Exercise Reduces Anxiety

Previously, a lot of researches have been done and investigated for depression. Depression refers to an illness where the suffered individual might experience lowly mood and aversion to activity. The stages before that, many refer to it as "anxiety". Though anxiety is not always being associated as a situation on par or worse than depression, but it holds quite similar characteristics with depression which characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components. But anxiety is often overlooked, until it turns into major depression disorder.

In the 22nd Feb edition of Archives of Internal Medicine, a group of researchers have analyzed the results of 40 randomized clinical trials which involved for about 3,000 patients with a variety of medical conditions, namely heart disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer, chronic pain from arthritis. The consequence, patients who exercised regularly were reported in showing a 20 percent reduction in anxiety symptoms compared to those who did not exercise.

Reducing anxiety through exercise seems to be a great way as far as the study is concerned. But previously, exercise has been overlooked as a method in decreasing the possibility of anxiety occurrence. Currently, physicians often prescribe that light exercises such as walking to strength training such as weight lifting are great exercises which could potentially reduce anxiety.

Apart from that, exercise which are done longer than 30 minutes appear to be better than exercises which lasted for less than 30 minutes.

Brain Booster

Got busy for the big whole day and felt tired right after spending time on those busy moments? How would you react under such circumstance? The chances are, very likely that you would yawn, and you would hope to have a nap very very badly.

There are several school of thoughts about napping, where generally, the outcomes of napping can be categorized into two different consequences, where one of it believes that napping is bad for you, while the other one says that it is good for you. In general, many people feel the urge to have a certain period of nap each day, but as far as the words of mouth is concerned, many people regard napping is bad for our healths.

The reason why people are talking bad things about napping, is because, they generally think that having a nap could cause instability in their internal clock as well as sleep disorders. For instance, when you take a nap for about 2 hours during the afternoon, you would probably need to sleep 2 hours later compare to the usual moment you sleep at night for that day. In other words, for some, they believe that nap serves to push back how early you can fall asleep at night.

But is napping really bad for us? Not really. According to a latest study, conducted by lead investigator Dr. Matthew Walker and fellow researchers who hail from University of Berkeley, they claim that an hour's of nap can dramatically boost and restore brain power. Not only restore, they suggested that it can boost your brain to perform even greater than moments before you had your nap.

The mentioned researchers recruited 39 healthy and young adults as participants, and then divided them into two different groups, which are nap group and non-nap group. At noon, both groups were given a task where they are to complete a task which required them to absorb a lot of facts. When the clock ticks at 2pm, the participants from nap group were required to have a 1.5 hour of nap. When 6 pm approached, both groups were once again required to take up the challenges.

The results were obvious. The nap group perform way better than their opposition. Not only they perform better than the other group, they performed even greater than they had in the earlier in the day. The theory behind this, is our brain just resembles as how the Internet Explorer works. It stores up a lot of temporary files, and they are needed to be removed by sleeping, because sleeping likens the method of clearing out process.

Listen to Bobby

Here is a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't worry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don't worry, be happy......

Do those sentences above ring any bells in your head? Well, you would probably have guess that. Yes, they are the famous lyrical phrases from the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy", written by Bobby McFerrin, and it is also the theme song for the movie "Cocktail".

But well, we are not discussing oldies and old time movies right here, but today, we are going to talk about the importance of being happy and enthusiastic. As one of the phrases sound, "In every life we have some trouble, when you worry you make it double, don't worry, be happy.....", indeed, this sounds very very true, especially when a latest study has been published in the 17th February advanced online issue of the European Heart Journal.

A group of zealous researchers, led by Dr. Karina Davidson, suggest that people with a tendency to experience positive emotions, such as being happy, enthusiastic and content, are also less likely to develop heart disease than those who do not experience it.

Although the findings were only based on observational study, but such evidence was fairly convincing that "positive effects" in individuals, such as joyful, pleasant feelings, are very likely decreasing the risk of developing heart diseases, while "negative effects", such as feelings of anxiety, depression and hostility, on the other hand, could lead to the elevation of risk in developing heart diseases.

The study, was involving some 800 plus healthy males and females respectively. These participants had their risk of heart disease checked at the very beginning stage of the study. Apart from that, they were also had their positive or negative effects measured, by using a positive five-point scale, ranging from "none" to "extreme". That is, being "none" means that you do not have any positive effect within you at that particular time, whereas "extreme" indicates that you are in a jovial mood.

After ten years of the study, the researchers found that there was a steady trend linking increased positive effect with lower risk of heart disease. Although such findings were somewhat convincing in the medical field, but a clinical trial will be done very soon for further confirmation on the outcome.

Therefore, be happy, don't worry!