Simple Steps to Overcome Stress and Avoid Harmful Effects

Stress is a part of daily life for many people today. Some amount of stress is generally protective and adaptive. It helps our mind and body to face the challenges in difficult situations and to cope up with the pressure in the time of crisis. Life may become dull and unexciting in the absence of the stress.
The reasons that cause stress can be anyone or many of these- financial problems, disagreements, demands on time and attention, work life balance, loss of a loved one, conflicts, illness, accidents, alcohol or drug abuse, and poor nutrition etc.
Extended periods of stress can seriously affect a person both physically and mentally ranging from severe depression and heart attack to headache. Continuous stress affects our daily activities, diminishes self-esteem, impairs relationships with family and friends, decreases work productivity, and leads to self-blame.
Since stress is the unavoidable part of the modern day, it cannot be averted completely. However, some stress-managing techniques can help to reduce the impact of stress. Some simple steps to relieve stress are:
Think positively
Think about the good things related to you. Consider how lucky you are by comparing with others who are in worse situations. Always hope for the best and think that this problem will be solved soon. Learn to accept 'things as it is' that you cannot change. Always look to solve problems rather than to worry about them.
Visit a good friend
Visiting a close friend or a relative can help you to reduce stress sometimes. A close friend, parent or partner can make a great listening pal with whom you can share your feelings and thoughts without any hesitation. You can get respite from the support you receive from your near ones.
Meditation
You should exercise your mind. Mental exercises such as meditation, yoga, art, and playing music relax your mind that reduces stress. These relaxation techniques need to be developed with patience, which are very effective in the stress periods.
Apart from mental exercises, one should also do physical exercise to relieve from stress and depression. These exercises give general relaxation of the nervous system. Physical exercises also helps to maintain good health, builds confidence, and self-esteem.
Take nutritious food
It is very important to take care of yourself in the stress situations. Stress lowers the immune system and can cause heart diseases and ulcers. People under stress have a common symptom of either eating excess food or very less. So, one should be very careful about having a balanced diet. Besides, you should avoid alcohol, drugs, or nicotine to stay healthy and be prepared to handle stress. It is even better if you stay away from coffee, tea, and other caffeinated beverages that tend to increase stress.
It is good to realize that small amount of stress is acceptable and is unavoidable in our daily life. However, one should be sensitive to the stress levels he/she is experiencing and be aware of the simple techniques like the above mentioned to overcome or reduce the stress.

Think on This and Feel the Emotional Relief You Desire

By Leon Cautillo

Human beings are more than simply one dimensional; in fact we are multi dimensional emotional identities. You will find yourself feeling down at the lower end of the scale and at times and hopefully you will reach the other end of the scale more often to experience the emotions of joy and bliss and even ecstasy. What is far more interesting is another aspect of who we are and it speaks to the source of our life. On one side is our identity self and the other our divine self. No matter the situation you have assess to relief when conflict between the two is present.
It's easy to recognize our identity self as it is the one we are quite familiar with. We each invented who we are. We will continue to shape and reshape our identity until we take the energy elsewhere. Whether you are 10 years old or 90 years old you have the identity you have come to know yourself to be. It is that life giving force within you that allows you to invent it as you have. It has always been a creative expression, a work of ongoing art, I'd say.
On the other hand our highest self is rarely if ever given attention. Just exactly what is the divine self? Your divine self, as I like to refer to it, is that aspect allowing you to choose to give your attention to whatever you desire. In fact there is never a time in your life that you are unable to be the source of where you focus your attention. Now that is rather startling. Especially when we know that we love to look for what makes us happy. Why would we look elsewhere?
When you focus on your higher self or that aspect of yourself that is just as you like it to be, you evoke good feelings. When you are focusing on what you deem to be your flawed side, your inadequate side, or your limits and shortcomings, you evoke feelings less desirable. When you realize sustained emotions will begin to show up in the appearance of life, you naturally begin to better focus your attention. Your higher self is perfect and without flaws or limits. It judges not and sees everyone including the identity you have so artistically inventive and wonderful. The state of its existence is happiness, joy and freedom.
Focus on your higher self and come to know it as real as the world around you. It is as real as all the situations and circumstances of your life. You can find enormous relief by seeing things through the eyes of your higher self. Everything will turn out by trusting in your greater capacities. It takes only the willingness to reach for better feeling thoughts, to look for a better interpretation or story about the way things are and are going to be. Point yourself in a more hopeful direction. It's your divine choice to do so.
Relief is realizing things are on their way towards the solution we allow to take place whether we are aware of the specifics of it or not. When you have that kind of trust you are truly allowing your highest self in. Just beyond the appearance of things, seemingly in hiding, are the feelings you are looking for. Look for it. It's right in front of you. Create a vision of your future at peace with your self. See it growing more each day and see and your trust that all is moving towards the happy and joyful reality you have long desired to experience.

Packing Healthy Lunches

Life can be really busy sometimes, can't it? We tend to rush through our day, and we just do not have the time to stop and eat a healthy lunch. In those cases, we usually tend to grab something not so good for us from the fast food restaurants or we get something from the work cafeteria that may not be what we need to help with our weight loss journey. Those foods can be packed with sodium, cholesterol, excess fat, and sugar. And the portion sizes they give could feed you for a few days!!
How in the world do you handle lunchtime with this new healthier lifestyle you are living??
You can start by packing your own lunch! It saves you time and money, you get the nutrients you want in the portions that are correct, and you know exactly what is going in your food! Here are a few tips to help you with this task:
1) Start planning your lunches for the week early. Make sure that healthy choices are in the refrigerator and pantry. If you need to make extra purchases, then do so! You can add this task to your weekly preparation time. This makes you more relaxed and focused on making the best meals for yourself.
2) Use a colorful lunch bag, a cooler bag with the ice packs, or something to help make preparing your lunch fun! If you have different colored lunch bags, alternate them to give yourself something to look forward to each day. Cute containers will put some enjoyment in the preparation task, also. Enjoy the process - do not dread the task.
3) Ensure that you pack a protein, a healthy carbohydrate, a beverage, and fruit for dessert (if you wish). This way, you are getting the correct balance of nutrients that you need to power through your afternoon. Proteins like chicken, fish, turkey, tofu, or beans are great choices for lunches. Healthy carbs include vegetables that have been lightly steamed, or a nice salad with light dressing. Excellent beverage choices include herbal tea or green tea, or water with a splash of fruit juice, and any type of fresh fruit is a great dessert option. You can search online recipe databases for additional ideas. Oh, and dinner leftovers make EXCELLENT lunches!!
Here are some sample meals you can use for future lunches that are easy to prepare, delicious, and full of nutrition:

• Turkey wrap on whole wheat tortilla with lettuce, roasted red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, and cucumbers with dijon mustard, broccoli slaw, water
• Black bean soup, spinach salad with carrots, celery, mushrooms, and light dressing, hot tea
• Grilled salmon filet, steamed kale, corn on the cob, peach green tea, granny smith apple
• Baked chicken with Mrs. Dash seasoning (southwest chipotle flavor), brown rice, green beans, water with lime juice, strawberries for dessert
• Chicken fajitas (chicken tenderloins baked with cumin, chili powder, and lime, cooked with sliced onions and sliced bell peppers) with chunky salsa, water with lemon juice, tangerine for dessert

The possibilities are ENDLESS!So consider preparing a healthy lunch this week, and keep up the journey to your best health!

Pinus Pinea Trees - Discover the Umbrella Trees of the World

Have you ever heard of the pinus pinea? Have you noticed that this is one of the most abundant tree species in the Mediterranean area? Well, apart from this location, it is also seen in places such as North and South Africa. This tree, also known as the stone pine, has been a source of trade products from prehistoric times and even today. Basically, this tree is not only utilized for the wood materials, but it also produces pine cones and seeds which is also a commodity of interest in some parts of the globe.
Most of the time, these trees reach the normal height of 12-20 meters but at times, it can exceed to 25 meters. If one is curious on how to recognize this tree, they are often tall, which have an umbrella like appearance. The bark of the tree usually has a dark brown color with a hint of red. At the same time, its trees are needle like and have a luscious green hue. As mentioned before, these produce cones which have been popular decorations for numerous interiors in the world.
At the moment, the main habitats of these beautiful trees are the Iberian Peninsula, which accounts for about 75% of this tree breed's production. At present, Portugal is considered as the second most pinus pinea populated country in the world. The country is to be recognized because since 1995, the increase in number of these trees has been rampant in the mentioned country. This is most probably because of the dry climate, which are conducive for these to grow. At the same time, these trees have been essential to the export industry of the country.
Basically, if one is planning to visit Portugal, take the time to visit their forests. One should definitely take note that these stone pine trees are considered to be umbrella trees, not only because of their evergreen nature, but also their contribution to the economies of both Portugal and the world.

7 Ways You Can Help Support the Honey Bee

Honey bees are dying in droves. Colony Collapse Disorder is causing them to die for unknown reasons. Researchers at Penn State University are working to solve this puzzle which could eventually cause major problems with our food supply if left unsolved. Here are some ways that you can help save the honey bee.
1. Become a beekeeper yourself. It is not that hard to do and there is help available from your local chapter of the beekeepers association. Focus on raising a small quantity of bees yourself and harvesting the honey. You can then either consume the honey yourself or sell it.
2. Donate money to Penn State to help with honey bee research or to any other group that is working to help solve Colony Collapse Disorder.
3. Patronize companies who sell products that support the research. There are several companies who do this and many more who are coming on board all of the time.
4. Help spread awareness about the problem by letting everyone you know about it and by doing your part to spread knowledge about the disease.
5. Support your local beekeepers by purchasing your honey from them. This will encourage them to continue raising more bees and to be able to turn a profit even though most of them are losing a third or more of their bees.
6. Avoid killing bees if they are bothering you or if they seem like they might sting you. Do your best to avoid annoying them and to capture them and let them lose outdoors without killing them. There are ways to avoid being stung without killing these precious honey bees.
7. Volunteer to help a friend, family member or other acquaintance to raise honey bees. This is another way to increase the honey bee supply if you are unable to be a beekeeper yourself. Encourage anyone you know who is able to become a beekeeper. It is not necessary to raise large quantities of honey bees, even one hive with a few bees can help.

Tehran Rejects Nuclear Accord, Officials Report

By DAVID E. SANGER, STEVEN ERLANGER and ROBERT F. WORTH

WASHINGTON — Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan its negotiators agreed to last week to send its stockpile of uranium out of the country, according to diplomats in Europe and American officials briefed on Iran’s response.
The apparent rejection of the deal could unwind President Obama’s effort to buy time to resolve the nuclear standoff.
In public, neither the Iranians nor the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, revealed the details of Iran’s objections, which came only hours after Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insisted that “we are ready to cooperate” with the West.
But the European and American officials said that Iranian officials had refused to go along with the central feature of the draft agreement reached on Oct. 21 in Vienna: a provision that would have required the country to send about three-quarters of its current known stockpile of low-enriched uranium to Russia to be processed and returned for use in a reactor in Tehran used to make medical isotopes.
If Iran’s stated estimate of its stockpile of nuclear fuel is accurate, the deal that was negotiated in Vienna would leave the country with too little fuel to manufacture a weapon until the stockpile was replenished with additional fuel, which Iran is producing in violation of United Nations Security Council mandates.
American officials said they thought that the accord would give them a year or so to seek a broader nuclear agreement with Iran while defusing the possibility that Israel might try to attack Iran’s nuclear installations before Iran gained more fuel and expertise.
The Obama administration was anticipating that Iran would seek to back out of the deal, and in recent days the head of the nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, traveled secretly to Washington to talk about what to do if that happened, according to several American officials. Last weekend, President Obama called President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in an effort to maintain a unified front in dealing with Tehran’s leadership.
A senior European official characterized the Iranian response as “basically a refusal.” The Iranians, he said, want to keep all of their lightly enriched uranium in the country until receiving fuel bought from the West for the reactor in Tehran.
“The key issue is that Iran does not agree to export its lightly enriched uranium,” the official said. “That’s not a minor detail. That’s the whole point of the deal.”
American officials said it was unclear whether Iran’s declaration to Dr. ElBaradei was its final position, or whether it was seeking to renegotiate the deal — a step the Americans said they would not take.
Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that “we await clarification of Iran’s response,” but that the United States was “unified with our Russian and French partners” in support of the agreement reached in Vienna. That agreement explicitly called for Iran to ship 2,600 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia by Jan. 15, according to officials who have seen the document, which has never been made public.
News of the accord led to a political uproar in Iran, with some leading politicians arguing that the West could not be trusted to return Iran’s uranium, produced at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. Clearly, however, the Iranian government does not want to appear to be rejecting the agreement. Mr. Ahmadinejad, in a speech in the northeastern city of Mashhad that was broadcast live on state television on Thursday, said, “We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.”
He did not address Iran’s efforts to change the deal, but cast it as a victory for Iranian steadfastness against the West. “A few years ago, they said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Now, look where we are today. Now, they want nuclear cooperation with the Iranian nation.”
In fact, the Iranians found something to like in the Vienna deal. It essentially acknowledged their right to use low-enriched uranium that Iran produced in violation of three Security Council agreements. The Obama administration and its allies were willing to create that precedent because the material would be returned to Iran in the form of fuel rods, usable in a civilian nuclear plant but very difficult to convert to weapons use.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks seemed to extend Iran’s two-track public position on the nuclear dispute, offering a degree of compliance while also insisting that there were limits to its readiness for cooperation.
“As long as this government is in power, it will not retreat one iota on the undeniable rights of the Iranian nation,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Fortunately, the conditions for international nuclear cooperation have been met. We are currently moving in the right direction and we have no fear of legal cooperation, under which all of Iran’s national rights will be preserved, and we will continue our work.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad also suggested that Iran expected Western countries to honor payments for nuclear assistance it made before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran paid more than $1 billion to help build a French reactor in return for access to that reactor’s fuel. After the revolution, France reneged on the contract.
“We have nuclear contracts,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “It has been 30 years, we have paid for them. Such agreements must be fulfilled.”
Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, arrived in Vienna on Wednesday night to deliver Iran’s response to the plan. On Thursday he told the ISNA news service that Tehran held a “positive view” of the Vienna talks.
An atomic energy agency team returned to the headquarters in Vienna on Thursday after inspecting a second nuclear enrichment plant, at Fordo, near the city of Qum, the state-run Press TV reported on its Web site.
Iran had kept the plant a state secret until a few days before the United States and other Western powers disclosed its existence last month.
In Washington on Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee unanimously approved a measure that would let the White House impose stronger sanctions on Iran. The Senate bill, passed a day after the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a similar measure, would authorize sanctions against companies that provide Iran with refined petroleum products and would ban most trade between the countries, exempting food and medicine.

The Human Body Is Built for Distance

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?

The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.

Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish line, an increase of 20 percent from the beginning of the decade, Running USA says. Next week about 40,000 people will take part in the New York City Marathon. Injury rates have also climbed, with some studies reporting that 90 percent of those who train for the 26.2-mile race sustain injuries in the process.

But now a best-selling book has reframed the debate about the wisdom of distance running. In “Born to Run” (Knopf), Christopher McDougall, an avid runner who had been vexed by injuries, explores the world of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, a tribe known for running extraordinary distances in nothing but thin-soled sandals.

Mr. McDougall makes the case that running isn’t inherently risky. Instead, he argues that the commercialization of urban marathons encourages overzealous training, while the promotion of high-tech shoes has led to poor running form and a rash of injuries.

“The sense of distance running being crazy is something new to late-20th-century America,” Mr. McDougall told me. “It’s only recently that running has become associated with pain and injury.”

The scientific evidence supports the notion that humans evolved to be runners. In a 2007 paper in the journal Sports Medicine, Daniel E. Lieberman, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, and Dennis M. Bramble, a biologist at the University of Utah, wrote that several characteristics unique to humans suggested endurance running played an important role in our evolution.

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.

Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.

“Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair.

There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.

“The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest nonrunning relatives,” Dr. Bramble said. “It’s the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe.”

Springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.

And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”

So if we’re born to run, why are runners so often injured? A combination of factors is likely to play a role, experts say. Exercise early in life can affect the development of tendons and muscles, but many people don’t start running until adulthood, so their bodies may not be as well developed for distance. Running on only artificial surfaces and in high-tech shoes can change the biomechanics of running, increasing the risks of injury.

What’s the solution? Slower, easier training over a long period would most likely help; so would brief walk breaks, which mimic the behavior of the persistence hunter. And running on a variety of surfaces and in simpler shoes with less cushioning can restore natural running form.

Mr. McDougall says that while researching his book, he corrected his form and stopped using thickly cushioned shoes. He has run without injury for three years.