April 1, 2013 in Blog by Dee

Why Love is Good for Your Health

By Carina Storrs

Is marriage good for your health? In general, research suggests yes. Married people live longer, have better access to health care, enjoy a more satisfying sex life, experience less stress, live a healthier lifestyle, and have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, and depression compared to their single counterparts.

The list of health perks conferred by marriage is so long, in fact, that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has made it a centerpiece of its two-year-old, $5 million national media campaign to promote wedded bliss.

But there’s a catch—men and women don’t get the same or equal benefits from a legally sanctioned pairing. A man’s sex life is likely to improve more than a woman’s after getting married, for instance, while a woman’s risk for depression tends to decrease more than her partner’s when she’s in a long-term relationship.

And in reality, getting hitched may not be strictly necessary. Women and men can reap some health benefits just by living together, or even by being in a stable long-term relationship, research suggests. Experts believe that same-sex couples, many of whom don’t even have the option to get married, also score health gains, though almost all research so far has focused only on heterosexual relationships.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of the marriage license; it’s a matter of the level of social support and mutual attachment,” said John Gallacher, PhD, a researcher at the Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, who recently published a paper on the health benefits of relationships in a BMJ journal.

We interviewed experts and sifted through the scientific research to determine which sex fares better in each of these eight categories.

Life span. Marriage offers the ultimate health benefit: a longer life. Compared to their unwed counterparts, married people have longer average life spans and are drastically less likely to die at an early age.

The link between marriage and longevity is much stronger among husbands than wives, however. A 2007 study that looked at death rates among European people over age 40 found that the rate was twice as high in unmarried men as in married men. The disparity in death rates was far more modest between unmarried and married women.

Marriage is especially good at warding off fatal accidents, violence, and other semi-avoidable calamities, which are more common in younger people, says Michael Murphy, PhD, a professor of demography at the London School of Economics and the lead author of the 2007 study. But regardless of age, men’s life spans appear to benefit more from marriage than women’s.

Advantage: Men.

Disease. One reason marriage may prolong life is that it appears to lower a person’s risk of serious disease. Rates of diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, lung disease, and other chronic ailments are all lower in married people than in unmarried people. (Notably, cancer is not on the list.)

For most diseases, the decrease in risk associated with marriage is roughly the same for men as for women. The exception—and it’s a big one—is heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the U.S. each year. While married men are three times less likely to die from heart disease than men who have never tied the knot, marriage only halves the risk of cardiac death for women, according to a 2009 study.

Advantage: Men.

Vices. The disproportionate heart benefits that men reap from marriage may be partly explained by the fact that bachelors tend to lead less healthy lifestyles than unmarried women, and are more apt to smoke, drink too much, and indulge in other vices. (In other words, men have more room for improvement after they get married.)

A 2006 study that tracked the substance-use patterns of thousands of young people before and after marriage found that men abruptly scale back their binge drinking and marijuana use when they get married. Women also binge drink less after they get married (or even after they start living with a boyfriend), but they smoke marijuana just as often after marriage as they did before.

Although relationship status appears to have less of an effect on cigarette smoking (perhaps because nicotine is so addictive), notable gender differences exist here as well. A woman who marries a smoker is more likely to start smoking herself, but the opposite doesn’t hold: If their brides smoke, men are no more likely to start or resume smoking themselves, a 2005 study found.

Simply put, women may be a better influence on men than vice versa. Wives tend to be the more emotionally supportive partner and are more likely to encourage their husbands to refrain from drinking or smoking, said Hui Liu, an assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Advantage: Men.

Depression. Although people love to complain that their significant others are driving them crazy, companionship actually tends to be good for mental health—especially for women. This is particularly true when it comes to depression, which is roughly twice as common in women.

“Depression is a very female expression of psychological distress,” said Robin Simon, PhD, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. “The benefit of marriage shows up in women in lower levels of depression.”

Marriage also appears to be a stabilizing force in women with bipolar disorder. Married bipolar women have fewer and milder depressive episodes than their never-married counterparts, but the same trend is not found in bipolar men.

Living with a partner seems to be just as beneficial to a woman’s mental health as marriage. A 2005 study of women over 50 found that cohabiting reduces the risk of mental health problems just as much as getting hitched.

Advantage: Women.

Stress. Contrary to popular belief, men tend to get stressed out more easily than women. Lab experiments have shown that when given a stressful task, men exhibit greater spikes in the stress hormone cortisol than women.

Fortunately for men, being in a romantic relationship—not just marriage—may curb their stress response. A 2010 experiment found that paired-off men had smaller spikes in cortisol levels than single men after taking part in a competitive game, whereas single and spoken-for ladies had comparable cortisol increases.

Advantage: Men.

Weight. A marriage license or a long-term relationship won’t buy you a clean bill of health, of course. One area where marriage appears to actually harm health is the waistline. “Historically there’s been this idea that marriage makes people healthy, particularly men,” said Susan Averett, PhD, a professor of economics at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. “That may be the case, but not with respect to BMI.” (BMI refers to body mass index, a simple ratio of height to weight.)

While both men and women in long-term relationships tend to gain weight (probably because they’ve implicitly agreed to let themselves go), women appear to gain a bit more weight on average after marriage than men—even if they don’t have children.

But the catch is that more men than women cross over into the dangerous categories of overweight and obese following marriage. This could be because women are more likely than men to be underweight going into marriage, so they can afford the extra pounds more than their groom can. Another strike against men could be that they scale back their exercise regimen more so than women after getting married.

Although unmarried couples living together also gain weight, and women gain more than men, the weight gain is less pronounced than in married couples. “It’s a little different because you might think of yourself as still on the market,” Averett said.

Advantage: Women.

Sex. TV images of swinging bachelors and bachelorettes might say otherwise, but being in a solid relationship actually tends to be good for your sex life (at least for the first decade or two). Married and cohabiting couples both have more sex than people who are single or dating, and married people in particular report more satisfying sex lives than their counterparts who are dating or shacking up.

Still, where sex is concerned, marriage appears to be a better deal for men. In a landmark national sex survey conducted in the 1990s, 49 percent of married men said they were “extremely” emotionally satisfied with their sex life, compared to just 33 percent of men who were unmarried or not living with a partner. By contrast, only 42 percent of married women were extremely satisfied with their sex lives, compared to 31 percent of women who didn’t live with a partner.

Women’s sex lives aren’t as fulfilling as men’s in marriage “because they often have resentment in inequities in domestic duties that still exist, [and] they feel they don’t get the appreciation they deserve,” said Pepper Schwartz, PhD, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Advantage: Men.

Financial stability. Married people are more financially stable than their single counterparts. And even though more women than ever before have college degrees and are the main breadwinners in their household, marriage still tends to mean a bigger step up for women than it is for men. “Even today, women still benefit from marriage in terms of economics,” Liu said. “For men, it’s mainly from the social, psychological factors.”

While worrying less about money certainly helps reduce stress and anxiety, financial stability also impacts health in a more concrete way, via access to health care. Marriage is associated with a hearty increase in the likelihood of having health insurance for both sexes, but it is associated with much greater gain for men. However, the percentages of single and married men who are insured still lag behind those of single and married women.

Advantage: Tie.

Our matchup puts men ahead by a slight margin—but women shouldn’t be dismayed. “[Although] there used to be a lot of literature that women get a raw deal in marriage, there’s been a bunch of research that says, ‘No, they’re really happy, and they think they’re getting as good a deal,’ ” Schwartz said.

And there’s reason to believe that women might actually start to get just as good a deal from relationships as men do. Many of the gender differences we found arise from one sex having healthier habits than the other to begin with, or taking on the brunt of the work in and outside of the home. But a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that, in the last several decades, people are getting married at an older age and to those with more matched socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, which could dissolve some of those gender differences.

And yet, even though the nature of relationships and marriage is changing with the times, the impact of relationships on health measures such as life span has remained largely steady. The health gender gap might take some time to catch up to these social trends, Liu said. “I think over time we may see men and women get similar benefits from marriage,” she said. “The gender roles have changed with more women going to work.”

April 1, 2013 in Blog by Dee

Overcoming Procrastination:Manage Your Time. Get It All Done

By Mind Tools

If you’ve found yourself putting off important tasks over and over again, you’re not alone. In fact, many people procrastinate to some degree – but some are so chronically affected by procrastination that it stops them fulfilling their potential and disrupts their careers.

The key to controlling this destructive habit is to recognize when you start procrastinating, understand why it happens (even to the best of us), and take active steps to manage your time and outcomes better.

What is Procrastination?
In a nutshell, you procrastinate when you put off things that you should be focusing on right now, usually in favor of doing something that is more enjoyable or that you’re more comfortable doing.

According to psychologist Professor Clarry Lay, a prominent writer on procrastination, procrastination occurs when there’s “a temporal gap between intended behavior and enacted behavior.” That is, procrastination is occurring when there’s a significant time period between when people intend to do a job, and when they actually do it.

How to Overcome Procrastination

Follow these steps to deal with and control procrastination:

Step 1: Recognize That You’re Procrastinating

If you’re honest with yourself, you probably know when you’re procrastinating. But to be sure, take our Are You a Procrastinator? self test.

Here are some useful indicators that will help you know when you’re procrastinating:

Notes:
Putting off an unimportant task isn’t necessarily procrastination: it may just be good prioritization!

Putting off an important task for a short period because you’re feeling particularly tired isn’t necessarily procrastination either, so long as you don’t delay starting the task for more than a day or so, and this is only an occasional event. If you have a genuine good reason for rescheduling something important, then you’re not necessarily procrastinating. But if you’re simply “making an excuse” because you really just don’t want to do it, then you are.

In his 1986 article “At Last, My Research Article on Procrastination”, published in the Journal of Research on Personality, Lay noted that procrastinatory behavior is independent of need for achievement, energy, or self-esteem. In other words, you may be a procrastinator even if you’re confident in your own abilities, energetic, and enjoy achieving things.

Step 2: Work Out WHY You’re Procrastinating

Why you procrastinate can depend on both you and the task. But it’s important to understand which of the two is relevant in a given situation, so that you can select the best approach for overcoming your reluctance to get going.

One reason for procrastination is that people find a particular job unpleasant, and try to avoid it because of that. Most jobs have unpleasant or boring aspects to them, and often the best way of dealing with these is to get them over and done with quickly, so that you can focus on the more enjoyable aspects of the job.

Another cause is that people are disorganized. Organized people manage to fend of the temptation to procrastinate, because they will have things like prioritized to-do lists and schedules which emphasize how important the piece work is, and identify precisely when it’s due. They’ll also have planned how long a task will take to do, and will have worked back from that point to identify when they need to get started in order to avoid it being late. Organized people are also better placed to avoid procrastination, because they know how to break the work down into manageable “next steps”.

Even if you’re organized, you can feel overwhelmed by the task. You may doubt that you have the skills or resources you think you need, so you seek comfort in doing tasks you know you’re capable of completing. Unfortunately, the big task isn’t going to go away – truly important tasks rarely do. You may also fear success as much as failure. For example, you may think that success will lead to you being swamped with more requests to do this type of task, or that you’ll be pushed to take on things that you feel are beyond you.

Surprisingly, perfectionists are often procrastinators, as they can tend to think “I don’t have the right skills or resources to do this perfectly now, so I won’t do it at all.”

One final major cause of procrastination is having underdeveloped decision-making skills. If you simply can’t decide what to do, you’re likely to put off taking action in case you do the wrong thing.

Step 3: Adopt Anti-Procrastination Strategies

Procrastination is a habit – a deeply ingrained pattern of behavior. That means that you won’t just break it overnight. Habits only stop being habits when you have persistently stopped practicing them, so use as many approaches as possible to maximize your chances of beating procrastination. Some tips will work better for some people than for others, and for some tasks than others. And, sometimes, you may simply need to try a fresh approach to beat the “procrastination peril”!

These general tips will help motivate you to get moving:

Make up your own rewards. For example, promise yourself a piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime if you’ve completed a certain task. And make sure you notice how good it feels to finish things!

Ask someone else to check up on you. Peer pressure works! This is the principle behind slimming and other self-help groups, and it is widely recognized as a highly effective approach.

Identify the unpleasant consequences of NOT doing the task.

Work out the cost of your time to your employer. As your employers are paying you to do the things that they think are important, you’re not delivering value for money if you’re not doing those things. Shame yourself into getting going!

If you’re pocrastinating because you’re disorganized, here’s how to get organized!

Keep a To-Do list so that you can’t “conveniently” forget about unpleasant or overwhelming tasks.

Use an Urgent/Important Matrix to help prioritize your to-do list so that you can’t try to kid yourself that it would be acceptable to put off doing something on the grounds that it’s unimportant, or that you have many urgent things which ought to be done first when, in reality, you’re procrastinating.

Become a master of scheduling and project planning, so that you know when to start those all-important projects.

Set yourself time-bound goals: that way, you’ll have no time for procrastination!

Focus on one task at a time.

If you’re putting off starting a project because you find it overwhelming, you need to take a different approach. Here are some tips:

Break the project into a set of smaller, more manageable tasks. You may find it helpful to create an action plan.

Start with some quick, small tasks if you can, even if these aren’t the logical first actions. You’ll feel that you’re achieving things, and so perhaps the whole project won’t be so overwhelming after all.

If you’re procrastinating because you find the task unpleasant:

Many procrastinators overestimate the unpleasantness of a task. So give it a try! You may find that it’s not as bad as you thought!

Hold the unpleasant consequences of not doing the work at the front of your mind.

Reward yourself for doing the task.

Finally, if you’re procrastinating because you can’t decide what action to take, and are putting off making a decision because you’re nervous about making the wrong choice, see our decision-making section. This teaches a range of powerful and effective decision-making techniques.

Remember: the longer you can spend without procrastinating, the greater your chances of breaking this destructive habit for good!

Key Points

To have a good chance of conquering procrastination, you need to spot straight away that you’re doing it. Then, you need to identify why you’re procrastinating and taken appropriate steps to overcome the block.

Part of the solution is to develop good time management, organizational and personal effectiveness habits, such as those described in Make Time for Success! This helps you establish the right priorities, and manage your time in such a way that you make the most of the opportunities open to you.

April 1, 2013 in Blog by Dee

Healthy Foods to Feed Your Brain

By Pamela Harding

The old maxim “You are what you eat,” turns out to be true. New research on so-called “brain foods” shows that some chemicals in the foods we eat go right to our brain cells. Sounds pretty powerful. But can food really make us more intelligent, give us smarter kids, improve memory, help us think more clearly, and maybe even forestall those so-called “senior moments,” or worse, dementia? The answer is a qualified “yes.” Although no one “miracle” food is going to boost your brain power instantly, make your kid a genius, or cure Alzheimer’s, regularly adding certain foods to your diet will help you function at your personal best, both physically and mentally, throughout your lifetime.

Berries are full of memory-boosting nutrients. Here’s how they work: When we talk about getting “rusty” at certain tasks, we may not be far off. Oxidation, the process that causes metal to rust, can also damage brain cells. This oxidative stress as it’s called, plays a part in many diseases associated with aging from dementia and Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s. Getting beneficial anti-oxidative compounds like vitamins C, E, beta-carotene and other nutrients through food may help prevent, or at least curtail, the damage, because they can disarm potentially cell-injuring free radicals circulating throughout the system. Research has shown that beneficial chemicals called ellagatannis in raspberries, strawberries and blueberries are also found right in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory control center. Talk about a direct hit! Blueberries also contain proanthocyanins, which gravitate toward the striatum, which is more closely related to spatial memory. Scientists believe that that these compounds may enhance the performance of those parts of the brain, and indeed, actual animal studies have substantiated the evidence that they do improve memory.

Oxidation is not the only process associated with diseases of aging. Inflammation also plays a big role in everything from heart disease to dementia. Cherries are nature’s own little anti-inflammatory pills. They contain Cox 2 inhibitors similar to those found in pain medications such as Vioxx and Celebrex, but they also contain compounds called polyphenols that keep platelets in the blood from clumping together, so they don’t produce undesirable side effects— like heart attacks and strokes—which are risks associated with the manufactured drugs. Isn’t Mother Nature clever?

That old adage about “an apple a day” is right on target. Turns out that apples contain a group of chemicals that could protect the brain from the type of damage that triggers neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. One of those compounds, a flavonoid called quercetin, has been shown to protect the brain from oxidative injury in animal studies.
Other chemicals such as phenolic acids and different flavonoids protect the apple itself against damage by bacteria, viruses and fungi—and if they protect the fruit, just imagine what they can do for us! Studies suggest that eating apples not only may help reduce the risk of cancer, but diminish the risk of neurodegenerative disorders too.

Turmeric, the yellow spice found in many curries, contains curcumin, which also has powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. It may even prove useful in treating Alzheimer’s; one study showed a reduction in beta amyloid deposits, the plaques associated with the disease, in the brains of animals fed curcumin-enhanced food. In another study, elderly people who ate curry often or very often did better on tests of mental performance than those who never or rarely ate curry.

The egg has gotten bad press because of its cholesterol-rich yoke and the associations between dietary cholesterol and heart disease. However, that same yolk contains one of the most important nutrients for building better brains: choline. Getting adequate amounts of choline, especially early in life—during fetal development and early childhood—may help us learn more readily and also help us retain what we learn. What’s more, sufficient choline intake early on may give us the mental building blocks we need to help keep memory intact as we age.

We’ve all heard that fish is “brain food,” and there’s good reason for it. Fatty fish like budget-friendly sardines contain omega-3 fatty acids, which are thought to be instrumental in maintaining brain function from early development throughout life. DHA, an omega-3, is present right in the brain, so having those good-for-you omega-3s in your diet is thought to boost brain function. In addition, components of fatty acids in fish go straight to the synapses of nerve cells, so they play an important role in how neurons communicate with one another, which may have a positive affect throughout life on learning and memory.

Speaking of seafood as brain food, consider the oyster, which is one food rich in both iron and zinc. If your mind wanders or you have memory lapses here and there, you may need more of the minerals zinc and iron in your diet. A lot of research has linked decreased iron and zinc levels with poorer mental performance in children, but newer studies on adults suggest these elements help keep grown-ups’ minds sharp as well. In those studies, marginally low iron reserves reduced adults’ ability to concentrate, and lower levels of zinc slowed test participants’ ability to recall words.

When it’s time for a treat, chocolate is not a bad way to go, for your brain as well as your taste buds. Several studies have shown that eating flavonol-rich cocoa can improve blood vessel function, boosting circulation throughout the body and blood flow to the brain. The beneficial compounds found in cocoa may even reduce the formation of damaging clots, which may cause heart attacks and strokes. However, while cocoa, the ingredient that carries “chocolate” flavor, is rich in beneficial compounds, it’s often combined with high-fat ingredients in chocolate bars and other desserts, so it’s best to keep chocolate treats to a healthy minimum.

April 1, 2013 in Blog by Dee

The Effect Of Violent Video Games On Teens

By Audrey Hamilton

Playing violent video games can make some adolescents more hostile, particularly those who are less agreeable, less conscientious and easily angered. But for others, it may offer opportunities to learn new skills and improve social networking.

In a special issue of the journal Review of General Psychology, published in June by the American Psychological Association, researchers looked at several studies that examined the potential uses of video games as a way to improve visual/spatial skills, as a health aid to help manage diabetes or pain and as a tool to complement psychotherapy. One study examined the negative effects of violent video games on some people.

“Much of the attention to video game research has been negative, focusing on potential harm related to addiction, aggression and lowered school performance,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, PhD, of Texas A&M International University and guest editor of the issue. “Recent research has shown that as video games have become more popular, children in the United States and Europe are having fewer behavior problems, are less violent and score better on standardized tests. Violent video games have not created the generation of problem youth so often feared.”

In contrast, one study in the special issue shows that video game violence can increase aggression in some individuals, depending on their personalities.

In his research, Patrick Markey, PhD, determined that a certain combination of personality traits can help predict which young people will be more adversely affected by violent video games. “Previous research has shown us that personality traits like psychoticism and aggressiveness intensify the negative effects of violent video games and we wanted to find out why,” said Markey.

Markey used the most popular psychological model of personality traits, called the Five-Factor Model, to examine these effects. The model scientifically classifies five personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Analysis of the model showed a “perfect storm” of traits for children who are most likely to become hostile after playing violent video games, according to Markey. Those traits are: high neuroticism (e.g., easily upset, angry, depressed, emotional, etc.), low agreeableness (e.g., little concern for others, indifferent to others feelings, cold, etc.) and low conscientiousness (e.g., break rules, don’t keep promises, act without thinking, etc.).

Markey then created his own model, focusing on these three traits, and used it to help predict the effects of violent video games in a sample of 118 teenagers. Each participant played a violent or a non-violent video game and had his or her hostility levels assessed. The teenagers who were highly neurotic, less agreeable and less conscientious tended to be most adversely affected by violent video games, whereas participants who did not possess these personality characteristics were either unaffected or only slightly negatively affected by violent video games.

“These results suggest that it is the simultaneous combination of these personality traits which yield a more powerful predictor of violent video games,” said Markey. “Those who are negatively affected have pre-existing dispositions, which make them susceptible to such violent media.”

“Violent video games are like peanut butter,” said Ferguson. “They are harmless for the vast majority of kids but are harmful to a small minority with pre-existing personality or mental health problems.”