Choose Meaning Over Happiness

Don’t you ever find yourself having an existential crisis? Why are we here? What is our purpose? Should I feel good or happy in this moment? Our brain is setup to make us feel scared at sometimes the best moments of our lives. But is it really worth our while to focus all of our energy on happiness? Can we really be happy all the time?

There may be another approach to viewing this concept is choosing meaning over happiness. Searching and finding your purpose and understanding why you’re here and why you’ve gone through what you’ve gone through can be a powerful mental healing exercise with a long-term benefit.

Sometimes we feel such an intense desire to chase happiness and the feeling of bliss but this path could be making us chase the wrong thing.

What makes life truly worth living is meaning. This should be the foundation of everything we do, no matter how small or big. This blissful feeling we’re talking about can slip away so fast.

Mental health tips to avoid losing sight of your meaning:

1. Value who you are right now and treat yourself with respect

2. Take care of your body physically to continue through with your feeling of purpose

3. Surround yourself with positive people

4. Give yourself a treat or gift everyday, small or big!

5. Quiet your mind to de-stress

6. Break up your routine

7. Set realistic goals

Sugary Drinks: How Much is Enough?

It has become common knowledge that too much sugar is correlated to Type II Diabetes, heart disease and tooth decay. The bigger problem behind sugar is why it starts. And why it starts is because we become addicted to it. When it comes to the example we set for our kids, sugar intake is probably the most critical food habit we can pass down to them.

Two-thirds of children have at least 1 sports drink, soda or fruit juice on a given day as noted in a recent study from the Centers for the Disease Control & Prevention. It has been reported by the journal Pediatrics that a quarter of U.S. children between the ages of 12-19 have either Type II Diabetes or pre-diabetes.

This disease can directly lead to heart attack, stroke and eventual blindness.

The American Diabetes Association recommends tips for those with childhood diabetes to manage the disease:

1. Choosing healthy foods

2. Exercising daily

3. Taking medications and checking blood glucose as doctors advise

4. Only allow them one sugary drink per week as a treat

5. Other options that can replace this craving is fruit-infused water - even try lemon or ginger!

Walking May Help Effects of Dementia

This seems like a given but hotels have been for years focused on elaborate public gyms inside their hotels. But now brands like Hilton are the first to innovate around in-room fitness, capitalizing on the very large niche audience that prefer solo fitness.

With the rise of apps for solo meditation and body-weight exercises, this makes so much sense. The idea is making exercise accessible for one of the toughest times, being on-the-go or traveling. For those that travel a lot for their job, this is critical. We often make excuses for not exercising or living healthy when we’re traveling or on-the-go. In May, Hilton became one of the first hotels to offer in-room fitness with 11 pieces of workout equipment.

The workout gear includes:

1. Indoor Wattbike bicycle

2. Gym Rax

3. Training station that lets users tackle body-weight moves with TRX straps.

4. Fitness kiosk, a touch-screen display that offers more than 200 videos, including tutorials on all the equipment, cycling, high-intensity interval training and yoga classes.

Hilton’s choices came from customer feedback that they’d be willing to pay more for convenience of fitness in their room. They also took into consideration a significant study from Cornell University. This report showed that “46 percent of guests expected to work out in the fitness center during their stay, but only 22 percent actually did so.”

The rooms were built much bigger to include enough space to move around the room and store the equipment.

The partnership came about after a survey by the hotel last year found that 70 percent of global travelers struggle to maintain their wellness routines on the road, said Sarah Lipton, the brand’s global director of marketing and management, and that 51 percent of Westin guests are likely to have gym memberships.

The hotel brand Westin also had jumped on the bandwagon. The brant itself conducting a significant survey last year that noted more than 70 percent of global travelers struggle to maintain their wellness routines on the road, said Sarah Lipton, the brand’s global director of marketing and management, and that 51 percent of Westin guests are likely to have gym memberships.

This proves gyms and fitness across the hotel ecosystem shouldn’t be an afterthought. With the rise of wearable tech like fitness watches and on-the-go heart monitors, this shows fitness is only going to become closer to us and convenience is half the battle of getting up off the couch each day. Enjoy your next vacation!

Hotels Begin to Focus on In-Room Fitness

This seems like a given but hotels have been for years focused on elaborate public gyms inside their hotels. But now brands like Hilton are the first to innovate around in-room fitness, capitalizing on the very large niche audience that prefer solo fitness.

With the rise of apps for solo meditation and body-weight exercises, this makes so much sense. The idea is making exercise accessible for one of the toughest times, being on-the-go or traveling. For those that travel a lot for their job, this is critical. We often make excuses for not exercising or living healthy when we’re traveling or on-the-go. In May, Hilton became one of the first hotels to offer in-room fitness with 11 pieces of workout equipment.

The workout gear includes:

1. Indoor Wattbike bicycle

2. Gym Rax

3. Training station that lets users tackle body-weight moves with TRX straps.

4. Fitness kiosk, a touch-screen display that offers more than 200 videos, including tutorials on all the equipment, cycling, high-intensity interval training and yoga classes.

Hilton’s choices came from customer feedback that they’d be willing to pay more for convenience of fitness in their room. They also took into consideration a significant study from Cornell University. This report showed that “46 percent of guests expected to work out in the fitness center during their stay, but only 22 percent actually did so.”

The rooms were built much bigger to include enough space to move around the room and store the equipment.

The partnership came about after a survey by the hotel last year found that 70 percent of global travelers struggle to maintain their wellness routines on the road, said Sarah Lipton, the brand’s global director of marketing and management, and that 51 percent of Westin guests are likely to have gym memberships.

The hotel brand Westin also had jumped on the bandwagon. The brant itself conducting a significant survey last year that noted more than 70 percent of global travelers struggle to maintain their wellness routines on the road, said Sarah Lipton, the brand’s global director of marketing and management, and that 51 percent of Westin guests are likely to have gym memberships.

This proves gyms and fitness across the hotel ecosystem shouldn’t be an afterthought. With the rise of wearable tech like fitness watches and on-the-go heart monitors, this shows fitness is only going to become closer to us and convenience is half the battle of getting up off the couch each day. Enjoy your next vacation!

Watch Puppies, Rekindle Your Marriage

Men, how do you keep the passion alive in your marriage? Surprise her with roses? Moonlight walks on the beach?

Well,we have a sure-fire, backed-by-science solution for you that won't cost a dime nor get sand in your shoes.

Puppies! Pictures of puppies, to be exact, although bunnies will work, too.

A team of researchers at Florida State University has determined thatpictures of cute animals, used as an intervention focused upon changing someone's thoughts about their spouse – as opposed to an intervention that targets their behavior – improves the quality of the relationship.

“One ultimate source of our feelings about our relationships can be reduced to how we associate our partners with positive affect, and those associations can come from our partners but also from unrelated things, like puppies and bunnies,” explained lead author James K. McNulty.

Here's what McNulty's team did: They rounded up 144 married couples, all under the age of 40 and married for less than 5 years. The average age of participants was 28 years old, and around 40 percent of the couples had children. To establish a baseline, at the start of the study, the couples were asked to complete a series of measures of relationship satisfaction.

A few days later, the spouses came to the lab to complete a measure of their immediate, automatic attitudes toward their partner.

Next, every three days for six weeks, each spouse was asked to individually view a brief stream of images. The stream contained embedded pictures of their partner. Those in the test group always saw the partner’s face paired with positive stimuli, such as a puppy or the word “wonderful,” while those in the control group saw their partner’s face matched to neutral stimuli, such as a button.

Along the way the couples were asked to complete implicit measures of attitude towards their partner, every 2 weeks for 8 weeks.

McNulty's thesis proved correct: Participants who were exposed to positive images paired with their partner’s face showed more positive automatic reactions to their partner over the course of the intervention compared with those who saw neutral pairings.

“I was actually a little surprised that it worked,” McNulty said. “All the theory I reviewed on evaluative conditioning suggested it should, but existing theories of relationships, and just the idea that something so simple and unrelated to marriage could affect how people feel about their marriage, made me skeptical.”

McNulty's team was quick to clarify that they are not arguing that behavior in a relationship is irrelevant to marital satisfaction. (That is, if your spouse catches you cheating, showing him or her a picture of a cute Cocker Spaniel likely won't cut it.) But a briefintervention focused on automatic attitudes could be useful as one aspect of marriage counseling or as a resource for couples in difficult long-distance situations, such as soldiers.

And this may be the best part, right here:

“The research was actually prompted by a grant from the Department of Defense – I was asked to conceptualize and test a brief way to help married couples cope with the stress of separation and deployment,” McNulty said. “We would really like to develop a procedure that could help soldiers and other people in situations that are challenging for relationships.”

The study has been published in Psychological Science.

Low on Sleep? Tips for Staying Alert

On average, adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night. While sleeping any less than that is not a sustainable way of life, for those occasional days when you just couldn’t get the essential hours, we have some quick tips for staying alert, especially on those days with lots ahead of you!

1. Use your alarm clock to wake up (and actually wake up when it goes off.) Get yourself out of the snooze-habit and get up when you hear the sound. This is the one of the first things you can do in the day to ensure you stick to your schedule. Whatever you do in the wake of these rough mornings, as long as you follow a routine, you’ll set yourself up for success during the day.

2. Quick movement will help get your blood and metabolism going. Try a quick jog in place along with some weight lifting for 10-20 minutes and your body will feel more awake. You can even stretch or meditate which will help get your brain going as well.

3. Take a cold shower to trigger your nervous system. It’s actually not a myth, this sends a nervous reaction throughout the body that wakes up the organs. When you hyperventilate from the cold water, your body is flooded with oxygen, which then starts to increase your heart rate. This makes you more present and focused.

4. Eating a hearty breakfast composed of complex carbs and protein will give your body more energy because of the digestive properties. Think oatmeal, eggs, full grain toast, fruit and veggies!

5. Drink extra water, especially as you get started in the morning. Hydration only makes your organs perform better throughout the day. Dehydration can exaggerate the feeling of exhausted. Don’t go for the caffeine, that will only further dehydrate you.

6. Take a minute to stretch mid-day. When you hold your body in a stretching position, it can trick your body into thinking it’s “resting,” which is what stretching can mimic. Even taking a small action like stretching your legs out underneath your desk for 10 seconds at a time can be beneficial.