healthy

Today’s Health Tip ~ Dreaming Provides Healthy Benefits

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Dreaming is Healing

Research shows that dreaming is not just a byproduct of sleep, but serves its own important functions in our well-being.. . . It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM-sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.

REM sleep is the only time when our brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline. At the same time, key emotional and memory-related structures of the brain are reactivated during REM sleep as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment.

Source: Why Your Brain Needs to Dream (Matthew Walker)

Today’s Health Tip ~ Want a Better Quality of Sleep?

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Avoid Alcohol Close to Bedtime

A glass of wine in the evening might help you fall asleep, but can impact the quality of your slumber, leaving you sluggish the following day. To help prevent this, avoid drinking close to bedtime to give your body time to process the alcohol. As a rough guide, it’s thought to take one hour for your body to process one unit of alcohol, although this varies between individuals. To find out more about the units in your drink – and to ensure you’re not exceeding the maximum 14 units a week – use the Unit Calculator on drinkaware.co.uk.

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Covid – 19 Life Hack ~ Adding Layers of Protection to Your Cloth Face Mask

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Do You Wear a Cloth Face Mask?

I wear a cloth face mask when I am not able to social distance or going to a public place like a supermarket, gym, etc. I was thinking, what if I add an additional layer of protection to my face mask? Check out the Covid – 19 Life Hack below.

Here’s A Covid – 19 life hack:

I take a paper towel (I use select a size). I fold the paper towel until it fits inside my cloth face mask. I now have (counting paper towel folds) three layers of cloth and four layers of paper towel.  Boom, added protection when I can’t social distance. 

Do you have a Covid – 19 life hack? Want to share it? Email it to me at ray.brese@gmail.com. I’ll post it (and attribute it to you, using your preferred attribution).

Stay Healthy

🍎 Health Hack ~ Eating & Exercise – Keys to Feeling Great

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Eating healthy is important to not only your physical health, but your mental well-being too. Incorporating a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy foods, and lean meats, poultry, and fish into your diet can help you stay healthy and energized. Along with exercising regularly and getting enough sleep, eating a well-balanced diet can do wonders for your mental well-being.

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🍎 Health Hack ~ How to Choose the Best Kale

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Choose smaller-leaved kale for tenderness and mild flavor, especially if you plan to eat the greens raw. Coarse, oversized leaves are tough. Look for moist, crisp, unwilted kale, unblemished by tiny holes, which indicate insect damage. The leaves should not be yellowed or brown. Kale stems are edible, so check to be sure that this part of the plant is also in good condition.

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🍎 Health Hack ~ 10 Tips to Live a Longer Life

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Tips for a Longer Life

No matter what your age, you have the power to change many of the variables that influence how long you live, and how active and vital you feel in your later years. Actions you can take to increase your odds of a longer and more satisfying life span are really quite simple:

  1. Don’t smoke.
  2. Enjoy physical and mental activities every day.
  3. Eat a healthy diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, and substitute healthier monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats for unhealthy saturated fats and trans fats.
  4. Take a daily multivitamin, and be sure to get enough calcium and vitamin D.
  5. Maintain a healthy weight and body shape.
  6. Challenge your mind. Keep learning and trying new activities.
  7. Build a strong social network.
  8. Follow preventive care and screening guidelines.
  9. Floss, brush, and see a dentist regularly.
  10. Ask your doctor if medication can help you control the potential long-term side effects of chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, osteoporosis, or high cholesterol.

Source: HarvardHealthBeat

🍎 Health Hack ~ Small Steps Yield Big Results

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THINK SMALL

Often the biggest deterrent to improving health is feeling overwhelmed by all the available advice and research. Try to focus first on one small, seemingly inconsequential, unhealthy habit and turn it into a healthy, positive habit. If you’re in the habit of eating as soon as you get home at night, instead, keep walking shoes in the garage or entryway and take a quick spin around the block before going inside. If you have a can of soda at lunchtime every day, have a glass of water two days a week instead. Starting with small, painless changes helps establish the mentality that healthy change is not necessarily painful change. It’s easy to build from here by adding more healthy substitutions.

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🍎 Health Hack ~ Skip the Diet! Yikes!

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 Don’t Go On a Diet

Diets are notoriously ineffective and rarely work well in the long term.

In fact, dieting is one of the strongest predictors for future weight gain (104Trusted Source).

Instead of going on a diet, try adopting a healthier lifestyle. Focus on nourishing your body instead of depriving it.

Weight loss should follow as you transition to whole, nutritious foods.

Source: HealthLine

🍎 Health Hack ~ Choose Real, Whole Foods

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Eat whole, real foods.

Make it your goal to have most of your nourishment come from unprocessed, real foods that are as close to the source as possible. What does that mean? Check out the ingredients. If you are eating a handful of almonds for a snack, the only ingredient should be just that: almonds! Whole foods fill your body with more vitamins and minerals, the nutrition we need to stay healthy on the inside.

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🍎 Health Hack ~ Exercise is Good for Your Memory

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Remember less as the years go by? You’re not imagining things: Your memory declines about 2 percent each decade because your hippocampus (the part of your brain that stores memories) literally shrinks. But you can even the playing field by keeping up with regular exercise, says neurologist Majid Fotuhi, M.D., Ph.D., director of NeurExpand Brain Center, and author of Boost Your Brain. “A third of your brain is made up of blood vessels, so it makes sense that your physical fitness impacts your brain health,” Fotuhi says. “Research shows that after a yearlong exercise program, the size of the hippocampus increases by about 2 percent, which effectively reverses age-related brain loss.”

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