. I decided to test out just eating one meal per day at night, like I did when I was young and lean.
Guess What? I got extremely lean within three weeks and didn’t lose an ounce of muscle. It just didn’t seem to make sense to me at all! The 6 meals per day plan seemed to make more sense, but the one meal per day at night plan was the strategy that got me lean!
I say;
I totally support his assertions, as I have tried this myself, and I can report that I am in excellent health and i’ve lost excess fat. It flies in the face of modern trends, but it works… period.
Check out his website: The Fitness Black Book: Advanced Tips Your Personal Trainer Doesn’t Know About
Nucleus Medical Art creates medical illustrations, medical animations, medical images, anatomical charts, anatomical models, and interactive multimedia.
The link below has some excellent animations of operations, child birth and much more, check it out.
Link: Nucleus Medical Art - Medical Animations
Diet foods and drinks for children may inadvertently lead to over eating and obesity, says a new report from the University of Alberta.
Researchers contend that animals learn to connect the taste of food with the amount of caloric energy it provides, and children who consume low-calorie versions of foods that are normally high in calories may develop distorted connections between taste and calorie content, leading them to over eat as they grow up.
Read more here: University of Alberta
Plyometrics is a type of exercise that uses explosive movements to develop muscular power, the ability to generate a large amount of force quickly.
For example; think of a Kangaroo, if a kangaroo needed to use 100% new energy to contract its leg muscles every time it jumped, it would not be able to jump very far consistently. However, because of the muscles’ ability to store energy from its previous jump before like a spring, the kangaroo only needs to use a fraction of the total energy in the jump.
Similarly, when you throw a ball, you don’t pause when your arm is fully extended behind you.
Elastic energy is created in the muscles and tendons and stored as a result of a rapid stretch. This stored energy is then released when the stretch is followed immediately by a concentric muscle action.
I highly recommend this method of training!
Read more here: http://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com
And here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plyometrics
You might be surprised, here is the answer; Takotsubo cardiomyopathy - Wikipedia
Philosopher Stephen Law says children need to be able to criticise authority in order to grow emotionally and intellectually.
In his Sydney Ideas lecture, to be held at the University of Sydney next Tuesday night, Law, the author of The War For Children’s Minds, will contend that children need to learn about right and wrong and respect for others, but they also need to think for themselves - something that’s lacking in many authoritarian-based schools.
According to Law, “liberal attitudes” to religious and moral education have been blamed for “everything wrong with modern societies”. This has encouraged a move back to more traditional, authoritarian schools, as seen by recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures that show a significant student shift from NSW State schools to faith-based ones.
He says that rather than fostering positive “values”, traditional schools stifle emotional and intellectual growth and do not encourage children to take responsibility for their own actions.
In his lecture, titled “The War For Children’s Minds”, Law, a senior lecturer at the University of London, will point to “growing empirical evidence” that suggests schools that encourage collective philosophical discussion and critical thinking not only increases pupils’ IQs but also foster emotional and social growth.
Source: University of Sydney
Physical inactivity and insufficient fruit and vegetable consumption are key risk factors for obesity and lifestyle-related diseases. Results presented recently at the 6th Annual Conference of the International Society of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity in Oslo, Norway, and soon to be published in the International Journal of Obesity reveal that 95 per cent of Australian adults are not meeting national physical activity and nutrition guidelines for health benefits.
They found that overweight perception may be another barrier to physical activity participation among men and women with excess body weight, and suggest that public health strategies need to focus on overcoming weight perception as well as weight status barriers to adopting healthy physical activity behaviours.
When analysed separately, investigators found that approximately 25 per cent of Australians met physical activity guidelines, and approximately 55 per cent and 15 per cent of Australians consumed sufficient fruit servings/day and vegetable servings/day, respectively. Investigators where also startled to discover that less than 5 per cent of Australians met both physical activity and diet guidelines.
Source: University of Sydney
Professor Ian Hickie from the University’s Brain and Mind Research Institute argues that if increased diagnosis and treatment has actually led to demonstrable benefits and is cost effective, then it is not yet being over diagnosed.
He says increased diagnosis and treatment has led to a reduction in suicides and increased productivity in the population.
On the other side of the debate Professor Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist from the University of New South Wales says the current threshold for what is considered to be ‘clinical depression’ is too low. He fears it could lead to a diagnosis of depression becoming less credible.
It is, he says, normal to be depressed and points to his own cohort study which followed 242 teachers. Fifteen years into the study, 79 per cent of respondents had already met the symptom and duration criteria for major, minor or sub-syndromal depression.
He blames the over-diagnosis of clinical depression on a change in its categorisation, introduced in 1980.
Source: University of Sydney
Tens of thousands of people across Australia are likely to be caught up in a major new epidemic of viral gastroenteritis, UNSW and Prince of Wales Hospital researchers have warned. Scores of outbreaks caused by the highly infectious norovirus have already occurred in eastern Australia, in some cases forcing hospitals to close their doors to visitors.
People in large families and in group settings - including nursing homes, hospitals and childcare centres - are most at risk. The infection causes vomiting and diarrhoea, usually lasting for about three days. No cure is available.
Source: The University of New South Wales
A landmark study by University of Western Sydney researchers has found people over 50 who take calcium supplements suffer fewer fractures and enjoy a better quality of life.
Dr Tang likens calcium supplements to superannuation payments where small regular contributions build to much larger pay off years down the track.
“The results showed the importance of starting supplements early in life, at around the age of 50, when bone mineral loss begins to accelerate.”
Source: University of Western Sydney
Individually, cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes and chronic kidney disease (CKD) are serious illnesses that contribute significantly to deaths and levels of ill health in the Australian population. When they occur together, the negative effects on health status and health services go beyond the sum of the effects of each single disease.
A new report released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) is the first of its kind to examine in depth, the number of people in Australia with two or more of these conditions and to quantify associated rates of hospitalisation and mortality.
The report is the first in a planned series that will examine other characteristics of these comorbidities.
Source: AIHW
Scientists at Melbourne’s Howard Florey Institute have shown that mental and physical exercise can improve behavioural deficits in schizophrenia and repair damaged chemical transmitter pathways in the brain.
“Pharmaceutical approaches may not be the sole answer for a given brain disease. People may still need optimal levels of physical and mental activity, as well as a healthy diet…”
Check out the full article here: Howard Florey Institute: Schizophrenia improved by mental and physical exercise
Twelve native Australian fruits that are exceptional sources of antioxidants have been identified in research published in the journal Innovative Food Science & Emerging Technologies.
The fruits: Kakadu plum, Illawarra plum, Burdekin plum, Davidson’s plum, riberry, red and yellow finger limes, Tasmanian pepper, brush cherry, Cedar Bay cherry, muntries and Molucca raspberry; were compared with blueberries (cultivar Biloxi) – a fruit renowned for its high antioxidant properties.
While Australian native fruits have been eaten by indigenous people for thousands of years, this is the first scientific study of the fruits as a source of antioxidants and confirms preliminary results published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2006
Check out the full article here Native fruits bear sweet antioxidants (Media Release)
I stumbled upon an interesting article today, and it prompted me to write this post…
Diabetes demands proactive approach
Lesley Russell - The Canberra Times, 13 August 2007.
From the article:
Australia is facing an epidemic of Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes. There are now nearly one million Australians with Type 2 diabetes. The problem will grow as the incidence of obesity increases, with 30 per cent of Australian children and 60 per cent of adults now overweight or obese. The rate of diabetes among overweight adolescents has jumped 16-fold in the last decade.
Read the full article here http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?story_id=1036228
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My opinion:
People are being conned into buying the wrong foods. Indeed, what the food corporations get away with is criminal. I’ve recently targeted Kellogg’s as a main offender, but there are many more who claim their products are healthy when clearly; they’re NOT.
Matt Emery - Author and Caveman
